The Year in Books

It has been a bumper year on the page for Russian leaders, past and present. As far as subject matter goes, Josef Stalin dominated the pack of 64 Russia-related books reviewed this year in The Moscow Times, with Vladimir Putin coming in a distant second.

As the current president sailed into his second term in March, Western journalists chimed in with evaluations of his first four years, delivering books with such no-frills titles as "Putin: Russia's Choice," "Putin's Progress" and "Inside Putin's Russia."

Meanwhile, last year's commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Stalin's death spilled over into this year's crop of books -- not surprising, considering the mountains of archives now available. Josef Vissarionovich figured as the primary focus of five biographical works, made cameo appearances in two novels and loomed in the background of a third, presided over the events of five historical studies, and made life a living hell for the subjects of three personal histories.

Here is The Moscow Times' pick of the five best Russia-related books of 2004, two of which, amazingly, have nothing to do with Stalin.

Best History: The dictator and his Byzantine ruling circle come to life in Simon Sebag Montefiore's "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar." Our reviewer, Abraham Brumberg, called Montefiore's book "as much a history of Stalin's close comrades-in-arms and their wives and children as of the dictator himself." Packed with fascinating details about a ruler who could flip from kindhearted at one moment to heartless the next, this study helps explain why so many of Stalin's henchmen remained passionately devoted to him even as they watched their comrades getting picked off, one by one.

Best Novel: Stalin plays a love interest of sorts in Vladimir Voinovich's satirical novel, "Monumental Propaganda," the first of this exiled dissident's works to be translated into English in nine years. When Stalin's cult of personality is debunked in 1956 and the statue of the dictator erected in the town square is designated as scrap, provincial apparatchik Aglaya Revkina has it installed in her apartment, where it remains standing for the next four decades. "Was Stalin's cult of personality sexual?" our reviewer Laurel Maury speculated. If so, then the writer best able to put so bizarre a relationship into words is Voinovich, who, "instead of raging at having wasted his prime on ridiculous ideals, turns to intelligent laughter."

Best Memoir: There was no room for satire in Stalin's Soviet Union, as poet Osip Mandelstam discovered after being denounced for his bitter 1933 epigram about the "Kremlin crag-dweller." Emma Gerstein stayed close to Mandelstam and his literary circle over the course of his arrest, exile and eventual death in a labor camp, but it wasn't until the 1990s that she wrote her "Moscow Memoirs," and not until this year that it was made available to an English-speaking audience. Our reviewer, Oliver Ready, praised Gerstein's memoirs as an "unusually messy and human picture of great poets and their foibles." Gerstein takes issue with accepted accounts of Mandelstam's heroism under interrogation, but steadfastly holds the poet above human judgment.

Best Biography: A treasure trove of literary trivia, Rosamund Bartlett's biography of Anton Chekhov is "unorthodox, fascinating and highly readable," in the words of our reviewer, John Freedman. Bartlett uses autobiographical details from Chekhov's works to supplement a wealth of factual minutiae, and liberally digresses to answer questions normally left unasked. Organized geographically, with chapters skipping from Moscow to St. Petersburg to the Crimea, "Chekhov: Scenes From a Life" may not be a reference tool, but it is the most vivid portrait of the writer to date.

Best Debut: Comparisons to Chekhov were drawn more than once in the buzz that greeted the nearly simultaneous release in three prestigious literary magazines of three short stories by an unknown Russian-Canadian writer in 2003. This past summer, David Bezmozgis delivered on that promise with a deceptively simple collection titled "Natasha and Other Stories." Each of the stories narrates an event in the life of Mark Berman, who, like Bezmozgis, grows up in Toronto after emigrating with his parents from Latvia. As I noted in my review, the collection deftly captures the humiliations and premature responsibilities of a child forced to act older than his years, launching Bezmozgis into the ranks of young Soviet-born writers currently putting their stamp on immigrant literature.