THE READING ROOM

Conversations about great books.

From the New York Times last Sunday, Oct.26.

Thoughts About the Soviet Union
By Bill Keller

I certainly agree with Ms. Prose that it’s hard to read Tolstoy’s account of the Napoleonic wars today without thinking of Iraq. (Is General Petraeus Kutuzov? Or Napoleon?) From a Russian vantage point the more apt military analogy is probably World War II — the “Great Patriotic War,” in Soviet-speak. Both the war against Napoleon and the war against Hitler cost Russia immensely, yet both victories left Russia with relative superpower status.

But I find myself, as I make my way through “War and Peace,” flashing back to the final years of the Soviet Union. The novel stirs up different, even conflicting thoughts about the Soviet era. Most superficially, in the accounts of the aristocratic Russia of the early 19th century you can find the excesses and inequities that, combined with tightening oppression and misrule, made the country ripe for the upheaval that came a century later.

Somewhat less superficially, you can find striking similarities between the autocracy of the tsars and the autocracy that was the Soviet Union. The tsar gave way to a different species of tyrant, the nobility was replaced by a nomenklatura, and the serfs were, well, just about everyone else. (And thanks, by the way, to Liesl Schillinger for plugging Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We,” a fine piece of dystopian literature written just as the Bolshevik revolution was curdling into the horror story it would become.)
Alternatively you can look at the European gloss on Tolstoy’s Russia— the Francophone elite, the English Club — and wonder whether Russia could have skipped the Soviet interlude altogether.

During the time I spent reporting from Russia — the end of 1986 until the fall of 1991 — I would encounter more appealing vestiges of the old Russia, in the architecture of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and in the pockets of intellectual life that clustered around the arts and sciences (and that produced many of the dissidents) and I would imagine a Russia that might have been had the Bolsheviks failed.

The full story here.