The Revolutions of History

Crisis is a word that defined 2008. The crisis in the Caucasus, followed by the crisis in relations between Russia and the West and, of course, the financial crisis. Karl Marx is a name on the tip of many tongues as his observations on capitalism provide food for thought during these challenging times for capitalism, but it is his remark that "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce" that remains perhaps most relevant to Russia. "Continuity or change?" is the eternal question about the country's apparently revolutionary upheavals in the last century. Rulers and empires have come and gone under different banners, but to what extent and how has Russia really changed? The best books reviewed this year in "The Moscow Times" have explored not only recent events and the issues they raise but also the ways in which those events have found striking resonance in the complex texture of Russia's past.

Best History.



In a year when tensions in the Caucasus again flamed into full-scale war, Charles King traces the history of the region through centuries of turmoil in his "The Ghost of Freedom" (Oxford University Press). Invaders and traders have always come from all points of the compass; Moscow's claim to dominion over the Caucasus was first staked during the southward expansion of the mid-16th century. In his review for The Moscow Times, Hugh Barnes wrote that King "shows how the mountainous landscape and its strategic location at the crossroads of East and West led to a multiplicity of political, cultural and economic influences." Recent events suggest that the pattern of upheaval at this crossroads is likely to necessitate new chapters, as ancient feuds become modern conflicts, and unresolved tensions fester, building fodder for future wars.















Best Memoir.

Owen Matthews' family history provides him with a sweeping, heartrending narrative, to which his moving and lucid prose proves a comfortable equal in his "Stalin's Children" (Bloomsbury). Three stories woven together take us from the death in Stalin's purges of his grandfather, a Soviet commissar and fervent believer in the communist cause, to his mother and father's love affair across the Iron Curtain, to his own tales of life in 1990s Moscow. In each tale we find Russia in all its contrasts, from the brutal and the unforgiving to the selfless and the warm.















Best Fiction.

Victor Serge is hardly a household name, but his novel, "The Unforgiving Years" (New York Review of Books), has been described as "a neglected masterpiece." A Russian ??migr?? who wrote in French on Russian themes, his final work is a fractured panorama of the world before, during and after World War II. The four "movements" of the work follow revolutionaries from Paris to France, Germany and Mexico, as they grapple with the horrors of war and the questions that will not leave them: "Could we have got it horribly wrong on some hidden point?" "Did we bring about the opposite of what we wanted?" "It is an extraordinary journey," wrote our reviewer Sally Laird, "but what makes the novel compelling is not so much its events as the vivid, painterly way in which Serge evokes each swiftly illuminated landscape or scene."















Best Biography.

Ideas seem to grow bigger and more extreme in Russia, which perhaps explains why the authorities have always both exploited and feared them. Peter Pringle's "The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov" (Simon & Schuster) follows the destruction of a man at the cutting edge of genetics in the early 20th century. Vavilov was expunged by Soviet authorities because his form of science suggested that some elements of the human organism are unchangeable ?€” anathema to the authorities and their "Homo Sovieticus" project. Instead of harnessing his outstanding talents to produce more productive crops, Stalin chose a more ideologically acceptable bogus peasant scientist to try ?€” without success ?€” to bring about a revolution in agriculture. "The real achievement of this biography is to show that the Russian Revolution left more than physical damage in its wake," wrote Hugh Barnes in his September review. "Not only did it ruin millions of lives, it also destroyed science and culture."















Best Debut.

Nina Khrushcheva's "Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics" (Yale University Press) is a boiling pot of biography, memoir, politics and even a fictitious conversation with the great writer himself. The author interprets Nabokov's life and works as a recipe for Russians ?€” and Russia ?€” to drag themselves out of "the vast undifferentiated Russian collective," the "childish Russian paradise" where suffering is equated with spiritual depth, to a world created by taking responsibility for oneself. As I wrote in my May review of the book, its publication is timely, as Russians continue to search for a way to reconcile their own history with the possibilities of democracy.