Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia [Hardcover]

Catherine Merridale (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 8, 2001

A brilliant new work of interpretative history that provides a unique perspective on the beautiful but tortured culture of twentieth-century Russia.

Russia has endured more bloodshed than any other European country in the twentieth century. Yet, while countries such as Germany have learned the value of confronting the darker side of their own pasts, Russia has never faced the reality of its troubled history in a meaningful and collective way. In this provocative and highly original book, Catherine Merridale asks Russians difficult questions about how their country's volatile past has affected their everyday lives, their aspirations, their dreams, and their nightmares.

Based on extensive research including rare imperial archives, Soviet propaganda, memoirs, letters, newspapers, literature, psychiatric studies, and texts, as well as interviews with doctors, priests, social workers, policemen, survivors, gravediggers, and funeral directors, Night of Stone seeks answers to the questions: What is the true impact of violence in the Soviet century? How successfully have the Russians psychologically rewritten their own histories? What rituals have survived the Soviet regime, and what do they tell us of the Russian mentality? Reminiscent of the highly successful The Hour of Our Death, Night of Stone is an emotionally wrenching, eloquent work that will appeal to all readers of Russian and European history as well as anyone interested in the processes of memory.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Russia's story of death has been obscured so often," explains Merridale (Perestroika: The Historical Perspective; Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin). The extraordinary scale of the violence and loss in modern Russian history has been shrouded in secrecy; indeed, the government has only recently acknowledged the hundreds of thousands killed under Stalin. "For 50 years," Merridale writes, "until the fall of Communism, families had kept bereavement of this kind to themselves.... It was dangerous, after all, to mourn the passing of an enemy of the people." Paying particular attention to the ways that Orthodox religion and Soviet atheism have affected Russian bereavement, Merridale explores Russian perceptions of death and afterlife from before the Bolshevik Revolution, through both world wars and the great famines of the 1930s and into the present. Her fascinating study is based on intimate conversations with bereaved Russians, as well as interviews with gravediggers, funeral directors, social workers, doctors and priests, and meticulous readings of imperial archives, Soviet propaganda, letters, memoirs, literature and government documents. (As Merridale points out, much of this research would have been impossible 20 years ago.) Merridale scrupulously avoids imposing her own ideological or cultural prejudices on her subject. By turns solemn and grisly, empathetic and scholarly, this inspired work provides a unique window on Soviet history through the brutality, ceremony and silences of death.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Merridale (history, Univ. of Bristol), the author of Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: The Communist Party in the Capital, 1925-32 (1990) and Perestroika: The Historical Perspective (1991), offers a history of the Soviet Union from the perspective of the Russian view of death. The plodding beginning (a 30-page foreword) gives way to insightful historical perspective. This work is in line with recent histories by Gregory Freeze (Russia: A History, LJ 5/1/98), Martin Malia (Russia Under Western Eyes, LJ 2/1/99), and Robert Service (A History of Twentieth-Century Russia, LJ 3/1/98)) but adds new information about the purges of the Thirties and Forties, the liquidation of the Kulaks, and more contemporary pogroms and ethnic cleansings of Chechnia. Chapter 4, "Transforming Fire," begins to set this book apart from earlier works of Sovietologists; its treatment of the USSR funeral industry during the Twenties and Thirties is, in my reading, unique. Merridale's reason for writing is to help comprehend the feelings and actions of the present day. "Confusions about loyalty help to explain why it is that some people still remain within the grip of memories that torment them. They were not happy in the past, but they cannot approve of the present either." Recommended for academic libraries. Harry Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. Syst., Iola
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (March 8, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670894745
• ISBN-13: 978-0670894741
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,209,207 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "the blood that lies beyond any death,", August 27, 2001

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (Hardcover)

This is a book that is painful to read, but what it deals with is far more important than the reader's discomfort. This is a book that deals with Russia's experience of death. But of course, what it deals with is the Russian experience with terror and mass murder. Starting off with the rather depresssing and miserable Tsarist state, Russians descended first into the inferno of the first world war, then into the massacres, famine, diseases and cannibalism of the revolutionary civil war. After a bit of a breather, it would then descend into the brutality and famines of collectivization and famine, then the purges and the Gulag, into the final frozen wastelands of the second world war. The climb up Mount Purgatory has been a slow one, and there is no guarantee that anyone will reach the garden at the top where virtuous pagans can go no further. Merridale brings a number of virtues to this account. First, she has read widely and taken care to read the most recent literature (the separate totals of collectivization, famine, purge and gulag have seven digits, not eight). Moreover she has a fine eye for detail. Some are fascinating, such as the fact that Stalin's son spent his infant years in a special nursery designed to be run on Freudian principles. We read stories of the grotesque shortage of graves in 1919 Leningrad, and the pathetically unsuccessful attempts to build a crematorium to deal with the corpses. As an example of Soviet kitsch, we read of popular (and rather tasteless) suggestions for a pantheon in Stalin's memory. There are the relatively small details of Stalinist cruelty, such as the fact that postwar invalids were swept off the streets in order to encourage a fatuous optimism, or the absence of drugs and anaesthetic to ease the pain of dying cancer patients, or the general contempt for mental patients. There are tales of people living through the famine or the purges apparently unaware of its existence, people who still now believe that the myriads of political prisoners were guilty of something, relatives of prisoners denouncing or abandoning their families. More important, though, is Merridale's subtlety and intelligence. The ambiguity is noted early on ("All sides--Reds, Whites, Greens, anarchists (Blacks), and nationalists-- used terror, including the mass slaughter of vilians, as part of their political and military strategy). Early on, she notes old popular traditions which suggest a somewhat callous attitude towards the death of one's children. Yet other traditions say too much grief harms the escaping soul, that tears might bind its soul to the earth forever. Merridale seeks to challenge the idea that the Russians were simply brutalized. She seeks to suggest a more subtle idea of trauma, an idea which is resisted by much of the postSoviet psychiatric profession and indeed by many of the victims she interviews. One problem, of course, is the problem of collective memory in a society that has not allowed it to remember. She notes that there is some evidence that the victims of the Stalinist famine of 1932-33 in Khazakstan no longer remember it, because their society has changed so much. Many monologues seem to have a scripted character, "often generality, chunks of Solzhenitsyn, rumor, snatches from the Book of Revelation..." When people claim they were always religious, or nationalist or anti-communist one cannot take them at their word. One of the most depressing elements of this book is sickening and consistent sense of ambiguity and responsiblity, the way so many people were both victims and exectutioners. There are few reservations one should make about this book. Merridale does at one point confuse the coronation of Nicholas II with the 300th anniversary of the Romanovs. More important, this is very much a book about Russian suffering. Anti-Semitism is also a constant theme, and there are passages about the Ukraine, the annexed Baltic countries, and the 1988 Armenian earthquake. On the other hand, the "Muslim" countries in the far East make almost no appearance, even though they made up at least a fifth of the old Soviet Union. In the later chapters the language shows the strain of dealing with such material without lapsing into cliche. There is a tendency to view the (Orthodox) religious beliefs as a salutary resistance to totalitarianism. Yet at other times, Merridale notes that much of the faith has a retroactive profession, and she notes a Bishop and a former Jew make anti-semitic remarks. The hope for a proper sense of memory to help create a viable democracy appears hollow. How could it be otherwise when much of the post-Soviet elite's objection to Communism was that it produced less to steal than capitalism? How could it be otherwise when Orthodoxy only commemorates its own dead, but cannot find the words to condemn the butchers of Sbrenicia? But in the end Merridale is left with the silence of the dead, "I cannot make it any clearer, and I do not think I have come home."

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Probaby the best book you'll read this year!, October 25, 2002

By 

Donal A. O'Neill - See all my reviews

This review is from: Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (Hardcover)

This is the most moving and memorable book I've read for many years. The scope is breath-taking, no less than an investigation of the Russian attitude to death, and ways of coping with it, from the late Czarist times to the present day. Given Russia's ghastly 20th century history the story is a terrible one and at many places in the book one has to pause, quite overcome by pity and emotion. Horror is piled on horror, though never for the sake of shock, yet the overriding feeling on finishing the book is of amazement at the resilience and nobility of the human spirit. The countless instances of cruelty, misery and waste, on a scale incomprehensible in a Western country, are matched by an even greater number of cases of endurance and triumph, if not physical, then spiritual. The overriding impression is of hell let loose on earth, not once, not transiently, but repeatedly, sustainedly, of millions dying, suffering and degraded in the process and yet of the survivors maintaining humanity, generosity and hope. Stupidity, prejudice and bull-headed arrogance all play their role in the story but more terrifying still is the sense of conscious, deliberate distancing from all human compassion that underlay so many of the man-made tragedies described. It is inappropriate to say that anyone will enjoy reading this wonderful book but they will be thrilled, moved and possibly changed by it. Other than by Zoë Oldenbourg's unforgettable novel "Destiny of Fire" I have never been so disturbed and challenged by a single book.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Finally the stories can be told, July 13, 2001

By 

Kimberley Mitchell "mitchki" (Woodbridge, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (Hardcover)

The history of 20th century Russia has led from one death-dealing regime to another, but always with a severe penalty attached to telling the truth about the repression and the people who've died.

Catherine Merridale's book tells the stories which before could not be told. She investigates original documents, footnotes profusely, and interviews survivors.

The stories are each unique, and in the absence of communal review, do not form a cohesive unified tale. This in itself may be the most poignant feature of this book, not only the courage and stoicism with which these sturdy people denied past atrocities and went on with their lives, but the profound silence of the denial.

It is a grim story, but a true one, and it deserves to be heard. In the face of repressions on this scale, it is easier to put the petty deceipts and injustices of our own time and place into some kind of perspective.