A Year in Reading: Stephen Dodson

I wasn’t planning to make ’s my lead review as I was reading it; it seemed overlong and somewhat scattered.  But by the time I was done, I realized I had been badly mistaken: Slezkine knew exactly what he was doing, and the book was as long as it needed to be. An early chapter on the history of religion that doesn’t even mention communism until the end seemed superfluous until I realized it was providing the concepts and vocabulary he would use to analyze the entire history of the Soviet Union. It is, of course, a commonplace to compare communism to a religion; he begins the chapter by asking whether it is one, and says “it does not matter.” What matters is-obsessed . Slezkine has been working on this for a long time, and it shows; all the allusions, all the quotes, all the juxtapositions work, and the final chapter, on (who grew up in the Government House and made it famous with his novel ), ties everything together.  The penultimate page quotes this passage from Trifonov’s : “Every contact with the past meant pain. Yet life is made up of such contacts, for the threads to the past are a thousandfold and each one must be torn out of living flesh, out of a wound. … Every object, every familiar person, every thought, every word—every single thing in the world was linked by some thread to him.” Slezkine’s (very Russian) ironic allusiveness is the perfect way to tell this multi-threaded story of a revolution gone wrong; it’s not so much a history as a book about how to understand history, and anyone interested in the fate of the Soviet Union should read it. (Since it concentrates on the people in the Government House, it necessarily represents a partial view of society; to supplement it, you can’t do better than , edited by , , and , which excerpts the diaries of 10 very different people, from a grumpy farmer to a woman who can’t stop mourning her daughter.)