The Russian Century Read online

  The Russian Century

  George Pahomov

  The Russian Century

  A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

  Edited by George Pahomov and Nickolas Lupinin

  The Russian Century

  A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

  Edited by George Pahomov Nickolas Lupinin

  UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA,® INC.

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  Contents

  Acknowledgementsv

  Introductionvii

  Glossary of Russian Termsxi

  PART I THE VANISHED PRESENCE: RUSSIA

  BEFORE 19141

  Viktor Chernov, Idylls on the Volga3

  Sergei N. Durylin, Domestic Love18

  Sofiia Kovalevskaia, A Thief in the House28

  Oleg Pantiukhov, A Student’s Summer41

  Aleksandra Tyrkova-Williams, A Woman’s Autonomy54

  Nikolai Volkov-Muromtsev, Memoirs64

  Vladimir Zenzinov, Coming of Age74

  Vasilii Nikiforov-Volgin, Presanctified Gifts88

  Mark Vishniak, In Two Worlds95

  Konstantin Paustovskii, Commencement Revelry103 PART II INSTABILITY AND DISLOCATION: 1914–1929111

  Georgii Altaev, How I Became a Cub Scout113

  Nikolai Filatov, A Soldier’s Letters120

  iii

  ivContents

  Konstantin Paustovskii, Save Your Strength130

  Roman Gul, We’re in Power Now139

  Sergei Mamontov, Civil War: A White Army Journal144

  Vera Volkonskaia, Orphaned by Revolution155

  Mikhail Gol’dshtein, My First Recital168

  Viktor Kravchenko, Youth in the Red173

  Vasilii Ianov, The Heart of a Peasant181

  PART III UNRELENTING ORDER AND TERROR:

  1930–1953189

  B. Brovtsyn, Dearly Beloved191

  Tat’iana Fesenko, Internal Dissenter199

  Nila Magidoff, Only to Travel! Only to Live!210

  Tat’iana Fesenko, War-Scorched Kiev225

  Elena I. Kochina, Blockade Diary236

  N. Ianevich, Literary Politics251

  K. Vadot, The Terrorist259

  PART IV APOGEE AND FRACTURE: 1954–1991265

  Mariia Shapiro, A Soviet Capitalist267

  Valerii Leviatov, My Path to God273

  Valentin Kataev, A Paschal Memory282

  Kirill Kostsinskii [K.V. Uspenskii], A Dissident’s Trial285

  Iurii Krotkov, The KGB in Action290

  Vladimir Azbel, Siberian Adversity306

  Leonid Shebarshin, Three Days in August315

  Acknowledgments

  My gratitude is due, first of all, to Professor Nickolas Lupinin of Franklin Pierce University, gentle critic and steadfast friend, co-author, without whom this volume would never have appeared and also to Marina Adamovitch, editor of The New Review (Novyi zhurnal), for her helpful advice and permission to translate and reprint a number of memoirs from that journal. Gratitude must also be expressed to a number of publishers and publications, some of them long-vanished, whose names appear in the brief introduction to each particular entry. I also wish to thank several colleagues and friends for their exemplary translations of various pieces: Professor Mark Swift, of the University of Auckland, for translating Filatov, “A Soldier’s Letters,” Leviatov, “My Path to God,” and Fesenko, “War-Scorched Kiev;” Professor Karen Black of Millersville University for Paustovskii, “Commencement Revelry;” Sharon Bain, my colleague at Bryn Mawr College, for Shapiro, “A Soviet Capitalist;” Cindy Burr-Ramsey for Durylin, “Domestic Love,” and Krotkov, “KGB in Action;” Julie Stetson for Vadot, “The Terrorist;” and Brian Boeck for Gul, “We’re in Power Now.” Finally, to my students at Bryn Mawr College who, in taking my course on Russian culture and civilization, provided incentive and manifested the curiosity and enthusiasm which is their valued hallmark.

  Bryn MawrGeorge Pahomov

  v

  Introduction

  Russia has had a great influence on the twentieth century world. Russian music, dance, theatre, art, and literature have shaped contemporary life in significant ways. It is very unlikely that one reaches adulthood without reading Dr. Zhivago, seeing the films of Eisenstein or the plays of Chekhov. And any overview of 20th century art and music will prominently include Malevich, Kandinsky, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. But this influence also has a dark side. The Russian version of communism was a virulent ideology during a major part of the twentieth century, its global impact so profound that it has rightly become the source of countless studies and extensive documentation. While this focus on Russian communism is invaluable and completely justified, it too often overshadows the many other aspects of Russian life. There is still an unknown Russia, a Russia comprised of private lives as opposed to public history. This Russia includes the stories of real people who lived during the turbulent one-hundred years between 1890-1991, people from diverse backgrounds, a broad geographic spectrum, and various educational and socio-economic levels. This volume, which brings together letters, diaries, personal sketches, and memoirs—most of which are appearing in English for the first time—was put together to tell that fascinating story.

  Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, with the rapid growth of cities and industry and Russia’s entrance into modernity, and proceeding chronologically to the collapse of the USSR in August 1991, the stories presented here do not simply trace linear change punctuated by great convulsive events. Those are the peaks of history. These accounts have been written by people who lived in the shadows of those peaks but who strived to make meaning of their lives. The selections speak in an intimate and personal voice of immediate experience rather than of the distant, general flow of history.

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  Introduction

  Personal matters—privations, suffering, joys, achievements—are recounted with candor and insight.

  This book is not an examination of Russian reality in terms of Western ideas, concepts, or norms but an evocation of twentieth century life through the personal voice. The English-speaking reader will elicit for her or himself the values in Russian culture, both latent and manifest, which shape the attitudes and guide the behavior of Russians.

  All too often the Russian experience has been presented as either horrific or heroic, absorbed in persecution and “victimology.” The field is replete with Gulag accounts. This volume goes beyond that approach and deals with the personal and intimate—love, sexuality, courtship, marriage, family life, work, faith, and education. In choosing these selections, we were not guided by “historical objectivity” but rather by subjectivity, by an emphasis on the subject or the unique self. This appro
ach intentionally counters and supplements the vast majority of existing works devoted to Russian history and culture. We offer the reader no great individuals, no overarching story lines, no plots conceived by an omniscient author. The private selves who wrote their own life stories did so in a language of common experience and common values without awareness of a greater meaning beyond the intimate particulars of their lives. In this sense the naive and unaffected recorder of history is its authentic witness.

  It is a given in anthropology that a culture’s collective self-view tends to be idealized and that such an idealization becomes a lens through which history and experience are viewed and understood. It is also true that a member of a given culture presents himself to outsiders in terms of that idealization. Many observers, both non-Russian and Russian, see only the idealization, the defining myths, and respond to them according to their own pre-existing needs and desires. Such needs and desires may be positively or negatively charged, but in either case they promote linear, monocausal interpretations of what has been observed, at the expense of the complex, contradictory, and even paradoxical realities of life. In 1943 in Amsterdam, confined to a secluded space, Anne Frank lived simultaneously in fear of the Nazis and in love with Pieter van Daan. To assume that she lived only in terror, that terror was the singular emotion of her life, would be to deny her full breadth of being and her full human dignity. Anne’s case cautions us to be wary of simple explanations of human behavior and sensibility.

  In its rich complexity human character is a source of numerous eventualities. So is a culture. When we try to understand a culture different than ours it is a mistake to assume that what is observed in a particular context or at a particular moment represents the totality of that culture. In fact, at any given moment most of a culture’s characteristics and make-up lie latent, waiting to manifest themselves at a particular juncture or in a particular context.

  Introduction

  ix

  In this volume we have let the writers decide what is to be revealed. They speak of events which endure in their memory. Often it is of universal human experience, the consciousness of self in the face of inevitable death. It is at such times that anguish, transformed by intelligence into recollection, loses its power to injure their hearts. Whether in its religious sense or removed from it, “bearing witness” stimulates a desire in every writer to open her or himself to other eyes, to testify and thus transform the sting of memory into some greater tempering idea which frees the rest of their lives from the burden of secrecy. In the process, their liberation becomes our gift.

  All too often Russians, as well as other observers, assume Russia to be a homogeneous and corporate cultural entity. Such a view was doubtlessly influenced by the monolithic political structure of the Soviet Union as it drove to homogenize its subjects. Communist ideology tended to see human beings as a commodity and an instrument. Coercion and violence were used against those with contrary views. The result, to some degree, was an actual but also a presumed uniformity.

  In cultures which tend toward uniformity and homogeneity the collective self-view and the self-image of the individual largely coincide. Such coincidence becomes especially apparent as one recalls descriptions of small and isolated cultures such as those of insular tribes and contemporary “cults” in which the individual is submerged within a corporate sensibility. In contrast, American experience is very heterogeneous and broad in spectrum. In a monolithic realm a people’s culture is not only the sole source of self-identity but also the primary means of knowing the external world. This is not the case for Russia. It does not have a monoculture. If anything, its culture is far more heterogeneous than the cultures of its neighboring nations. Language, especially its lexicon, is an objective indicator of the openness and permeability of a culture. Russian, by borrowing from languages as diverse as Iranian, the Turkic group, the Scandinavian group, Greek, Bulgarian, Tatar and Mongolian, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, German, French, and English, demonstrates its rich and productive variety.

  In some minds such variety raises the question of whether a coherent, cognizable, and explicable Russian culture exists at all. This book does not attempt to answer that question nor define the culture but rather suggests the shape of its dynamic. In a classic formulation A.L. Kroeber affirms that every culture “derives most of its component elements from its own past” but also “tends to absorb new elements . . . and reshape them in accord with its own patterns.”1 In a thriving culture both processes are at work simultaneously. It has always been a debate among Russians what the proportions of the old and the new elements should be. This was the argument between the so-called “Slavophiles” and the

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  Introduction

  “Westernizers” in the nineteenth century and is currently the debate between the isolationists and the integrationists. The debate seems largely political but is driven by inchoate, deeply rooted attitudes and values.

  The would-be fusion of the old and new elements always creates tension. And it is a tension which permeates the life of most Russians. Even though there is a saying in the language which proclaims that “The destiny of one person is the destiny of a whole generation,” the epic and the private do not run an identical course. The line between collective and personal destiny may be difficult to locate, but it does exist.

  This volume looks at private life, its satisfactions and discontents, its joys and sorrows. Yet, while looking at such life we do not presume that the mundane and the routine determine all. Russian life in the hundred years before 1991 did include much violent change and great hardship. We want to dispel the notion, however, that Russian life was one disaster after another, an endemic and unrelieved tragedy. Life, after all, is not lived in disaster. It may be lived through a disaster, but even then life assumes a routine, though perhaps an altered one.

  We have spoken of Russians and Russian culture without any attempt at academic definition of the terms. We intentionally leave that to the reader. However, several points should be made. The English language, unfortunately, has only one word to designate people who are ethnically Russian and those who live in Russia, or more properly, the Russian Federation. This insufficiency makes for misapprehension and an awkward ambiguity. Rossiia (Russia) is the name of the state; the adjectival form is rossiiskii (of the Russian state). A citizen of Rossiia is called a rossiianin. A person who is ethnically Russian is called russkii, likely derived from Rus, the medieval Slavic principality and its people. As an entity Rossiia is analogous to Great Britain. Not everyone living in Great Britain is ethnically English and not everyone living in Rossiia is ethnically Russian. Yet in both nations a language is shared: English in Great Britain, Russian in Rossiia. The pieces chosen for this anthology were written by men and women who saw themselves as largely belonging to Russian culture and for whom the Russian language was the primary means of expression. These are the people of the Russian Century.

  George Pahomov

  NOTE

  1. A.L. Kroeber, An Anthropologist Looks at History, University of California Press, 1963, p. v.

  Glossary of Russian Terms

  artel—a cooperative association of workers, craftsmen, or traders within a particular profession

  borshch—a kind of vegetable soup usually made with a beef stock and with beets, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, and occasionally other vegetables

  brichka—a carriage, heavier than a drozhki, with a collapsible leather or canvas top

  dacha—a summer home, frequently having a glass enclosed veranda

  desiatina—a square measure equivalent to 2.7 acres or 1.09 hectares

  drozhki—a light, open carriage usually drawn by one horse

  gimnazium—a classical high school, featuring the classical and foreign languages and a liberal arts curriculum as opposed to real’noe uchilishche, a vocational high school; pronounced with a “hard” g as in gimlet

  Gulag—the system of prison camps throughout the Soviet Union; the adm
inistrative body of those camps

  izba—a rural, peasant house in central and northern Russia constructed of logs either round or square in cross-section

  kolkhoz—collective farm; largely the product of forced collectivization in Soviet times

  kolkhoznik—collective farm worker

  kulebiaka—fish baked en croute; an open-face Beef Wellington filled with filet of sturgeon instead of beef tenderloin

  kvas—a kind of beer made by fermenting rye bread or rye flour, yeast, malt and, sometimes, sugar; served chilled

  muzhik—an adult male peasant; also a term of derision

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  xii

  Glossary of Russian Terms

  name(s)day—a holiday celebrating the patron saint bearing the same name as the celebrant, e.g., 23 April is St. George’s day

  Okhrana—the secret police in tsarist times

  papirosa (plural: papirosy)—a cigarette with a long cardboard mouthpiece, widely smoked before the advent of the modern cigarette during WWI

  pirog (plural: pirogi)—a generic term for pies, usually deep-dish and rectangular, with fillings ranging from berries and fruit to mushroom and egg, sautéed cabbage, and ground beef. Pirozhok (plural: pirozhhki) is the palm-size version of a pirog, similar to a hot pocket or the English pastie

  primus—a heating apparatus with a single flame similar to a Bunsen burner but with fuel pressurized by manual pumping; from Primus, the name of the Swedish manufacturer of the device; used for cooking when nothing else functioned