"Lenin's Tomb" by David Remnick page 223

I started reading this Pulitzer Prize winning history of the last days of the Soviet Empire about a month ago, and I have read 223 of 530 pages of rather brilliant writing. Remnick lived in the U.S.S.R. for four years as a correspondent for the Washington Post, I think between 1988 and 1992. During that time, he interviewed people, researched, traveled, and literally lived the history as it happened. The book is the product of that work as well as the compilation of the articles he wrote for the Post.

Living as I am in a post Soviet eastern bloc country, this book has been an amazing education to augment what I have experienced here. The most powerful lesson I’ve seen so far is what happens when a society becomes Godless. There was so much energy poured into forcing this system into place, rolling roughshod over anyone who so much as questioned it. And then to maintain that system for upwards of seventy years, all the energy of constantly saying black is white…how could it do anything but destroy people, especially when they had to finally face the fact that black is black.

Many of the stories early in the book are about true believers who dedicated their lives to communism and the state, who then had to come to terms with the horror of it. I see more clearly than ever why God’s first commandment is Thou shalt have no other gods before me. These people bowed to and worshiped something invented and implemented by horribly flawed men, and it destroyed them.

I’ve known for a long time that the Stalinist purges claimed more that 20 million lives. Some put the number as high as 60 million. What the book has really pounded into me is that one didn’t have to get a bullet in the back of the head or be buried in a mass grave to have their life destroyed. The collectivization of the farms throughout eleven time zones of our world shredded to threads the fabric of thousands of societies and put nothing in its place. Remnick tells the stories of the old women in the nursing homes who remember before all that what a joy is was just to own some chickens.

Beyond being a fine wordsmith, I also admire Remnick’s pluck. He goes places he is far from welcome, pursues people who don’t want to be found, and through persistence, gets their stories. I get nervous going to a cranky babushka in the kiosk for a bus ticket, and get totally riled if she refuses to sell me one.