Remembering the Dead

Russia?€™s best-known and best-preserved dead body, Lenin, is a leading character in Catherine Merridale?€™s Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, an ambitious, broad-reaching look at how his and millions of other corpses were rendered, treated and remembered in the Soviet Union. Lenin died in January 1924, a time when the Bolsheviks were hastily destroying centuries of accreted religious tradition and building a new world that man, not God, would shape.

Death, of course, was beyond the Bolsheviks?€™ grasp. Their treatment of Lenin?€™s corpse is telling, writes Merridale. First, there was the Funeral Commission, the Immortalization Commission and, finally, the Institute for the Study of Lenin?€™s Brain. With loving detail and the occasional flash of wry wit, Merridale chronicles the petty ideological bickering that accompanied the funeral preparations, the worrisome decay of the body and the hope that someday science would reach the point where it could bring Lenin back to life.

After relating the gruesome details, poking some fun at nervous Party functionaries and reflecting on the people?€™s genuine grief, Merridale dwells on the rich symbolism and profound implications of choosing to construct the massive granite mausoleum on Red Square.

"Soviet power, which sought in so many ways to deny the power of death, turned the heart of its capital, the ceremonial core of its government, into a grave," she writes. "Death had not been conquered. The Bolsheviks were trapped by it."

In death, Merridale, an English academic, has taken on a topic that could easily have been rendered in dry, abundantly footnoted prose. Instead, she takes the reader on a colorful, sure-footed journey spanning the disciplines of history, demography, psychology and sociology.

"Night of Stone" is a tightly woven account based on scores of interviews, Soviet archival sources and contemporary literature. Merridale?€™s simmering anger at the millions of needless deaths gives the narrative an edge and, often, a sweeping eloquence. She is wise, however, to avoid letting her indignation turn into the patronizing righteousness that often creeps into Western accounts of the wars, famines and mass executions that led to 50 million deaths between Russia entering World War I in 1914 and Stalin?€™s exit from this world in 1953.

The urge to make martyrs of those who died unjustly is supremely tempting. Merridale rejects it forcefully at the book?€™s end, writing, "to make them into icons for freedom, consumerist democracy or loosely defined human rights is the most complacent kind of moral tourism."

While the more resonant themes of "Night of Stone" treat death as a barometer of Soviet society?€™s moral health, Merridale takes pains to ground abstractions in a firm historical context. Before the Revolution, the treatment of death was almost exclusively the domain of the Russian Orthodox Church, of which 94 percent of ethnic Russians were members. In Church publications printed for mass consumption, authors like the monk Mitrofan gave a precise accounting of what happens to the soul after death: for three days the soul remains on earth, then it travels to meet God, see heaven for six days, hell for a longer period and, on the 40th day, is judged for eternity.

The vast Russian peasantry did not completely trust the state-controlled Church to help them achieve salvation. As Merridale writes, some peasants feared the village priest to be an informer ready to tell God everything. One strategy to avoid this was for a dying person to secretly change his name and thus start with a clean slate in the eyes of God, whose angels kept a list of sinners and their sins.

With their emphasis on building a communist heaven in this world, the Bolsheviks never came close to creating as elaborate a schematic of life after death. They did come up with the secular Red funeral to partially fill the vacuum. And, as Soviet culture evolved and matured, simple rituals were devised for those who died as citizens ?€” not enemies of the state. The memories of the millions who died the good death in service to the state were preserved in carefully tailored myths.

The suffering and death deliberately caused by the state was accompanied by silence and secrecy, robbing the victims and their families of a context for grieving. This is one of the central themes of Merridale?€™s work: the changing value of death. From the late 1930s until the beginning of World War II, state executions were kept secret, in part, because the "basic message was that human life, without the state, was worthless."

The Soviet state?€™s claim on life and death was so complete in those years that, as one former prisoner told Merridale, "I wanted to kill myself but they told me that only a real enemy of the people would do such a cowardly thing. Soviet people do not kill themselves."

Millions died in the purges, leaving millions more to grieve in silence, afraid to mourn an enemy of the state. It would not be until Gorbachev?€™s glasnost that people were free to grieve properly, but by that time, Merridale notes, "the secret memories would turn out to be elusive, slippery, easily lost because there was so little talk."

Terror enforced the silence and secrecy. Sometimes, though, the evidence of massive, violent death intruded on everyday life and language. Merridale writes of Ukrainian children playing soccer with famine victims?€™ skulls, of Siberian children collecting blueberries with gulag prisoners?€™ skulls, of the important distinction among the starving between the Russian verbs for "people eating" and "corpse eating."

The sheer enormity of the number of needless dead and Merridale?€™s relentless chronicling can make the mind search for a way out, a way to blame it on the peculiarities of the time and place and people of 20th-century Russia. Merridale resists this. She is convinced that Russia is not an anomaly, a place where the people are genetically, historically or culturally destined to kill each other off. Today?€™s Russians are wrong when they blame it on the "so-called Asiatic tradition or the legacy of the Tartar yoke."

This, Merridale writes, is lazy thinking: "It is far harder, after all, to imagine another kind of truth ... that their history of violence did not grow from some national eccentricity, like a taste for eating chunks of salted lard, but from particular combinations of events and circumstances ... they are not members of a different humanity."

Merridale is keenly aware of the baggage she carries as an academic from the West, where life, death and justice mean something else. As a researcher at Moscow?€™s Institute for the Study of Public Opinion told her, "A lot of foreigners come here and ask stupid questions. What?€™s different about you is that you ask stupid questions that we can?€™t answer."

She is contemptuous of Western therapists and counselors who see Russia as a vast nation of victims in bad need of time on the couch. Nor does Merridale have patience for Russians with a similar view that the people suffer en masse from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Perhaps the greatest mistake of all is for the West to triumphantly seize on Russia?€™s "suffering, courage, tenacity and repeated disappointment" as the victory of one set of beliefs over another.

Something went horribly wrong here, especially in the first 30 years of the Soviet state ?€” one of the most disturbing and revolting periods in human history. The response, so far, has been muted and confused, especially when compared with the emphatic "Never again!" evoked by the Holocaust.

"Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia," by Catherine Merridale. 512 pages. Granta. On sale at Anglia, 2/3 Khlebny Pereulok. 1,250 rubles.

Frank Brown is a journalist in Moscow specializing in religious affairs.