Rachel Polonsky: Molotov’s Magic Lantern. Travels in Russian History. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 390 pp.
Rachel Polonsky had the good fortune to arrive in Russia at just the right time and place. The place was an apartment in Romanov Lane in central Moscow, not far from the Kremlin, and the time was during the first years of this century – just before the apartment above hers was sold and underwent a complete remodeling that left nothing behind from its one-time owner, Vyacheslav Molotov. Not even his books.
But when Polonsky came, part of his private library was still stored there, and the Texas banker who was renting the apartment from Molotov’s heirs allowed her free access. And what she found there, along with what she found out about the building itself, provided the twin inspirations for this book. Cracking open the volumes from Molotov’s collection, she – like the recent investigator of Hitler’s library – discovered strands of the former owner’s hair. Her initial focus, naturally, was on which titles were in the collection, whether their owner had read them or not (many pages were uncut), and if he had, what underlining and marginalia had he left behind?
Beyond that, she studied the plaques honoring the dignitaries who had once lived on her street, then went in and talked with the current residents. In the nearby Lenin State Library she consulted books by and about them, including the last tsarist-era telephone book, which listed, for example, not just the address but also all the titles and memberships of Count Sergei Sheremetyev, whose remodeled palace is also located on Romanov Lane.
From there, her excursions took her to a famous banya (steam bath) which Pushkin had once frequented, and where in Polonsky’s day elegant young women could be seen conspicuously reading the latest best-seller, a new Russian translation of Spengler’s Decline of the West. This is one chapter in which she provides perhaps a little more history than one cares to know, if you are not already a fan of the institution of the banya and its rituals. She details not only what people read there, but what they eat and drink; what Pushkin said about it; where the oldest one in Moscow is located, how Georgian ones differ from their Russian counterparts, what classes of people go there, what kind of folk work there, and the proper use of a loofah. She talks about banya poetry and Chekov’s story set in one – not forgetting to discuss the architecture and furnishings. Others might think that suffering intense heat and being beaten with birch twigs is perhaps not the most enjoyable way to spend your free time, especially when the chief payoff seems to be your feeling of relief when the ordeal is over. But this is an unfashionable opinion, not to be expressed in polite Moscow society.
After the banya, what could the next chapter be about except the dacha? Here in a district outside Moscow, our guide rescues the Balandins, a family of distinguished scientists who first prospered under Stalin, then suffered, from undeserved obscurity. She also resurrects Academician Olga Lepeshinskaya, a biologist and follower of the infamous Lysenko. Because she made astute political decisions, the career of this “Old Bolshevichka” was untroubled. What’s more, she was so “shrewish, mean and untrusting… that she would poke through the garbage to check that her servant had not stolen any leftovers for her animals.” (pg. 128) That’s the kind of character who was able to not only survive but prosper in those times.
The deeper one reads in this book, the more one realizes that Molotov is not so much the central focus as a thread that disappears for a time, only to pop up in the most unexpected places. For Polonsky does not confine herself to Moscow and environs. She ventures into the hinterlands, going west to Novgorod (World War II buffs are treated to a rare glimpse of what the city looked like in 1944, just after the Nazis had been pushed out); south to the region around the Sea of Azov; north to Vologda and Murmansk, Archangel and Kolyma (during the war, Molotov had tried to claim Spitzbergen in the Arctic for the USSR, after the Soviets had occupied a few miles of northernmost Norway); and finally out to the far east, to Lake Baikal and beyond. It’s a shame she did not go to St. Petersburg.
What does she find in these places? Let’s start with Vologda, north of Moscow. After the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution, the US embassy moved there for a time (described in idyllic terms by George Kennan). By strange coincidence, Molotov himself had been exiled to this very town before the revolution. Dressed as a minstrel, he earned tips by playing the violin nightly in the railroad station restaurant. It’s not clear how much he really needed the money, as the tsarist government incredibly provided him a monthly stipend of eleven gold rubles. He also enjoyed visiting the town library and reading the newspapers to keep up with current events. Molotov made profitable use of his exile, studying Latin and devouring Darwin, Dostoevsky and above all his favorite, Chekov. For him, Chekov’s stories were a call to revolution; they were about lives rendered unproductive by poverty and bureaucracy. From there, Polonsky traces Chekov’s footsteps in Taganrog, in the south of Russia. It turns out that one of his contemporaries, the son of his math teacher, was none other than Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Turning back to Molotov, one of the things he was partly responsible for was the forced collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine. So harsh and excessive were his demands that for security he had to sleep in a guarded train. Though most people today do not think of him as being particularly bloodthirsty, during the purges he actually signed off on more execution lists than did Stalin, including a decree approving the use of torture. As a dedicated Bolshevik, he routinely turned a deaf ear to the personal pleas of old friends. Did he really believe all of them to be guilty? Probably not, yet his sleep was untroubled – as he proudly asserted – in part no doubt because it was not his responsibility to conduct investigations himself. By leaving that job to others, who presumably knew their business, he kept a clear conscience because he persuaded himself that he was marching in the vanguard of historical necessity.
The motto to chapter seven, taken from Dostoevsky’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, could serve as a motto for the entire work: “After all, an entire nation consists only of certain isolated incidents, does it not?” Polonsky’s book increasingly resembles a meandering stroll through Russia’s history and across its landscape, following no definite path, heading in no particular direction. We should just enjoy the journey for its own sake. The result is not as radical as Tristram Shandy but it has something of the same flavor. When she says near the end that she is tempted to “digress and delay,” the reader is tempted to cry out, “What else have we been doing?” (pg. 343)
It is only when we arrive at a destination that we get some inkling of what the probable goal was. When she shows up at Stara Rusa on Lake Ilmen, where Dostoevsky wrote much of The Demons, my best guess is that she wanted to visit the author’s home, since converted to a museum. It turned out to be closed for renovation. No matter – the chapter is included anyway. When she travels to Irkutsk, her destination may have been the house of Maria Volkonskaya, the princess who heroically followed her husband, a Decembrist conspirator, into exile. Or it may have been the sanatorium that advertises itself as being able to cure the exhaustion one incurs in reaching the sanatorium itself (Chekov said that every traveler arrives in Irkutsk exhausted).
The effect of concealing the destination is that we seem to be drifting on a wide river, stopping here and there, chatting with this person and that. This has its attractions. The downside is that we never share any sense of achievement at having completed an arduous task. We do not get the impression that she has climbed a mountain so much as that she has wandered almost accidentally onto its peak.
On the whole, this is an outstanding book, but it could have been even better. We are treated to so many descriptions of buildings, paintings, and photographs that a few pictures of them would have been welcome. Did this run counter to the publishing philosophy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux – or its budget? At least they allowed two maps, one of Moscow and one of Russia, though these are no more than adequate at best. The one of Moscow is spread over two pages, but since almost everything of interest is right in the center, that part is bisected, so you end up bending back the cover to make sure you haven’t missed anything in the fold. (The maps are so frustrating that other reviewers have felt the need to supplement them by consulting Google Earth.)
Historical quibbles: Stalin may well have asked Marshals Zhukov and Konev who would take Berlin, the Soviets or the Western Allies? But in fact this question had already been decided at Yalta. Any competition for territory among the Allies would have been self-injurious, and so it was tacitly agreed that Berlin would be left to the Red Army. The only race to get there was between Zhukov and Konev themselves, and when Stalin posed his question, all three of them understood perfectly what he really meant. By the way, both Marshals had apartments in the same building as Molotov on Romanov Lane.
Final quibble: Admiral Pavel Nakhimov (1802-1855) commanded the Russian fleet at the battle of Sinope, where he annihilated the Ottoman fleet during the Crimean War. As an admiral, he does not belong on a list of “three great generals of Russian imperial history.” (pg 113) It’s a bit like calling the three great generals of British history Marlborough, Wellington – and Nelson.
All in all, this is history of a good kind – a series of human dramas. Polonsky tells us: “These are the people who once lived in this apartment or dacha or city, and this is what they did.” Or, since we are talking about Russia, perhaps it is better to say: “… and this is what happened to them ” There will not be many people who, after finishing this book, will be able to say, “Well, nothing I didn’t already know.”
Of related interest: See the review of Jonathan Brent: Inside the Stalin Archives, and Elif Batumen: The Possessed, elsewhere at this site.
© Hamilton Beck
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