‘Library Notes’ (4)

Book No. 713. Catherine Merridale. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia. London, Granta, 2000, 506 pp.

This is the penultimate in my series of posts about books that have been in my Russian library — which is going to a bibliophile in the States — for years, but which I had never read. As soon as I started reading this one, however, I found pencil proof marks that look as though they were made by me. Could I have actually read it, or some of it, when it came out in 2000? I’m afraid it is possible. The book created a great stir. I had known Catherine Merridale in Cambridge as a very talented historian, moreover one with a sense of humour, and it was obvious I should have a copy of her book. But its subject is so ghastly that I may subsequently have blocked out the memory of reading any of it.

Even now it has taken me over a month to read it all, as I simply had to stop every so often from a surfeit of physical disgust, horror, revulsion and fury. But I have forced myself to finish it. Towards the end of the book there is much discussion of the history of PTSD diagnosis and treatment in Europe and America, and why many Russians (even psychiatrists) refuse to recognise the syndrome in survivors of the Bolshevik holocaust, or the Second World War, or the Afghan War of 1979-89. Attempting to read this book, I relived squeezing between tall construction screens at Babi Yar in the summer of 1968 and being confronted by a ‘Tide of Bones’ (chapter 11) myself, reading Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror later that year, and wondering what I was doing studying Russian.

It’s vital to point out that Merridale’s book is in the first instance a scrupulous objective history of Russia from 1900 to the advent of Putin. The collapse of tsarism, the early Bolshevik terror, the Civil War, the famines of 1920-2, 1929-33 and 1946-7, the genocidal ‘dekulakization’, the Stalinist terrors, the demographic catastrophe of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, the post-Stalin cover-ups, the collapse of Communism — they are all there. But they are the contexts to what Merridale aptly calls ‘Russia’s culture of death’. The country has always had a higher mortality rate than anywhere in Europe. With Lenin embalmed in his mausoleum, the new Communist empire was ‘built upon the bones of a saint […] Death had not been conquered. The Bolsheviks were trapped by it’ (p. 195).

The country descended into psychosis, mass executions, starvation and cannibalism, all viscerally documented here. In 1937 the staff at Moscow’s new crematorium took consignments of bodies from the NKVD through the night:

The bodies arrived in batches, accompanied by stamped and duplicated forms that requested they be burned immediately. ‘They were such handsome men,’ recalled a crematorium worker. ‘Some of them were still warm. Some of them were not even dead when we put them into the furnace’. The practice was not secret, at least as far as women like her were concerned. The ashes were buried in two or three common pits in the cemetery grounds. (p. 255)

And here is the real substance and point of Merridale’s book: personal testimonies collected by her in Russia itself, memories kept when the regime ‘forced forgetting’ and ‘willed amnesia had become a habit’. She is deeply engaged with the individuals she interviews, with their memories, their attempts at articulating them, how they think of their own murdered loved ones, how they want to commemorate them in a culture that until recently negated any afterlife, how they think of the perpetrators of the crimes, how they resort even to traditional pre-Christian customs to honour their loved ones, how they attempt as survivors to cope with their PTSD, or deny it…

In a word, Catherine Merridale’s book is the polar opposite of a ‘bloodless’, statistical, in Norman Stone’s word ‘autistic’ work such as socialist E.H. Carr’s 14-volume History of Soviet Russia. Hers is empathic, heuristic, personalised, yet strictly factual. This is Russia as it really has been for real people since 1917. After reading it, you will understand why Russia has staggered from the catastrophe of Communism to the catastrophe of Putin and why no-one can help Russia but Russians themselves. The book is nothing less than the best one ever written about this terrible country. If you have the stomach to read it.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.