Victor Serge (1890-1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-Tsarist exiles and grew up in Brussels where he mingled with socialist, anarchist, unionists, etc.  Leaving home while in his teens, he lived in a French mining village and then in Paris.  He became an anarchist and editor of a like-minded paper and after refusing to testify against comrades who participated in an anarchist action, was sentenced to five-years in prison.

When released in 1917, he traveled in 1919 to Russia then in the midst of a civil war.  From this point on, his description of the Civil War, bloody elimination of factions opposed to the Communists, the excesses of the Cheka, the Kronstadt Rebellion is one of the best descriptions of that period on record.  Still an anarchist, he is allowed to edit several papers (until the Communist close them down) and can participate in governmental conferences until the Communists begin to turn on their own.  Intra-party fighting pits Left Opportunists against Right Opportunist, Left and Right Deviationist against each other and of course, the anarchists against all the above.  Unlike John Reed’s classic (but dry and pro-Party book), Serge gives us a real feeling of the ever-changing forces and factions as the Communists attempt to solidify their hold on the world’s largest country.

About once every decade I treat myself to Anatoli Rybakov’s wonderful trilogy (Children of the Arbat, Fear and Dust and Ashes). Rybakov himself, like his main character, Sasha, was arrested in 1933 and sent to Siberia for three years. That was before the main Stalinist terror and purges which only a couple of short years later would have merited a term of ten or twenty years. After his release, he was barred from most major cities as his internal passport showed that he had been convicted of a crime against the state. Working odd jobs, he was called up into the army after the German invasion of 1941and was twice decorated. After the war, he continued to write but it was not until Gorbachev and glasnost that the first of his trilogy was published at which time, he won international fame. He continued to write until his death in December 1999 at the age of eighty-seven.

The trilogy traces some of the idealistic youth of the early 1930s in the Soviet Union, as they hoped for a better future. Most were members of the Soviet youth movement, the Komsomol which served as a propaganda arm of the Party, aimed at molding strong Soviet citizens. The book traces the lives of various members, such as Sasha who was convicted of anti-Soviet propaganda when his poster at school was deemed to mock various Party members at his school. Some students keep their belief in the Party, one becomes a member of the NKVD and manages to survive the great purge of the secret police while another is thrown into poverty when her high Party ranking father is arrested in the middle of the night.

In 1929, the Soviet government decided to create a Soviet homeland for Jews.  The Jews who had been forced under the Tsars to live “beyond the Pale” could finally have their own homeland, free from oppression, pogroms, etc., and create a wonderful Soviet paradise.  The only problem was, that the area afforded the Jews, Birodidzhan, an area of 14,800 squa miles (Israel encompasses 9,800 square miles) made current day pre-Israel land look like a garden of paradise.  With little water, forested mountains, swamps, many bugs and wild animals, few roads and no natural resources, it offered little to Jews who migrated there, mostly from the cities of the Soviet Union.  Ill prepared for frontier life (many settlers were artists, poets, etc.), many gave up when they realized that there were no paved roads, few buildings (most “settlers” lived in tents) and little if any help from the central government.

Harrison Salisbury was the first NY Times correspondent stationed in Moscow after World War II and wrote a number of both fiction and non-fiction books about life in the Soviet Union, including a classic on the siege of Leningrad, The 900 Days. Unlike Walter Duranty, the besotted and compromised NY Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Soviet regime, Salisbury was not compromised by the system and was often criticized by the Soviets.

This novel tells a familiar story; a young Soviet citizen who somehow runs afoul of the Soviet system. He is pulled from front line service against the Germans and run through the hands of the Soviet secret police (including at Lubyanka prison, also known as the gates of hell) and the Gulag system. Along the way, his life is destroyed; his wife (at his request), divorces him so she may continue her schooling (being married to an enemy of the State would hinder her), his best friend after serving his time becomes a supporter of the State, his dreams of a better world are destroyed.

Despite it all, the main character survives and becomes a major dissent against the system. With the publication of his main book outside of the Soviet system, and, given the timing of its publication, he manages to salvage his dignity and resurrect his dreams of a better world.

Is this book a thinly covered version of the life of Solzhenitsyn (written in a clearer manner than Solzhenitsyn would have ever done)? More likely it is a composite character of survivors of the Gulag system who were able to maintain their humanity and hope for the future.

If you are not familiar with novels about the Soviet system, this is an easy read and should give you an idea of the brutality and craziness of a system which promised utopia but neglected to remember human nature.

Grossman is best remembered for his novel, Life and Fate which has been described as the greatest Russian novel since War and Peace. When originally shown to the Soviet censors, they agreed that it was a great novel but that it could not be published for at least two hundred years; its descriptions of the men and women fighting in the Great Patriotic War were too real and did not pay any homage to Stalin.

The first book that I have read which really examines the contribution, militarily and politically of Russia to the defeat of Napoleon from the time of his invasion of Russia to his fall in 1814. An outstanding work which corrects many historical myths such as it was not Kutuzov who developed the strategy of retreating into Russia’s interior, but rather the Czar and Barclay de Tolly, and that the Czar while an autocrat sat on a very shaky throne.  He also points out the political intelligence of Czar Alexander I who welded together the alliance which defeated Napoleon, overcoming the reluctance of the Austrians and the fear of the Prussians.

Imagine there is a famine in part of your country; you are the Minister who control the rail system which can move food where needed when needed.  You are told that in the entire rail system there are too few cars to carry the good; being a diligent Minister, you find a car here, one there, four there and get them to the correct siding where the much-needed food is needed.  Finally, the train with its precious cargo is loaded and on its way; you wait by your telephone, calling and check on the progress of the train.  It must travel over a thousand miles, but you are determined that it arrives safely even though it must travel over a dangerous route and deal with a massive snow storm.  Finally, past the snowstorm you let yourself to relax only to receive a call that it was all mistaken, there was no train and no, the extra cars you found cannot now be found.  Welcome to the Soviet Union.

During the Second World War, Grossman was an outstanding war correspondent for the Soviet Union and did his part to create the waves of patriotism which helped the Soviet Union defeat Germany.  After the war, Grossman became disillusioned with the system; his visits to the death camps in the Occupied Lands and the refusal of the official State organs to portray the millions of Jewish victims as having any special place in the memory of the war, plus the move towards anti-Semitism once the war was won helped to make him created his greatest novels.

For years, Albert Seaton’s “Battle for Moscow” has been the gold standard for reviews of that famous and brutal battle. This work is a welcome addition to any library on the subject as it is lighter and raises several points which are worth examining. Michael Jones uses eyewitness accounts of actions to bring a personal touch which was missing from Seaton’s and thus the reader is drawn not so much by the technical aspect of the battle as by the personal.

This was the first Glasnost biography to come out of the then Soviet Union using many new resources and archives.  The author, the son of an agrarian specialist who was purged in 1937, went on, despite his questionable background, to become a Colonel General of the Soviet Army. Dedicated to his profession, he was shocked by the 1956 denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev and began to gather material for this book at this time.  In addition to early access to archives, the author also was able to speak to many individuals who were associated with Stalin; although Stalin did not have any close relationships after the suicide of his second wife, these individuals were able to provide tidbits of information about Stalin’s habits, techniques, etc.