Sheila Fitzpatrick

“Nina realised that her diary was potentially dangerous. After her mother read it, fearing that it ‘might contain something counter-revoluntionary’ and finding that it did, Nina crossed out some of the most dangerous passages. But her first, typically adolescent reaction was a stab of embarrassment that her mother had read what she’d written about boys. In an earlier entry she had said: ‘What if the apartment is suddenly searched and it is confiscated because of my completely uncensored remarks about Stalin? And it winds up in the hands of the secret police? They’ll read it and laugh at my amorous gibberish.’ In the event the NKVD didn’t laugh when they read her diary.”

“Kitchens and bathrooms were the sites of epic battles over property (saucepans, washbasins) and use of space. Readers of Svetlana Boym’s Common Places will recall the nightmarish story of her parents’ efforts to entertain foreign visitors in their room in a communal apartment while a stream of urine from a drunken neighbour . . . trickled slowly under the door.”

Has 20th-century Russia a history? The problem is that Russia – or, to be precise, the Russian Federation – became a nation state, or something approximating to it, only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For nearly seventy years (1923-1991), it was part of the Soviet Union; for the first 17 years of the century, it was part of the multinational empire ruled by the Romanovs. ‘What was Russia? And what was Russia’s part in the Soviet Union?’ Robert Service asks in his introduction. But there are no answers to these questions, only – as is frequently the case in this rich but sometimes inconclusive work – a series of options. ‘For some witnesses the Soviet era was an assault on everything fundamentally Russian. For others, Russia under Stalin and Brezhnev attained her destiny as the dominant republic within a USSR. For yet others neither tsarism nor Communism embodied the positive quintessence of Russianness.’ Russia in the 20th century, Service tells us, was an entity with changing borders and a population only weakly and intermittently interested in being ‘Russian’, incorporated within multinational states whose leaders’ attitudes to Russianness changed over time. Strictly speaking, it was not even ‘Russia’ that was incorporated, but a multinational ‘Russian Socialist Federated Republic’. In a more literal sense than Churchill intended, Russia was ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’.’‘

Leo Tolstoy was not only a great writer but also a passionately outspoken public moralist in the Russian prophetic mode followed a century later by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A political presence because of his impact on public opinion, he steered clear of direct political involvement. He was above politics. ‘On the one hand,’ Lenin wrote of him in 1908, ‘we have a remarkably powerful, direct and sincere protest against social lies and falsehood, while on the other we have the Tolstoyan, i.e. the washed-out, hysterical cry-baby known as the Russian intellectual, who publicly beats his breast and cries: I am vile, I am wretched, but I am morally perfecting myself; I do not eat meat any more and now feed only on rice patties.’