The Russian Revolution Recast as an Epic Family Tragedy – New York Times

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 Id 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.

The turning point in Slezkines 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 Miagkovas 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, Slezkines writing is sharp, fresh, sometimes playful, often undisciplined. The momentum suffers from the narratives 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. Utopias 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.

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: Im reading Tolstoys 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.

A version of this review appears in print on August 20, 2017, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Unbreakable Broken.

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The Russian Revolution Recast as an Epic Family Tragedy - New York Times