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The Arbat Trilogy

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Anatoli Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat

Anatoli Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat

For me, this has been a year in which my reading has been strongly colored by Russian history and literature. I am currently reading the third volume of Anatoli Rybakov’s Arbat trilogy, which consists of Children of the Arbat, Fear, and Dust and Ashes.

The Arbat is a street around the center of Moscow that dates back to the sixteenth century and is famous for its picturesque buildings and as the home of artists, academics, and petty nobility.

What Rybakov does in these novels is take a group of young people who knew each other in school in the Arbat and follows them through Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and into the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War). In addition to his fictional characters, Rybakov also gives us a glimpse into the minds of Stalin, Voroshilov, and other Russian political and military leaders.

Suppressed for many years by the Soviet authorities, the Arbat trilogy finally saw the light of day after twenty more than years of circulation via the samizdat underground press. In the meantime, he had served for three years in the Gulag, after which he was a tank commander during the war.

I read the first volume, Children of the Arbat, in 2008, while Martine and I were on vacation in Canada. Then, at the beginning of this year, I joined a European History discussion group, which in the end turned out to be a Russian History discussion group. This was no disappointment for me, as I delighted to learn more about Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the purges under Stalin, and now the Second World War in Russia.

The literature of Stalin’s purges is vast, including Victor Serge’s great The Case of Comrade Tularev and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But I have a special fondness for Rybakov’s trilogy, as I have gotten to know the characters as they manage to walk on eggshells during one of the darkest periods of their country’s history while still retaining their essential humanity.

 

 

 

 

The General Who Came Back from the Dead

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Field Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky of the Soviet Union

Stalin was one of the great paranoids of history. Beginning in 1937, he purged a large percentage of the top officers in his military—just before Hitler invaded Russia and caught the army and Stalin flat-footed. Gone were three of the five marshals of the Red Army, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky (a brilliant strategist who has influenced warfare to this day), Vasily Blyukher, and Aleksandr Yegorov; thirteen out of the fifteen army commanders; eight out of nine of the admirals; fifty of fifty-seven army corps commanders; 154 out of 186 division commanders, 16 of 16 army commissars; and 25 of 28 army corps commissars.

Did he not think he would be needing his military commanders to fight off the coming Nazi onslaught? It’s hard to tell, but when Operation Barbarossa kicked off in 1941, the Russians had 3.3 million men under arms, 2.1 million of whom were dead or missing in the third quarter of 1941 alone!

Somehow Stalin had to find generals to replace those whom he had shot or imprisoned. In fact, he had to release about 30% of the purged generals and admirals who were festering in various of his Gulags.

One of them was General Konstantin Rokossovsky, who was half-Polish and half-Russian. Under interrogation by Stalin’s NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB), the General had eight was his teeth knocked out (which is why you don’t find too many pictures of him smiling). Yet, Rokossovsky was the go-to guy for such operations as the victory at Stalingrad, where he all but wiped out a whole German army. For this, he was promoted to Field Marshal and, later, promoted to command one of the three Russian armies converging on Berlin.

After the war, he was made one of the leaders of the Polish Peoples’ Republic and returned to Russia to serve in several key defense posts under Khrushchev. He died in 1968 at the age of seventy-one and is buried in Red Square.

Apparently, once he returned to active service after being tortured and accused of false crimes—mostly for being an adherent of the brilliant Marshal Tukhachevsky—there was no longer any question of his loyalty, which he proved time and time again by clipping the wings of the Nazi war machine.

Here in the United States, we don’t know much about the men who had more to do with Hitler’s defeat than anyone on the Western Allies’ side, including Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and Montgomery. Rokossovsky was just one of those immortal heroes, along with others such as Zhukov, Konev, Vasilevsky, Cherniakhovsky, and other men whose names we can’t pronounce but who helped change the course of history.

The Time magazine cover shown above was for the issue of August 23, 1943.

 

The Bludgeon

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German POW Surrendering to Russian Defender at Stalingrad

For us, it was the last “Good War.” For the Russians, it was “The Great Patriotic War,” in which 20-30 million soldiers and civilians died defending the Rodina, or Fatherland. I am currently reading David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House’s When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler.

I’m not going to say we had it easy on the Western Front: There’s a lot we don’t know and perhaps never will know about some of the horrors of the Sicilian and Italian campaigns, as well as D-Day and its aftermath in France, Belgium, and Germany. (If you can, see John Huston’s WW2 documentaries, especially The Battle of San Pietro.) But there was something particularly horrible in the way that the two great 20th century dictators, Hitler and Stalin, moved great numbers of men and materiel across the Russian steppe as if it were a chessboard:

The superb German fighting machine was defeated by more than distance. The German rapier, designed to end conflict cleanly and efficiently, was dulled by repeated and often clumsy blows from a simple, dull, but very large Soviet bludgeon. That bludgeon took the form of successive waves of newly mobilized armies, each taking its toll of the invaders before shattering and being replaced by the next wave.

Stalin had a huge supply of manpower at his beck and call. Once the Nazis invaded Russia during Operation Barbarossa, their forces kept getting farther and farther from their source of supply, while, at the same time, the Russian supply lines were getting shorter and shorter as the battle zone neared Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad.

It was not just a matter of manpower, however.The Russians were developing new tanks that could take on the best that the Panzer divisions could throw against them, new fighters and bombers that harassed the rapidly dwindling Luftwaffe, and bringing terrifying new weapons such as the Katyusha rocket launchers that helped to turn the tide against the hapless Germans, who were stuck fighting a two-front war once the Americans and British invaded North Africa, Italy, and France.

We don’t think much about the Eastern Front. After all, we weren’t there. And we were taught that the real show was in Western Europe. The Germans knew, though, that it was in Russia that the coffin nails were pounded into the Thousand-Year Reich. Hitler wound up blowing his brains out, while Stalin died in bed.

No, we don’t like to credit the Russians for their victory; but they deserved it. They certainly gave up enough to achieve it.

 

 

The Phantom Lands of Eastern Europe

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Map of Galicia

If you’ve read any of the literature of Eastern Europe, you will see names of provinces and whole countries that you have difficulty in locating on a map. Names like Galicia (not to be confused with the Galicia region of Northwest Spain), Bukovina, Volhynia, Moldavia, Moldova (this one’s currently a country in its own right), Wallachia, and Silesia—just to name a few.

Most are pawns in the endless historical struggles between Russia, Poland, Germany, the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Balkans. Most of the time, they were absorbed into an adjoining larger country (such as Wallachia into Romania), or split between countries (such as Galicia going to Poland, Russia, Austria, or the Ukraine). Only Moldova, the former Moldovan SSR ( Soviet Socialist Republic), is an independent nation today—at least for the time being.

Much of the problem is in the shifting borders affected by the partitions of Poland and the vagaries of fortune of the Ukraine, which was in recent history a political football between Poland, Germany, and Russia.

When one thinks about it, there are only a relatively few countries in the area that have maintained their independence, albeit with constantly shifting borders and political affiliations, over the centuries. Germany and Russia are two examples of relative stability, with just about everyone else being stretched, shrunk, or absorbed multiple times.

Much of the Eastern European emigration to the United States, Canada, and other Western countries is a result of this constant instability. It would be difficult for me to walk down certain streets in Los Angeles without encountering the children of immigrants from these phantom lands of Eastern Europe.

The Outrage Machine

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The members of Pussy Riot behind bars

I am tired of writing blog postings about my outrage at the misdeeds of others, most particularly the political Right in America. So today, instead of the usual fulmination over the misdeeds of ignorant Confederate Yahoos, I want to bring to your attention three brave and beautiful young women who form a punk rock group in Russia who calls itself Pussy Riot. They are, from left to right in the above photo, Yekaterina Samutsevich, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Maria Alyokhina.

Their own particular outrage is against Vladimir Putin, particularly his hypocritical attempt to suck up to the Russian Orthodox Church.

On February 21 of this year, Pussy Riot staged a performance in front of the iconostasis of Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow a few blocks away from the Kremlin. The concert was stopped by church security guards. When videos of the event were circulated the following month, the girls were promptly arrested and charged for hooliganism, a sort of ill-defined catch-all crime in Russia. As of last week, they have been sentenced to two years in prison, despite pleas for clemency from the Orthodox clergy.

If you’re interested, below is the video of their performance on YouTube:

There is a CC button at the bottom which allows you to select English subtitles of the lyrics the group is singing. While some Rightist-leaning media in this country have come out against Pussy Riot, I personally am for them. Organized religion and its sometimes dubious ties to the regime need to be exposed. The group did this with humor, artistry, and some slight blasphemous language which is pardonable under the circumstances.

There are dangers in the group’s course of action: I keep thinking of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was shot to death in the elevator to her apartment for daring to expose the utter corruption of Putin’s government, particularly in its policy toward Chechnya. There was a big show trial with some obvious fall guys, but nothing much came of it.

So, rock on, girls! I hope you can beat the rap.

Imaginative Infamy

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Soviet-era postage stamps honoring Sergei Kirov

No one could say that Josef Stalin was unimaginative when it came to being one of the greatest tyrants in living memory. You may have heard of the old saying “Keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer.” In the 1920s and 1930s, Sergei Kirov was a rising star in the Communist party, and reputed to be one of the dictator’s best and closest friends. They even took working vacations together on the Black Sea.

But there was this nagging problem: Kirov was getting much too popular. At the Seventeenth Party Congress early in 1934, both positive and negative votes for various leaders were cast; and it appeared that a large number of negative votes were cast against The Man of Steel (Stalin). In fact, some party leaders approached Kirov and suggested that he take over the reins of power. As a loyal party member, Kirov reported this to Stalin, who thereupon rigged the vote count so that he himself won.

On December 1, Kirov was shot in the back of the head just outside his second-floor office at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. When Stalin was contacted in Moscow, he rushed at once to Leningrad and took over the investigation in person. The gunman was, in all probability, Leonid Nikolaev.

But it didn’t stop there. Stalin saw Kirov’s death (which he may or may not have engineered himself) as the perfect opportunity to rid himself of some enemies from the earliest days of the party. Hurled into prison were Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev, two of the early Bolsheviks whom Stalin accused of masterminding a massive conspiracy leading to his friend’s death. Before it was all over, upwards of several thousand enemies and families and friends of enemies of Stalin were fingered by the NKVD and either imprisoned, exiled, or shot outright.

In the meantime, Stalin make a big show of grieving for Kirov, being one of his pallbearers, and retrospectively naming him as one of the Heroes of the Revolution. Also he authorized some postage stamps honoring his memory (see illustration above), renamed streets around the Soviet Union to honor him, and even changed the name of the Maryinsky Ballet in Leningrad to the Kirov Ballet.

This was only the beginning of what came to be known as Stalin’s Purges, which reached their peak in 1937-1938. In the end, untold millions of lives were affected, and the literature of the era has given birth to many great novels in which these events were mirrored, books such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tularev, and Anatoly Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat and Fear. And these in turn gave birth to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s many works about the Gulag Archipelago.

I have just finished reading Amy Knight’s excellent Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery, in which she concludes:

The story of Kirov’s murder did not end with the trials of January 1935. On the contrary, the murder and its aftermath marked the beginning of a nightmare that would consume the Soviet Union for the next four years. Some historians insist that the police terror that unfolded after Kirov’s assassination was not the product of any grand strategy of Stalin’s, but rather a haphazard, frenzied process that fed on itself. But when one considers how Stalin meticulously pored over transcripts of interrogations and indictments and how he systematically meted out retribution to his real or perceived enemies, a picture of a carefully planned vendetta emerges.

Friendship with those who are too powerful and too paranoiac has its price.