Resurrection is harder to imagine than death. Newspapers don’t devote a page a day to resurrections, and the archetypal Resurrection draws more deniers than believers. Death, on the other hand, is the single greatest preoccupation of literature and the prime prompter of the human drama. David Remnick won a Pulitzer Prize when the motif was death, in Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. The key question about its sequel is whether, for a book subtitled “The Struggle for a New Russia,” the right title is Resurrection.
Early reviewers say no. They praise the reporting of the former Washington Post Moscow correspondent and current New Yorker staffer, but they observe the inconvenient fact that most of the news he brings is negative: The standard of living has plummeted. Crime has soared. Corruption disfigures politics. Pollution fouls the rivers, the skies, the land. Life-expectancy rates are stunningly low–59 years for males–and the birthrate is the third lowest in the world. The forecast: demographic disaster.
Remnick’s instincts are surer than his critics’. This best Western reporter on improbable Russia moves beyond the predictable analytical categories of politics and economics to consider culture as well, and in the process, he espies “a recovery from postimperial funk.” A non-Christian, he nevertheless recognizes how important the faith of this long-Christian nation was to its enduring the 74-year Soviet parenthesis. In sum, he transcends the common failing of measuring Russia by a Western yardstick, and more than the mere sentiment of a Russophile gives him grounds for his hopeful title.
True, the open-endedness of this book’s story makes for a narrative less tidy than that of Lenin’s Tomb. True, also, if a new birth is in process, it is being handled by some pretty messy and very bloodstained midwives. Remnick’s main theme, “the struggle for a definition of the new Russian state,” is captured neatly by the microcosmic story of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior–“magical realism, Russian style.”
Stalin destroyed this cathedral, which could accommodate 15,000 worshipers, as he did 95 percent of the churches in the capital of atheism. In its place was to rise the Palace of Soviets, taller than the Empire State Building and implementing “a design that can only be described as a Tower of Babel with Lenin on top.” The plan “to erase the old gods of man and establish bolshevism as the reigning faith . . . came to the most pathetic and banal of ends.” Natural springs defeated the plan, until, years later, the stagnant water was converted to the world’s biggest swimming pool.
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, the Richard Daley of Moscow, now oversees the rebuilding of the cathedral. It is a symbol of Russia’s rebirth, he explains: “We are recovering the memory of our ancestors.” A popular television host, who finds it “disgusting to watch former members of the Central Committee act pious and more religious than the patriarch himself,” concedes that “there is vitality, real life, in all this. This is an aesthetic built on illegal money and faux Orthodoxy and tawdriness. But what else is there? This is our life as it is!”
The Soviet Union died on Christmas Day 1991, and that date demarcates Remnick’s two books. (It seems that Someone outdid the mayor at the symbolism game.) To carry the story from 1991 to 1996, reporter Remnick relies heavily on his well-honed skill at conducting interviews, and he offers ample–sometimes more than ample–selections from them. He gets in to see the high and mighty, some of them known in the West and some of them not, and he seeks out ordinary people as well. Certain interviewees have lost considerable relevance, Mikhail Gorbachev especially, Vladimir Zhirinovsky somewhat less so. Remnick has not yet gotten to certain dramatis personae, most notably general-turned-politician Aleksandr Lebed. President Boris Yeltsin is, fittingly, at the center of the cast. The book intertwines two main plot lines, Yeltsin’s and his country’s.
Remnick’s judgments about character seem generally sound, even authoritative, but not always. He retains the soft spot for Gorbachev symptomatic of Western liberals–this, despite averring that whatever the egomaniacal “retired czar” of Bolshevism achieved was at odds with what he intended. (Gorbachev’s first words on hearing that the Soviet Union was dissolved: “What happens to me?”) Nor does Remnick depart from the eastern seaboard consensus on Lebed. The general is honest, yes, but he is also “stupid,” the flaw of flaws to sophisticates.
Remnick does seem to have his finger on Yeltsin’s pulse, such as it is these days. The figure of courage atop a tank in 1991 is now a bumbling shadow of his old self. Hemmed in by shockingly misbehaving parliamentarians and obtuse advisers, his reactions are as erratic as his electrocardiogram. Remnick’s strong narratives of the 1993 firestorm at the Russian White House and the 1995 electoral campaign show how close to the abyss Russia was. The war in Chechnya is an ineradicable blot on Yeltsin’s memory. Without discrediting his historic achievements in moving Russia out from under the totalitarian thumb, Remnick persuasively demonstrates how overmatched this erstwhile Communist apparatchik is by the task of creating a civil state amid the anarchic rubble of the collapsed great experiment.
Some people we don’t know may be more important than some we do. Remnick got an interview with Vladimir Gusinsky, “the most powerful and mysterious member of the new Moscow elite,” a 41-year-old capitalist who employs 12,000 in his conglomerate, of whom 1,000 are his personal security force. In putting this swimmer among Mafia sharks on display, Remnick sets up this contrast: Moscow intellectuals “now see only disaster and oligarchy,” but “the new wave of Russian entrepreneurs craves a legal order.” Here is another contrast to ponder: American interest in Russia has waned at the very moment when “there is no place on earth more future-oriented, more interesting, than Russia.” (See, for example, the roiling, neon-lit phantasmagoria of “Moscow This Minute” in the June 1, 1997, issue of the New York Times Magazine.)
No Russian receives more space in Remnick’s account than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One can read whole books on the collapse of the Soviet empire that mention Solzhenitsyn not a single time. The Western consensus may be that he is an irrelevant icon; but Remnick, while not uncritical, takes him very seriously, indeed, not only as the literary figure with the greatest historical impact on our century but also as a source of wise counsel for rebuilding Russia. One who has repeatedly been prescient before may prove prescient again, despite being a spectacular public-relations failure. Remnick gives Solzhenitsyn his due as few do.
Remnick also observes, as astonishingly few Western commentators do, the calamitous effect of three generations’ worth of systematic liquidation of Russia’s most spiritually sound and intellectually independent citizens. Solzhenitsyn is only one among many who mourn this loss. Fellow camp survivor Lev Razgon tallies the millions and concludes that “the capacity to create a democratic critical mass was diminished genetically by the communist regime’s policy of forced exile, imprisonment, and execution.” Many of those who remain suffer from residual communism-in-the-soul, and they are fertile soil for the National Bolshevism of the Red-Brown alliance of convenience, which is the greatest threat to a gradual democratic flowering. Yet, relentlessly, a generation not suckled on the old fears and prejudices now moves into adulthood.
As we watch the Russia-watchers, we can put it down as a rule that the more optimistic they were that the Soviet worm would someday metamorphose into a normal-society butterfly, the more pessimistic they are today. The less they blamed the ideology for the horrors, the less they cheer its passing. But those who got it wrong once are more than likely to get it wrong again. Conversely, those who saw the Soviet story as a tragedy can now imagine a happy ending. After the euphoria of 1991 has come a protracted period of “anti-euphoria” about Russia’s prospects. Remnick’s book shows why, in dense detail. Yet he remains hopeful–not naively; rather, grimly–but hopeful nonetheless.
A newspaper story tells of the tolling of the church bells this past Easter, from 300 churches in Moscow and countless others across Russia, spreading anew the “sounds of heaven” above the citizens. “Victory,” cries a priest, “a miracle,” a vindication. Remnick could have used that story.
Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is professor of English at Calvin College. He is the author of Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World (Regnery).
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.
Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 23
7B5lm7B50237826
