Russia - Rulers And Victims: The Russians In The Soviet Union
The Age
Saturday July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW: Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union Geoffrey Hosking, Harvard University Press, $67.95
On the train from Moscow to Leningrad in 1969 Geoffrey Hosking read a Soviet novel, Business as Usual, about a collective farm in the north of Russia, and the decision of a farmer there to break with the village and make a new life in the town. "What the book revealed to me was that there was a way of being Russian that was non-Soviet," writes Hosking, and in the widely conceived, elegantly written book that follows he examines the fate of non-Soviet Russian aspects of society under Communist rule: traditions of Russian patriotism and nationalism, the Orthodox Church, the intellegentsia and the village, marriage and family and the distortions of private life under the totalitarian regime. His approach is both broad and intimate: when he writes about the Civil War period, in which famine and overcrowding hastened the degradation of pre-1917 bourgeois life as much as Communist ideology managed to, there is a novelistic aptness to it. And his accounts of the various workers and peasant riots against their collective overlords during the fifties and sixties present a different picture to the one the average Western mind has, which is of dissenters being pretty much an intellectual affair. The riots were easily put down and had not much political content other than everyday fed-upness, but they make oddly heartening reading. Hosking attributes the disintegration of the Soviet Union in large part to the anomalous position of Russia within the larger imperium; exactly how much this is true is a question for the historians and political scientists, but his rather grand book makes a strong case.
© 2006 The Age