Customer Reviews

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

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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."

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.

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.

What an incredible book, and also necessary. Merridale puts so much emotion into her work, and one cannot help but feel incredible sorrow and sympathy for the poor peasants in communist Russia. These stories are essential for us to know, and hopefully suffering of this magnitude will never happen again. Recommended for everyone, as Merridale's style is easy to read and hard to put down. What makes Merridale's book so unique is her combination of history and psychology. She indicates the importance of national recognition of tragedies as a way to help the people heal. Also, she points to the many inefficiencies of communist Russia that most people probably never imagined. Her descriptions of the crematoriums is especially chilling. Worth every penny.

Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, a vast treasure trove of once hidden documents has become available to historians, showing exactly what happened during the bloody reign of Lenin and Stalin.

The most in-depth book on the subject is "The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Empire from Lenin Through Stalin" by Christopher Lawrence Zugger, but you will also want to read "The Black Book of Communism". Everyone will a drop of interest in history will be mesmerized by the sheer scope of the horror created by Lenin and Stalin.

"Night of Stone" is another fascinating glimpse into the starvation, mass executions, gulags and unrelenting terror under communism. The author, a British historian, visited Russia and interviewed witnesses to the brutality of communism.

The group that felt the brunt of communism's murderous impulses were those connected to religion.

"Lenin's hatred of the church" Merridale relates, began in March, 1922, when Lenin wrote, "we must now undertake a decisive and merciless battle against the clergy...The more...clergy...which we succeed in shooting...the better" (pp138-9). Almost the entire of the clergy was murdered.

The hatred extended to places of worship. Convents, monasteries and churches were closed or destroyed, priceless church antiques turned into rubble, and vast numbers of church books and records burned.

An important book.

I cannot compete with the detailed description of one of the earlier reviewers. My own opinion of the book is more impressionistic, which is, I remember details from the different sections, but felt that the big picture is lacking. Ultimately, I could not finish the book and gave it to my husband, who could not finish it either. The author clearly did extensive research for this work and it shows in the careful crafting of scenes in the different eras. I was particularly impressed by the description of the superstitious Orthodox priests at the turn of the prior century and their constant presence in the lives of their parishioners. The descriptions of burial rites, both religious and civil did illuminate one part of the Russian/Soviet/Russian nightmare but, ultimately, I felt that the narrative lacked continuity. It assumed too much about the reader's knowlege of the century covered. I wondered whether the separate chapters had been published as magazine articles. The whole seemed less than the sum of the parts.

One of the constants that I've noticed for many years is the near total ignorance that so many of us have about Russian/Soviet 20th Century History. It seems there has been more interest in soap operas and sitcoms than in the trials and horrors of the vast nation that was our cold war enemy for so many years. Having read dozens of great books on the wars, revolutions, famines etc. of the recent Russian past, it was great to run across one that brought it all together, even if this huge story on occasion becomes macabre in it's deathly persistance. For all those horror fans out there, try this book, and you'll really get a dose of the real thing. Suffering and tragedy completely foreign to most of us. Say the seige of Leningrad during WWII (barely known here), where a great city the size of Chicago loses over a million civilians, more than all the casualties of all the American wars.If you can find a copy, grab it!

Not many people realize that over 50 million Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, etc. lost their lives unnaturally at the first half of the 20th century. This book, however unbalanced by its constance reference to the Orthodox Church and other mistakes, should be applauded by taking this grim statistic and analyzing its effects on the minds and mentality of the Soviet people. These facts have been hidden behind the Iron Curtain far too long for Westerners to be so blissfully ignorant. Bravo to Catherine Merridale for writing this excellent book.

The books suffers from terrible prose. The sentences are interrupted constantly with tangential thoughts set off by dashes and commas and semi-colons. I had to read it very slowly just to make sense of it.
The topic is important. The historical data hidden beneath the mounds of unimportant reflective narrative is good.
Not worth owning. Not worth reading. If the author could condense it down to about 75 pages, it would be a great read.