John Reed, the American journalist buried in the Kremlin, spoke of "ten days that shook the world" to sum up the Russian Revolution. In reality, it was seven decades that tried to transform society and ended up creating an amount of suffering impossible to measure. When the photographer Robert Capa and the novelist John Steinbeck were invited to tour the Soviet Union in 1949, at the beginning of the Cold War, their trip aroused deep mistrust in the US At the end of their journey, the future Nobel Prize in Literature counts that, before leaving for the West, they searched their luggage and took photos from Capa showing the destruction of Stalingrad or the prisoners of war. But they left them what the journalists considered important: “The farms and the faces,the images of the Russian people were intact, and that's what we went looking for, ”Steinbeck writes in
A Russian Journal
(published in Spanish by Grupo Unisón, 2005).
"The Russians we met wanted the same things that everyone wants: a good life, security and peace."
The USSR has produced tons of literature, essays and history: in this necessarily incomplete list of books about the Soviet world, we have tried to follow Steinbeck's path and include books that tell how that regime influenced the lives of specific people, that in many cases it destroyed.
'The Russian revolution.
History and memory '
Jose Maria Faraldo
'The Russian Revolution: History and Memory', by José María Faraldo
At the level of already classic books such as
The Russian Revolution
, by the conservative historian Richard Pipes, or The
Russian Revolution. The tragedy of a people
, by the expert on Stalinism Orlando Figes, although much more affordable (just 200 pages compared to a thousand of each of the previous volumes), professor José María Faraldo builds in
The Russian Revolution: History and Memory
(Alliance , 2017), a highly documented and easily readable account of the seven years from 1917 until Lenin's death in 1924. Taking advantage of the opening of the Soviet archives under Gorbachev, Faraldo reconstructs the crucial years of the revolution, mixing facts and characters without forgetting the enormous human cost that that change of regime produced.
'Those who whisper.
Repression in Stalin's Russia '
Orlando Figes
'Those who whisper.
The Repression in Stalin's Russia ', by Orlando Figes.
The title of this huge (in every way) book by Orlando Figes sums up the terror under Stalin: no one dared to speak because death was always near.
Those who whisper.
The Repression in Stalin's Russia
(Edhasa, 2009) is a story that drags the reader into a paranoid and ruthless world, full of details as real as they are implausible: a man was declared "enemy of the people" during the Great Terror by to use, unknowingly, a phrase that the outlaw Leon Trotsky had used in a letter.
For those who still have the courage to continue reading about one of the most terrible moments of humanity, this book can be complemented with
In the Court of the Red Tsar
by Simon Sebag Montefiori, which tells the terror from the point of view of those around Stalin.
'Against all hope'
Nobodyzhda Mandelstam
'Against All Hope', by Nadiezhda Mandelstam
The memoirs of the poet Nadiezhda Mandelstam constitute one of the most beautiful, moving and terrible testimonies of Stalinism.
Her husband, the great poet Ósip Mandelstam, died in the Gulag in 1938, and she lived in internal exile until the dictator's death.
Against all hope
(Cliff) is a story of love and survival, which portrays a state turned into a monster that devours everything.
It shows moments of horror, but also of solidarity.
And it explains the extent to which death had become routine.
She recalls a conversation with the caretaker of her building, when she asks about her husband and explains that he has died in the Gulag.
"The woman sighed: 'And we thought you would be the first."
Ósip Mandelstam's poems and essays are also published in Spanish.
'Tales of Kolimá'
Varlam Shalamov
'Tales of Kolima', by Varlam Shalámov.
Together with
the Gulag Archipelago
, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the
Tales of Kolima
(Minuscule), by Varlam Shalámov, constitute the great fresco of the concentration camps of Stalinism. Shalámov spent almost twenty years in the Soviet ice cream gulag and his work was published clandestinely, as
samizdat
, books that were copied and distributed by hand. Edited in Spanish in six volumes, his stories can be read separately, although they intertwine and relate to each other to build a portrait of the cold and ruthless terror that roams freely in the fields. The
Gulag
trial
. History of the Soviet concentration camps,
with which Anne Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, it can serve to complete the works of Shalámov and Solzhenitsyn.
'Engineers of the soul'
Frank Westerman
'Engineers of the soul', by Frank Westerman.
Without propaganda it is very difficult to understand real socialism.
In his critique of
Those Who Whisper
, the French narrator Emmanuel Carrère wrote that "in the USSR, property was not abolished, but reality."
Engineers of the soul
, a fabulous essay by the Dutch journalist Frank Westerman, narrates the literary world under the Soviet totalitarian system, whose maximum creative aspiration can be summed up in the work
The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea
, “on Comrade Krzhizhanovski's hydrological plan”.
Máximo Gorki, a crucial character in this book, is also a crucial character in another amazing essay on art, in this case architecture, under Stalin:
Terror and utopia.
Moscow in 1937
, by the German Karl Schlögel.
'Voices of Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future'
Svetlana Alexievich
'Voices of Chernobyl: Chronicle of the future', by Svetlana Alexievich.
Two books can be used to relate the end of the Soviet world, both are written by journalists who knew communism and who knew how to tell about its shipwreck. They are
The Empire
, by the Polish Ryszard Kapuscinski, and
Voices of Chernobyl
, by the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich, the first journalist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. With a style in which his voice barely appears and is filled with those of the protagonists of his stories, Alexievich constructs a choral account of the catastrophe and, at the same time, of politicians incapable of managing the reality they created, which ended up constituting the epitaph of the USSR. A novel by the great Cold War narrator, John le Carré, was also able to capture the agony of that world:
The Russian House.
As in all his work, the British writer portrayed characters who tried to do the right thing, such as those people that Capa and Steinbeck crossed paths with, who were looking for a better life that they surely did not have.
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