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OVERTHROWING THE CZAR (AND THE FACTS) TO TELL A GRIPPING REVOLUTIONARY TALE
\"The Revolutionist\" is a fast-paced tale of adventure and intrigue set in Russia between the Revolution of 1917 and the death of Stalin. These were the best and worst of times in Russia, when hope for the future and fear of the present drove men and women to do great deeds and commit even greater crimes to shape a world whose dimensions they only vaguely comprehended. Known to friend and foe alike as Zander, Alexander Til, the hero of \"The Revolutionist,\" knows, works with, or fights against many of the men and women who shaped Russia's destiny during the first half of this century. Born and raised in the Jewish ghetto of Manhattan's Lower East Side, he, like a number of young American labor activists of Russian Jewish background, is drawn to the land of his forefathers by the revolutionary promise of 1917. Soon, he is deeply involved in a love affair with the twin sister of Prince Iusupov, one of the assassins of Rasputin, and even more deeply involved in the Revolution. Happily, these two seemingly conflicting passions intertwine, for Princess Lili, like proletarian Zander, is a dedicated Bolshevik.
Newspaper Article
'LIFE AND FATE' SURELY A COURAGEOUS BOOK--BUT NOT A GREAT ONE LIFE AND FATE BY VASILY GROSSMAN TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY ROBERT CHANDLER HARPER & ROW, 864 PAGES, $22.50
Russia's pre-revolutionary literary heritage stands as a monument to the fact that great literature can be written despite the heavy hand of censorship. The poet Pushkin wrote some of his most brilliant works during the late 1820s, when Russia's censorship laws had become so strict that a frustrated censor once complained that \"even the Lord's Prayer could be interpreted as a Jacobin speech.\" Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky published their first novels during the late 1840s and early 1850s, a time that has been remembered as \"the era of censorship terror,\" and the writers who gave birth to Russia's silver literary age produced some of their most important early works during the 1880s and 1890s, despite the intense censorship that clouded the reactionary reign of Alexander III. Yet today many Western critics disdain the work of Soviet writers on the grounds that censorship makes it impossible to publish good literature. At the same time, these critics have tended to pay particular attention to literary works that have not found favor in the Soviet Union, especially when such have included passages critical of the Soviet system. As a result, too many in the West have come to equate criticism of the Soviet regime with \"good\" literature. A Ukrainian Jew who owed his literary beginnings in part to the efforts of the dean of Soviet proletarian writers, Maxim Gorki, Grossman first wrote about the Russian Civil War and the lives of Soviet workers during the 1920s and 1930s. As a highly regarded war correspondent during World War II, he applauded the raw courage of Russia's soldiers again and again in the accounts he wrote for the Red Star army newspaper.
Newspaper Article
DOES PUTIN'S VISION MAKE ANY SENSE?
[Vladimir] Putin values stability and he is not likely to urge Russia to follow the democratic path of the West too readily. Russia must be free to be Russia, he insisted. \"The state, its institutions and structures have always played an exclusively important role in the life of the country and the people,\" he wrote in a statement released last week. \"For Russians a strong state . . . is the source and guarantor of order. (It is) the initiator and main driving force of all change.\"
Newspaper Article
REBURYING THE ROMANOVS
On Friday, the Russians laid to rest their last czar, Nicholas II, and his family. The ceremony was supposed to be an act of contrition by a penitent nation for the brutal murders that the Bolsheviks inflicted upon their fallen rulers exactly 80 year ago. Yet the funeral in St. Petersburg's Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul stirred more controversies than it settled. What had been planned to reunite the Russians with their past divided them from it instead. Leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church refused to attend the ceremony, and held a rival service in Moscow. Representatives of the Lower House of the Duma also stayed away, and Russia's President Boris Yeltsin decided to put in an appearance only at the very last minute. Chronic cynicism and mistrust continued to play the roles in which they had figured so prominently in Soviet time. Public opinion polls showed that less than half of the Russians believed that the bones buried on Friday were those of the murdered Romanovs, despite overwhelming DNA evidence that proved their identity. The Romanov heritage on which Friday's funeral focused helps to dilute this painful realization and give the Russians a new sense of hope. For the Russia of the Romanovs--despite its many economic and social failings--was decidedly not an evil empire. This was the Russia of Peter and Catherine the Great. Its armies liberated Europe from the despotism of Napoleon. It stood firmly among Europe's great powers, was held in awe by some and feared by others. As such, it earned the respect of allies and adversaries alike, for it lived by the same moral code as the nations among which it claimed to have a place.
Newspaper Article
An Imperial family's fate New information about the life and death of Russia's Nicholas II
On the night of July 16-17, 1918, in Ekaterinburg, Siberia, the Bolsheviks shot Nicholas II, the Empress Alexandra, their five children, the family doctor and several servants. In less time than it takes to write about, 10 men fired more than two dozen bullets into their victims at point-blank range and then carted the bodies away in the back of a truck: That was the version of those tragic events that the world heard a few weeks later. But the bodies were never found, and the handful of eyewitnesses arrested by the anti-Bolshevik forces that stormed Ekaterinburg a few days after the executions told a muddle of conflicting tales that grew more tangled as time passed. Almost as soon as news of the execution reached the West, rumors began to circulate that one or more members of the Imperial family had survived. Such tales have a long history in Russia, reaching back at least to the beginning of the 17th Century, when no fewer than six pretenders claimed to be the not-really-murdered youngest son of Ivan the Terrible. Since then, others have claimed to be the murdered Emperor Peter III and the Emperor Alexander I. Thus, rumors that Nicholas and Alexandra had escaped to Germany and whispers that the heir Alexis somehow had survived the execution were in keeping with a long historical tradition, as were stories told by several tragedy-scarred young women claiming to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Now Edvard Radzinsky, a trained Soviet archivist and Russia's most frequently staged playwright after Chekhov, has written what may be the final volume about the deaths of the Romanovs. Working with materials taken from once top-secret Soviet archives and fleshing them out with interviews and first-hand accounts he collected on his own, in \"The Last Tsar\" Radzinsky has pieced together the most detailed account of the shooting of the Imperial family yet to appear.
Newspaper Article
RUSSIA'S CATHERINE: NOT JUST GREAT, 'EXTRAORDINARY'
Catherine the Great-the autocrat who established Russian hegemony on the Black Sea, ended Sweden's reign as a major Baltic power, incorporated the eastern half of Poland into the Russian Empire and refused England's request to hire 50,000 battle-hardened Russian troops to suppress the American Revolution-has been remembered too often for her legendary erotic exploits. Even while she lived, Catherine's supposedly insatiable appetite for sex with men, women and animals seized the imagination of Europe's political cartoonists, and tales of her amorous escapades have been common coin ever since. Battalions of handsome guardsmen reputedly paraded through Catherine's bedchamber during the 34 years (1762-1796) she ruled Russia, and undergraduates still ask if it is true that she died because, as Professor John T. Alexander politely explains (recounting a tale told by others), \"a horse was lowered on her too suddenly.\"
Newspaper Article
Pollution in the name of progress How the leaders of the former Soviet Union systematically poisoned the environment
How faithful were the founders of the Soviet Union to these promises? How genuine was their commitment to the utopia about which they spoke and wrote in such glowing terms? Those are among the questions answered by Murray Feshbach, professor of demography at Georgetown University, and Alfred Friendly Jr., a former Newsweek and New York Times correspondent, in \"Ecocide in the USSR\"-a deeply disturbing book that shows how Lenin and his successors systematically poisoned the air, water, soil and people of the USSR in the name of progress toward their grandly proclaimed goal. As they pursued their quest for an earthly paradise, the rulers of the Soviet Union pillaged the natural resources of a sixth of the earth's territory, polluted a fifth of its fresh water and condemned future generations who live in the vast lands that stretch from the frontiers of Poland to the Pacific to lives of ill health, misery and want. In less than three-quarters of a century, their readiness to waste natural resources and squander human life allowed them to create a superpower in which the average life expectancy of its adults had fallen to that of Paraguay and infant mortality had risen to be on a par with that of China and Sri Lanka. According to an article that appeared in Pravda in 1990, every fourth adult and every sixth child in the Soviet Union now is chronically ill. Parents dare not have their children immunized for fear of unsafe vaccines and unsterilized needles, and medical services have become so poor that 20 percent of the nation's hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from complications caused by medications that have been administered to them during their hospital stays. The gallows humor in the anecdote about two Soviet physicians who, after examining a patient, asked: \"Well, shall we treat him or let him live?\" has taken on a very real ring of truth.
Newspaper Article
Understanding Stalin A former Soviet insider reveals how `the triumph of one man became a tragedy for a whole people
Joseph Stalin created the most brutal and pervasive system of mass terror in modern history. Not counting the tens of millions who died in World War II and the millions more who returned broken and useless from NKVD slave labor camps, Stalin's 25-year war against the citizens of the Soviet Union killed at least 15 million innocent people-nearly three times the number of Jews killed in Hitler's Holocaust. Here was a system built upon the malignant violation of every human right by a man who loved nothing better than to abuse his power. As striking as Stalin's readiness to abuse his power was the willingness of his victims to cheer him on. It was truly unique in the annals of human history, as Dmitri Volkogonov writes in \"Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy,\" that one man could \"exterminate millions of his own countrymen and receive in exchange the whole country's blind adulation.\" How could this have happened? And what sort of man could create a system that took the lives of millions and imposed untold suffering upon tens of millions more? Like Robert Tucker's brilliant \"Stalin in Power,\" published in 1990, Volkogonov's book explores these questions. But Tucker concentrated on Stalin between his rise to power and the outbreak of World War II, while Volkogonov tells the entire tale of how, in his words, the \"triumph of one man became a tragedy for a whole people.\"
Newspaper Article
HOMO SOVIETICUS: SEEING WHAT MADE HIM WHAT HE IS TODAY
Ever since the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia 70 years ago, western experts have probed the mysteries of the world's first socialist state in an effort to understand its politics, society and motivations. Of necessity, they have drawn conclusions about Soviet life without being a part of it, for the Soviet system has stubbornly resisted assimilating foreigners. The barriers that separate \"us\" from \"them\" still remain firmly in place and, despite optimistic westerners' hopes for glasnost, there is no reliable evidence that the barriers are being dismantled. An inside view of the world inhabited by what some have called homo sovieticus, the new Soviet man, therefore still remains beyond the reach of Sovietologists born and educated in the West.
Newspaper Article