Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The House of Government
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 2/7/1956
WEBSITE:
CITY: Berkeley
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
http://history.berkeley.edu/people/yuri-slezkine * https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/yuri-slezkine/#!
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 88174498
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n88174498
HEADING: Slezkine, Yuri, 1956-
000 00631cz a2200169n 450
001 215966
005 20141210072520.0
008 891113n| azannaab |a aaa
010 __ |a n 88174498
035 __ |a (DLC)n 88174498
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC
046 __ |f 1956
100 1_ |a Slezkine, Yuri, |d 1956-
400 10 |a Slezkin, I︠U︡riĭ, |d 1956-
670 __ |a Fushille, M. Speak Russian! 1990: |b CIP t.p. (Yuri Slezkine) pub. info. (asst. prof., Wake Forest Univ.; b. 2/7/56)
670 __ |a Arctic mirrors, c1994: |b t.p. (Yuri Selzkine) jkt. (assistant professor of history at University of California, Berkeley)
953 __ |a ba20 |b sd13
PERSONAL
Born February 7, 1956, in Soviet Union; immigrated to United States, 1983.
EDUCATION:University of Moscow, M.A.; University of Texas, Austin, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, educator, writer. Former assistant professor, Wake Forest University; University of California, Berkeley, current Jane K. Sather Professor of History; Hoover Institution, Stanford University, W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow. Former fellow, National Endowment of Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, National Council for Soviet and East European Research, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
AWARDS:National Jewish Book Award, Wayne S. Vucinich Prize (Best Book in Any Discipline), American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies), and Association of American Publishers’ Best Scholarly Book in Religion Award, all for The Jewish Century; fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Also worked as a translator in the Soviet Union, Mozambique, and Lisbon, Portugal, before immigrating to the United States.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to journals and of chapters to scholarly books.
SIDELIGHTS
Russian-born American historian Yuri Slezkine is the Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or editor of a number of books dealing with Russian history and with the history of the Jews. Among these are Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, from 1994, In the Shadow of the Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, coedited with Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Jewish Century, winner of multiple awards, including the National Jewish Book Award, and the 2017 study, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution.
Arctic Mirrors and In the Shadow of Revolution
In Arctic Mirrors, Slezkine examines the complex relationship between the twenty-six indigenous groups that inhabit the Arctic tundra and subarctic regions with the people of Russia, who first entered and began colonizing the region in the eleventh century. Slezkine looks at how Russians view these peoples, who survived by fishing, hunting, trapping, and herding reindeer. To that end, he inspects both historical documents as well as popular fiction, and closely examines their fate during the Stalinist era when many of what the Russians termed “savage,” were transformed into industrial laborers. Reviewing Arctic Mirrors in Booklist, Joe Collins felt that the author’s “descriptions of the trials of the northern Russians help make this book an invaluable look at the people the totalitarian Soviets forgot.”
In the Shadow of Revolution is a collection of life stories of Russian women in the first half of the twentieth century that gathers recollections and memoirs of women of all classes–from aristocrats to milkmaids. These narratives are organized chronologically around important events of the time, including the 1917 Revolution, the ensuing Civil War of 1918-1920; the collectivization of the 1920s, and the Stalinist Great Terror of the 1930s. “[T]hese 36 accounts explore the schism that split Russian society for a century: Us and Them, Red and White, Bolshevik and Bourgeois,” according to a Russian Life contributor.
The Jewish Century
In his award-winning study, The Jewish Century, Slezkine argues that the Modern Age is really the Jewish Age, and that we are all metaphorically Jews. His central thesis is a division of the humanity into two groups: Apollonians, who are the food-producing majority, and Mercurians, the “service nomads,” as anthropologist term them–free agents who specialize in the delivery of goods and services. These Mercurians–Jews and Armenians among others–became the entrepreneurial minorities but by the modern age, their model of urban, literate, mobile, and occupationally flexible, has become the standard, and Apollonians are now becoming Mercurians. The Jews, according to Slezkine are the most successful of the Mercurians, and thus they are the model moderns. Slezkine looks at the fortunes of Russian Jews who have immigrated to America and Palestine and at those who remained in Russia. The author further argues that both Bolshevism and American capitalism and liberalism were deeply affected by the Jewish exodus.
Commentary reviewer Hillel Halkin had a varied assessment of The Jewish Century, observing: “This is the problem with Slezkine’s categories. ‘Apollonianism’ and ‘Mercurianism; may explain many things, but when used as all-purpose historical tools they turn out, like all tools when applied to tasks for which they are not precisely fitted, a very roughly finished product. … The Jewish Century is, on its own terms, a successfully provocative work, but only because Yuri Slezkine’s visit to Jewish history, has been a brief one. Had he stayed any longer, he would have rightly begun to feel confused himself.” A similar nuanced evaluation came from Books & Culture writer Jonathan Kahn, who commented: “Trapped within Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, struggling to free itself from Slezkine’s ideological thesis, is a poignant history of Russia’s Jews. It is a history of desire–of 19th-century Jews seeking to free themselves of the Jewishness of the Pale of Settlement by exulting in the Russia of Tolstoy and Chekov; of zealous Jewish commitment to and success within the early Soviet Revolution.” However, in the end, Kahn felt that the author does not do the “hard and necessary work … [of] spend[ing] time in specific historic contexts, gathering and analyzing evidence of what worked and what didn’t.” Kahn added, “He gives us myth instead.”
Higher praise was offered by New Leader reviewer Gene Sosin, who noted: “When Slezkine focuses on the transformation of Jewish life in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union, where most of Europe’s Jews lived, his book gains in interest and momentum. Although the subject is familiar, he gives it a fresh perspective.” A Publishers Weekly contributor also had a positive assessment, noting: “Slezkine’s work is one of the most innovative and intellectually stimulating books in Jewish studies in years.”
The House of Government
In his narrative history, The House of Government, Slezkine tells the story of the Russian Revolution in a new manner–through the true stories of the top Communist officials and their families who lived in the huge Moscow apartment building, the House of Government, located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. This complex included over five hundred furnished apartments. Additionally, there were a number of public spaces, including a library, movie theater, shooting range, and tennis court. The author employs accounts from diaries, letters, and interviews to tell the story of 800 of these roughly 2,700 residents who were ultimately evicted from the House of Government during Stalin’s purges and led to prisons or to death.
Library Journal contributor Laurie Linger Skinner termed The House of Government a “comprehensive work of scholarship and storytelling,” and further noted: “Throughout the book, first-person entries taken from diaries, letters and memoirs illuminate daily life and private thoughts.” Similarly, a Publishers Weekly reviewer commented, “Slezkine aggregates mountains of detail for an enthralling account of the rise and fall of the revolutionary generation.” Writing in Foreign Affairs, Robert Legvold also had praise, dubbing the work an “epic narrative,” and adding: “The book’s depth (not to mention its length) invites the reader to luxuriate in it, chapter by chapter, rather than simply plowing through.” New York Times Book Review critic Marci Short likewise observed: “Slezkine’s The House of Government is a history of the Soviet project as experienced by those who carried it out.” Short added: “[The] chapters on the Stalinist Terror are the most vivid. Overall, Slezkine’s writing is sharp, fresh, sometimes playful.” New York Review of Books Online writer Benjamin Nathans was also impressed with this work, observing: “Constructed on what feels like a lifetime of research and reflection, The House of Government offers a virtuosic weaving of novelistic storytelling, social anthropology, intellectual history, and literary criticism. … Slezkine … has caught an extraordinary set of lives in this book. Few historians, dead or alive, have managed to combine so spectacularly the gifts of storyteller and scholar.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 1994, Joe Collins, review of Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, p. 399.
Books & Culture, July-August, 2005, Jonathon Kahn, review of The Jewish Century, p. 40.
Commentary, December, 2005, Hillel Halkin, review of The Jewish Century, p. 73.
Foreign Affairs, November-December, 2017, Robert Legvold, review of The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, p. 164.
Library Journal, July 1, 2017, Laurie Linger Skinner, review of The House of Government, p. 88.
New Leader, September-October, 2004, Gene Sosin, review of The Jewish Century, p. 24.
Publishers Weekly, June 21, 2004, review of The Jewish Century, p. 49; May 22, 2017, review of The House of Government, p. 82.
Reason, November, 2017. Matthew Harwood, “The Insatiable Utopia: The Soviet Elite Who Built a ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ and Paid with Their Lives,” p. 74.
Russian Life, March, 2001, review of In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, p. 60.
ONLINE
Commentary Magazine Online, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/ (December 1, 2005), Hillel Halkin, review of The Jewish Century.
E and T, https://eandt.theiet.org/ (October 16, 2017), Vitali Vitaliev, review of The House of Government.
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (August 11, 2017), David Priestland, review of The House of Government.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (December 15, 2017), Owen Hatherley, review of The House of Government.
London Review of Books Online, https://www.lrb.co.uk/ (March 1, 2005), Sheila Fitzpatrick, review of The Jewish Century; (July 1, 2017), Sheila Fitzpatrick, review of The House of Government.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (January 9, 2018), “Yuri Slezkine.”
New York Review of Books Online, http://www.nybooks.com/ (November 23, 2017), Benjamin Nathans, review of The House of Government.
New York Times Book Review Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (August 18, 2017), Marci Shore, review of The House of Government.
Tablet Magazine, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/ (October 10, 2017), David Mikics, review of The House of Government.
Times Literary Supplement Online, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/ (December 19, 2017), Stephen Lovell, review of The House of Government.
University of California Berkeley, Department of History Website, http://history.berkeley.edu/ (January 9, 2018), “Yuri Slezkine.”*
Yuri Slezkine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (August 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Yuri Slezkine
Born February 7, 1956
Russia
Alma mater Moscow State University
University of Texas, Austin
Occupation Historian, author, translator
Employer University of California, Berkeley
Yuri Lvovich Slezkine (Russian: Юрий Львович Слёзкин; born February 7, 1956) is a Russian-born American historian, writer, and translator. He is a professor of Russian history and Director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known as the author of the book The Jewish Century (2004).[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Career
2 Slezkine's theory of ethnic identity
3 Works
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
Career[edit]
Slezkine originally trained as an interpreter in Moscow State University. His first trip outside the Soviet Union was in the late 1970s when he found work as a translator in Mozambique. He returned to Moscow to serve as a translator of Portuguese, and spent 1982 in Lisbon before emigrating to Austin, Texas the next year. He earned a PhD from the University of Texas, Austin.
Skezine is a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008).[2]
Slezkine's theory of ethnic identity[edit]
See also: middleman minority
Slezkine characterizes the Jews (alongside other groups such as the Armenians, overseas Chinese, Gypsies) as a Mercurian people "specializ[ing] exclusively in providing services to the surrounding food-producing societies," which he characterizes as Apollonians. This division is, according to him, recurring in pre-20th century societies. With the exception of the Gypsies, these "Mercurian peoples" have all enjoyed great socioeconomic success relative to the average among their hosts, and have all, without exception, attracted hostility and resentment. A recurring pattern of the relationship between Apollonians and Mercurian people is that the social representation of each group by the other is symmetrical, for instance Mercurians see Apollonians as brutes while Apollonians see Mercurians as effeminate. Mercurians develop a culture of "purity" and "national myths" to cultivate their separation from the Apollonians, which allows them to provide international services (intermediaries, diplomacy) or services that are taboo for the local Apollonian culture (linked to death, magic, sexuality or banking). Slezkine develops this thesis by arguing that the Jews, the most successful of these Mercurian peoples, have increasingly influenced the course and nature of Western societies, particularly during the early and middle periods of Soviet Communism, and that modernity can be seen as a transformation of Apollonians into Mercurians.
Works[edit]
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, Princeton University Press, 2017
The Jewish Century, Princeton University Press, 2004 (ISBN 0-691-11995-3)
In the Shadow of the Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, Princeton University Press, 2000
Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, Cornell University Press, 1994
The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism, Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994), 414-452
Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture, 1993
See also[edit]
Amy Chua, American writer on market dominant minorities
Model minority
Dominant minority
Middleman minority
Home » Faculty » Yuri Slezkine
Yuri Slezkine
Jane K. Sather Professor of History
Office Hours:
On Leave for Spring 2018
2220 Dwinelle
(510) 642-2224
slezkine@berkeley.edu
Education:
M.A., University of Moscow
Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin
Research Interests:
Late Modern Europe: Russia
Representative Publications:
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017)
The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000).
Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
"The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53, no. 2
(Summer 1994): 414-452.
Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture, ed. by Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).
Courses
Semester Course Title Syllabus
Spring 2017 171C The Soviet Union, 1917 to the Present
Spring 2017 285B.004 Research Topics in Soviet History
Spring 2016 171C The Soviet Union, 1917 to the Present
Spring 2015 171C The Soviet Union 1917 to the Present
Fall 2015 280B Introduction to Soviet Historiography
Fall 2014 285B Research Topics in Soviet History
Spring 2013 171C The Soviet Union, 1917 to the Present
Spring 2013 280B.005 Introduction to Soviet Historiography Microsoft Office document icon 280 Sov Sp 2013 Syll.doc
Spring 2012 171C The Soviet Union, 1917 to the Present File 171CSylSp 2013 History 171C Yuri Slezkine.docx
Fall 2012 285B Research Topics in Soviet History
Printer-friendly version
3229 Dwinelle Hall • Berkeley, CA 94720-2550 • ph (510) 642-1971 • fax (510) 643-5323 • history@berkeley.edu • Facebook
University of California Berkeley • College of Letters & Sciences • © 2017, The Regents of the University of California
CHANNELS
REVIEWS
ESSAYS
INTERVIEWS
SECTIONS
BLARB
PRINT
AV
ABOUT
EVENTS
DONATE
SUPPORT LARB
SIGN IN
Yuri Slezkine
Yuri Slezkine is the Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Jewish Century (Princeton), which won the National Jewish Book Award.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Awaiting the Real Day: An Excerpt from Yuri Slezkine’s “The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution”
August 16, 2017
An excerpt from “The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution” by Yuri Slezkine, published this month by Princeton University Press....
Awaiting the Real Day: An Excerpt from Yuri Slezkine’s “The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution”
START TYPING...PRESS ENTER TO SEARCH, OR ESC TO EXIT
Print Marked Items
The Insatiable Utopia: The Soviet elite who
built a "dictatorship of the proletariat" and
paid with their lives
Matthew Harwood
Reason.
49.6 (Nov. 2017): p74+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Reason Foundation
http://reason.com/about
Full Text:
IN FEBRUARY 1917, a 30-year-old Bolshevik named Valerian Osinsky wrote to his 22-year-old mistress
about a coming revolution that would wipe away czarism and deliver what Christianity couldn't: the
kingdom of heaven on earth. "Only in the world of insatiable Utopia," he wrote, "will the simplest ethical
rules become real and free from exceptions and contradictions."
Twenty-one years later, he would be executed as an "enemy of the people" for his blasphemies against the
Soviet Union.
Stories like that abound in the Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine's 1,100-page epic, The House of
Government, which chronicles the lives of elite Bolsheviks and their families from their early days of
revolutionary awakening through the overthrow of the czar, the building of "the dictatorship of the
proletariat," Joseph Stalin's Great Terror, and their children's loss of faith. Divided into three volumes, The
House of Government isn't just history. It's art that self-consciously, and successfully, mimics Tolstoy's War
and Peace and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.
By the end it's also a horror story of grotesque proportions, as the "insatiable utopia" devours its own.
The Bolsheviks weren't just ideologues, Slezkine argues at the outset. They were "millenarian sectarians
preparing for the apocalypse" who "managed to take over Rome long before their faith could become an
inherited habit." After showing them prevail in the revolution, the book centers around the House of
Government--Europe's largest apartment building, reserved for the "high priests of the Revolution." It was,
Slezkine writes, "a place where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to die."
These priests of "earthly salvation" made no vow of poverty. The House of Government, which ended up
costing over 30 million rubles and was built in what was known as Moscow's "Swamp," was equipped with
all the latest amenities--"a kitchen with a gas stove, garbage chute, exhaust fan, and fold-away bunk for the
maid," plus extra living space not afforded the typical worker. The House of Government also conveniently
contained public spaces, such as a cafeteria, a movie theater, a child care center, a laundry, a bank, a library,
and a gym.
That wasn't the end of the luxuries they allowed themselves. Elite party members relied on chauffeurs and
made full use of the aristocratic estates, or dachas, "expropriated" from the "enemies of the working class."
A prince's country property became "Lenin Rest Home No. 1"; built "in the Italian style," the manor could
accommodate 150 guests and included a 27-acre park and a large pond with a motorboat.
The House of Government, the elite told themselves, was a transitory moment in socialism's destruction of
the family--"halfway between bourgeois individualism and communist collectivism," summarizes Slezkine.
Under socialism, according to the communal house theorist L.M. Sabsovich, "children will no longer be 'the
property' of their parents; they will be 'the property' of the state, which will take upon itself the solution of
all problems involved in child rearing."
In practice, unsurprisingly, these elite Bolsheviks loved and spoiled their children.
THE CONTRADICTIONS OF Bolshevism weren't just confined to the elite's way of life. Stalin's first fiveyear
plan, which sought to industrialize the Soviet Union and establish the economic preconditions for
communism, relied "on forced labor as much as it did on 'genuine enthusiasts'" of the working and peasant
classes, writes Slezkine. Workers and peasants didn't want to build socialism, and so labor shortages meant
that low-level criminals and political prisoners would.
According to Matvei Berman, the head of the Gulag system, a convict cost the state approximately $500
rubles a year. "Why on earth should workers and peasants feed this army of parasites, swindlers, wreckers,
and counter-revolutionaries?" he wrote. "Let's send them to the camps and say: 'Here are your means of
production. Work, if you want to eat.'" As the need for labor increased, labor camps multiplied.
Stalin's first five-year plan also initiated forced collectivization. Since peasant families couldn't be relied on
to provide their grain to the state freely, they had to be done away with. "The socialist city can lead the
small-peasant village only by imposing collective and state farms upon it," Stalin told a conference of
agrarian Marxists in December 1929. Long-term liberation called for slavery in the here and now.
Stalin's forced collectivization divided the rural population into three categories: poor, middle, and rich. The
rich were known as kulaks, and they were further divided into three categories. The first were "immediately
liquidated by means of imprisonment in concentration camps, not hesitating to use the death penalty with
regard to the organizers of terrorist acts, counterrevolutionary actions, and insurrectionary organizations,"
according to the Soviet policy. The second group were exiled to remote locations and forced to labor for the
state. The third group were resettled around where they lived.
Forced collectivization was both an economic and a human rights disaster. The servants of the state were
given production quotas that couldn't be met, then beaten when they failed to produce. "They whine and
whimper that there's nothing left," wrote one party official responsible for grain procurement, "but when you
grab them by the throat, they deliver both grain and hay, and whatever else they're required to."
Mass death resulted. "The determined enforcement of ambitious production plans," notes Slezkine, "resulted
in a famine that killed between 4.6 and 8 million people." Some resorted to cannibalism to fill their bellies.
Meanwhile, the elite had more than enough. A short time after witnessing the Kazakhstan countryside
starving to death, one secret policeman's fashionista wife wrote about how they dined on "roast suckling
pig."
BUT MUCH OF the elite would soon face their own troubles.
On December 1, 1934, the old Bolshevik and Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov was murdered by Leonid
Nikolayev, possibly under Stalin's orders with the assistance of the secret police. Stalin, always fearful of
losing his stranglehold on power, used Kirov's assassination to eliminate any and all potential rivals, no
matter how remote. The resulting "search" for Nikolayev's co-conspirators would degenerate into a witch
hunt aimed at purging the Soviet Union of all those who "stray from the Party's path," as one apostate,
Grigory Zinoviev, put it before he was executed in 1936.
The terror usually began at night with a knock on the door or with secret policemen appearing in the target's
room. It often ended with the "criminal" sentenced to "10 years without the right of correspondence,"
doublespeak for execution. The last third of Slezkine's book is a horror show of arrest, accusation,
interrogation (sometimes involving torture), and either exile or execution for residents of the House of
Government. As one old Bolshevik, Aleksandr Arosev, wrote in his diary in 1936, "Everyone is afraid of
everyone."
No matter how bad it got, many people kept the faith, at least outwardly. "The Party is the sun of our lives,"
Yulia Piatnitsky wrote to her 17-year-old arrested son, "and nothing can be dearer than its health, and if
sacrifices are required...find the strength to remain a human being."
Yulia would eventually be arrested for telling an informer that her husband, who had been arrested before
their son, was innocent.
The terror wasn't confined to the elite. People associated with certain ethnic groups--Poles, Germans,
Japanese--were deported or cleansed as "anti-Soviet elements." So were kulaks and citizens who spent time
abroad. Mass graves proliferated. Civil liberties and the rule of law simply did not exist. The state owned
you, and it wanted people not just to obey it but to believe in it.
November marks the centennial of the Bolshevik revolution. The anniversary comes at a time when
socialism is once again seen by some on the left as a political project worthy of implementation in America.
Bernie Sanders, a New Deal Democrat in socialist clothing, made a serious run at the presidency; the
provocative Marxist magazine Jacobin garners clicks online. Millenarian socialism offers the promise that a
small band of true believers can change the world with the help of history's unstoppable march.
Slezkine's House of Government is an exhaustive antidote to such theology, and it should give pause to any
insatiable Utopians of the 21st century. As the American anarchist Benjamin Tucker wrote as Stalin's Soviet
Union deteriorated into an inquisition, "Capitalism is at least tolerable, which cannot be said of Socialism or
Communism."
Any system that allows for certain individual freedoms, no matter how negative or constrained, is better
than the alternatives.
MATTHEW HARWOOD is a senior writer and editor at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Harwood, Matthew. "The Insatiable Utopia: The Soviet elite who built a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' and
paid with their lives." Reason, Nov. 2017, p. 74+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A510482355/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=430d97bc.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A510482355
History
QUOTE:
Throughout the book, first-person entries taken from diaries, letters and memoirs illuminate daily
life and private thoughts
comprehensive work of
scholarship and storytelling
Library Journal.
142.12 (July 1, 2017): p88+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Chin, Rita. The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History. Princeton Univ. Aug. 2017. 376p. notes.
index. ISBN 9780691164267. $35; ebk. ISBN 9781400884902. HIST
Chin (The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany) explores the history and issues surrounding
immigrants and multiculturalism in post--World War II Europe. Although the title implies a wider view, the
analysis mainly covers the UK, Germany, France, and occasionally the Netherlands. Chin argues that
multiculturalism began in earnest in Europe after World War II, when immigration was encouraged as a way
to rebuild. However, the influx and subsequent settlement of immigrants exacerbated preexisting cultural
and racial tensions. Great Britain, Germany, and France then created policies which contributed to the
integration (or lack thereof) of minority communities into the existing population. Questions of nationality,
identity, and citizenship run throughout the book, and Chin also interrogates the degree to which cultural
differences act as an explanation for failed integration. The focus is on Muslim immigrants in particular,
with the author presenting modern-day examples, such as the controversy over girls wearing head scarves in
France and the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in the UK, to illustrate the countries'
responses to a growing Muslim population. Finally, Chin considers the lasting legacy and future of
multiculturalism. VERDICT A thoughtful explanation of the issues surrounding multiculturalism in three
large European countries. Recommended for scholarly audiences.--Rebekah Kati, Durham, NC
* Fidler, Richard. Ghost Empire: A Journey to the Legendary Constantinople. Pegasus. Sept. 2017.520p.
illus. photos. maps. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781681775111. $29.95; ebk. ISBN 9781681775777. HIST
While traveling with his teenage son, debut author Fidler, the host of a popular radio program in Australia,
felt inspired to write a history of Constantinople. Combining history and travelog, he details his visits to
well-known sites such as the Hagia Sophia, the Hippodrome, and the Theodosian Walls, expounding on the
role each location played in the city's history. He covers the key events of Constantinople from 330 CE,
when it was founded as the new capital of the Roman Empire, to its fall in 1453, when it was captured by
the Ottoman Turks and renamed Istanbul. During the journey, Fidler introduces fascinating characters such
as Constantine the Great, Justinian, and Empress Irene of Athens. He underscores the many violent conflicts
throughout Constantinople's existence, including those with the Persian Empire, the Crusaders, and the
Turks. He also notes the city's important contributions to the modern world. Fidler's prose is lively and
entertaining; he has a great affection for his subject and often describes it in a way that makes it seem
magical. VERDICT Strongly recommended for anyone interested in traveling to Istanbul and in its history.--
Dave Pugl, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL
Friend, David. The Naughty Nineties:
The Triumph of the American Libido. Twelve: Grand Central. Sept. 2017. 640p. bibliog. index. ISBN
9780446556293. $32; ebk. ISBN 9781455567553. HIST
Vanity Fair editor Friend (Watching the World Change) offers up a gossipy retrospective of a decade most,
though not all, of his readers will remember firsthand: over 600 pages chronicling the sexual politics as well
as the pains and pleasures of the 1990s. Each of the 31 chapters focuses on a particular subject related to
gender and sexuality with some narratives--the winding political and media fortunes of Bill and Hillary
Clinton, for example--woven throughout the text. In rapid succession, readers are introduced to diverse
subjects such as Sex in the City, Viagra, The Vagina Monologues, "don't ask, don't tell," virtual sex at the
dawn of the Internet, plastic surgery, third-wave feminism, and the cultural significance of the man cave.
Source notes at the end provide a list of books, articles, and interviews by the author that informed each
chapter. Lengthy discursive footnotes, meanwhile, supplement the main narrative with additional details,
anecdotes, and commentary. VERDICT Those wishing for in-depth analysis or historical contextualization
will be left feeling winded by the pace of this cultural tour. Will most likely appeal to readers wishing to
revisit Nineties cultural touchstones, deftly escorted by a somewhat insouciant tour guide.--Anna J.
Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc.
* Hathaway, Oona A. & Scott J. Shapiro. The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan To Outlaw War Remade
the World. S. & S. Sept. 2017.608p. notes. index. ISBN 9781501109867. $30; ebk. ISBN 9781501109881.
HIST
The 1928 Paris Peace Pact has been discredited by historians and heads of state because it failed to prevent
the rise of Nazism during the 1930s and World War II that followed. Hathaway (international law, Yale Law
Sch.; coauthor, Foundations of International Law) and Shapiro (law and philosophy, Yale Law Sch.;
Legality) convincingly challenge this interpretation in their significant revisionist investigation, which
concludes that war was successfully outlawed with the establishment of the UN in 1945. This lucid account,
which occasionally lapses into legalese, offers fascinating background on the lesser-known academics and
diplomats who carved out the framework for the post--World War II new world order that made wars of
conquest illegal. Included is a chilling overview of the rise of the Third Reich and Carl Schmitt, its
malevolent legal apologist. Although "out-casting" (settling disputes through treaties) now governs
diplomacy, the authors warn that the rise of the Islamic State and Russia's invasion of Crimea could lead to a
resurgence of the Old World Order and its promotion of war as a first resort. VERDICT An often engrossing
narrative that provides a new framework for interpreting international relations over the previous five
centuries. For informed readers and diplomatic historians. [See Prepub Alert, 3/27/17.]--Karl Helicher,
formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA
Jones, Dan. The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God's Holy Warriors. Viking. Sept. 2017.448p.
maps. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780525428305. $30; ebk. ISBN 9780698186439. HIST
Jones (The Plantagenets; War of the Roses) brings his well-tuned narrative style to the subject ot the
Templars, who played a critical role in the Crusades from their beginnings in 1119 through the early 14th
century, acting as knights and financiers, and whose castles dotted the Holy Land of Jerusalem. Jones
divides the book into four parts: "Pilgrims," which discusses the order's founding; "Soldiers," covering
campaigns in the Holy Land and in Spain; "Bankers," highlighting growing financial and landed interests;
and "Heretics," detailing the Templars' dramatic end by arrest and inquisition in the early 1300s. Readers
will discover important figures in Crusade history, including Richard the Lionheart, St. Bernard of
Clairvaux, Saladin, the Baldwin dynasty, and many others. Critical events, including the Battle of Hattin
(1187) and the capture of Acre (1191) are well detailed. The book reads well, but it is information rich; a
general background of the Crusades is recommended. VERDICT Both seasoned medievalists and lay
readers wanting a detailed account of the Crusades will find food for thought here. Highly relevant to
current events. [See Prepub Alert, 3/27/17.J--Jeffrey Meyer, Mt. Pleasant P.L., IA
Service, Robert. The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russia Revolution. Pegasus. Sept. 2017.496p.
illus. photos. notes. bibliog. index. ISBN 9781681775012. $29.95; ebk. ISBN 9781681775722. HIST
Historian Service (emeritus, Russian history, Univ. of Oxford; The End of the Cold War) has written
extensively about the history of modern Russia, and has authored biographies of Leon Trotsky and Vladimir
Lenin. Here, he provides fresh information about the events of 1917-18. While other historians have
accurately written about the fate of the Romanovs, Service provides a thorough analysis of the reasons why
the Romanovs were murdered, documenting the complicity of revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in this mission.
The author shows the movements of the Red and the White Armies in the revolution that kept the Urals in a
state of panic, and the White Army advancement on Yekaterinburg. The movement by the White Army
provided the excuse and the impetus for murdering the whole Romanov family in the basement of the Ipatev
house. Service documents the grisly details of the murder and the disposal of the bodies. Lastly, he delves
into the politics and economics of the region during the Russian revolution, recounting the complete details
of the last 17 months of the Romanovs. VERDICT Recommended for history buffs and serious Russian
historians--Harry Willems, Great Bend P.L., KS
Slezkine, Yuri. The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Princeton Univ. Aug.
2017.1096p. photos. bibliog. ISBN 9780691176949. $39.95; ebk. ISBN 9781400888177. HIST
The House of Government, a large Soviet living complex built in Moscow in the 1920s, was populated by
government and party officials not quite significant enough to live in the Kremlin. Slezkine (history, Univ. of
California Berkeley; The Jewish Century) relates Bolshevik and Soviet life and history as experienced by its
residents. The residence is placed in geographic, architectural, and historical contexts of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. The Bolshevik revolution is compared to other religious and nonreligious millenarian
sects. During the 1920s, revolutionaries moved into the house and became domesticated, attaining a
surprising level of material comfort and leading traditional family lives. Stalin's Great Terror tore
domesticity apart, and many residents of the house, labeled wreckers and enemies of the people, were exiled
or killed. Throughout the book, first-person entries taken from diaries, letters and memoirs illuminate daily
life and private thoughts, as in Orlando Figues's The Whisperers. VERDICT This comprehensive work of
scholarship and storytelling will appeal to readers with an interest in the Russian Revolution, the early
Soviet Union, and the pitfalls of Utopian community building.--Laurie Linger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty.,
Waukegan, IL
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"History." Library Journal, 1 July 2017, p. 88+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497612727/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=24a7e2c6.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497612727
QUOTE:
lezkine
aggregates mountains of detail for an enthralling account of the rise and fall of the revolutionary generation.
The House of Government: A Saga of the
Russian Revolution
Publishers Weekly.
264.21 (May 22, 2017): p82.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
Yuri Slezkine. Princeton Univ., $39.95 (l,096p) ISBN978-0-691-17694-9
In this mammoth and profusely researched work, Slezkine (The Jewish Century), professor of history at UC
Berkeley, recounts the Russian revolution through the activities and inhabitants of the House of
Government, Europe's largest residential building. Built in 1931 in a central Moscow swamp, the house was
home to hundreds of Communist Party officials, their dependents, and maintenance workers. The
community lasted just over a decade; Stalin purged many residents in the 1930s and the rest were evacuated
in 1941 as the Nazis advanced. Slezkine finds the story of the House of Government worth telling because it
was "where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to die." This is a family saga of the "Old
Bolsheviks," the men and women who midwifed the revolution and guided its early steps before falling
victim to Stalin's paranoid excesses. Slezkine illuminates myriad aspects of these lives, including fashion
choices and intellectual schisms. He also analyzes Bolshevism's failure so soon after its apparent triumph,
inviting controversy by describing the Bolsheviks as "millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse."
Slezkine asserts that the cosmopolitanism and humanism of postrevolutionary culture undermined the
single-mindedness necessary to maintain their ideology. It's a work begging to be debated; Slezkine
aggregates mountains of detail for an enthralling account of the rise and fall of the revolutionary generation.
Illus. Agent: Zoe Pagnamenta, Zoe Pagnamenta Agency. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution." Publishers Weekly, 22 May 2017, p. 82.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494099088/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8ca5dfad. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494099088
QUOTE:
This is the problem with Slezkine's categories. "Apollonianism" and "Mercurianism" may explain many
things, but when used as all-purpose historical tools they turn out, like all tools when applied to tasks for
which they are not precisely fitted, a very roughly finished product.
The Jewish Century is, on its own terms, a
successfully provocative work, but only because Yuri Slezkine's visit to Jewish history, has been a brief one.
Had he stayed any longer, he would have rightly begun to feel confused himself.
Nomads
Hillel Halkin
Commentary.
120.5 (Dec. 2005): p73+.
COPYRIGHT 2005 American Jewish Committee
http://www.commentarymagazine.com
Full Text:
The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine Princeton. 344 pp. $29.95
THE EQUATION of Jewishness with the quintessence of modernity, the central thesis of Yuri Slezkine's
The Jewish Century, is hardly new. Neither, however, is it as old as modernity itself. If one goes back to the
time of the Enlightenment and the beginnings of the industrial revolution, one finds the Jews widely
regarded, by their own Europeanized intellectuals no less than by Christian society, as the epitome of
backwardness. Self-imposed isolation, religious primitivism, economic and social stagnation, intellectual
obscurantism-these were the attributes attached to them. A small number of them, like the Rothschilds or the
Oppenheimers, had become or were becoming cosmopolitan entrepreneurs and bankers involved in
changing the face of Europe. But these were assumed to be either mere throwbacks to the medieval Jewish
moneylender or anomalies, atypical of the Jewish world beyond whose confines their success had propelled
them.
One of the first European intellectuals to propose otherwise was the perfunctorily baptized German-Jewish
poet and essayist Heinrich Heine. In an essay written after viewing a production of Shakespeare's The
Merchant of Venice in London in 1838, Heine remarked:
All Europe is catching up with
the Jews. I say catching up because
from the outset the Jews
embodied the principle of modernity
[das moderne Prinzip] that is
now visibly unfolding among the
peoples of Europe.
Heine continued, explaining himself:
The Greeks and Romans championed
the soil, the Fatherland.
Subsequently Greco-Romanized
northern Europe championed
the person of the chieftain, replacing
the patriotism of antiquity
with the vassalage and fidelity
to princes of the Middle
Ages. The Jews, however, championed
only the law and abstract
thought, as do the cosmopolitan
republicans of our own age, who
esteem above all neither homeland
nor ruler, but law alone.
Heine's point was that in modern, capitalist Europe the individual's connection to his fellow was being
defined less and less by determinants of blood and birth like tribe, polls, family, clan, guild, and social caste,
and more and more by universally recognized rights and obligations that regulated all of human life. The
single bureaucratic state was now the theater of operations for everyone, and everyone was an autonomous
player on a vast field of interlocking relationships--economic relationships, above all--where performance
was increasingly a function of private abilities, talents, and proclivities.
And because (Heine thought) the original model for a society in which a commitment to law replaced
personal loyalties was the Torah and its rabbinic exposition, by whose pre-cepts Jews had always lived, the
Jew was the modern, capitalist man par excellence. The rise of families like the Oppenheimers or the
Rothschilds from small-time merchants and moneylenders to international economic powers was, far from
being an anomaly, an essential expression of their Jewishness. All that had changed was that the same
Europe that once, in medieval times, had excluded the Jewish "shylock" as a pariah was itself now being
"Judaized," so that Shylock could compete on equal terms. The Oppenheimers and Rothschilds were only
the first; many more like them were sure to follow.
HEINE WAS not alone in his day in associating the Jews with the transformation of values that had turned
the pre-modern world into the modern one--a transformation that would be systematically described decades
later in the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies's classic Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Moses Hess, the
Jewish socialist and subsequent early Zionist, expressed similar thoughts, as did Karl Marx, who in place of
law substituted money as the ultimate abstraction that the Jew was devoted to. Marx's The Jewish Question
(1843), declaring that "Money is the jealous god of Israel, in lace of which no other god may exist" and that
the "god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world," was to become a
seminal text for the anti-Semitic European Left.
On the whole, however, late-19th- and 20th-century Jewish historiography, though it did not slight the
economic and social role of the Jews in modern times, failed to follow up on Heine's apercu. (The one
important exception was the German economist Werner Sombart's The Jews and Modern Capitalism,
published in 1911 and later put to anti-Semitic purposes by the Nazis.) Perhaps this was because, as the
writing of Jewish history became a more academic discipline, it also became a more cautious one.
Moreover, it was a discipline largely in the hands of Jewish scholars, educated and rooted in Jewish society,
whose work had both an insider's perspective and an apologetic bias.
In this perspective, Jewish life, when seen from close up, was intricate, multifaceted, and riddled with
internal conflicts and contradictions, and thus hardly amenable to sweeping generalizations like Heine's.
Why make, or even discuss, grandiose claims for it that would only provide more grist for the mills of the
anti-Semites, who already blamed the Jews for all the ills of capitalism and modernity alike?
AS THE author of a book that begins by paraphrasing Heine with the declaration that "Modernization is
about everyone becoming Jewish," Yuri Slezkine, who teaches history. at the University of California, is
therefore, one might say, the right historian at the right time. Russian born and educated, he comes to his
subject, despite the Jewish grandmother that he tells us about, very much as an outsider, having had neither
a Jewish upbringing nor training in Jewish history. And writing about 19th- and 20th-century Jewry at the
start of the 21st century, he has returned to Heine's proposition in an era in which it is no longer a handy
weapon for anti-Semites, at least of the "progressive" variety.
Not that anti-Semitism, alas, has ceased to exist. But the anti-Semitism of our global village has largely
reverted to the period when the modern age began: it blames the Jews, and especially the state established
by them, for being backward and tribalistic as the rest of humanity enters the age of universal man.
Gemeinschaft, the comfortingly coherent community of the pre-modern past whose disappearance it was
once fashionable to mourn, is today intellectually out; Gesellschaft, the fluid, open society of the postmodern
present, is in. To make the case, as Slezkine does, for the Jews having been the supreme engineers
of Gesellschaft is thus to pay them the highest compliment.
Slezkine does not use Tonnies's terminology, just as he does not mention Heine's Merchant of Venice essay.
Nor, coming 150 years afterward, is he looking at quite the same things. Indeed, in equating the Jews with
das moderate Prinzip he faces a paradox different from the one faced by Heine. The latter had to ask himself
the question: how is it that the same Jews who are everywhere still mired in backwardness are also at the
cutting edge of a new capitalist class that is forging the future of Europe? Slezkine, whose area of expertise
is Russian history, asks a different question: how is it that the same Jews who were everywhere so
prominent in the development and advance of modern capitalism became also so prominent in the great anticapitalist
movements of the times, and specifically of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet society it
constructed? How explain that, judging by every statistical means of measurement at our disposal, the Jews,
more than any other people, were the outstanding success stories of two such opposite processes?
MUCH OF The Jewish Century consists of marshaling those statistics, which, though composing a picture
that has been sketched many times, are impressive when presented in bulk. Take pre- and post-revolutionary
Russia, for instance. On a single page (and there are many others like it), Slezkine informs us that, as
recorded in different years of the late-19th and early-20th century, Jews in Odessa accounted for 57 percent
of the city's factory production and 90 percent of its grain exports, and controlled most of its banks; that in
Ukraine they owned one-third of all sugar mills; that in Kiev (in which the average Jew was not even
allowed to reside), they composed 36.8 percent of all corporate managers; and that in St. Petersburg, where
they made up a mere 2 percent of the population, they were 43 percent of all stock brokers and 37 percent of
all business owners. Mid this, in a period when the overall Jewish situation in the Russian empire was so
dire and seemingly so hopeless that 2 million Jews, most of them impoverished, were emigrating westward,
largely to America.
Comes the 1917 revolution: did Jews, who comprised, as Slezkine documents, a remarkably high proportion
of the Bolshevik leadership in its early years (45 percent of the Bolshevik Central Committee, 31 percent of
Bolshevik delegates to the First All-Russian Congress, 40 percent of elected officials in the Red Army, 41.7
percent of the governing bureau of the Petrograd Soviet, etc.), lose out now that their capitalist skills were
no longer in demand? Not at all. Not only were they, in 1935, 38.5 percent of the "leading cadres" of the
Soviet secret police, but in 1939, when they made up only 1.8 percent of the Soviet population, they were
17.1 percent of all university students in Moscow, 19 percent in Leningrad, 24.6 percent in Kharkov, and
35.6 percent in Kiev. In Leningrad, they were 69.4 percent of all dentists; 58.6 percent of all pharmacists; 45
percent of all defense haters; 38.6 percent of all doctors; 31.3 percent of all writers, journalists, and editors;
and 24.6 percent of all musicians. They were 19.6 percent of all physicians in the entire Soviet Union and
14.1 percent of all researchers and university professors.
Indeed, until the Holocaust and the semi-official anti-Semitism that set in soon after World War II, the Jews
of the socialist Soviet Union, Slezkine shows, were achievers every bit as spectacular as the Jews of the
capitalist United States. Simply putting this down to inbred Jewish intelligence would be at best a partial
explanation; although three times as many Jews as Russians had a Soviet high-school education in 1939,
Jews were certainly not (if one may be allowed a statistical joke) three times as smart. Some other way of
accounting for it must be looked for.
SLEZKINE'S WAY of doing this is to invent a terminology of his own that he then uses to link the Jews,
anthropologically, with a wide range of other minorities: Indian traders in East Africa, Chinese businessmen
in Indonesia, Gypsies, Irish tinkers, and even exotic groups like the Humli-Khyampa of Nepal and the
Inadan of the Sahara. Resorting to ancient Greek mythology and religion, Slezkine describes all of these as
"Mercurians" vis-a-vis an "Apollonian" majority, in whose midst they dwelled.
Being "service nomads," he writes, these Mercurians were
nonprimary producers specializing
in the delivery, of goods and
services to the surrounding agricultural
or pastoral populations.
Their principal resource base
was human, not natural....
They were the descendants--or
predecessors--of Hermes (Mercury),
the god of all those who
did not herd animals, till the soil,
or live by the sword; the patron
of rule breakers, border crossers,
and go-betweens; the protector
of people who lived by their wit,
art, and craft.... What all of
Hermes' followers had in common
was their mercuriality, or
impermanence. In the case of nations,
it meant that they were all
transients and wanderers--from
fully nomadic Gypsy groups, to
mostly commercial communities
divided into fixed brokers and
traveling agents, to permanently
settled populations who thought
of themselves as exiles.
Hermes, writes Slezkine, "had nothing except his wit." His "big brother" Apollo, by contrast,
possessed most things in the universe
because he was the god of
both livestock and agriculture.
As the patron of food production,
Apollo owned much of the
land ... protected sailors and
warriors, and inspired true poets.
He was both manly and eternally
young, athletic and artistic,
prophetic and dignified--the
most universal of all gods and the
most commonly worshiped....
The difference between Apollonians
and Mercurians is the all-important
difference between
those who grow food and those
who create concepts and artifacts.
The Mercurians are always
sober but never dignified.
In the pre-modern past, the "sober but never dignified" Jewish merchant, artisan, shopkeeper, and
moneylender had made his living from the "manly" Russian, Polish, or German peasantry and ruling
nobility; the two, Jews and Christians, lived side by side, joined, as "Mercurians" and "Apollonians" always
are, by mutual need and mutual disdain. And as always, too, despite the Mercurian's mental advantages, it
was the Apollonian who, being physically stronger and more numerous, "had the upper hand"--until, that is,
modern times came along and "things began to change."
This, writes Slezkine, was because modernity was about
everyone becoming a service nomad:
mobile, clever, articulate,
occupationally flexible, and good
at being a stranger.... Some
Apollonian groups would prove
willing and able to convert to
Mercurianism; others would
balk, fail, or rebel. No one would
remain immune, however, and
no one was better at being a
scriptural [i.e., educated and literate]
Mercurian--and therefore
"modern"--than [the original]
scriptural Mercurians, old and
new.
We are in a sense, then, back to Heine. The modern European Jew, Slezkine maintains, possessed not only
native intelligence but a set of attitudes that, while they had helped him to survive in the medieval period,
too, were of limited power in a Christian world that had exploited but not honored them and that lived by
different values of its own. What modernity did was to turn "Jewish" values into general ones--not because
Jews imposed their values on Christians, but because, under capitalism and socialism alike, old hierarchies
collapsed, giving the advantage to whoever, like the Jews, was by habit quick and changeable enough to
spot and seize new opportunities. Although modernization was about "everyone becoming Jewish," it would
have taken place even had the Jews never existed. The fact that they did exist, however, gave them a running
head start.
The Jewish Century revives, with intellectual sophistication and stylistic verve, an old perception of the
Jew's centrality to modernity. Yet we did not need Yuri Slezkine to tell us that the Jews, when they have not
been persecuted and murdered, have done extremely well in modern times under highly varied conditions,
and that this must have something to do with their pre-modern mode of life. Why, then, has The Jewish
Century been showered by reviewers, even those critical of aspects of it, with accolades like "daring,"
"original," "audacious," "provocative and brilliant," and "a bracing breath of fresh air"?
The answer, it would seem, lies in the conceptual apparatus surrounding Slezkine's "Mercurian/ Apollonian"
distinction. In his long opening chapter, "Mercury's Sandals," which is the book's most interesting, he indeed
does a masterful job of integrating a wealth of information, culled from dozens of studies ranging as far
afield as "Peddling in East Afghanistan" and "The Function of Peripatetics in Rwala Bedouin Society," in
order to show how much Jews have had in common with other "Mercurians" or "service nomads" all over
the world.
Of course, comparing Jewish commercial functions in pre-modern Europe with those of Chinese inhabitants
of southeast Asia or of Indian settlers in Africa is also old-hat. Yet what Slezkine argues is that the traits
shared by Jews with other "service nomads" extend well beyond the occupation of similar economic niches.
They also include such things as distinctive religious beliefs; a sense of diaspora or exile; institutionalized
feelings of superiority; endogamous marriage; social clannishness; dietary taboos and other ritual means of
keeping apart from one's "Apollonian" hosts; "secret" languages, often created, as in the case of Yiddish, by
introducing incomprehensible foreign vocabulary into the local, "Apollonian" tongue; high literacy rates (a
necessary requirement for conducting commerce and keeping books); and "corporate kinship" arrangements,
whereby family businesses expand by taking in relatives rather than employing strangers. Seen in this light,
Jewish "exceptionalism" was not very. exceptional.
This raises an interesting hypothetical question. Obviously, modern European and American Jews would not
have accomplished all they did, not only in commerce and the professions, but in the arts, sciences,
entertainment industries, and other areas, had not Western civilization already attained high levels in these
fields before the Jews entered them. Does this mean that any other developed "Mercurian" population--the
overseas Chinese, for instance--would have done just as well had they had the good fortune to be, not in
southeast Asia when the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution took place, but in Europe and
America? Might they also then have ended up incinerated in a Holocaust, the victims of the jealousy and
hatred of de-Apollonianized Apollonians? Would some of them have sought (as Slezkine describes the
Zionist movement as having done) defensively to "Apollonianize" themselves, at the very moment that
Europe was becoming "Mercurianized," by creating a Chinese Zionism? Would Yuri Slezkine then have
written a book called The Chinese Century?
Although hypotheticals like this cannot really be answered, many historians, and certainly many Jews,
would instinctively react to such questions by saying: "No--despite everything, the Jews have been
different." But the clear implication of Slezkine's analysis is "Yes." Nothing that he says about the
"Mercurianism" of the Jews gives us any reason to suppose that, substituted for them, another group of
"service nomads" would not have had the same fate. In the end, if there is no need to be a Jew in order to be
"Jewish," being a Jew cannot mean very much.
This is the problem with Slezkine's categories. "Apollonianism" and "Mercurianism" may explain many
things, but when used as all-purpose historical tools they turn out, like all tools when applied to tasks for
which they are not precisely fitted, a very roughly finished product. There is an old journalist's quip that, in
order to write a good book about a foreign country, one has to spend either less than two weeks in it or more
than ten years--that is, to have either an outsider's fresh but superficial impressions or an insider's detailed
knowledge, since anything in between is merely confusing. The Jewish Century is, on its own terms, a
successfully provocative work, but only because Yuri Slezkine's visit to Jewish history, has been a brief one.
Had he stayed any longer, he would have rightly begun to feel confused himself.
HILLEL HALKIN is the author most recently of A Strange Death. His "Sailing to Ithaca" appeared in last
month's COMMENTARY.
Halkin, Hillel
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Halkin, Hillel. "Nomads." Commentary, Dec. 2005, p. 73+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A139601848/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9b5566d0.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A139601848
QUOTE:
WHEN Slezkine focuses on the transformation of Jewish life in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet
Union, where most of Europe's Jews lived, his book gains in interest and momentum. Although the subject
is familiar, he gives it a fresh perspective.
'By their wit, craft and art'
Gene Sosin
The New Leader.
87.5 (September-October 2004): p24+.
COPYRIGHT 2004 American Labor Conference on International Affairs
Full Text:
The Jewish Century By Yuri Slezkine Princeton. 438 pp. $29.95.
IF OSAMA BIN LADEN ever reads this book, he will be spinning in his cave. Yuri Slezkine, a professor of
history at the University of California, Berkeley, declares in his Introduction that the "Modern Age is the
Jewish Age," and modernization "is about everyone becoming Jewish." To support his provocative thesis he
amasses impressive evidence (including 38 pages of notes), but curiously does not mention the challenging
rise of Islamic fundamentalism.
Slezkine begins by rather ponderously tracing the role of the Jews and other "ethnic strangers" during
medieval and early modern times. As members of a social and anthropological category of minorities known
as "service nomads," they provided goods and services to the surrounding agricultural or pastoral
populations. The author metaphorically labels them "Mercurians," in contrast to the "Apollonians," the
food-producing majorities. These groups were the "descendants" of Hermes/Mercury, the god of commerce
and patron of go-betweens "who lived by their wit, craft and art." He describes the various services
rendered, inter alia, by Jews and Gypsies in Europe; Chinese in Southeast Asia; Parsis in India; Indians in
Africa; Armenians in the Middle East.
Slezkine considers the "post-exilic" Jews of Europe "quintessential, extraordinarily accomplished
Mercurians," who for a long time, over a large territory, filled service occupations ranging from peddling
and smithing to medicine and finance. With the rise of nation-states and capitalism, Apollonians
increasingly took up such Mercurian vocations as entrepreneurship, medicine, law, journalism, and science.
Once Jews emerged from legal, ritual and social seclusion, they moved to large cities and were especially
successful in the general pursuit of wealth and learning. In the early 19th century, for example, 30 of the 55
private banks in Berlin were owned by Jewish families. In fin de siecle Vienna, 40 per cent of the directors
of public banks were Jews or of Jewish descent, and all banks except one were administered by Jews. The
Rothschilds, "the world's bankers," it may be recalled, became the wealthiest family of the 19th century.
Education was the other principal means of advancement. The author informs us that between 1870 and
1910 about 40 percent of all gymnasium graduates in central Vienna were Jewish. Elsewhere in Europe the
percentage of Jewish university students, lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists, and publishers was greater
than their percentage of the total population. Formerly, Apollonians and Mercurians had lived in separate
worlds, feeling both need and contempt for each other. After the Jews started identifying themselves as
members of nation-states controlled by the majority, the Apollonians' resentment was heightened by the
Jewish monopoly of jobs they now wanted for themselves.
WHEN Slezkine focuses on the transformation of Jewish life in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet
Union, where most of Europe's Jews lived, his book gains in interest and momentum. Although the subject
is familiar, he gives it a fresh perspective.
Before 1917, Jews were largely segregated by the tsars in the Pate of Settlement, where they performed the
traditional Mercurian service tasks while coexisting on hostile terms with their Apollonian Christian
neighbors. Among other Mercurians in the Russian Empire, the most prominent were the Germans.
Following Peter the Great's reforms, they had come to occupy central roles in the imperial bureaucracy,
economic life and the professions. They were not as severely restricted as the Russian Jews, who were
barred from government employment, limited by quotas in their access to education and vulnerable to
pogroms.
The Jewish response was emigration. Slezkine repeats the well-known statistics about the 1.2 million Jews
who left the empire between 1897 and 1915, and largely headed for the United States. But he also points out
that most of the remaining 4 million migrants moved from rural areas to small towns and then to big cities.
Abandoning Hebrew and Yiddish, they eagerly learned Russian, because "converting to the Pushkin faith"
was their passport to success in various fields. This meant, of course, rejecting their parents' world and
becoming members of the Russian intelligentsia.
The Social Democratic movement attracted many Jews with its message of world revolution and
brotherhood. "For many Jewish Socialists, being an internationalist meant not being Jewish at all," the
author tells us. Their Mercurian skills, he adds, combined with their ability to debate fine points of theory
and adapt everyday behavior to doctrinal concepts, helped propel Jewish revolutionaries to top positions. On
the other hand, Zionist leaders like Chaim Weizmann and Vladimir Jabotinsky deplored the
overrepresentation of Jews among Russian Socialists. A revolution in someone else's nation, they argued,
was not worth the spilling of Jewish blood.
The author draws on Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman for an imaginative metaphor to dramatize the
different directions taken by the Russian Empire's Jewry. He chooses several of Tevye's daughters to
represent the choices made by Jews of the shtetls in the Pale.
Hodl follows her revolutionary husband into Siberian exile; Slezkine sees her ultimately settling in Moscow.
Her "children and grandchildren" become fully secular and thoroughly Russified members of the Soviet
cultural and scientific elite, as well as the Communist Party hierarchy, including the secret police.
Beilke goes to America, which "represented Mercurianism in power, nomadism without strangeness, full
freedom of wealth and learning." Her children achieve prominence in the arts and sciences, politics and
finance, medicine and law, and the media ("Mercury's original job was that of messenger"). They are joined
in time by many of Hodl's descendants, who finally realize they must emigrate from a false paradise.
Chava goes to Palestine, where her children build the Zionist state. After 2,000 years of living as Mercurians
among Apollonians, Jews in the land of Israel turned into "the only civilized Apollonians in a world of
Mercurians and barbarians." Tsaytl remains in rural Ukraine. When the Nazi Army invades, she perishes
along with nameless thousands in every walk of life, who are revered in a heartbreaking excerpt quoted
from one of Vassily Grossman's accounts of the Holocaust on Soviet territory.
THE AUTHOR'S extensive academic expertise on Russia and Russian Jewry is amplified by his own family
background. His father, ethnically Russian, had no problem graduating from Moscow State University in
1949, even though Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign was intensifying. The author's maternal grandfather was
Jewish--Moisei Goldstein, a writer in Moscow. During the purges of the late 1930s he was arrested, tortured
and released after 18 months. Nevertheless, shortly before his death in 1943, he wrote to his young daughter,
the author's mother: "On the 25th anniversary of the glorious Red Army, in whose ranks I now serve, my
wish is that you do well in school, as the great Party of Lenin-Stalin demands."
Slezkine concentrates on "Hodl's choice" in the last half of the book. He deals in depth with the triumph and
tragedy of scores of Russian Jewish intellectuals who embraced the Bolshevik Revolution with idealistic
enthusiasm, but later became disillusioned.
One of the people he cites is Lev Kopelev, a renowned dissident in the literary world of post-Stalin Moscow.
Kopelev is described as having been impressed by Stalin as a young man in the 1930s. He was a "convinced
internationalist, a Soviet patriot, and a representative of the newly formed multinational Soviet people," as
well as a lover of Russian history and "the Russian word." Kopelev took part in the ruthless confiscation of
peasant property in Ukraine, witnessed the famine that followed, and justified it as a "historical necessity,"
since Soviet power was "the best and most just power on earth."
Although Slezkine briefly tells us of Kopelev's eventual change of heart in the post-Stalin years, he omits
significant details that might have been provided at the least in his voluminous notes: Kopelev served in the
Great Patriotic War as a major in intelligence and was arrested for protesting the atrocities perpetrated by
Soviet soldiers against the German population as they advanced to Berlin. Convicted of "bourgeois
humanism," he was sent to a special prison camp housed in a former church on the outskirts of Moscow,
where gifted Soviet citizens could conduct useful research for the regime.
The place was called a sharashka, a name that will sound familiar to readers of The First Circle by
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a fellow inmate. The two men became friends, and in his magisterial novel
Solzhenitsyn presents a faithful portrait of Kopelev as Lev Rubin, a linguist who is assigned to help design
electronic scramblers so that enemies of the state could not bug official communications.
In the early 1960s, Solzhenitsyn asked Kopelev for help in getting a novella published. It was One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which caused a sensation when it appeared in Aleksandr Tvardovsky's liberal
journal Novy Mir during the "thaw" period of Nikita S. Khrushchev's rule. The Jewish Century's panorama
of the intellectual landscape in post-Stalin Russia is also filled with many other courageous Russian Jews
whom Slezkine praises for their important contributions to Soviet society and to the struggle for human
rights.
His conclusion, however, may be too pessimistic. In contrast to the spread of Jewish influence elsewhere in
the world, he says, "the Jewish part of Russian history is over." It is true that most of those who remain are
assimilated, but a vibrant minority has rediscovered its long suppressed traditions, actively helped and
inspired by the participation of Beilke's American and Chava's Israeli progeny. That minority may not have
fulfilled Tevye's dream of becoming a rich man, as have some oligarchs among Russia's Jews today. Yet
Tevye would derive great joy from seeing the remarkable resurgence of Jewish identity in a more tolerant,
though far from fully democratic, post-Soviet era.
Gene Sosin
Author, "Sparks of Liberty: An Insider's Memoir of Radio Liberty"
Sosin, Gene
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sosin, Gene. "'By their wit, craft and art'." The New Leader, Sept.-Oct. 2004, p. 24+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A124007758/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a3b0b351.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A124007758
QUOTE:
Trapped within Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century, struggling to free itself from Slezkine's ideological
thesis, is a poignant history of Russia's Jews. It is a history of desire--of 19th-century Jews seeking to free
themselves of the Jewishness of the Pale of Settlement by exulting in the Russia of Tolstoy and Chekov; of
zealous Jewish commitment to and success within the early Soviet Revolution
time in specific historic contexts, gathering and analyzing evidence of what worked and what
didn't. Slezkine does not do this hard and necessary work. He gives us myth instead.
A mythical Jewishness
Jonathon Kahn
Books & Culture.
11.4 (July-August 2005): p40+.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Christianity Today, Inc.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/
Full Text:
Trapped within Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century, struggling to free itself from Slezkine's ideological
thesis, is a poignant history of Russia's Jews. It is a history of desire--of 19th-century Jews seeking to free
themselves of the Jewishness of the Pale of Settlement by exulting in the Russia of Tolstoy and Chekov; of
zealous Jewish commitment to and success within the early Soviet Revolution; of the shock of betrayal
under Stalin, as Jews were persecuted for their ethnic Jewishness; and finally, of Soviet Jews' spasmodic,
discomfiting, but at times passionate rediscovery of their Jewish identity. The emblazoning image Slezkine
leaves us with is of thousands of Russian Jews, most of whom "had probably never been to a synagogue
before," coming to meet Golda Meir in 1948 on Yom Kippur at the Moscow synagogue, chanting in the
streets, "Next year in Jerusalem."
Unfortunately, Slezkine surrounds and ultimately overwhelms the promise of this narrative with a thick and
loathsome typological shell. Instead of dealing fully with actual Jews, Slezkine mythologizes all Jews as the
descendents of Mercury (Hermes), "the god of all those who did not herd animals, till the soil, or live by the
sword." As Mercurians, Jews work with their minds and by their wit. They value language, they value ideas,
they value talent and merit. Even when they dwell in a land for centuries, they are essentially nomads,
eschewing any permanent connection to place and nation: "A Jewish house in the Ukraine did not resemble
the peasant hut next door, not because it was Jewish in architecture (there was no such thing) but because it
was never painted, mended or decorated. It did not belong to the landscape; it was a dry husk that contained
the real treasure--the children of Israel and their memory." Sure of their divine exceptionalism, Jews think
their neighbors dim-witted: "Their world is larger and more varied" than those of the poor or the princely,
both of whom lack a Mercurian intellect. These non-Jews, in Slezkine's typology, are Apollonians,
committed to arcane structures of nobility and caste that run according to values such as manliness and
honor, but not merit and ingenuity. Jews think they are better than the Apollonians, lord and plebe, because
Jews think better than both: "[Jews] would all take a justifiably dim view of Ivan," for "[i]f one values
mobility, mental agility, negotiation, wealth, curiosity, one has little reason to respect either prince or
peasant."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Slezkine's grand and, one can only say, facile thesis consists of the great modern victory of the Mercurians
over the Apollonians. It is an account breathtaking in its reductionism: "[F]or much of human history, it
seemed quite obvious who had the upper hand.... Then things began to change: Zeus was beheaded,
repeatedly, or made a fool of; Apollo lost his cool; and Hermes bluffed his way to the top." Modernity
emerges on the heels of the Jewish Mercury: "Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile,
literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is about
learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not fields or herds." In a nifty syllogism, to become modern is
to become Mercurian, which is to say, to become Jewish: "only the Jews--the scriptural Mercurians of
Europe--came to represent Mercurianism and modernity everywhere." Indeed, it appears that Slezkine is
either being modest or inexact in referring only to the 20th century as "the Jewish century."
Ultimately, the real value in The Jewish Century is that it reminds us of precisely what is so objectionable
about typological thinking. There is, of course, the obvious: Slezkine's valorization of Jews relies on the
very terms used by any and every anti-Semitic tract: for Slezkine and, say, The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, Jews are effeminate, cosmopolitan, cunning thinkers whose odd insular languages and blood ties
separate them decisively from their neighbors--whom, for good measure, they see as inferior. At the very
least, any scholar taking up this tired dichotomy must address how he expects his use of these terms not to
validate the racism of which they are a part. Slezkine not only confirms that Jews historically have been
seen as "devious, acquisitive, greedy, crafty, pushy and crude," but he, shockingly, affirms this view of Jews
as rational: "This, too, is a statement of fact, in the sense that, for peasants, pastoralists, princes and priests,
any trader or moneylender, or artisan is in perpetual and deliberate violation of most norms of decency and
decorum." One would think that at this point doing history requires more than affirming society's most
reflexive and stereotypical beliefs, even if the values they traditionally reinforce are inverted in the process.
Yet, where The Jewish Century is most instructive of the failure of typological thinking is in the way its
emphasis on epic battles and the myth of historical tectonic shifts overwhelms and buries the empirical
details of human life that make history a joyfully unpredictable and rich affair. Typological histories are
committed to imposing unchanging value-structures on human events, and in this they become anything but
historical. Typologies become systems unto themselves. Instead of analyzing history, Slezkine preoccupies
the reader with typological brain teasers such as: "Modernity meant universal Mercurianism under the
nationalist banner of a return to local Apollonianism." The more time spent translating abstractions such as
this, the more distant become the actual circumstances of people's lives. Consider how just now wading
through the abstractions of Mercury and Apollo has made remote and hazy the compelling historical
narrative of Russia's Jews that I outlined at the outset. This is precisely how it feels to read this book.
Ultimately, when resisted even slightly, typological histories can be shown to be absurdly and comically
inaccurate. In claiming that "good citizenship (including patriotism) is a version of the ever vigilant Jewish
endeavor to preserve personal and collective identity in an unclean world," Slezkine writes as if the history
of political theory does not exist; after all, Aristotle and Augustine, non-Jews both, have contributed a thing
or two on citizenship. Indeed, Slezkine's own account tumbles inward. At one point he insists that "Jews
epitomize Western civilization--as its original creators, best practitioners, and rightful beneficiaries." In
almost the same breath--literally eight pages later--he admits that "Jews did not launch the Modern age.
They jointed it late, had little to do with some of its most important episodes (such as the Scientific and
Industrial Revolutions), and labored arduously to adjust to its many demands." On the text's first page, he
claims that nationalism is modernity's "principal religion," which is to say that modernity is "about every
nation becoming Jewish." Elsewhere he claims that "nationalism ... [was] fundamentally Apollonian," which
by his calculus means that nationalism is fundamentally un-Jewish. What needs to be said here is
screamingly obvious: No single people epitomizes Western civilization or nationalism. People, civilizations,
and political phenomena are best thought of as full of knots; responsible scholarship gives an account of
their tangles.
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about The Jewish Century is that it so often--even centrally--betrays
its own typological thesis. Slezkine claims that of the three loci of Jewish life in modernity--the Soviet
Union, Israel, and the United States--only the United States was Mercurian. Marxism, in its anti-nationalist
universalism, and Zionism, in its remaking of Jews as self-sufficient farmers and manly warriors, embodied
Apollo. Given that of the three, only the United States did not have Jews central to its theoretical
beginnings, we might reasonably wonder how it can be that, as Slezkine says, becoming modern is about
becoming Jewish. That is, if we are to take Slezkine's terms seriously for the moment, what he presents is a
story of the way in which the majority of 20th-century Jews were only too ready to remake themselves as
Apollonians. Typologically, the Jews, in fact, missed out on their own century.
Of course, in light of the destruction of European Judaism, the 20th century was anything but the Jews' (or
anyone else's, for that matter). If the absurdity of Slezkine's typological argument is not amply revealed by
the fact that the terms by which he mythologizes Jews--Jews are cunning, clannish, lacking "in dignified
maleness," good with money, disproportionately represented in business and print--are the very terms by
which Nazism justified the Jewish genocide, then consider this: "One reason the twentieth century became
the Jewish Century is that Hitler's attempt to put his vision into practice led to the canonization of the Nazis
as absolute evil and the reemergence of the Jews as universal victims." Slezkine's calculus becomes obscene
when being the victim of genocide is made to affirm "Jewish values." There is no meaning to being
slaughtered; it is simply to die a horrible death.
In the end, if we strip away all the typology, the motivating question of this book very well may be, how is it
that Jews have been able to achieve a real measure of material and intellectual success as decided
minorities? To that end, Slezkine presents innumerable lists of high Jewish demographics, from banking in
Minsk to university faculties in Moscow. This is a legitimate question; there is nothing inherently wrong
about trying to account for Jewish achievement. But if we are looking for generalizations, what more can be
said beyond this: that under the pressure of historical circumstance, some Jews exhibit certain habits,
practices, and values that make for certain types of social prominence? Further than this, what's required is
to spend time in specific historic contexts, gathering and analyzing evidence of what worked and what
didn't. Slezkine does not do this hard and necessary work. He gives us myth instead. And he leaves us to
wonder what became of those Moscow Jews promising to return to Jerusalem.
The Jewish Century
YURI SLEZKINE * PRINCETON UNIV. PRESS, 2004 * 438 PP. * $29.95
Jonathon Kahn has a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University's Society of Fellows in the
Humanities.
Kahn, Jonathon
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kahn, Jonathon. "A mythical Jewishness." Books & Culture, July-Aug. 2005, p. 40+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A134043918/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=832d6c66.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A134043918
QUOTE:
Slezkine's work is one of the most
innovative and intellectually stimulating books in Jewish studies in years.
The Jewish Century
Publishers Weekly.
251.25 (June 21, 2004): p49.
COPYRIGHT 2004 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
THE JEWISH CENTURY YURI SLEZKINE. Princeton Univ., $29.95 (424p) ISBN 0-691-11995-3
* The provocative argument that underlies this idiosyncratic, fascinating and at times marvelously
infuriating study of the evolution of Jewish cultural and political sensibility is that the 20th century is the
Jewish Age because "modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate,
intellectually intricate.... Modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish." A professor
of history at UC-Berkeley, Slezkine plays a delicate game here. Knowing that his grand statements are more
metaphorical than supportable with historical fact, he maps out a new history of Jewish culture over the past
100 years in four radically diverse but cohesive chapters. In a history of Jewish group identity and function,
Slezkine depicts Jews as a nomadic tribe that functions as a promoter of urban cultural and economic
change. The book's last chapter ("Hodel's Choice") uses the image of the daughters of Sholem Aleichem's
famous milkman Teyve to discuss the three great recent Jewish immigrations--to America in the 1890s,
from the Pale of Settlement to the Russian cities after the revolution and to Palestine after the birth of
Zionism. Through these migrations, Slezkine argues, the modernism of Jewish culture spread throughout the
world. Nearly every page of Slezkine's exegesis presents fascinating arguments or facts--e.g., that "secular
American Jewish intellectuals felt compelled" to become more Jewish when they were allowed into
traditional American institutions. While net strictly a traditional history, Slezkine's work is one of the most
innovative and intellectually stimulating books in Jewish studies in years. (Oct.)
A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Jewish Century." Publishers Weekly, 21 June 2004, p. 49. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A118672039/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5b3e1b66.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A118672039
QUOTE:
these 36 accounts explore the schism that split Russian society
for a century: Us and Them, Red and White, Bolshevik and Bourgeous
IN THE SHADOW OF REVOLUTION:
Life Stories of Russian Women From 1917
to the Second World War
Russian Life.
44.2 (Mar. 2001): p60.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Russian Information Services, Inc.
http://www.russianlife.net/
Full Text:
Ed. By Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine Princeton Univ. Press * 445 pages * 2001 * $24.95
Maria Belskaya was six when collectivization began to thrash away at the lives of her mother and father and
12 (!) brothers and sisters. Her harrowing account of their survival of dekulakization in the Altai puts a
human face to the otherwise unfathomable numbers of dispossessed and disappeared from those horrible
years.
Princess Sofia Volkonskaya escaped from Bolshevik Russia, but her husband did not. So she went back in
and got him out of a prison camp and back out to Europe.
It can only be said that this is a truly remarkable book. Alongside stories of almost unimagineable poverty
and distress--of dispossessed kulaks and prisoners, are the stories of zealous Stakhonovites and "true
believers." What results is an incomparable portrait of Russian life in the first five decades of the last
century.
They are women with ancient-sounding names like Praskevaya, Efrosinia or Agrippina, or, more familiarly,
like Anna, Alla and Irina. But all have unique and and absorbing tales to recount.
In addition to their very personal elements, these 36 accounts explore the schism that split Russian society
for a century: Us and Them, Red and White, Bolshevik and Bourgeous, etc. Thankfully, this
dichotomization is ending. But equally thankfully, stories such as these have been preserved and catalogued
so that we and our children cannot be allowed to forget.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"IN THE SHADOW OF REVOLUTION: Life Stories of Russian Women From 1917 to the Second World
War." Russian Life, Mar. 2001, p. 60. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A74013949/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d7bbc8c3.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A74013949
QUOTE:
descriptions of the trials of the northern Russians help make this book
an invaluable look at the people the totalitarian Soviets forgot.
Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples
of the North
Joe Collins
Booklist.
91.4 (Oct. 15, 1994): p399.
COPYRIGHT 1994 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Since the groundbreaking 1922 silent documentary Nanook of the North, not much has changed in the
everyday life of the Alaskan Eskimos. Nor has much changed for the Arctic people of Russia, despite the
incursions of many armies, both military and missionary. Despite their obvious primitiveness, the small
Russian tribes of the North saw perhaps lesser levels of brutality by the Stalin regime and beyond, and the
most obvious reason for this is the weather. Slezkine spends some time on the northerners' ability to cope
with the climate, but mostly concentrates on the changing face of the Soviet Union in the microcosm of the
northern people: from "savage Indians" to the slow evolution from icebound hunters and trappers to
industrialized laborers. The book is an intellectual treatise, and occasionally Slezkine's clinical language can
be as dry as a Siberian plain, but his descriptions of the trials of the northern Russians help make this book
an invaluable look at the people the totalitarian Soviets forgot.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Collins, Joe. "Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North." Booklist, 15 Oct. 1994, p. 399.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A15915683/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a9a16cc6. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A15915683
QUOTE:
epic narrative
he book's depth (not to mention its length)
invites the reader to luxuriate in it, chapter by chapter, rather than simply plowing through.
Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics
Robert Legvold
Foreign Affairs.
96.6 (November-December 2017): p164+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org
Full Text:
The NGO Game: Postconflict Peacebuilding in the Balkans and Beyond BY PATRICE C. MCMAHON.
Cornell University Press, 2017, 238 pp.
McMahon has produced a detailed, tough-minded study of what happened when a swarm of
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) rushed into Bosnia and Kosovo in the wake of conflicts during the
1990s. She argues that, despite their good intentions and hard work, their actual contribution to postconflict
peace building was largely insignificant--or even counterproductive. Rather than generate local initiative,
create community, strengthen civil society, or foster democracy, they left locals despairing of change,
cynical, and disdainful of the NGO model. This, she says, is because of a perverse interaction between
international and local NGOs. International groups and the governments and global institutions that
supported them had the money, but their aims did not match the reality on the ground. Making matters
worse, they relied on self-serving measures of success and disregarded the insights and preferences of their
local counterparts. Those counterparts soon figured out that to get funding, they had to design their
programs according to international priorities rather than genuine local needs. Bust followed boom as failure
and exhaustion set in; international NGOs moved on, and local NGOs withered. Many within the NGO
community now understand these problems, but McMahon fears that too many incentives exist to leave
things as they are.
Communism's Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes BY GRIGORE POPELECHES
AND JOSHUA A. TUCKER. Princeton University Press, 2017, 344 pp.
In this immensely ambitious, careful, and data-rich study, Pop-Eleches and Tucker do not merely explore the
historical legacy of communism in eastern Europe; they also tackle the far more difficult problem of
distinguishing its impact from that of other factors. They compare contemporary attitudes in postcommunist
countries with those in societies never ruled by communist regimes on issues such as democracy and
market-based economics (less support in postcommunist states), government-funded social welfare
programs (more support in postcommunist states), and gender equality (not much difference between the
two groups). It is often hard to determine how much those differences are due to the communist past rather
than historical features that predated communism or factors that transcend the nature of political systems,
such as what the authors refer to as "geographic location." But Pop-Eleches and Tucker succeed in that task
by applying a highly refined theoretical model to their large data sets. Those trying to pin down with greater
precision the legacy of communism now have a model to emulate.
Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan BY MATHIJS PELKMANS.
Cornell University Press, 2017, 232 pp.
Kyrgyzstan was once seen as one of the post-Soviet states best positioned to build democracy and foster a
market economy. It is now mired in corruption, political dysfunction, and economic stagnation. Pelkmans
paints an earthy portrait of how people in one Kyrgyz city, a former mining town of 20,000 inhabitants, have
coped. Half of them have fled. Those who stayed have adopted a variety of credos to help them understand
their new world. Initially, many hewed to neoliberalism, which promised a future of democracy and
prospering markets. When those dreams failed to materialize, people drifted to alternatives, including
nationalism and religion, with conservative Islam (ushered in by Tablighi Jamaat, a proselytizing group that
encourages personal piety), Pentecostal Christianity, and shamanistic spiritual healing all enjoying a surge in
popularity. Pelkmans focuses on the swift cycle in which these belief systems gained purchase over people
and generated enthusiasm and energy, which then deflated when prophets failed and outcomes disappointed.
He is interested in not merely the force of ideas but also what determines their influence, durability, and
decline.
Property Rights in Post-Soviet Russia: Violence, Corruption, and the Demand for Law BY JORDAN
GANS-MORSE. Cambridge University Press, 2017, 250 pp.
A lack of reliably enforceable property rights discourages investment and burdens the Russian economy.
This problem attracts intense scrutiny from those studying and promoting economic reform. Normally,
scholars draw a sharp correlation between secure property rights and the strength and integrity of political
and legal institutions. Most analysts assume that if those institutions are weak or corrupt, people and groups
struggling to protect their property will resort to criminal or corrupt means. Gans-Morse, employing survey
data and extensive interviews, turns that assumption upside down. In this valuable, original take on an
important subject, he demonstrates that even when faced with imperfect legal remedies, Russians
increasingly use the courts when the costs of criminal or corrupt alternatives are too high or the returns
insufficient. Despite lagging efforts to improve Russian courts and state bureaucracies, a great many
disputes over ownership and contracts are settled by legal means. This trend, however, has advanced
unevenly, and the level of engagement with the legal system often depends on the size of the firms involved,
the nature of their products, and the character of the markets in which they operate.
Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture, 1861-1881 BY LYNN ELLEN
PATYK. University of Wisconsin Press, 2017, 368 pp.
The immediacy of the threat from contemporary terrorism might make it difficult to view the phenomenon
through the lens of nineteenth-century Russian literature, but Patyk makes a stimulating case that the
essence of today's violence originates there. The seditious emotions that would later inspire political terror,
she suggests, first appeared in Aleksandr Radishchev's 1790 Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow. It then
gestated in the work of authors such as Turgenev and Dostoyevsky (and, even more boldly, in that of their
less famous but more radical counterparts, Sergei Nechaev and Nikolai Chernyshevsky), who depicted
revolutionary zeal and its terrorist strain. Although Patyk draws on the works of many authors to subtly
tease out the symbiosis between words and deeds, her central focus is Dostoyevsky's three great novels
Crime and Punishment, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, which gave terrorism literary form well
before it became a fixture of modern politics.
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution BY YURI SLEZKINE. Princeton University
Press, 2017, 1,128 pp.
Slezkine builds the core of this epic narrative around the lives of a stunning cast of Soviet personalities in
the period from the Russian Revolution through the aftermath of World War II. The main characters are the
residents of the House of Government, an immense edifice in Moscow, completed in 1931, that housed the
Soviet elite. He traces their lives, often in their own words, from youthful idealism and ardent revolutionary
fervor to disillusionment and prosaic surrender to pragmatism--and, for a vast portion of the protagonists,
exile or death during Stalin's terror. The book is richly layered and multifaceted: it offers a philosophical
reflection on religion and its relationship to the intellectual underpinnings of the Russian Revolution, a
political and biographical history of the first half of the twentieth century, a study of the period's key literary
texts, and an extensive assessment of Stalinist architecture. The book's depth (not to mention its length)
invites the reader to luxuriate in it, chapter by chapter, rather than simply plowing through.
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Legvold, Robert. "Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics." Foreign Affairs, Nov.-Dec. 2017, p. 164+.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513927375/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=59437c0b. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A513927375
The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine review – the Russian Revolution told through one building
A dizzying epic history of a 1931 block of flats in Moscow, home to the Soviet elite, aims to tell of the rise and fall of Bolshevism
Owen Hatherley
Fri 15 Dec 2017 04.00 EST Last modified on Tue 19 Dec 2017 13.01 EST
View more sharing options
Shares
35
Comments
3
The House of Government in Moscow … ‘a place where the revolution came to die’.
It is rare to come across a work of history that so obviously wants to be a literary masterpiece. Roughly the length of War and Peace, The House of Government aims to capture the rise and fall of Bolshevism through a building and its residents, via a study in eschatology – the creation of an apocalyptic cult, its unexpected success, and its equally unexpected failure. It is a dizzying book, a hall of mirrors, panoramic and bizarre, as puzzlingly esoteric and thrillingly fervent as the doctrines it describes. Whether it succeeds in what it tries to do – essentially, to write a totally new history of the Russian revolution, cast in the mould of a teeming historical novel – is questionable. That there is nothing else like it is indisputable.
Sign up for the Bookmarks email
Read more
We should begin where the author does not, with the building. Slezkine is best known to non-specialists for The Jewish Century, a lively revisionist history that placed the Soviet Union at the heart of 20th-century Jewish experience, but in the academy he might be better known for his essay The USSR as a Communal Apartment, a pivotal study of Soviet multinationalism through the spatial/architectural metaphor of a crowded, thinly subdivided “kommunalka” flat. The House of Government was another, larger block of flats, completed in 1931, “a place where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to die”. It was designed in the late 1920s by the architect Boris Iofan for the Soviet elite. Its tenants were decimated in the Great Purge, leading to the later nickname “the House of Preliminary Detention”.
That’s as simple as The House of Government gets. Perhaps more important is Slezkine’s central view of Bolshevism as a millenarian cult, a notion that was a mainstay of the cold war. His idea of what Marxism is or was is comically inadequate, based on Marx’s early work on Hegel and the “Jewish question”, although the book his tenant inhabitants are always reading, or rather failing to read, is Das Kapital. The Bolsheviks here are not contemporaries of, say, Rosa Luxemburg or James Maxton, but successors to the Anabaptists of the 16th century, who “banned all books except the Bible, destroyed altars and sculptures, renamed streets and days of the week (and named their city the New Jerusalem), banned monogamy and private property, rationed food and clothing, enforced communal dining”. What makes Slezkine’s version of this hoary idea interesting is a lack of moralism, and a mindboggling sweeping perspective that aligns Bolshevism with Christianity, Islam and “the Commonwealth of Massachusetts”.
Slezkine’s mindboggling perspective aligns Bolshevism with Christianity, Islam and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
The House’s site is equally crucial – a low-rise, unplanned area of central Moscow known as “the Swamp”. By 1905, the Swamp had a power station and factories alongside its street markets and muddy, frequently flooded, streets. In that year, “the empire was crawling with prophets, soothsayers and itinerant preachers. Everyone seemed to believe that the world was sick and would not last much longer.”
In 1917, the Swamp’s workers were, Slezkine notes, solidly pro-Bolshevik; yet the need to fight against the petit bourgeoisie continued. Their New Jerusalem would be clean, rational, machine-made. Slezkine treats this as pathological, though it seems a fairly uncontroversial response to the realities of Russia in the early 20th century – trying to stop men beating their wives and shitting in the street does not an apocalyptic cult make. But when the central argument becomes tiresome, there are digressions into, to take a random sample, revolutionary nudism, monumental and modernist architecture, Don Quixote and the Spanish civil war, the socialist realist novel, abuse scandals of early 1990s America, Ibsen ...
The building itself was a result of Bolshevism’s shift from eager expectation of global revolution into “Augustinian” state-building. As Slezkine rightly notes, in design it was (and is) closer to the Dakota in New York (or Dolphin Square in London) than to the utopian communes of constructivism, with family apartments connected to abundant communal facilities – cinema, club, pool, theatre, restaurant. With the turn of the 1930s, the elite tenants attempted to drain further swamps, with de-kulakisation, collectivisation and the creation of the Gulag. With the Moscow Metro, under the direction of tenant Nikita Khrushchev, they even brought the opulence and glory of the New Jerusalem right down into the bog and clay itself.
Puzzlingly esoteric, thrillingly fervent … Yuri Slezkine.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Puzzlingly esoteric, thrillingly fervent … Yuri Slezkine. Photograph: Anatoly Strunin/TASS
During the horrific famines they brought to Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the tenants were publicly resolute in persecuting “saboteurs”. In private, however, they desperately tried to convince the real first rank of power – the likes of Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich, resident in the Kremlin opposite – to send relief. This gap between deed and thought would be remembered, when the Great Purge came in 1937. Here, The House of Government becomes almost unbearably harrowing. one , in starved Kazakhstan, administered by House resident Filipp Goloshchekin, where we glimpse an empty village, out of which runs “some sort of small creature … its long hair had frozen into bloody icicles which stuck out at all angles … its teeth were bared, and its mouth dripped with red foam”. It then disappeared, just as quickly as it emerged.
The other is told through the self-abasing letters of the Old Bolshevik Tatiana Miagkova. Thrown into an isolator for oppositionist sympathies, when her husband is arrested too, she writes to her daughter that a concentration camp is not all bad, as “it means working and therefore participating in the life of our country. There is no place for hopelessness in our – very tough – system.”
Does Slezkine’s own construction atop the swamp of Soviet history hold steady? Not entirely
Does Slezkine’s own construction atop the swamp of Soviet history hold steady? Not entirely. One crucial problem is in isolating the House and its tenants from events around them. When Slezkine finds Lenin, in 1918, quoting the then-decades old prediction by Engels that capitalism would produce “a world war of an extent and violence hitherto undreamed of”, he sees a raving cult leader proclaiming a confirmed prophecy, rather than a politician citing a remarkably accurate prediction of the state of Europe in that year. The postwar revolutionary wave of 1918-19, or the rise of fascism and the Great Depression, are treated essentially as figments of the Bolsheviks’ apocalyptic imaginations. The many non-Soviet communists who passed through the House are ignored, as is the Comintern – or communism outside Russia at all.
That omission is not accidental. In a throwaway concluding note, Slezkine argues that Bolshevism only endured where it became a national liberation movement, as in China, Cuba and Vietnam – something the cosmopolitan, Latvian, Jewish, Georgian, Ukrainian and Polish inhabitants of the House of Government could never entirely countenance, although the surviving tenants would toy with Russian nationalism in Stalin’s late years. Finally, Slezkine ascribes the USSR’s failure to endure to a refusal to break up the family. “The problem with Bolshevism is that it was not totalitarian enough.” It is a maddening conclusion, perverse and infuriatingly partial, but in the context of The House of Government it makes perfect sense – after being trapped in this labyrinthine, terrifying, fascinating structure for 1,096 pages, the paradoxical becomes logical.
• To order The House of Government for £25.46 (RRP £29.95) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
QUOTE:
Slezkine’s “The House of Government” is a history of the Soviet project as experienced by those who carried it out.
chapters on the Stalinist Terror are the most vivid. Over all, Slezkine’s writing is sharp, fresh, sometimes playful,
BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION
The Russian Revolution Recast as an Epic Family Tragedy
By MARCI SHOREAUG. 18, 2017
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page
Share
Tweet
Pin
Email
More
Save
Photo
Constructivist and neo-Classical, the House of Government in Moscow was designed on a scale larger than life. Credit NVO/Moscow
THE HOUSE OF GOVERNMENT
A Saga of the Russian Revolution
By Yuri Slezkine
Illustrated. 1,104 pp. Princeton University Press. $39.95.
It was winter in Petrograd, exactly 100 years ago. The imperial Russian Army was exhausted from fighting the Germans in World War I. There were bread shortages, strikes, mutinies. In March 1917 Czar Nicholas II abdicated the throne. The Germans smuggled Lenin back to Petrograd from Swiss exile in a sealed train car. It is worth dwelling on that sealed train car: Had Lenin not arrived in Petrograd in April 1917, the 20th century as we know it would not have happened.
The world war bled into the Russian civil war. The Bolsheviks won. In 1922 Lenin proclaimed the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Five years later the decision was made to build a House of Government on a muddy island in the Moscow River. Laborers brought sand in horse-drawn carts to fill the swamp. They lived in dank barracks where they were given food infested with maggots.
Constructivist and neo-Classical, the House of Government was designed on a scale larger than life. The costs were exorbitant. The complex contained not only apartments and courtyards, but also a theater, library, gym, hair salon, post office, cinema, laundry, grocery store, day care center, medical clinic and social club offering classes in boxing, singing, painting, fencing, target shooting and radio building. The first residential sections were completed in 1931; in 1935 there were 2,655 registered tenants in 505 apartments.
Yuri Slezkine’s “The House of Government” is a history of the Soviet project as experienced by those who carried it out. The house itself was built for Bolshevik elites. They were fanatically dedicated, self-sacrificing, unbreakable. One of them was Yakov Sverdlov, who ordered the executions of Czar Nicholas II and his family. Even the family’s dogs were hanged. Sverdlov remained preternaturally calm. His favorite stanza by his favorite poet, Heinrich Heine, ended with the lines, “let’s make heaven on earth, my friends / instead of waiting till later.” The problem was that heaven had to be made by earthlings. “People even the best of them, the Bolsheviks,” Sverdlov lamented, “are made up of the old material, having grown up under the conditions of the old filth.” The task of the Old Bolsheviks was to “build the eternal house and leave it for ‘proletarian infancy and pure orphanhood.’”
Continue reading the main story
Buy
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
Yuri Slezkine
We earn an affiliate commission with each book purchase, which helps support our journalism at The New York Times.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
This demanded the forging of a new consciousness, one that would overcome the antinomies of subjective and objective, body and spirit, family and party. The Bolsheviks longed for seamlessness. The house was designed to facilitate transparency between the individual and the collective. Yet in fact — Slezkine argues — by building apartments, the Bolsheviks perpetuated the family unit they aspired to overcome. “Revolution was inseparable from love,” writes Slezkine, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. Yet love between individual persons obstructed seamlessness. The Bolsheviks fantasized about dialectically superseding the bourgeois family, but were unsure what would come afterward. In the meantime, they behaved like an endogamous sect, finding husbands, wives and lovers within their own incestuous milieu. Not only family attachments, but also domesticity, with all its “philistine vulgarity,” proved resilient. Old Bolsheviks filled their apartments with pianos, samovars, embroidered towels. “The revolution’s last and decisive battle,” Slezkine writes, “was to be against ‘velvet-covered albums resting on small tables covered with lace doilies.’”
As these families decorated their apartments, the party declared war against middle-class peasants. Famines brought on by collectivization spread through Soviet Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia. Slezkine describes a peasant and his family thrown out of their home in the middle of a winter night, leaving his daughter-in-law frostbitten and her 2-day-old baby dead from the cold. While the peasants ate grass, Stalin requisitioned their grain to fund industrialization in the cities. “Please congratulate me on my new party card,” a requisitioner wrote to a friend. “My heart was overcome with incredible joy, like I’d never felt before.” In the countryside there was cannibalism. Party officials stumbled over corpses. Peasant women who fled the famine became nannies for House of Government residents. The families who remained behind starved.
Photo
The turning point in Slezkine’s story is the 1934 murder of the Leningrad party head Sergei Kirov. “Human emotions had always been at the heart of Bolshevism,” Slezkine says. “The telephone call on Dec. 1, 1934, changed everything. No one believed human emotions anymore.” Now Old Bolsheviks became the targets of their own terror. “Nights with fewer than 100 executions were rare,” Slezkine writes. At the House of Government there was silence. “Everyone talks as if nothing has happened,” Aleksandr Arosev wrote in his diary.
Tania Miagkova’s daughter, Rada, was 8 when her mother was sent to prison. Tania used her time there to read “Das Kapital.” When her husband was arrested, Tania switched from “Das Kapital” to “Anna Karenina.” When her request for transfer to the gulag to be with her husband was denied, she began to read poetry: Mayakovsky, Blok, Pushkin. To her mother she wrote, “A concentration camp? So be it! Over a period of several years? So be it! Long, difficult years? So be it! Mikhas must be accepted back into the party.”
These chapters on the Stalinist Terror are the most vivid. Over all, Slezkine’s writing is sharp, fresh, sometimes playful, often undisciplined. The momentum suffers from the narrative’s overpopulation; and Slezkine falls into digressions about the Exodus, Armageddon and repressed memory theory. Despite meandering, he makes certain arguments clearly: Bolshevism was a millenarian sect with an insatiable desire for utopia struggling to reconcile predestination with free will — that is, working ceaselessly to bring about what was supposedly inevitable. Utopia’s failure to arrive after the Civil War led to The Great Disappointment. In the second half of the 1920s, Soviet sanitariums were filled with Bolsheviks eating caviar, playing chess and suffering from depression.
Newsletter Sign UpContinue reading the main story
Book Review
Be the first to see reviews, news and features in The New York Times Book Review.
Enter your email address
Sign Up
You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.
SEE SAMPLE MANAGE EMAIL PREFERENCES PRIVACY POLICY OPT OUT OR CONTACT US ANYTIME
For Slezkine, two qualities made the Bolsheviks special. The first was “wrapping faith in logic”: Marxism fused mysticism with scientific rationalism. The second was sheer magnitude: history had known many other millenarian sects, but not on this scale. This book is about the possibilities and limits of social engineering. When in 1934 Evgeny Preobrazhensky said, “It has been the greatest transformation in the history of the world,” he spoke the truth. The Soviet project was the most far-reaching experiment ever conducted on human beings.
Yet, as Slezkine writes, “the Soviet age did not last beyond one human lifetime.” Why? He answers: Among the generation enjoying the proverbial happy Soviet childhood, no one read “Das Kapital.” What they did read was Tolstoy and Pushkin, Heine and Goethe. The Bolsheviks, Slezkine claims, dug their own graves when they gave Tolstoy to their children. The historical novel made it impossible for them to gaze solely into the coming utopia: “the parents lived for the future; their children lived in the past. … The parents had comrades; … the children had friends.”
Slezkine plots “The House of Government” as an epic family tragedy. “Last night NKVD agents came and took Mommy away,” wrote an 11-year-old boy in 1938. “Mommy was very brave.” A few days later: “I’m reading Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace.’” Then, “Mommy-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y!!!”
Neither Tania Miagkova nor her husband ever saw their daughter again. Like many children of Bolsheviks, Rada was raised by her grandmother. That many of these grandmothers “were orthodox Bolshevik sectarians” — Slezkine observes — “does not seem to have diminished their family loyalty. The fact that their families were punished for unexplained reasons does not seem to have diminished their Bolshevik orthodoxy. “The two sets of loyalties … were connected to each other by silence.”
Children from the House of Government without grandmothers completed their school days in orphanages. Many went on to be killed fighting the Germans in World War II. Those mothers who did survive the gulag returned years later, aged. They were no longer needed by their children, who had grown up without them. As one woman whose mother returned said, “We never really managed to get used to each other again.”
Marci Shore is an associate professor of history at Yale and the author of “The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.”
I sailed away with a mighty push, never to return
Sheila Fitzpatrick
The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine
Princeton, 438 pp, £18.95, October 2004, ISBN 0 691 11995 3
This book review is only available in full to LRB subscribers. Register to read it now and access our entire archive for 24 hours. Email address:
Your email address
Register For Free Your email will be added to our mailing list. By registering you agree to our terms.
This book changed my sense of the big story of Soviet history as well as the big story of the Jews in the modern world.＊ Chapter 4, in particular, the interpretative history of Jews in the Soviet Union (and the United States and Israel), which takes up almost half the book, should be compulsory reading for everyone who has ever expressed an opinion on the subject.
Yuri Slezkine dedicates the book to his grandmother: not the Russian noblewoman who, despite having ‘lost everything she owned in the Revolution’, ‘at the end of her life … was a loyal Soviet citizen at peace with her past and at home in her country’, but the other grandmother, Berta (Brokhe) Iosifovna Kostrinskaia, born in the Pale of Settlement, who ‘went to prison as a Communist, emigrated to Argentina, and returned in 1931 to take part in the building of socialism. In her old age, she took great pride in her Jewish ancestors and considered most of her life to have been a mistake.’ The Jewish Century is an exploration of that ‘mistake’: the love affair of Russian Jews with the Russian Revolution. Slezkine probably shares her final view of the cause to which she devoted her life, but the dedication implies more than sympathy. Soviet history has generally left out its Jewish component (except for the anti-semitic campaign of the late Stalin period), just as 20th-century Jewish history has left out its Soviet component (with the same exception). This book is an act of historical recovery.
It starts by creating a category, ‘Mercurians’, the purpose of which is simultaneously to explain the singularity of the Jews and to diminish it by making them part of a larger group. Mercurians are ‘the descendants … of Hermes, the god of all those who did not herd animals, till the soil or live by the sword; the patron of rule breakers, border crossers, and go-betweens; the protector of people who lived by their wit, craft and art’. They are diasporic ‘service nomads’, in Slezkine’s term, who provide various services and skills to the natives they live among, whom Slezkine calls ‘Apollonians’. Mercurians were
transients and wanderers – from fully nomadic Gypsy groups, to mostly commercial communities divided into fixed brokers and travelling agents, to permanently settled populations who thought of themselves as exiles. Whether they knew no homeland, like the Irish travellers or the Sheikh Mohammadi, or had lost it, like the Armenians and the Jews, or had no political ties to it, like the Overseas Indians or Lebanese, they were perpetual resident aliens and vocational foreigners.
Mercurians were ‘admired but also feared and despised’ by Apollonians, and these feelings – at least the last two – were mutual. The Mercurians, embodied in classical mythology by Odysseus, ‘possess a quality that the Greeks called metis, or “cunning intelligence” (with an emphasis on either “cunning” or “intelligence”, depending on who does the labelling)’; and they tended to take a dim view of slow-witted Apollonian Ivans. For much of human history, Slezkine concludes, Apollonians and Mercurians ‘have lived next to each other in mutual scorn and suspicion – not because of ignorant superstition but because they have had the chance to get to know each other’.
Suspicion increased with the advent of capitalism and modern state nationalisms, which, on the one hand, required Mercurian rather than Apollonian skills and, on the other, marginalised Jews and other diasporic (non-national) peoples. Ever greater Jewish business and professional success was accompanied by growing anti-semitism in the increasingly nationalist nation-states of Europe and – by way of revolt against Jewish parents as well as anti-Jewish discrimination – the growing involvement of young Jews in socialist and revolutionary movements. When a son was born in 1889 to Alexander Helphand (Parvus), ‘world revolutionary, international financier and future German government agent’, he announced ‘the birth of a healthy, cheerful enemy of the state’.
It is often suggested that Jewish advancement in Russia was blocked by the quotas introduced in the 1880s. But Slezkine, following Benjamin Nathans’s lead in Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (2002), shows that the quotas ‘succeeded in slowing down the Jewish advance in the professions but failed to halt it’. By 1913, a majority of dentists in St Petersburg were Jewish, as were almost a fifth of its doctors and a large contingent of lawyers. These were Jews who had left the Pale, sometimes formal converts to Christianity. However, the two really important Jewish ‘conversions’ in Slezkine’s argument were not to Christianity but to revolutionary socialism and Russian literature, both of which drove a wedge between generations in many Jewish families. ‘I sailed away with a mighty push, never to return,’ Trotsky wrote. Despising his family’s ‘instinct of acquisitiveness’ and ‘petit-bourgeois outlook’, he too had fallen in love with Russian literature as well as revolution. ‘Many, too many of us, children of the Jewish intelligentsia, are madly, shamefully in love with Russian culture,’ the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky lamented in 1903. Paradoxically, their eager embrace of ‘the Pushkin faith’ (as Slezkine calls it) made Jewish intellectuals co-creators of the icons of cultural nationalism that emerged in most Central and East European states and would-be states at the turn of the century: it wasn’t a matter just of Pushkin in Russia but of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, Petöfi in Hungary, and Mickiewicz in Polish lands.
The steady but relatively small stream of departures from the Pale to major cities of the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries turned into a flood with the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War that followed. The Jewish population of Moscow, Russia’s new capital, grew by a factor of almost ten between 1912 and 1926, and continued to grow until by 1939 it had reached 250,000, making Jews the second largest ethnic group in the city. More than a million first-generation emigrants from the Pale were living elsewhere in the Soviet Union, mainly the big cities, at the outbreak of the Second World War. This demographic shift, which warrants further study, was of enormous significance, not just for the history of Russia’s Jews but also for the social and cultural history of Russia.
The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.
Good Communist Homes
Sheila Fitzpatrick
BUYThe House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine
Princeton, 1096 pp, £29.95, August 2017, ISBN 978 0 691 17694 9
You are invited to read this free book review. Register now for 24 hours of free access to the entire LRB archive. Email address:
Your email address
Register For Free Your email will be added to our mailing list. By registering you agree to our terms.
Yuri Slezkine, a master stylist as well as a first-class historian, is the least predictable of scholars. Still, it comes as a surprise to find that the book he has now produced, after long gestation, is a Soviet War and Peace. True, Slezkine says he is writing history, whereas Tolstoy’s War and Peace is generally treated, if somewhat gingerly, as a novel; and Slezkine’s subject is not so much war and peace as that curious state between the two that existed in the Soviet Union from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Second World War. The correspondences even so are notable. The two books are much the same length and offer the same practical difficulties of reading (the Penguin edition of War and Peace once fell apart in my hands when I tried to read it at the beach; The House of Government is so thick I had to put it on a flat surface to read it). The time span of the two books is much the same (fifteen years for Tolstoy, twenty or so for Slezkine), as is the intention to show how a society survived a cataclysmic event (the Napoleonic invasion for Tolstoy, the Bolshevik Revolution for Slezkine). Tolstoy had a philosophical point to make about history being the outcome, not of the decisions of a few great men, but of the chaotic actions of multitudes. Slezkine’s historical-philosophical point is that Bolshevism, and the Marxism from which it sprang, should be understood as millenarian religious movements.
To be sure, there are differences. Slezkine is fond of many of his (Old Bolshevik) characters, but when he writes about Bolshevism as an intellectual and political system there is a tinge of distaste, perhaps even contempt, that is alien to Tolstoy but reminiscent of another Russian epic predecessor on the boundary between history, literature and sarcastic polemic, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Then there is the difference, perhaps less important than it may at first seem, that Tolstoy’s work, despite its research base and the 160 historical figures among its characters, has made-up characters too and passes as fiction, whereas all Slezkine’s characters are real people who lived in the elite House of Government in Moscow in the 1930s. Slezkine doesn’t make up characters or dialogue, but then he scarcely needs to, given that the letters, diaries and memoirs his characters produced in such profusion show them to be self-inventors of a high order. The salient difference is perhaps not so much that Tolstoy’s characters are fictional as that, as a writer of fiction, Tolstoy can present them in the round, whereas Slezkine, as an intellectual historian, is restricted to their self-representations.
The House of Government begins with the disclaimer, a typical Slezkine inversion of a cliché, that ‘this is a work of history. Any resemblance to fictional characters, dead or alive, is entirely coincidental.’ Leaving aside the question of whether this is accurate, given his characters’ devotion to literature and their tendency to see life through its lens, it is a deceptively simple statement of disciplinary allegiance and genre that is quickly undercut in the introduction that follows. There are three strains in his work, Slezkine writes. One is ‘analytical’: that is, his argument that Bolshevism is a millenarian religion. Another is literary: at each stage of his story, in tandem with his historical account, he runs a summary of the literary works that ‘sought to interpret and mythologise’ events. But the most important strain, listed first, is the epic. Slezkine’s introduction makes only the modest claim that the book ‘is a family saga involving numerous named and unnamed residents of the House of Government … readers are urged to think of them as characters in an epic.’ But the publisher’s blurb more straightforwardly – and, I think, accurately – characterises the book as an ‘epic story … in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago’.
As befits an epic, Slezkine’s mode of narration is expansive. The first third of the book, before the House of Government even makes its appearance, offers a history of the Russian revolutionary movement, with a side excursion into Marx; a sixty-page overview of religion in human history, with special reference to millenarianism; and historical and literary accounts of 1917, the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, including the factional struggles in the party following Lenin’s death, and the ‘great turn’ of the late 1920s (Stalinist industrialisation, collectivisation and famine). There are several lengthy digressions on such topics as constructivism and utopian architectural visions. Slezkine lets his characters speak for themselves, both in long quotations from diaries, letters and autobiographies, and in extensive paraphrases. He affords equivalent space to literary works, most frequently Mayakovsky’s and Babel’s writing for the early years and Platonov’s and Leonov’s for the later ones.
Change your perspective - subscribe now
There are endnotes referencing secondary works, particularly those of intellectual historians who share Slezkine’s eschatological view of Bolshevism. The endnotes are no doubt to remind us that the book is, inter alia, a work of scholarly history, but I think they would have been better left out. This is partly for the parochial reason that, as a social historian in the field, I was somewhat irritated by his choices, and partly because, as a reader, I was less interested in the book as a work of scholarship (impressive though it is in its breadth of research and reference) than as a work of literature. References to secondary sources suggest that this is an ordinary academic work which, according to the conventions, ought to ‘position itself in the scholarship’. It isn’t, any more than The Gulag Archipelago was.
The overall framework of the book is structured according to the stages of a millenarian movement. ‘Early in the book,’ Slezkine explains,
the Bolsheviks are identified as millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse. In subsequent chapters, consecutive episodes in the Bolshevik family saga are related to stages in the history of a failed prophecy, from an apparent fulfilment to the great disappointment to a series of postponements to the desperate offer of a last sacrifice. They managed to take over Rome long before their faith could become an inherited habit, but they never figured out how to transform their certainty into a habit that their children or subordinates could inherit.
‘Anticipation’ is the title of the section on the revolutionaries in exile and underground in Russia before 1917, followed by ‘Fulfilment’ with the October Revolution, ‘The Second Coming’ and ‘The Reign of the Saints’ for the struggles to survive and fulfil the prophecy (incorporating ‘The Great Disappointment’, as it becomes ever more clear that what the revolution had brought into being was not heaven on earth), and ‘The Last Judgment’, winding up the drama with the destruction in the Great Purges of many of the erstwhile revolutionaries.
Slezkine suggests in passing that the early 20th-century Russian intelligentsia – symbolists and Christian mystics as well as revolutionaries – was in the grip of a millenarian and apocalyptic mood. But the main genesis of Bolshevik millenarianism, in Slezkine’s account, was Marxism. Marx’s early preoccupations, Slezkine argues, were the emancipation (resurrection) of Germany and the reformation of the Jews; and ‘the entire edifice of Marxist theory … was built on these foundations.’ Marx, ‘like Jesus and unlike Mazzini or Mickiewicz, succeeded in translating a tribal prophecy into a language of universalism’. Not being an expert on the early Marx, I will leave it to others to take up the gauntlet on this one, but I winced when, much later in the book, Hitler is thrown into the mix as a fellow millenarian with ‘the same enemy – but whereas the Bolsheviks thought of it as a class, the Nazis thought of it as a tribe’.
Interpretations of Bolshevism as a religion, of which there have been many over the years, generally leave me cold, but Slezkine’s argument is more interesting. I have always tended to dismiss the Bolsheviks’ predictions of imminent total transformation on the grounds that nobody could be so silly as to believe such a thing, except fleetingly in the madness of the revolutionary moment, but Slezkine has persuaded me to take it seriously – up to a point. I still privately believe that, for all the Bolsheviks who thought like Platonov characters, there were others of a practical cast of mind who didn’t. Lenin I can more or less accept as a millenarian, at least until October, after which responsibility sobered him up. But not even Slezkine could convince me that Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, also an Old Bolshevik, was ever anything of the kind. While that may restrict the applicability of Slezkine’s thesis, it doesn’t refute it. Slezkine himself notes that the most passionate exponents of Bolshevik millenarianism tended to be male.
You may by now be wondering when I am going tell you what the House of Government was and who lived there. Take it as my homage to Slezkine, a past master at stringing out anticipation. His narrative for the first 407 pages is dotted with stories and quotations from Old Bolsheviks who, the reader must presume, are likely to show up later as residents of the House of Government. This is so, by and large (even if Nikolai Bukharin, who makes many appearances in the story, did not actually live in the House), but it is also part of Slezkine’s art to avoid locking himself in with strict definitions. The reader, he warns at the beginning, should think of the persons who appear in his narrative not just as characters in an epic but also as similar to people encountered in their own lives, who may or may not be familiar and may or may not turn out to be important. ‘No family or individual is indispensable to the story,’ however. ‘Only the House of Government is.’
*
The building, renamed ‘the House on the Embankment’ in Yuri Trifonov’s autobiographical novel of the 1970s, was a grey constructivist/neoclassical elephant designed by Boris Iofan and built on Swamp Square on the Moscow River diagonally across from the Kremlin. (Slezkine likes to translate his Russian names into English: Swamp Square is his rendition of Bolotnaya ploshchad; the House of Government’s cinema Udarnik becomes Shock Worker.) Luxurious and modern by the standards of the time, and intended primarily, as the name suggests, to house senior government (including party, military and security) officials, the House consisted of 507 apartments ranging in size from one to seven rooms (three to five rooms was the norm), with facilities including a kindergarten, a shop, a club and a theatre.
In an earlier iteration, Slezkine’s book was conceived as a biography of the building, and traces of this remain, usually in the form of deadpan lists of objects, one of his standard techniques for dealing with non-narrative archival material. Incoming residents had to sign an inventory of 54 items including ‘ceilings, walls, wallpapers, tiled floors (in the kitchen, bathroom and toilet), parquet floors (in the rest of the apartment), closets, windows, hinges, lampshades, doors (French and regular), locks (two kinds), doorknobs (three kinds), nickel-plated doorstops, an electric doorbell, enamel bathtub with overflow drain and nickel-plated plug, nickel-plated shower’ and so on. Sometimes the lists are of abstract nouns, such as the Housekeeping Department’s priorities of ‘centralisation, symmetry, transparency, cleanliness, accountability and surveillance’, or even verbs: Slezkine reminds us of the practical demands on a building whose residents, as human beings, ‘ate, drank, slept, procreated, grew hair, produced waste, got sick, and needed heating and lighting, among other things’.
Once the story gets under way, the human beings come into focus. Tenants began moving into the House of Government in 1931, and by the mid-1930s they numbered 2655. Of the 700 leaseholders (heads of household), a high proportion were Old Bolsheviks (people whose connection with the party predated the revolution), mainly intellectuals born in the 1880s and 1890s currently holding high office; among the intellectuals, ‘by far the largest group’ were Jews. The rest of the residents were wives (an even higher percentage of whom were Jewish), children, wards, in-laws, maids and an array of other relatives and non-relatives who made up the often unconventional households. An appendix lists the 66 ‘leaseholders’ who, along with some of their dependants, are most prominent in Slezkine’s story. They include the journalist Mikhail Koltsov, who covered the Spanish Civil War and became a character in For Whom the Bell Tolls; the secret policeman Sergei Mironov, whose frivolous, clothes-loving wife wrote memoirs that serve as a foil to the high-mindedness of everyone else; the cultural official Alexander Arosev, a close friend of the head of the government, Vyacheslav Molotov; Aron Solts, the party’s morality expert; Valentin Trifonov, a Civil War military hero; Karl Radek, sometime oppositionist who for some years returned to favour with Stalin as an international specialist; and the trade minister Israel Veitser, married to the high-profile director of the Moscow Children’s Theatre, Natalia Sats. Elena Stasova – b. 1873, one of the oldest of Old Bolsheviks – is a rare woman among the overwhelmingly male leaseholders. Even Sats is listed only as a dependant of her husband. But most of the wives worked, if generally in less exalted jobs (usually in the cultural sphere) than their husbands.
The extraordinarily detailed information on the households and the complexity of their domestic relations is one of the remarkable and unique aspects of this book. Nobody knew what a good communist home ought to be like, Slezkine remarks, but on the basis of House of Government data it looks strikingly non-nuclear. Partnerships shifted, not always rancorously, so that an ex-wife plus children might be living down the hall from the new wife plus children, with the husband dividing his time between the flats. Arosev shuttled between three apartments: he lived in the House of Government with two daughters by a first marriage, their governess and a maid; his new wife and their young child lived next door; and his first wife and another daughter lived in a different building. Sometimes, an old wife and a new one lived in the same apartment, as in the case of Bukharin’s third wife (Anna Larina) and his first, who was an invalid, together with his aged father and Anna and Bukharin’s small son; Bukharin himself continued to live in the small apartment in the Kremlin he had swapped with Stalin after Stalin’s wife’s death. Valentin Trifonov lived in an apartment with his wife and their two children, Yury and Tatania, along with his mother-in-law (an old revolutionary to whom he had once been married) and Undik, the young man she had adopted as an orphan during the Volga famine of 1921.
Many families in the building included an adopted child – sometimes strays like Undik, sometimes children taken in after the arrest or death of their parents, who might be relatives or just friends. Registered tenants in Mikhail Koltsov’s apartment included his old wife, Elizaveta, and his new German partner, Maria Osten, along with a young German boy whom Mikhail and Maria had adopted. The two essential components in the everyday life of a House of Government apartment were a babushka (often of ‘bad’ social origin and/or a believing Christian or Jew) and a maid, running the household between them while the parents were out at work. The babushka was not necessarily an actual grandmother, but might be another elderly female relative. The maids came from the countryside: as Slezkine points out, high Soviet officials might, by virtue of their status, be insulated from the collectivisation struggle, but ‘almost every child raised in the House of Government was raised by one of its casualties.’
The Great Purges hit the House of Government with particular fury. The NKVD usually came for people at night, and many households experienced repeat visits, first for the husband and then, sometime later, weeks or months, for the wife. The apartments were sealed, and the remaining family moved elsewhere in the building, often sharing with another family in the same situation before finally being evicted. They came for Inna Gaister’s mother on her 12th birthday: ‘Mother kept walking through the rooms with me following behind her in my nightshirt. And Natasha [the nanny] followed after me with Valiushka [the youngest daughter] in her arms. We just kept walking like that in single file around the apartment.’ Arosev (and wife), Koltsov (and Maria Osten), Larina (and Bukharin), Trifonov (and wife), Radek, Mironov, Veitser and Sats were all arrested in the Great Purges; the men and some of the women were shot or died in the Gulag, but Gaister’s wife, Larina, and Sats survived, returning to Moscow in the 1950s. Platon Kerzhentsev, fired as head of the Committee on the Arts, wrote desperate denunciations as he awaited arrest – but the Black Maria passed him by and he died of heart failure a few years later. In similar circumstances, Solts had a breakdown, while another jurist, Yakov Brandenburgsky, appears to have feigned madness and sat out the terror in a psychiatric hospital.
‘Last night NKVD agents came and took Mommy away,’ 12-year-old Yuri Trifonov wrote in his diary for 3 April 1938. (Slezkine’s American translation of Mama as ‘Mommy’ is jarring, at least to my ears.) ‘They woke us up. Mommy was very brave. They took her away in the morning. Today I did not go to school.’ Yuri’s father had been arrested earlier. ‘Now it’s only Tania [his younger sister] and me with Grandma, Ania [a friend of his parents, living with them since her husband was arrested] and Undik.’ Some House of Government children were shunned by family and friends and had trouble at school; others found support at school from friends and teachers. Babushki and occasionally maids stepped in to care for the children after their parents’ arrests, but many ended up in orphanages in distant provinces.
Change your perspective - subscribe now
The orphanage experience, as later recounted by the children, was not necessarily negative: nine-year-old Volodia Lande, sent to an orphanage in Penza in 1937 after the arrest of both his parents, received warmth and kindness from his teachers, quickly made friends, and eventually went to military college and became a naval officer. Surprisingly, the upheaval of 1937-38 seems not to have permanently thrown the House of Government children out of the circle of Soviet privilege. ‘Most of the children of government officials, including “family members of the traitors to the motherland”, graduated from prestigious colleges and (re)joined the postwar Soviet cultural and professional elite.’
The children of the House of Government are very important in Slezkine’s story. In the first place, he is deeply interested in their attitude (he treats it as a singular Weltanschauung rather than as a spectrum of positions) to their parents and the Soviet way of life. Their childhoods were blissfully happy (or remembered as such), as Soviet childhoods were meant to be. The children ‘admired their fathers, respected their seniors, loved their country, and looked forward to improving themselves for the sake of socialism and to building socialism as a means of self-improvement’. They loved school and loved their friends, as well as venerating the idea of friendship. Like their parents, they were passionate readers and admirers of the Russian classics, Pushkin usually coming at the top of the list, as well as the ‘Treasures of World Literature’: Dickens, Balzac, Cervantes etc, whose volumes were to be found on the shelves of their fathers’ studies. They were also attached to Jack London and Jules Verne; they were romantics who embraced the real-life sagas of polar explorers with the same fervour as the fictional adventures of Verne’s Children of Captain Grant.
You might think that the sudden arrest of their parents as ‘enemies of the people’ would have significantly changed these attitudes, but apparently not. Most of the children believed in their parents’ innocence, and perhaps that of their friends’ parents, while at the same time accepting the Soviet premise that enemies were everywhere and needed to be unmasked. When one House of Government child, Andrei Sverdlov, went to work for the NKVD and participated in the interrogation of some of his former playmates, most of his contemporaries ‘considered him a traitor but did not question the cause he was serving. They did not feel that they had to choose between their loyalty to the party and their loyalty to their friends, family and themselves.’
*
The Second World War marks the end of Slezkine’s saga. The House of Government, cast into turmoil by the Great Purges, was essentially emptied after bombing damage and with the approach of German troops in the autumn of 1941. Remaining residents were called up into the army or evacuated east. A significant proportion of the children died on active service. Those who survived tended to come back to Moscow but not to the House of Government, which was back in operation after the war with a largely new set of residents. Some of the mothers arrested during the Great Purges returned from the Gulag in the 1950s, but they were changed people, shadows of their former selves, and their adult children often found it difficult to relate to them.
The Great Terror ‘spelled the end of most Old Bolshevik families and homes; it did not bring about the end of faith,’ Slezkine says. But something did, since seventy odd pages later he writes that by the Brezhnev period the children still ‘venerated the memory’ of their dead fathers ‘but no longer shared their faith’. The cause of this loss of faith is not very clearly spelled out. It wasn’t the war, since as Slezkine tells us, ‘the coming of the war … justified all the previous sacrifices, both voluntary and involuntary, and offered the children of the original revolutionaries the opportunity to prove, through one more sacrifice, that their childhoods had been happy, that their fathers had been pure, that their country was their family, and that life was, indeed, beautiful, even in death.’ Nor, presumably, was it the Thaw of the mid-1950s, which ‘heartened and briefly rejuvenated’ the former House of Government children. Perhaps it was the long disillusioning years of Brezhnev’s ‘stagnation’, in which some of the House of Government children became dissidents and some of the Jewish ones emigrated. Most of those remaining in the Soviet Union ‘welcomed Gorbachev’s Perestroika’, but it was too late: some time in the postwar decades, ‘utopia’ had ‘evaporated … without anyone quite noticing’. ‘By the time the Soviet state collapsed, no one seemed to take the original prophecy seriously any more.’
‘Why did Bolshevism die after one generation?’ Slezkine asks. Why was its fate ‘so different from that of Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and countless other millenarian faiths? Most “churches” are vast rhetorical and institutional structures built on broken promises. Why was Bolshevism unable to live with its own failure?’ His answer is that the Bolsheviks, unlike other millenarian sects, failed to bring the family under its control. ‘One of the central features of Bolshevism as a life-structuring web of institutions was that Soviets were made in school and at work, not at home … The Bolshevik family was subjected to much less pastoral guidance and communal surveillance than most of its Christian counterparts.’
Perhaps so. (But what about Pavlik Morozov, the heroic child of Soviet myth who denounced his own father?) One could also question Slezkine’s premise. The émigré sociologist Nicholas Timasheff in his book The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (1946) noted with approval a process of routinisation in the Soviet Union. A few years earlier, Trotsky had observed the same process, which he called ‘The Great Betrayal’. From this perspective, the Soviet (Stalinist) system that emerged in the mid-1930s looks very like one of those ‘vast rhetorical and institutional structures built on broken promises’ that follow the utopian moment in the millenarian success stories of Christianity and Mormonism.
Slezkine isn’t writing a success story, however. His saga is in the tragic mode, and tragedies, in his interpretation, are about failures and their inevitability. It wasn’t an inability to achieve ‘routinisation’ that constitutes Bolshevism’s real failure in his narrative, but the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Slezkine’s short discussion of this is interesting if perfunctory. Marxism didn’t take permanent root because its economic determinism was sterile. The House of Government children inherited their parents’ literary tastes but not their interest in Marxist theory, being ‘entirely innocent of economics, and only indirectly acquainted with Marxism-Leninism through speeches, quotations, and history-book summaries’. It also failed because Russia was Russia. Bolshevism’s international orientation was unappealing, and the multinational structure of the Soviet state proved its undoing. ‘Stalin may have sounded like a Russian national prophet, but his Russian never sounded native … Because the House of Government had never become the Russian national home, late Soviet Communism became homeless – and, eventually, a ghost.’
Success and failure are a matter of opinion, and Slezkine’s interpretations should give Soviet historians plenty to argue about. But this may be beside the point. Bolshevik millenarianism and Soviet ideocracy must fail in Slezkine’s story, both for dramatic reasons and because of his intuitive conviction that they did. As for the issue of genre, the best summation probably comes from Tolstoy who, explaining that War and Peace was ‘not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle’, stated simply that it was ‘what the author wanted and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed’.
QUOTE:
Constructed on what feels like a lifetime of research and reflection, The House of Government offers a virtuosic weaving of novelistic storytelling, social anthropology, intellectual history, and literary criticism.
has caught an extraordinary set of lives in this book. Few historians, dead or alive, have managed to combine so spectacularly the gifts of storyteller and scholar.
Bolshevism’s New Believers
Benjamin Nathans NOVEMBER 23, 2017 ISSUE
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
by Yuri Slezkine
Princeton University Press, 1,104 pp., $39.95
Russian State Library, Moscow/©Estate of Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg/RAO Moscow/VAGA, New York
A poster for Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s 1928 film October, about the Russian Revolution of 1917, designed by Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg with Yakov Ruklevsky; from Susan Pack’s Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde, just published by Taschen
Over the past one hundred years, some 20,000 books on the Russian Revolution have been published, roughly six thousand of them in English. It’s as if, starting on October 25, 1917—or November 7, according to the Western calendar the Bolsheviks adopted soon after seizing power—a new book on that topic appeared without fail every weekday (with summers off). It could be worse: there are now over 70,000 books on the French Revolution. Which one are you going to read?
The Russian Revolution reshaped global time and space. The replacement of the House of Romanov by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics inaugurated what came to be known as the “short twentieth century”; the USSR’s disintegration in 1991 signaled its finale, in all likelihood the last time events in Europe will serve as a century’s bookends. The Soviet project precipitated the partition of the planet into first (capitalist), second (socialist), and third (developing) worlds. For much of its existence, the USSR haunted the West and beckoned developing societies to replicate Russia’s leap into industrial and fully sovereign socialism.
The Russian Revolution, to borrow a phrase from Gershom Scholem, the historian of Jewish messianism, was one of history’s “plastic hours,” when inherited institutions melt away, clearing a path for possibility. Having embarked on that path, the Bolsheviks set about turning capitalism into the world’s ancien régime. Instead, at the centenary of its birth, the Soviet Union is an increasingly distant memory, a bizarre country that once had the audacity to try to abolish private property, markets, and, for a brief time, money itself.
Where did the USSR come from? Was it the offspring of Russia’s peculiar development under the tsars, or did it arise from the inner contradictions of capitalism? Were its ambitions scripted by Marx and Engels, or did they emerge from broader currents of the Enlightenment—the same currents that, under different conditions, propelled the United States, France, and other countries to take their leave of monarchy? Throughout the many studies devoted to these questions runs an abiding tension between those that cast the USSR as an outlier in modern history and those that place it within a family of European or even universal phenomena. One of the first attempts at the latter approach focused on the fact that, notwithstanding their radically different political habits, in the end the Soviets and their capitalist rivals produced roughly the same kind of society: urban, industrial, educated, secular, consumerist, and science-friendly. A more recent version of the modernization-as-convergence argument, shaped by thinkers as diverse as Michel Foucault and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, puts the family resemblance in a decidedly darker light, stressing shared attributes of technocracy, state surveillance, mass mobilization, and urban anomie.
Yuri Slezkine’s monumental new study, The House of Government, also situates the Russian Revolution within a much larger drama, but one that resists the modernization narrative and instead places the Bolsheviks among ancient Zoroastrians and Israelites, early Christians and Muslims, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Puritans, Old Believers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Rastafarians, and other millenarian sects. As sworn enemies of religion, the Bolsheviks would have hated this casting decision and demanded to be put in a different play, preferably with Jacobins, Saint-Simonians, Marxists, and Communards in supporting roles. Slezkine, however, has claimed these groups for his story as well, insisting that underneath their secular costumes they too dreamed of hastening the apocalypse and building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Bolsheviks, it seems, were condemned to repeat history—a history driven not by class struggle, as they thought, but by theology.
Slezkine was born in 1956 and raised in Moscow. The son of a historian and grandson of a fiction writer also named Yuri Slezkine, he graduated from Moscow State University before making his way to the United States, where he attended graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin and is now a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. He first achieved international notice in 1994 with an article entitled “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.”* The Soviet Union had just broken up into fifteen ethnically defined states, confirming for many its status as a “prison house of nations” (one of Lenin’s many epithets for tsarist Russia) from which the inmates had finally staged their jailbreak.
Slezkine came to a very different conclusion: despite their insistence that class, not nationality, was the deepest source of human solidarity, the Bolsheviks had turned out to be nation-builders of the first order. Their “chronic ethnophilia” inspired “the most extravagant celebration of ethnic diversity that any state had ever financed,” and was largely responsible for the formation of the very national-territorial units that burst forth as newly independent states in the 1990s. To capture the process of socialist nation-building, Slezkine deployed a perfectly Soviet metaphor: the communal apartment, the sprawling pre-revolutionary living space partitioned after 1917 into separate rooms, each housing an entire family, with a single shared kitchen and bathroom per apartment. “Remarkably enough,” he wrote, “the communist landlords went on to reinforce many of the partitions and never stopped celebrating separateness along with communalism.”
Slezkine’s book The Jewish Century (2004) performed a similar volte-face, turning the story of Jewish assimilation on its head and moving Soviet Jewry from the margins to the center of the short twentieth century. Wide-ranging, witty, and provocative, it became the subject of academic symposia in the United States, France, Germany, Russia, and Israel. Modernization, Slezkine argued, is about “everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible,” and thus “about everyone becoming Jewish.” Different groups accomplished this metamorphosis at different rates, “but no one,” he noted, “is better at being Jewish than the Jews.”
For centuries, diaspora Jews (or at least some of them—Slezkine was not overly interested in such distinctions) belonged to a human type he dubbed “Mercurians,” familiar strangers wherever they lived, “service nomads” whose professional profile, food rituals, cosmologies, and, not least, endogamy kept them distinct from the rooted, agrarian, martial, and much more numerous “Apollonians” around them. Diaspora Armenians and Chinese were Mercurians too. Ukrainians, Russians, and other peasant-dominated populations, by contrast, were Apollonians. Slezkine’s most important point, however, was that Mercurianism and Apollonianism, rather than being innate qualities of this or that group, were strictly functional categories. Individuals and ethnic groups could move in and out of them over time, and since the modern world increasingly rewarded Mercurian qualities, modernization was the story of what happened when more and more Apollonians began to switch sides—as did a few quixotic Mercurians, aka Zionists.
The Jewish Century, it turns out, was a kind of prequel to an even grander project, The House of Government. A striking proportion of the latter’s characters (and residents) were of Jewish background, reflecting the extraordinary presence of Jews in the early Soviet political, cultural, and administrative elite. By attending to the rise and fall of that presence in The Jewish Century, Slezkine in effect cleared space for exploring the Soviet experiment in its largest, world-historical dimensions. Readers will note cameo appearances by this or that figure in both books, but above all they will recognize the hallmarks of Slezkine’s highly distinctive way of thinking and writing about history. Serious novels, the literary critic Robert Alter once wrote, are a way of knowing, and much the same can be said of Slezkine’s work.
Constructed on what feels like a lifetime of research and reflection, The House of Government offers a virtuosic weaving of novelistic storytelling, social anthropology, intellectual history, and literary criticism. It moves effortlessly (though the copious sources cited in the endnotes suggest otherwise) across different historical scales, joining a millennia-spanning, pattern-seeking master narrative to acute readings of diaries, letters, novels, and other such documents, often quoted at luxurious length. More than most historians, Slezkine conveys a sense of knowing his Bolshevik subjects (and occasionally their spouses and children) from the inside out, inhabiting not just their thoughts but their emotions and their most intimate relationships as well. He himself is capable of many moods: ironic, elegiac, deadpan, tragic, analytical. His goal is to make readers feel at home in the House of Government, and he accomplishes this not least via a preternatural prose style in a language not his native tongue, calling to mind Nabokov and Conrad.
The House of Government was a fortress-like edifice constructed in the late 1920s on a swamp across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, its 507 fully furnished apartments were designed to house leading Soviet officials and their families, the pinnacle of what would come to be known as the nomenklatura. It may have been a bad idea to build such a structure on a swamp, but Russia had a history of pulling off such ventures. Peter the Great had founded a spectacular new capital, St. Petersburg, on the swamps off the Gulf of Finland. The Bolsheviks had launched the world’s first Marxist revolution in a figurative swamp, an overwhelmingly agrarian, thinly industrialized country whose tiny proletariat had only begun to emerge from the sea of peasants spread across Russia’s vast hinterland. Building socialism in backward Russia meant transforming the entire country into “a gigantic construction site.” Unlike some other political figures, when the Bolsheviks promised to drain the swamp, they meant it.
If the communal apartment served as a metaphor for the USSR’s multiethnic society, the House of Government, in Slezkine’s telling, was the “place where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to die.” By the mid-1930s it was the dwelling place of some seven hundred top officials and more than twice that number of spouses, children, assorted relatives, and nannies—the last group mostly refugees from the famine caused by the disastrous collectivization of Soviet agriculture. The up-and-coming Nikita Khrushchev lived in Apt. 199 with his wife and three children. Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s foreign minister, lived in Apt. 14, just a few doors away from his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, the future dissident Pavel Litvinov. Matvei Berman, chief architect of the Gulag system, was in Apt. 141, while Boris Iofan, chief architect of the House of Government itself, settled into Apt. 426. The civil war hero Valentin Trifonov shared Apt. 137 with his second wife, Evgenia Lurye (sixteen years his junior), as well as his ex-wife, Tatiana Slovatinskaia (nine years his senior). Evgenia was Tatiana’s daughter by a previous marriage. Evgenia and Valentin’s children Yuri (the future Soviet writer) and Tatiana lived there too. Trifonov, Slezkine archly notes, was a man “free of prejudices.” He wasn’t the only one. Nikolai Bukharin secured Apt. 470 for his aging father; his second wife, Anna Larina (twenty-six years his junior); their infant son; and his first wife, Nadezhda Lukina (who was also his cousin). Bukharin himself retained an apartment inside the Kremlin.
Tate Gallery, London/David King Collection/Art Resource
Vladimir Lenin making a gramophone recording of a speech, Moscow, March 1919
This being the Soviet Union, the apartments belonged to the state, as did the furniture and, in some sense, the inhabitants. Most of the fathers and some of the mothers were “Old Bolsheviks,” professional revolutionaries under the tsarist regime who had joined the party as young men and women, serving time in prison, Siberian exile, or abroad, where they had “courted each other, married each other (unofficially), and lectured each other.” All of them had pledged their lives to the party.
As Slezkine makes clear, however, the Bolsheviks were not a political party in the conventional sense of a group seeking, by vote gathering or other means, to elevate themselves into existing institutions of power. Nor, despite their fervent denunciation of religion and metaphysics in the name of science and materialism, were they immune to eschatological impulses. Writing of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary parties of the early twentieth century, Slezkine observes:
Their purpose was to…bring about [Russian] society’s replacement by a “kingdom of freedom” understood as life without politics. They were faith-based groups radically opposed to a corrupt world, dedicated to “the abandoned and the persecuted,” and composed of voluntary members who had undergone a personal conversion and shared a strong sense of chosenness, exclusiveness, ethical austerity, and social egalitarianism.
In a word, the Bolsheviks were a sect.
Slezkine is by no means the first to argue that Bolshevism is best understood as a form of religious faith. In July 1917, two months before they overthrew the Provisional Government, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote that “Bolsheviks, as often happens, do not know the ultimate truth about themselves, do not grasp what spirit governs them.” By laying claim to “the entire person” and seeking to provide answers to “all of a person’s needs, all of humanity’s sufferings,” Bolshevism drew on “religious energies—if by religious energy we understand not just what is directed to God.” The German political theorist Carl Schmitt’s landmark study Political Theology, published in 1922, revealed modern European notions of law, sovereignty, and the state as thinly disguised transpositions of theological concepts, smuggling the sacred into what purported to be secular institutions.
Following Berdyaev and Schmitt, countless observers have linked Bolshevik practices to alleged Christian precedents. Samokritika (self-criticism) sessions have been likened to Christian confession, the project of building socialism to a crusade, communism’s “radiant future” to the Kingdom of Heaven, and the Lenin cult to the veneration of saints. Herbert Marcuse claimed that in the USSR, Marxism stood in for Weber’s Protestant ethic, cultivating forms of self-discipline essential for a modern industrial economy. Most of these analogies are merely associative, suggesting ways of thinking about Bolshevism without claiming (let alone demonstrating) lineal descent from Christianity. All of them face significant challenges. Wouldn’t one have to posit an epidemic of false consciousness to account for so much religiosity on the part of the militantly antireligious Bolsheviks? Why do some analogies refer to quintessentially Catholic practices and others to quintessentially Protestant or Russian Orthodox ones? How can any of them account for the motives of the many Jewish party members?
Bolsheviks are by no means the only moderns to be subjected to the secularization thesis. While the first Soviet officials were settling into their apartments in the House of Government, the American historian Carl Becker was completing his boldly contrarian Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, in which he argued that the Enlightenment had dethroned Christianity only to reinstate it “with more up-to-date materials.” A generation later, M.H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism claimed much the same for Romanticism.
Slezkine’s version of the secularization thesis is simultaneously more specific and much broader. In their thinking and their interactions with one another, on the one hand, Bolsheviks displayed the particular form of religious fervor associated with millenarian sects, namely the desire to eradicate “private property and the family as the most powerful and mutually reinforcing sources of inequality,” thereby fashioning, once and for all, a “simple, fraternal society organized around common beliefs, possessions, and sexual partners (or sexual abstinence).” Millenarian sects with apocalyptic dreams, on the other hand, have appeared in many different religions and historical eras. Indeed, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism (to name a few) are, according to Slezkine, “institutionalized embodiments of unfulfilled millenarian prophecies,” churches that sought to routinize the teachings, if not all the practices, of the rebellious sects that gave birth to them.
Not only is apocalyptic millenarianism a type of belief and a way of life found in all major religions, Slezkine claims, it is also the template for all modern revolutions. Before the Bolsheviks there was the Russian intelligentsia, to be a member of which meant “being religious about being secular; asking ‘the accursed questions’ over lunch and dinner; falling deeper and deeper into doubt and confusion as a matter of principle; and feeling both chosen and damned.” Before them were the Jacobins (“an Age of Reason revival”) and before them the Puritans (“a Christian revival”):
Both were defeated by the non-arrival of a New Jerusalem (“liberty”) and the return of old regimes (“tyranny”), but both won in the long run by producing liberalism, the routinized version of godliness and virtue. The inquisitorial zeal and millenarian excitement were gone, but mutual surveillance, ostentatious self-control, universal participation, and ceaseless activism remained as virtues in their own right and essential prerequisites for democratic rule (the reduction of individual wills to a manageable uniformity of opinion)…. The expectation of imminent happiness was replaced by its endless pursuit.
In the nineteenth century, a new breed of prophets—foremost among them Marx—“left Jesus out altogether without feeling compelled to change the plot. Providence had become history, progress, evolution, revolution, transcendence, laws of nature, or positive change, but the outcome remained the same.” Weber was wrong: the modern world is not disenchanted (even if secularists pretend otherwise) but a continuation of Christianity by other means. Whether liberal, communist, fascist, or authoritarian, every polity relies to one degree or another on the persistence of charismatic authority and the (usually disguised) theological legitimation of political power.
In the ongoing debate about secularization, as should be clear by now, Slezkine has staked out a maximalist position: politics is incapable of divorcing itself from the sacred, and history consists of endlessly recurring salvation projects. The Bolsheviks, following Marx’s example, made sense of their unfolding revolutionary drama via French archetypes: they were the new Jacobins, the Mensheviks were the hated Girondins, and everyone anxiously awaited a Russian Vendée and a Russian Thermidor.
Slezkine does them one better. Having concluded that millenarianism is the true interpretive key, he applies his own rebranding: capitalism is “Babylon,” the Bolsheviks are “the preachers,” Marxism-Leninism is “the faith,” agitation and propaganda are called “missionary work,” and the end of tsarist Russia becomes “the end of the world.” The revolution is “the flood,” enlightenment is renamed “conversion.” The New Economic Policy, Lenin’s tactical retreat following the civil war, is “The Great Disappointment,” while Stalin’s revolution from above is christened “the Second Coming” and his Great Terror, “the Last Judgment.”
By rhetorically collapsing the distinction between Bolsheviks and their biblical predecessors, The House of Government signals its ultimate aim: to grasp the meaning of the Russian Revolution sub specie aeternitatis, to suggest an abiding element in human history, something very old of which we have not freed and may never free ourselves, precisely because we are human.
There is something undeniably intoxicating about such world-historical narratives, with their deep structure and eternal recurrences. But they have their frustrations too. “What man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis,” Carl Jung wrote, “can only be expressed by way of myth.” Slezkine’s saga of apocalyptic millenarianism provides a powerful way of knowing the Bolsheviks, placing them in an almost mythic framework of significance. When it comes to actually explaining the October revolution, however, or Stalin’s revolution from above, or the Great Terror (aka the Flood, the Second Coming, and the Last Judgment), the saga seems to offer little beyond the claim that the Bolsheviks were millenarians, and this is what millenarians do.
Nor does it account for the radically different outcomes of various millenarian movements—why some died as sects, others managed to routinize themselves into churches, but the Bolsheviks alone “found themselves firmly in charge of Babylon while still expecting the millennium in their lifetimes.” Not all instances of political fervor, even utopian fervor, qualify as millenarian, and there’s an important difference between believing in the possibility of progress and believing in its inevitability or necessity. Liberalism, communism, and fascism may indeed have certain millenarian instincts in common, but like a haircut and a beheading, the outcome is hardly “the same.”
One aspect of the Russian Revolution for which The House of Government does offer an explicit explanation is its demise. Most histories of the Soviet Union emphasize the failure of the command economy to keep up with its capitalist rivals. Slezkine, however, is not terribly interested in economics. In his account, the Soviet experiment failed, half a century before the country’s actual collapse, because it neglected to drain the oldest, most persistent swamp of all—the family.
In between their epic labors at the great construction site of socialism, residents of the House of Government “were settling into their new apartments and setting up house in familiar ways,” unable to transcend the “hen-and-rooster problems” of marriage and domestic life. Many of them expressed unease at the prospect of sinking into the traditional bonds of kinship and procreation. “I am afraid I might turn into a bourgeois,” worried the writer Aleksandr Serafimovich (Apt. 82) to a friend. “In order to resist such a transformation, I have been spitting into all the corners and onto the floor, blowing my nose, and lying in bed with my shoes on and hair uncombed. It seems to be helping.”
But it wasn’t. No one really knew what a communist family should be, or how to transform relations between parents and children, or how to harness erotic attachments to the requirements of revolution. Bolsheviks were known to give their children names such as “Vladlen” (Vladimir Lenin), “Mezhenda” (International Women’s Day), and “Vsemir” (worldwide revolution). But naming was easy compared to living. The Soviet state went to great lengths to inculcate revolutionary values in schools and workplaces, but not at home. It never devised resonant communist rituals to mark birth, marriage, and death. The party ideologist Aron Solts (Apt. 393) claimed that “the family of a Communist must be a prototype of a small Communist cell…, a collectivity of comrades in which one lives in the family the same way as outside the family.”
In that case, why bother with families at all? Neither Solts nor anyone else had a convincing answer. Sects, Slezkine notes, “are about brotherhood (and, as an afterthought, sisterhood), not about parents and children. This is why most end-of-the-world scenarios promise ‘all these things’ within one generation…, and all millenarian sects, in their militant phase, attempt to reform marriage or abolish it altogether (by decreeing celibacy or promiscuity).”
Unable or unwilling to abolish the family, Bolsheviks proved incapable of reproducing themselves. For Slezkine, this is cause for celebrating the resilience of family ties under the onslaught of Stalin’s social engineering. It’s worth asking, though, why the same Bolsheviks who willingly deported or exterminated millions of class enemies as remnants of capitalism balked at similarly radical measures against the bourgeois institution of the family. Could it be that they, especially the men among them, realized that by doing so they stood to lose much more than their chains?
Whatever the case, the children they raised in the House of Government became loyal Soviet citizens but not millenarians. Their deepest ties were to their parents (many of whom, as Slezkine shows with novelistic detail, were seized from their apartments and shot during the Great Terror) and to Pushkin and Tolstoy—not to Marx and Lenin. Instead of devouring its children, he concludes, the Russian Revolution was devoured by the children of the revolutionaries. As Tolstoy’s friend Nikolai Strakhov wrote about the character Bazarov, the proto-Bolshevik at the heart of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (another work about family), “The love affair takes place against his iron will; life, which he had thought he would rule, catches him in its huge wave.”
Yuri Slezkine, Mercurian par excellence, has caught an extraordinary set of lives in this book. Few historians, dead or alive, have managed to combine so spectacularly the gifts of storyteller and scholar.
*
Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994). ↩
Down and out in Bombay and London
Sworn to do killing
HISTORYDECEMBER 19, 2017
Yuri Slezkine
THE HOUSE OF GOVERNMENT
A saga of the Russian Revolution
1,104pp. Princeton University Press. £29.95
Subscribe now to the TLS and get the best writing on big books and big ideas from only £1.50 or $2.40 per week
Subscribe
The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow, being demolished, December 5, 1931 © ITAR-TASS Photo Agency/Alamy
The great error
STEPHEN LOVELL
What more fitting monument to a millenarian movement could there be than a thousand-page “saga”? Yuri Slezkine’s guiding argument in this remarkable, many-layered account of the men (rarely women) who shaped the October Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were not a party but an apocalyptic sect. In an extended essay on comparative religion that constitutes just one of his thirty-three chapters, he puts Russia’s victorious revolutionaries in a long line of millenarians extending back to the ancient Israelites; in their “totalitarian” demands on the individual believer, he suggests, the Bolsheviks are cut from the same cloth as the sixteenth-century Münster Anabaptists and the original “radical fundamentalist”, Jesus Christ.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEKLY TLS NEWSLETTER
Slezkine is by no means the first person to draw the analogy between the Bolsheviks and sectarians (Lenin himself is reported to have taken an interest in the Münster Anabaptists and Cromwell’s Puritans as he pondered Russia’s revolutionary potential in the early twentieth century), but no one before him has extracted such analytical mileage from it. This intellectual framework allows him to explain the Bolsheviks’ striving to bring self and society, individual and history, into perfect alignment; their relentless study and exegesis of their own version of scripture (Marx and Engels, later Lenin); their jealous guarding of their purity and integrity; and their embrace of violence, which was a welcome sign of the apocalyptic confrontation that would herald the “Real Day”. Like other sects, the Bolsheviks had an intense, even incestuous, small-group cohesion born of initial persecution: they bonded fiercely and permanently in the prisons, places of exile and underground discussion circles where they first encountered one another. Like other millenarians, many of them seemed to relish the heat of battle more than the fruits of victory. Combat and violence provided a more immediate purpose than the future utopia, the outlines of which remained hazy and contested. Here, Slezkine suggests, the Bolsheviks had something in common with their founding fathers: Marx and Engels were more eloquent and informative on the irreconcilable contradictions and coming crisis of capitalism than on the future shape of communism.
Feature stories, read aloud: Download the Audm app for your iPhone.
There were, however, some crucial differences between the Bolsheviks and all previous sectarians. The main one was the vast power they obtained at a relatively early stage of their collective existence, which brought with it an unusual degree of insecurity. As Slezkine puts it, they were the only apocalyptic sect that had ever taken over an “existing heathen empire”: they ruled over the population of the former Russian Empire, which was overwhelmingly ignorant of or unreceptive to their teachings. This required a proselytizing effort unparalleled in history; and when persuasion failed, coercion would have to follow, along with the isolation, exclusion and even extermination of the unconverted. Apocalypse – in the form of the destruction of the old regime and the ensuing civil war – occurred much sooner than even Lenin could have expected. When it failed to deliver paradise, and indeed forced all sorts of regrettable compromises with petit-bourgeois reality, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the prophecy had not been fulfilled.
Slezkine paints the 1920s, the era of the New Economic Policy, as the time of the Bolsheviks’ “Great Disappointment”. The first years after the civil war were haunted by apprehensions of contamination by the class enemy, emasculation and materialism. The quintessential bogey of NEP culture was a frivolously attired bourgeoise bearing chocolate. For a while the Bolsheviks could maintain their revolutionary elan by wearing leather jackets or military tunics and leading a peripatetic existence as they hopped from one party mission to the next. But sooner or later, almost all of them donned suits, acquired families (sometimes more than one), accumulated possessions, put down roots. They seem not to have been excessively troubled by the contrast between their own living conditions and the less luxurious dwellings and rations of the surrounding Muscovites, let alone the plight of the millions they drove into starvation during the collectivization campaign. But some rhetorical ingenuity was required. Summer jaunts to the Crimea, for example, were routinely justified as necessary to cure chronic ailments or nervous disorders.
Another important distinctive feature of the Bolsheviks as sectarians was that their large-scale attempt at a reformation took place in a post-Romantic age. This meant that the individual self required an exceptionally high degree of maintenance: even after they were converted and incorporated, Bolsheviks continued to ask themselves, and each other, a great many questions about the revolutionary’s conduct and motives. As they did so, the written word was their greatest friend. They wrote voluminously: The House of Government would be unthinkable without the corpus of letters and diaries that this group of people managed to leave behind, despite the depredations of the late 1930s. Above all, Slezkine’s subjects read incessantly. Besides Marx, the “Pamirs” of world literature got most of their attention: Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy, with honourable mentions for Heine, Romain Rolland and various others. For the Bolsheviks, scripture was not a single book but a whole library. No wonder that “father’s study” was the main fixed point in the nomenklatura apartment, and that the in-house carpenters were kept busy making shelves. The Bolsheviks’ aim, in the motto of Yakov Sverdlov, the future mastermind of the party apparatus, was to “put books to the test of life, and life to the test of books”. It seems that neither life nor books emerged unscathed from the encounter. In 1911, when Sverdlov wrote from pre-trial detention to his pregnant common-law wife, he earnestly used War and Peace as a guide to childbirth.
The intense bookishness of the upper echelons of Bolshevism permeates Slezkine’s work, which draws to great effect not only on first-person documents of the time but also on fictional distillations or sublimations of the revolutionary cause. The Bolsheviks’ acceptance, at times even relish, of apocalyptic violence was not suppressed or concealed by the literary fraternity: it was on display in civil war novels such as Alexander Serafimovich’s canonical The Iron Flood (Zheleznyi potok, 1924). Conversely, nowhere are the apprehensions and nightmares of the NEP period rawer than in the fiction of the 1920s. The tensions of the Bolshevik project are most poignantly expressed in works whose narrators and protagonists desperately want to believe, set out to chronicle the building of socialism, but remain, to quote the title of one Andrei Platonov story, “doubting Makars”. Whether they are novelists or diarists, Slezkine’s authors are often allowed to speak for themselves: sources are quoted at length, sometimes several paragraphs at a time. Bolshevism, he implies, was a text as well as a political project.
The House of Government is both an inquiry into the historical sociology of religion and an exercise in literary-cultural excavation and recreation. But it is also, as the title suggests, a fine-grained history of a very particular place: the enormous residential complex for the Bolshevik elite that went up on the south bank of the Moscow River, almost opposite the Kremlin, during the first five-year plan (1928–32). The House of Government contained more than 500 spacious apartments as well as extensive leisure and service facilities. The dimensions were generous and the specification high: 11-foot ceilings, granite panelling, marble steps, ceramic tiles. Slezkine has conducted prodigious research into the building and its inhabitants, drawing on the relevant institutional repositories but also soliciting documents from family archives and conducting a series of interviews in the late 1990s with surviving descendants of the Old Bolsheviks. This material would sustain a very fine book on its own.
The House was not just a perk of office but a powerful statement. It stood on an island formed by the Moscow River on one side and the Vodootvodnyi (drainage) canal on the other. Its very location made tangible the struggle with the “old” world. Before the Revolution, this was known as a swampy district, and “swamp” was a convenient metaphor for the old social order that would be swept away by the “flood” of revolution. The completion of this nomenklatura citadel would serve as a high-profile demonstration of the triumph of socialist construction. Here was a monument to Soviet permanence – and the best spot in town to watch the symbolic obliteration of the old world through the detonation of the Christ the Saviour cathedral in December 1931.
But in fact the House of Government was an equivocal place from the moment its plans were approved. In architectural terms, it was not an unambiguous statement of the newness of the new world but rather a blend of constructivism and neoclassicism. It took inspiration from bourgeois New York apartment living rather than anything particularly socialist. The House was fortunate in that “infantile leftism” went into remission halfway through its construction, which meant it could be hailed as a model building rather than a betrayal of utopian ambitions. There had always been muttering about the inordinate cost, which outran the original estimate by a factor of ten. Ultimately, however, money for the project was no object, as the government was always able to grant itself credits to build its own home. The more enduring problem was that the House did not constitute the symbolic break with the past that its initiators had intended. By 1934, Lazar Kaganovich declared that it could not after all serve as a model for the future, because “its composition is a bit too heavy”. Nor did the building’s internal design have obvious revolutionary credentials. Far from challenging the ancient institution of the family, the House entrenched it at the heart of the Soviet elite. Worse still, the families in question were far from neat and cellular: the typical Old Bolshevik household was complex and three-generational, as party potentates gathered their extended families and other dependants around them. There was little in the way of collective life beyond the unit of the single-apartment clan. By the standards of many Western apartment blocks, the House was distinctly lacking in communal spirit and routine socializing. A Bolshevik’s apartment, it turned out, was his castle.
Admittedly, the Bolshevik men were usually out at work or roving the country in search of construction projects or enemies of the people. The permanent element was the women and (especially) the children. Slezkine provides a rich ethnography of Soviet elite life in the 1930s, showing just how fulfilled the “happy Soviet childhood” was in this milieu. Like their fathers and mothers before them, the offspring of the nomenklatura read voraciously, formed close intellectual friendships and had a blissful sense of purpose in life. Unlike their parents, they did not even have to go to prison or sit through Siberian exile to enjoy these blessings. As usual, the consummation of life came in writing. Slezkine spends almost thirty pages on the extraordinary teenager Lyova (Lev) Fedotov, artist, musician, collector and above all chronicler. In a thoroughly Tolstoyan attempt to fuse living and writing, Lyova went so far as to produce a hundred-page diary entry on a single day. Slezkine sums up his endeavour in a characteristically striking metaphor: “He wrote as he read, and he read as he wrote, and he lived through what he read and wrote in an ever-tightening dog-chase-tail race for the fullness of time and limitless self-awareness”.
Before long, of course, some of the Bolshevik children did in fact experience prison and exile as their parents were arrested and disgraced. After an ethnographic lull in its treatment of the House of Government routine in the 1930s, the book builds to an inevitable climax in the Great Terror. As Slezkine tells it, the phone call with news of Sergei Kirov’s murder in December 1934 “changed everything”: without this event, which triggered an ever-widening search for the culprits and an avalanche of accusations and denunciations, the Bolshevik elite might have stabilized itself. Here the theorist in Slezkine takes a back seat to the storyteller: unexpected phone calls are a wonderful plot device, but the book has already shown that the bloodletting of the 1930s was far from surprising given the Bolsheviks’ longstanding fear of infiltration and stigmatization of dissent, however deeply buried. The reader may have been beguiled into the pastoral mode by Slezkine’s account of the domesticity, dachas and rest homes of the House residents in the early 1930s, but this apparently timeless “normality” was in fact nothing of the sort. If we follow the logic of Slezkine’s “sectarian” analysis, what followed was perhaps the least unexpected witch-hunt in history.
Whatever view one takes of historical causation, the bookish and self-reflective Bolsheviks took this ancient scapegoating ritual to new depths. Even the victims were eager to recognize that enemies were everywhere. Slezkine cites at length Nikolai Bukharin’s self-scrutiny in the months preceding his show trial, an agonizing process that culminated in his final letter to Stalin accepting the need for a “general purge”. Still more affecting, if less well-known, are the letters the former oppositionist Tanya Myagkova wrote to her husband, mother and daughter from various sites of isolation, exile and forced labour. Myagkova kept up a brave face and strenuously expressed her loyalty to Soviet ideals, evidently balancing the requirements of her three different audiences: her family members, her NKVD censors and, above all, her own inner self.
The blurb to the book compares it with War and Peace, and there are some Tolstoyan touches even at the level of style and composition: memorable aphorisms, short paragraphs, interweaving of plotlines, a rhetoric of juxtaposition. By the time we reach the Terror, however, Anna Karenina is starting to seem the better analogy: the Bolsheviks, disappointed in their revolutionary romance and catatonic after rejection by their beloved party, queue up to throw themselves under the locomotive of History. Or, to switch back to the language of apocalyptic sectarianism, this seems to be a straightforward case of mass self-immolation. For Moscow read Waco, Texas.
But life did go on, for the sacrificed sectarians’ wives and offspring as well as for their more fortunate comrades. Some of Slezkine’s most moving pages concern the ways in which the children of the repressed made sense of events. Only one boy in his sample has what we might regard as the “natural” reaction: to rage at the Terror and denounce the Soviet government (including Stalin). A couple of others throw in their lot with the killers of the Old Bolsheviks and become informers and NKVD agents. But a surprising number continued much as before, reading and writing, forming intense friendships, and remaining attached to their notions of happiness and fulfilment. Childhood was not necessarily unhappy even in orphanages, where the sons and daughters of the enemies of the people sometimes encountered humane and understanding treatment. For those Bolshevik children who were unsettled or tormented by their parents’ disgrace, there was soon an opportunity to achieve redemption and to emulate the exploits of the revolutionary generation. The Great Patriotic War of 1941–5 yielded nothing to the civil war in apocalyptic horror and exceeded it in the opportunities it afforded for righteous fury and self-sacrifice. Here, or so it appeared, were the deferred End Times that the interwar Old Bolsheviks had craved.
Slezkine’s family perspective means that War and Peace is after all a better fit for his narrative than Anna Karenina or the Book of Revelation. The Great Terror was not the moral and narrative dead end that it might seem: the fathers lived on in their children. But something important got lost in intergenerational transmission. As Slezkine points out, it is hard to imagine a less Marxist-Leninist work than War and Peace. Yet Tolstoy’s epic, along with much else in world literature, was what the second-generation Bolsheviks imbibed; Marx and Engels were not authors they read by choice. As the hold of scripture weakened, so did the spirit: the Bolsheviks’ sectarian intensity could not be maintained beyond a single generation. The Soviet Union, like any other theocracy that enjoys longevity, became a “priesthood”. But, in Slezkine’s analysis, even that priesthood could not maintain itself beyond a single human lifespan (1917–91), largely because it neglected matters of family life and morality to which traditional religions tended to devote minute attention. It turned out that the Bolsheviks were “not totalitarian enough”: agitation had stopped at the door to the single-family apartment.
Slezkine, accordingly, pronounces the revolution a failure, in the sense that the Bolshevik priesthood did not preserve itself for as long as the Catholic Church. That sets the bar rather high for a small group of people taking over a vast state in a century of decolonization and heightened geopolitical peril, and it perhaps underestimates the impact of the Bolsheviks’ missionaries in the non-European world. It also neglects the possibility that Bolshevism merely adapted itself to the fact that its Armageddon turned out to be not the civil war, devastating and atrocious though that conflict was, but the Great Patriotic War. It was not that Bolshevism reached a dead end but that it was re-routed to the cause of imperial nationalism. As Slezkine describes, by the end of the Great Terror, and in fact sometime before, political language had become almost empty of referential meaning; it was impossible in empirical terms to draw the line between backsliding and “excesses” of zeal or to know in advance what “Lenin would say”. But language cannot remain meaningless forever, and geopolitics and Nazism provided a potent reality check.
It is unavoidable that Slezkine’s account of the later Soviet period should seem rather telescoped, given the microscopic character of his account of the 1930s. But this is a book at least partly inspired by the centenary of October, and Slezkine needs his narrative arc. The House of Government is a compelling microhistory of the interwar Soviet elite, but it is also a literary-rhetorical tour de force. In this it feeds off the proclivities of its subjects. It almost goes without saying that Bolshevik politics was full of turf wars, vendettas, self-interest, cowardice and patron–client relationships; motivations were often baser and more pragmatic than anything in the Marxist-Leninist playbook, and sometimes more humane. But the Bolsheviks were also master rhetoricians, creating a unique brand of syllogistic storytelling that showed why the arrival of communism was not only desirable but impeccably logical. This did not make them con men: the first people they set about persuading of the nobility and inexorability of their cause, despite all evidence to the contrary, were themselves. When they were sharing huts in exile in Siberia, they still understood that rhetoric and reality were some way apart. But when the brotherhood turned into a ruling class, language became detached from empirical referent, rhetoric became reality, and words became deeds. Yuri Slezkine has provided a powerful history of a building that was also a deadly echo chamber.
The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine
HILLEL HALKIN / DEC. 1, 2005
5
shares
A
The Jewish Century
by Yuri Slezkine
Princeton. 344 pp. $29.95
The Equation of Jewishness with the quintessence of modernity, the central thesis of Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, is hardly new. Neither, however, is it as old as modernity itself. If one goes back to the time of the Enlightenment and the beginnings of the industrial revolution, one finds the Jews widely regarded, by their own Europeanized intellectuals no less than by Christian society, as the epitome of backwardness. Self-imposed isolation, religious primitivism, economic and social stagnation, intellectual obscurantism—these were the attributes attached to them. A small number of them, like the Rothschilds or the Oppenheimers, had become or were becoming cosmopolitan entrepreneurs and bankers involved in changing the face of Europe. But these were assumed to be either mere throwbacks to the medieval Jewish moneylender or anomalies, atypical of the Jewish world beyond whose confines their success had propelled them.
One of the first European intellectuals to propose otherwise was the perfunctorily baptized German-Jewish poet and essayist Heinrich Heine. In an essay written after viewing a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in London in 1838, Heine remarked:
All Europe is catching up with the Jews. I say catching up because from the outset the Jews embodied the principle of modernity [das moderne Prinzip] that is now visibly unfolding among the peoples of Europe.
Heine continued, explaining himself:
The Greeks and Romans championed the soil, the Fatherland. Subsequently, Greco-Romanized northern Europe championed the person of the chieftain, replacing the patriotism of antiquity with the vassalage and fidelity to princes of the Middle Ages. The Jews, however, championed only the law and abstract thought, as do the cosmopolitan republicans of our own age, who esteem above all neither homeland nor ruler, but law alone.
Heine’s point was that in modern, capitalist Europe the individual’s connection to his fellow was being defined less and less by determinants of blood and birth like tribe, polis, family, clan, guild, and social caste, and more and more by universally recognized rights and obligations that regulated all of human life. The single bureaucratic state was now the theater of operations for everyone, and everyone was an autonomous player on a vast field of interlocking relationships—economic relationships, above all—where performance was increasingly a function of private abilities, talents, and proclivities.
And because (Heine thought) the original model for a society in which a commitment to law replaced personal loyalties was the Torah and its rabbinic exposition, by whose precepts Jews had always lived, the Jew was the modern, capitalist man par excellence. The rise of families like the Oppenheimers or the Rothschilds from small-time merchants and moneylenders to international economic powers was, far from being an anomaly, an essential expression of their Jewishness. All that had changed was that the same Europe that once, in medieval times, had excluded the Jewish “shylock” as a pariah was itself now being “Judaized,” so that Shylock could compete on equal terms. The Oppenheimers and Rothschilds were only the first; many more like them were sure to follow.
_____________
Heine was not alone in his day in associating the Jews with the transformation of values that had turned the pre-modern world into the modern one—a transformation that would be systematically described decades later in the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies’s classic Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Moses Hess, the Jewish socialist and subsequent early Zionist, expressed similar thoughts, as did Karl Marx, who in place of law substituted money as the ultimate abstraction that the Jew was devoted to. Marx’s The Jewish Question (1843), declaring that “Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist” and that the “god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world,” was to become a seminal text for the anti-Semitic European Left.
On the whole, however, late-19th- and 20th-century Jewish historiography, though it did not slight the economic and social role of the Jews in modern times, failed to follow up on Heine’s aperçu. (The one important exception was the German economist Werner Sombart’s The Jews and Modern Capitalism, published in 1911 and later put to anti-Semitic purposes by the Nazis.) Perhaps this was because, as the writing of Jewish history became a more academic discipline, it also became a more cautious one. Moreover, it was a discipline largely in the hands of Jewish scholars, educated and rooted in Jewish society, whose work had both an insider’s perspective and an apologetic bias.
In this perspective, Jewish life, when seen from close up, was intricate, multifaceted, and riddled with internal conflicts and contradictions, and thus hardly amenable to sweeping generalizations like Heine’s. Why make, or even discuss, grandiose claims for it that would only provide more grist for the mills of the anti-Semites, who already blamed the Jews for all the ills of capitalism and modernity alike?
_____________
As the author of a book that begins by paraphrasing Heine with the declaration that “Modernization is about everyone becoming Jewish,” Yuri Slezkine, who teaches history at the University of California, is therefore, one might say, the right historian at the right time. Russian born and educated, he comes to his subject, despite the Jewish grandmother that he tells us about, very much as an outsider, having had neither a Jewish upbringing nor training in Jewish history. And writing about 19th- and 20th-century Jewry at the start of the 21st century, he has returned to Heine’s proposition in an era in which it is no longer a handy weapon for anti-Semites, at least of the “progressive” variety.
Not that anti-Semitism, alas, has ceased to exist. But the anti-Semitism of our global village has largely reverted to the period when the modern age began: it blames the Jews, and especially the state established by them, for being backward and tribalistic as the rest of humanity enters the age of universal man. Gemeinschaft, the comfortingly coherent community of the pre-modern past whose disappearance it was once fashionable to mourn, is today intellectually out; Gesellschaft, the fluid, open society of the post-modern present, is in. To make the case, as Slezkine does, for the Jews having been the supreme engineers of Gesellschaft is thus to pay them the highest compliment.
Slezkine does not use Tonnies’s terminology, just as he does not mention Heine’s Merchant of Venice essay. Nor, coming 150 years afterward, is he looking at quite the same things. Indeed, in equating the Jews with das moderne Prinzip he faces a paradox different from the one faced by Heine. The latter had to ask himself the question: how is it that the same Jews who are everywhere still mired in backwardness are also at the cutting edge of a new capitalist class that is forging the future of Europe? Slezkine, whose area of expertise is Russian history, asks a different question: how is it that the same Jews who were everywhere so prominent in the development and advance of modern capitalism became also so prominent in the great anti-capitalist movements of the times, and specifically of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet society it constructed? How explain that, judging by every statistical means of measurement at our disposal, the Jews, more than any other people, were the outstanding success stories of two such opposite processes?
_____________
Much of The Jewish Century consists of marshaling those statistics, which, though composing a picture that has been sketched many times, are impressive when presented in bulk. Take pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, for instance. On a single page (and there are many others like it), Slezkine informs us that, as recorded in different years of the late-19th and early-20th century, Jews in Odessa accounted for 57 percent of the city’s factory production and 90 percent of its grain exports, and controlled most of its banks; that in Ukraine they owned one-third of all sugar mills; that in Kiev (in which the average Jew was not even allowed to reside), they composed 36.8 percent of all corporate managers; and that in St. Petersburg, where they made up a mere 2 percent of the population, they were 43 percent of all stock brokers and 37 percent of all business owners. And this, in a period when the overall Jewish situation in the Russian empire was so dire and seemingly so hopeless that 2 million Jews, most of them impoverished, were emigrating westward, largely to America.
Comes the 1917 revolution: did Jews, who comprised, as Slezkine documents, a remarkably high proportion of the Bolshevik leadership in its early years (45 percent of the Bolshevik Central Committee, 31 percent of Bolshevik delegates to the First All-Russian Congress, 40 percent of elected officials in the Red Army, 41.7 percent of the governing bureau of the Petrograd Soviet, etc.), lose out now that their capitalist skills were no longer in demand? Not at all. Not only were they, in 1935, 38.5 percent of the “leading cadres” of the Soviet secret police, but in 1939, when they made up only 1.8 percent of the Soviet population, they were 17.1 percent of all university students in Moscow, 19 percent in Leningrad, 24.6 percent in Kharkov, and 35.6 percent in Kiev. In Leningrad, they were 69.4 percent of all dentists; 58.6 percent of all pharmacists; 45 percent of all defense lawyers; 38.6 percent of all doctors; 31.3 percent of all writers, journalists, and editors; and 24.6 percent of all musicians. They were 19.6 percent of all physicians in the entire Soviet Union and 14.1 percent of all researchers and university professors.
Indeed, until the Holocaust and the semi-official anti-Semitism that set in soon after World War II, the Jews of the socialist Soviet Union, Slezkine shows, were achievers every bit as spectacular as the Jews of the capitalist United States. Simply putting this down to inbred Jewish intelligence would be at best a partial explanation; although three times as many Jews as Russians had a Soviet high-school education in 1939, Jews were certainly not (if one may be allowed a statistical joke) three times as smart. Some other way of accounting for it must be looked for.
_____________
Slezkine’s way of doing this is to invent a terminology of his own that he then uses to link the Jews, anthropologically, with a wide range of other minorities: Indian traders in East Africa, Chinese businessmen in Indonesia, Gypsies, Irish tinkers, and even exotic groups like the Humli-Khyampa of Nepal and the Inadan of the Sahara. Resorting to ancient Greek mythology and religion, Slezkine describes all of these as “Mercurians” vis-à-vis an “Apollonian” majority in whose midst they dwelled.
Being “service nomads,” he writes, these Mercurians were
nonprimary producers specializing in the delivery of goods and services to the surrounding agricultural or pastoral populations. Their principal resource base was human, not natural. . . . They were the descendants—or predecessors—of Hermes (Mercury), the god of all those who did not herd animals, till the soil, or live by the sword; the patron of rule breakers, border crossers, and go-betweens; the protector of people who lived by their wit, art, and craft. . . . What all of Hermes’ followers had in common was their mercuriality, or impermanence. In the case of nations, it meant that they were all transients and wanderers—from fully nomadic Gypsy groups, to mostly commercial communities divided into fixed brokers and traveling agents, to permanently settled populations who thought of themselves as exiles.
Hermes, writes Slezkine, “had nothing except his wit.” His “big brother” Apollo, by contrast,
possessed most things in the universe because he was the god of both livestock and agriculture. As the patron of food production, Apollo owned much of the land . . . protected sailors and warriors, and inspired true poets. He was both manly and eternally young, athletic and artistic, prophetic and dignified—the most universal of all gods and the most commonly worshiped. . . . The difference between Apollonians and Mercurians is the all-important difference between those who grow food and those who create concepts and artifacts. The Mercurians are always sober but never dignified.
In the pre-modern past, the “sober but never dignified” Jewish merchant, artisan, shopkeeper, and moneylender had made his living from the “manly” Russian, Polish, or German peasantry and ruling nobility; the two, Jews and Christians, lived side by side, joined, as “Mercurians” and “Apollonians” always are, by mutual need and mutual disdain. And as always, too, despite the Mercurian’s mental advantages, it was the Apollonian who, being physically stronger and more numerous, “had the upper hand”—until, that is, modern times came along and “things began to change.”
This, writes Slezkine, was because modernity was about
everyone becoming a service nomad: mobile, clever, articulate, occupationally flexible, and good at being a stranger. . . . Some Apollonian groups would prove willing and able to convert to Mercurianism; others would balk, fail, or rebel. No one would remain immune, however, and no one was better at being a scriptural [i.e., educated and literate] Mercurian—and therefore “modern”—than [the original] scriptural Mercurians, old and new.
We are in a sense, then, back to Heine. The modern European Jew, Slezkine maintains, possessed not only native intelligence but a set of attitudes that, while they had helped him to survive in the medieval period, too, were of limited power in a Christian world that had exploited but not honored them and that lived by different values of its own. What modernity did was to turn “Jewish” values into general ones—not because Jews imposed their values on Christians, but because, under capitalism and socialism alike, old hierarchies collapsed, giving the advantage to whoever, like the Jews, was by habit quick and changeable enough to spot and seize new opportunities. Although modernization was about “everyone becoming Jewish,” it would have taken place even had the Jews never existed. The fact that they did exist, however, gave them a running head start.
_____________
The Jewish Century revives, with intellectual sophistication and stylistic verve, an old perception of the Jew’s centrality to modernity. Yet we did not need Yuri Slezkine to tell us that the Jews, when they have not been persecuted and murdered, have done extremely well in modern times under highly varied conditions, and that this must have something to do with their pre-modern mode of life. Why, then, has The Jewish Century been showered by reviewers, even those critical of aspects of it, with accolades like “daring,” “original,” “audacious,” “provocative and brilliant,” and “a bracing breath of fresh air”?
The answer, it would seem, lies in the conceptual apparatus surrounding Slezkine’s “Mercurian/ Apollonian” distinction. In his long opening chapter, “Mercury’s Sandals,” which is the book’s most interesting, he indeed does a masterful job of integrating a wealth of information, culled from dozens of studies ranging as far afield as “Peddling in East Afghanistan” and “The Function of Peripatetics in Rwala Bedouin Society,” in order to show how much Jews have had in common with other “Mercurians” or “service nomads” all over the world.
Of course, comparing Jewish commercial functions in pre-modern Europe with those of Chinese inhabitants of southeast Asia or of Indian settlers in Africa is also old-hat. Yet what Slezkine argues is that the traits shared by Jews with other “service nomads” extend well beyond the occupation of similar economic niches. They also include such things as distinctive religious beliefs; a sense of diaspora or exile; institutionalized feelings of superiority; endogamous marriage; social clannishness; dietary taboos and other ritual means of keeping apart from one’s “Apollonian” hosts; “secret” languages, often created, as in the case of Yiddish, by introducing incomprehensible foreign vocabulary into the local, “Apollonian” tongue; high literacy rates (a necessary requirement for conducting commerce and keeping books); and “corporate kinship” arrangements, whereby family businesses expand by taking in relatives rather than employing strangers. Seen in this light, Jewish “exceptionalism” was not very exceptional.
This raises an interesting hypothetical question. Obviously, modern European and American Jews would not have accomplished all they did, not only in commerce and the professions, but in the arts, sciences, entertainment industries, and other areas, had not Western civilization already attained high levels in these fields before the Jews entered them. Does this mean that any other developed “Mercurian” population—the overseas Chinese, for instance—would have done just as well had they had the good fortune to be, not in southeast Asia when the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution took place, but in Europe and America? Might they also then have ended up incinerated in a Holocaust, the victims of the jealousy and hatred of de-Apollonianized Apollonians? Would some of them have sought (as Slezkine describes the Zionist movement as having done) defensively to “Apollonianize” themselves, at the very moment that Europe was becoming “Mercurianized,” by creating a Chinese Zionism? Would Yuri Slezkine then have written a book called The Chinese Century?
Although hypotheticals like this cannot really be answered, many historians, and certainly many Jews, would instinctively react to such questions by saying: “No—despite everything, the Jews have been different.” But the clear implication of Slezkine’s analysis is “Yes.” Nothing that he says about the “Mercurianism” of the Jews gives us any reason to suppose that, substituted for them, another group of “service nomads” would not have had the same fate. In the end, if there is no need to be a Jew in order to be “Jewish,” being a Jew cannot mean very much.
This is the problem with Slezkine’s categories. “Apollonianism” and “Mercurianism” may explain many things, but when used as all-purpose historical tools they turn out, like all tools when applied to tasks for which they are not precisely fitted, a very roughly finished product. There is an old journalist’s quip that, in order to write a good book about a foreign country, one has to spend either less than two weeks in it or more than ten years—that is, to have either an outsider’s fresh but superficial impressions or an insider’s detailed knowledge, since anything in between is merely confusing. The Jewish Century is, on its own terms, a successfully provocative work, but only because Yuri Slezkine’s visit to Jewish history has been a brief one. Had he stayed any longer, he would have rightly begun to feel confused himself.
Curtain GradientTabletTablet
BOOK REVIEWS
Yuri Slezkine’s Brilliant New ‘The House of Government’ Tells the Story of a Religion That Pretended to Be a Political Theory
Early Soviet elites living—and dying—in thrall to a totalitarian ideal
By David Mikics
Tablet
Book Reviews
YURI SLEZKINE’S BRILLIANT NEW ‘THE HOUSE OF GOVERNMENT’ TELLS THE STORY OF A RELIGION THAT PRETENDED TO BE A POLITICAL THEORY
Early Soviet elites living—and dying—in thrall to a totalitarian ideal
By David Mikics
January 17, 2018 • 12:00 AM
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Google Plus
Soviet Communism was a faith masquerading as political theory. Whereas the Nazis lashed out at external enemies, most of all the Jews, the Bolsheviks attacked the enemy within, the self that refused to adhere completely to the godlike thinking of Lenin or Stalin. In December 1934, former leading Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev was arrested for conspiring to kill Leningrad party boss Sergey Kirov, who had been murdered, without Zinoviev’s help, earlier that month. At his trial Zinoviev diagnosed himself and his fellow defendants:
The problem is that … we were unable to submit to the Party, merge with it completely, become imbued with the same feelings of absolute acceptance toward Stalin that the party and the whole country have become imbued with, but instead continued to look backward and to live our separate, stifling lives.
Yuri Slezkine quotes Zinoviev’s speech to his judges at the first Moscow Show trial in his magisterial new book The House of Government. Zinoviev knew, Slezkine says, that the trial “was about the soul, not politics.” His actual crime, as his words show, was failure to annihilate the bourgeois construct of independent selfhood and allow Stalin’s will to become his own. Try as he might, Zinoviev could not love Big Brother absolutely. Because of this sin, he was a dead man. Zinoviev was executed in August 1936, condemned by his own words, as Stalin wanted it.
Slezkine has given us a darkly enthralling thousand-page history of the House of Government, usually called the House on the Embankment. Built in 1931, the block-wide House across the Moskva River from the Kremlin had 505 apartments and was the largest residential building in the world. In it lived about 700 Soviet state and party officials and their families. The building had a theater, music hall, health clinic, hair salon, grocery store, and repair shop. In addition to tennis and chess, Slezkine reports, the House’s club offered lessons in “fencing, painting, skating, skiing, singing, sewing, boxing, theater, volleyball, basketball, photography, stenography, target shooting, radio-building, and various foreign languages.” In nearby Gorky Park, there were carousels, bumper cars, daily circuses, and concerts given by 10 different orchestras a day. In the House of Government, the head of the Gulag, Matvei Berman, rubbed shoulders with Lenin’s embalmer, Stalin’s relatives, Nikita Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Party’s Moscow branch, and the author Yuri Trifonov, who later wrote a poignant novel titled The House on the Embankment.
The residents of the House of Government lived well: they employed maids and governesses. Many had country dachas. But their isolation from their country’s agonies did not last. During and after the Great Terror of the 1930s, 800 of the House’s residents were evicted, found guilty of crimes against the revolution, and then imprisoned or shot.
“The House of Government was where the revolution came to die,” Slezkine remarked at a lecture he gave last month in New York. Before that, though, the House was a residence for true believers, Communists who thought—no, knew—that Lenin had ushered in a new heaven and new earth. Slezkine calls Bolshevism a Millenarian sect, like the Millerites of upstate New York or the original Jesus cult. Such movements expect an imminent apocalypse, and when that doesn’t happen, they either recalibrate or die off. Paradise on Earth didn’t materialize in Russia, and the result was a large number of nervous breakdowns.
The death of Lenin, Slezkine said in his lecture, resulted in the Bolsheviks “smoking cigarettes, having lots of sex, arguing about historical necessity—and weeping.” This led to a question: “Was there a neuroticism that was not bourgeois?” Yet despite these neurotic episodes, the Soviet elite proved adaptable to the point of self-deceit. If the USSR was no utopia, its great strides forward were nevertheless the wonder of the world. Before long the capitalist countries would collapse under their own weight, and then, after the bloody revenge of the workers on their bosses, the world of iron necessity would become a kingdom of eternal love. Stalin’s purges interrupted the reverie but failed to shatter it.
Slezkine presents a varied gallery of characters from the House. Some of them seem created by Chekhov, others by Dostoevsky, but they’re all real: The book’s epigraph is “This is a work of history. Any resemblance to fictional characters, dead or alive, is purely coincidental.” He shows us Arosev and Molotov, both fearsome top Bolsheviks, enjoying their horseplay at Molotov’s dacha, splashing in the water like little boys. He tells the story of Comintern member Karl Radek, who bared his chest at the 1934 Writers’ Conference and gave what a visiting German writer described as “a Dostoevsky speech, an act of ecstatic confession and self-flagellation. ‘We must look more deeply into our hearts and scatter the eggshells of our self-deception’ he cried. … I found him terrifying, with his gleaming eyes and the little, ugly fringe of beard on his chin.” Radek’s daughter Sofia, a friend said, “was a glamorous girl. She had all kinds of admirers, mostly pilots. Sometimes they got drunk and threw up in the bathrooms.”
In a few of Slezkine’s cases, the self-delusion is heartbreaking. In January 1933 Tania Miagkova-Poloz was arrested as a “counterrevolutionary Trotskyite” and sent to a “political isolator” (prison) in the Urals. “It is so good to be a citizen of the USSR, even if you are temporarily confined to an isolator,” she wrote to her mother. After the crash of the airplane Maxim Gorky, she added, “The common experience of joy and grief in our USSR is extremely precious.” Her letters reflect what Slezkine calls “the recently introduced main themes of Soviet public life: the love of life, the richness of everyday experience, the joy of being a witness to history.” When her husband was charged with being a Ukrainian nationalist and sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp, she pleaded to join him but was turned down. Transferred to another labor camp, Kolyma, she wrote to her young daughter, “My life is not very easy these days, my little one, because I am so far away from you and all alone.” Miagkova-Poloz never saw her family again. She was executed in November 1937, about two weeks after her husband.
For the Marxists, Slezkine writes, freedom was “the coincidence of the human will with the will of God”—if for the word God you substitute history, whose arc must naturally bend toward justice. The voice of history was the Party, which was embodied in the person of its leader, who gave the correct line. In this way, history offered a release from the agony of the Russian, especially Jewish, intellectual, who had a habit of “asking ‘the accursed questions’ over lunch and dinner; falling deeper and deeper into doubt and confusion as a matter of principle.” Lenin provided the answers just as Christian theology had done, by insisting that correct thinking removes all doubt.
But Bolshevism also needed visible results. The goal was “to produce harmonious men and women who love what they cannot escape.” “Communism was about conquering the kingdom of necessity by submitting to it,” Slezkine writes, by showing self-discipline with even the most minor tasks. Yet what the Soviet Union eventually turned into was a place where, as the Brezhnev-era joke went, you pretended to work and they pretended to pay you. The spiritual fervor had died out.
In contrast to most sects, Bolshevism didn’t much care about its followers’ private lives. This, Slezkine argues, was because Marxism had “a remarkably flat conception of human nature.” The Bolsheviks had nothing to say about how to have sex or raise children as a Communist. Unlike other Millenarians, they did not try for a complete remaking of the human being. A worldwide overturning of property relations, the Marxists thought, would rapidly lead to a revolution in everything. Cooperation would blossom, work and freedom become one.
The Bolsheviks also preserved traditional Russian culture. Their educational system focused on Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy rather than Marxist texts. As Slezkine remarks, these were anti-Bolshevik books: consider War and Peace with its attack on grand schemes and sweeping historical judgments.
The result of these inconsistencies was that Soviet Communism failed to last even one human lifetime. The first elite generation pored over Marx’s Capital. Their children instead focused nostalgically on the country dachas where they enjoyed nature, the trips to Gorky Park, and the living rooms where the whole family dived into the “treasures of world literature,” from Goethe and Heine to Mark Twain.
What doomed the Soviet idea, Slezkine argues, was not Stalinist paranoia, but the split between the cult of revolution and the bourgeois domestic comfort that families enjoyed in a place like the House of Government. The will of the party could not take over private existence (“our separate, stifling lives,” as Zinoviev put it). And so the parents failed to pass on their own revolutionary zeal to a new generation. The children did not devote themselves like their parents to following the correct Leninist line. They cared not about Marx and Engels but about Jules Verne, Tolstoy, and Dickens, whose books were a crucial part of the culture of home, the “happy Soviet childhood” that so many of them clung to as the Communist system began to seem less and less ideal.
***
Jewish matters bring out Slezkine’s wicked sense of humor, here as in The Jewish Century (2004), his sweeping, scholarly masterpiece. The Hebrew God, Slezkine notices in The House of Government, resembles Dostoevsky’s underground man, constantly boasting about his superiority. As for Lenin, he was the Bolshevik Moses, “a true prophet who could both lead his people through the parting waves and attend, one way or another, to their every petulant complaint.”
The Jewish Century is full of bravura set pieces on everything from the Jewish nose to Joyce’s Ulysses, Einstein, and Freud. The book’s plotline is that modernist universalism really means nationalism, with every nation a suffering chosen people in its own eyes. In the 20th century, the most cosmopolitan one ever, no one was allowed to be a cosmopolitan. The “mercurial” Jews, as Slezkine calls them, those ambitious orphans who threw away tradition and liked to skate between foreign cultures, wound up either choosing a nation to belong to or, in the shape of Zionism, inventing one.
Russianness was supremely important to secular Russian Jews, those lovers of Pushkin par excellence. But it was easier for Philip Roth’s Swede Lvov to become a bucolic American squire in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, than for Russian Jews to become truly Russian. When the Great Patriotic War came, Soviet mythology recentered itself around Russianness, and the Jews who formed so much of Bolshevism’s inner circles and its artistic elite began to look like strangers, not “real” Russians.
At his trial in 1938, Nikolai Bukharin, one of the original Bolsheviks, lamented that “no one believes human emotions anymore: feelings, passions, tears.” He was greeted by scornful laughter, but his accusers knew just what he meant. The Bolshevik revolution was forged by intense emotion: Its marriage of passionate impatience and ruthless logic stirred the depths of the spirit.
“These were not monsters,” Slezkine said after his lecture about the (mostly male) Bolshevik leaders. “They were in love, with particular women, and with the revolution.” The men and women from the House of Government kept the faith when they were signing off on the executions, as they did later on when they were being executed. As a result, the Soviet Union never reached the apex of totalitarianism predicted in Orwell’s 1984, where the party exercises power for power’s sake rather than for an ideal. Communism remained a religion, though a faded one. Lenin and Stalin were still revered, the divine men who had known what history meant. But the people died in the wilderness.
***
Read David Mikics’s Tablet reviews of political and historical nonfiction here.
Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/21eccc8e-7d35-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c
FT Books Essay Books Add to myFT
True believers: inside Moscow’s House of Government
A study of the building that housed the Bolshevik elite traces a journey from idealism to exhaustion
The House of Government under construction in 1931
Share on Twitter (opens new window)
Share on Facebook (opens new window)
Share on LinkedIn (opens new window)
Save
Save to myFT
David Priestland AUGUST 11, 2017 7
A hundred years after the October Revolution, Lenin’s Mausoleum still stands near the centre of power in Moscow, and a majority of Russians want it to remain there — even if most think his embalmed body should be removed and buried. Much less discussed and yet perhaps more revealing is another building just across the river, a vast residential edifice completed a few years later in 1931 and now home to a small museum. Here in the “House of Government”, amid faded photographs and dated furniture, visitors can see where the Bolshevik elite slept, played and read.
This “dormitory” for revolutionaries is the subject of Yuri Slezkine’s brilliant and suitably monumental book. It is, as he says, one part “family saga”, one part analysis of the Bolshevik experiment, and one part exploration of the thought-world of the early communists, all brought to life through their letters, diaries, drawings and, especially, the books they read. Following the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia — into which Slezkine was himself born — most were “binge-readers” and viewed their own lives through the prism of the European classics, from Tolstoy to Dickens, Goethe and Flaubert. And Slezkine, now a professor of history at Berkeley, also frequently sees their world through a literary lens. Among those writers who figure prominently in his work are Andrei Platonov, the ambivalent chronicler of Bolshevik idealism; Isaac Babel, the flint-eyed observer of civil-war brutality; and Yuri Trifonov, the House of Government’s own biographer, who spent his childhood there and memorialised it in his celebrated 1978 novel The House on the Embankment.
Vivid, engaging and omnivorous in its deployment of anthropological and sociological ideas, The House of Government has a Tolstoyan cast of characters. In 1932 the House housed 2,745 registered tenants, though many more passed through, especially during the purges and Terror of the 1930s. The building itself made a huge impression on its inhabitants: the child Trifonov saw it as “an entire city or even an entire country”. Planted upon a reclaimed swamp, it combined neoclassical and constructivist styles, comprising 507 apartments, together with a bank, theatre, library, shooting gallery and cinema.
Its residents were largely male pre-1917 “Old Bolsheviks”, together with their wives, children, maids and relatives. They were by no means a homogenous group, ranging from the erudite literary theorist Aleksandr Voronsky to the rather more populist boss of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumiatsky; former party leaders such as Aleksei Rykov and Karl Radek (old foes of Stalin who had been temporarily forgiven) were close neighbours of the secret police (NKVD) chiefs who conducted the Terror that destroyed them. The house embraced both victims and perpetrators: Andrei Sverdlov, the son of the Old Bolshevik Yakov, had played with Anna Larina when they were children, but was to interrogate her in the Lubyanka following the show trial and execution of her husband Nikolai Bukharin.
Novelist Yuri Trifonov, pictured as a baby with family members
Slezkine’s family saga is also a tragedy, in which the hubristic subjects are destroyed by their fatal flaws of utopian ambition, theological dogmatism and arrogance. The central argument is that the Bolsheviks are best understood, like the Fifth Monarchists of Cromwell’s England, Joseph Smith’s Mormon “Latter Day Saints” or, indeed, Jesus’s early followers, as a “millenarian sect” — true believers in Marx’s utopia. The Bolsheviks believed that the “End Days” were nigh, and that the final struggle between the socialist saints and the capitalist Babylon would give birth to a communist heaven-on-earth. The duty of the virtuous was to forsake normal family life and become heroic revolutionaries.
But paradise conspicuously failed to arrive. In response, the Bolshevik apostles would sometimes push for renewed “advances” towards the ideal society and sharp struggles against the remnants of bourgeois evil. This was the thinking behind the radical “Great Break” of the late 1920s, when the new Stalinist regime pursued furious industrialisation and construction (including of the House of Government itself) alongside the brutal collectivisation of agriculture — a campaign in which some of its residents participated. Such “advances” were inevitably followed by retreats to greater pragmatism, and so in the early 1930s, the Bolshevik believers endured another period of calm; “socialism” had supposedly been achieved but the paradise of “communism” was some way away. Yet even in more peaceful eras they sought to preserve their revolutionary purity — resisting not only bourgeois “enemies” but also the threats of a loss of ideological faith (or “philistinism”) and contamination by the Russian “backwardness” that surrounded them (“the swamp”, as they termed it). For Slezkine, this vigilant and fearful attitude partly explains why Stalin’s Terror of 1936-38 came to resemble an early-modern witch craze, consuming many of the residents themselves.
Comparing Marxist theory to apocalyptic prophesy, or Bolshevism with religious sects, is not new, and has always been controversial among academic historians. Such approaches often neglect more down-to-earth efforts to transform economies and achieve social justice in poor, unequal societies; they can also encourage dismissals of the movement as a pathology of the irrational and the deluded, when it needs to be understood in a more complex social and political context. However, Slezkine’s defence of this approach is the most convincing I have read — in large part because his sensitive and intelligent readings of these Old Bolshevik writings show the unmistakable presence of quasi-religious language and ways of thinking. And while he has no sympathy for Bolshevism, he is fully committed to understanding why his characters thought as they did.
Even so, I am not a complete convert. The Bolshevik project certainly manifested important elements of quasi-millenarian utopianism, but equally prominent was a more conventional technocratic strain stressing order and routine, particularly among those who specialised in running the Soviet economy. One of Slezkine’s subjects, the Dickens-loving Platon Kerzhentsev, revealed this worldview when he appealed to Soviet citizens to imitate Englishmen, who “irrespective of status” woke up at 7am-8am, went to bed at 11pm-12pm, and drank tea at 4.30pm, for “the industrial way of life requires the creation of orderliness, with the correct alternation of periods of work and rest”. This was itself a utopia of sorts, but it could be condemned for bourgeois pragmatism during the more heroic periods of Soviet history.
Slezkine’s framework illuminates much about everyday life in the House of Government during the mid-1930s. The residents were determined to maintain the purity of a revolutionary sect as they built socialism, and for top officials the virtuous life involved intense labour for the greater good. Internal trade commissar Izrail Veitser declared that “Soviet trade is our personal, Bolshevik cause”, and his routine spoke more of a romantic heroism than an orderly “English” self-discipline — frequently he left for work at 9am and returned at 4am the following morning. Wives often worked too, though in less elevated positions, and relied on a seemingly unsocialist retinue of maids and nannies to look after their children. Even so, the children seem not to have felt deprived; they generally recalled happy childhoods.
Despite this fairly austere lifestyle, the Old Bolsheviks constantly fretted that they were “degenerating” into a Soviet “bourgeoisie”. The anxiety was not wholly unfounded: pristine modernist interiors became cluttered with doilies, curtains and other signs of bourgeois recidivism; the writer Aleksandr Arosev blamed his wife for inflicting her “bourgeois domesticity” and a tyranny of tablecloths on him. Even more worrying was the increasing presence of non-communist in-laws and other relatives in the building — including some former priests.
For Slezkine, this failure to transform the family helps to explain the loss of faith in the Bolshevik project among the following generation. Unlike Christian sects that devoted efforts to pastoral care in the home, they concentrated their “agitation and propaganda” on the workplace. And it is no surprise, Slezkine argues, that the Old Bolsheviks failed to transmit their revolutionary faith when socialist literature was rarely read at home and spurned for a diet of Tolstoy and Dickens. The children of the House of Government — even those orphaned by the Terror — grew up to be loyal Soviets. But they no longer had the faith of their parents.
Modernist interiors became cluttered with doilies, curtains and other signs of bourgeois recidivism
Slezkine therefore concludes that the Bolshevik sect was unusual in its failure to propagate its faith beyond the first generation. Though one might argue that it was both less abnormal and more successful than that, transforming itself from a sect to a more inclusive church and embedding at least some of its values in Soviet society.
Indeed, Slezkine’s final chapter stresses another aspect of Bolshevism that can be found in many other political movements in recent history — its aggressive commitment to “modernisation”. Briefly departing from his religious framework, here he considers the Bolsheviks through the prism of that great myth of modernity, Goethe’s Faust. The play was popular reading in the House of Government, and it spoke directly to the residents’ own experience. At the end of the tragedy Faust, now a powerful man committed to agricultural improvement, builds a grand castle on drained land; yet he is cruel in his pursuit of his “land of Eden”, causing the murder of an old couple whose hut blocks his vision of progress. And as we struggle to balance the benefits of industrial modernity with its huge costs — both human and environmental — Slezkine’s gripping history of these latter-day Fausts is especially relevant, even if their mental world seems so remote from our own.
The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, by Yuri Slezkine, Princeton University Press, RRP£29.95/$39.95, 1,128 pages
David Priestland is a professor of history at Oxford university and author of ‘The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World’ (Penguin)
Review
Book review: ‘The House of Government’ by Yuri Slezkine
By Vitali Vitaliev
Published Monday, October 16, 2017
Moscow’s notorious Dom na Naberezhnoi building - ‘the House on the Embankment’ - embodies one of the darkest periods in Russian history.
As I am writing these lines, the word ‘Russia’ can be heard everywhere: from TVs, from the web and from the radio, where BBC Radio 4’s ‘Russian Week’ has just begun. No wonder. In the run-up to the centenary of the 1917 Bolshevik coup d’etat, Russia is again on everyone’s lips. In a number of TV and radio travelogues, young and daring British presenters travel the length and breadth of the world’s largest country, at times still followed (for no particular reason) by the FSB, the KGB’s successor - a fact that leads to the conclusion that nothing much has changed on one-sixth of the Earth’s territory in the last 100 years. Why? Where does this extraordinary adherence to totalitarianism come from?
To find an answer, in ‘The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution’ (Princeton University Press, £29.95, ISBN 9780691176949), Yuri Slezkine, professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, rather than venturing to Russia’s remote parts decided to zoom in on one spot in Moscow. One building, to be more exact: the famously notorious (and notoriously famous) Dom na Naberezhnoi, 'the House on the Embankment' – a grey 12-storeyed constructivist bulk of a residential block completed in 1931. It was located, incidentally, not far from the sprawling Gustav List Metal Works - once Russia’s leading engineering plant which produced steam engines, fire hydrants and water pipes. Most Moscow pedestrians, however, would walk past the House at 2, Serafimovicha (formerly Bolotnaya) Street briskly, without looking up.
The building’s dark ‘fame’ went back to the years of the Great Terror between 1936 and 1938, when hundreds of its tenants were led away during the night to be arrested, interrogated and promptly executed in the basement of the still-functioning Lubianka prison. It was in a way a brutalist concrete microcosm of the Stalinist Soviet Union itself, the only difference being that the House’s tenants were almost exclusively high-ranking apparatchiks, academics, artists and journalists – the crème de la crème of the pre-WWII Soviet society, the short-lasting (until their executions that is) members of the Soviet elite and their families.
Among them were such prominent engineers and industrialists as Mikhail Granovsky, head of construction and the director of the Berezniki Chemical Plant and one-time director of the Central Administration of Railroad Construction; Boris Ivanov, chairman of the Soviet Flour Milling Industry Directorate, and Alexander Bruskin, former director of the Cheliabinsk Tractor Plant and later people’s commissar of machine and tool industry, to name just a few. The stories of many of the victims are recounted in the book.
The statistics associated with the ill-famed building are astounding and can only be matched by those of this Bible-sized review title itself, which with its 1,100 odd pages and an estimated one million word count is now by far the largest volume in my library. In 1935, ‘the House of Government’, as Slezkin refers to the House on the Embankment, had 2,665 registered tenants (including 588 children), of whom 700 were state and party officials. The building contained nearly 600 well-designed high-ceilinged apartments (still very much coveted by tenants in the 1970s and 1980s), a library, a tennis court, an Udarnik (‘shock worker’) cinema and a capacious Variety Theatre (Teatr Estradi), where I myself had the chance to perform a couple of times, reading out my own humorous stories and poems.
According to Zlezkine, in the 1930s and 1940s, about 800 House residents were evicted from their apartments; 344 of them are known to have been shot and the rest sentenced to various forms of imprisonment.
Unsurprisingly, those gruesome statistics of the House were kept secret in the USSR, with the first major leak of the truth in 1976, when writer Yuri Trifonov, himself a son of one of the House’s erstwhile residents, published his novel ‘Dom na naberezhnoi’ in Noviy Mir magazine. The novel, telling only slightly fictionalised stories of the purged residents of the House, became an immediate bestseller in the USSR, and Trifonov himself came close to being nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature. The nomination was, of course, eventually blocked by Soviet officialdom, but the genie was out of the bottle and the House acquired an even more sinister look in the eyes of the Moscow passers-by.
Zlezkine’s book, although extremely well written, certainly cannot compete with Trifonov’s in literary merit. However, it certainly exceeds the latter in the sheer number of stories told. Among them is the heartbreaking ordeal of the acclaimed military journalist, one-time editor of Krokodil magazine and Pravda correspondent, Mikhail Koltsov, who lived in apartment 143. Koltsov was arrested on the morning after a reception in his honour that was attended by Stalin himself, who, according to some sources, annoyed by Koltsov’s growing popularity threatened the journalist with death and advised him to commit suicide there and then. Sure enough, the journalist was executed shortly after his arrest. I knew Koltsov’s story from the words of his brother Boris Yefimov, one of the leading political cartoonists on Krokodil magazine, where I also worked in the 1980s.
My favourite part of this truly substantial book is ‘The Faith’, where Slezkine, having looked back at the essence of the world’s leading religions, tries to understand whether Marxism in general and Russian Bolshevism in particular may have originated from some honest and heartfelt religious beliefs. He doesn’t give a direct answer, leaving it to the reader, but finishes the chapter with the fairly conclusive quote from George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’: “He loved Big Brother”.
This extraordinary book is certainly a pleasure to read, but it is also a challenge. Not so much because of its size, but due to its emotional and informational charge – enormous and eye-opening in equal measure. It can indeed be compared to the Bible, again, not in sheer volume, but in its importance for anyone interested in Russia and the Soviet Union. In short, not a brick (of the book), but - using a nice engineering term - a true cornerstone, not just of the ‘House of Government’, but of the history of totalitarianism, too.