The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Russia has had a great influence on the twentieth century world. Russian music, dance, theatre, art, and literature have shaped contemporary life in significant ways. It is very unlikely that one reaches adulthood without reading Dr. Zhivago, seeing the films of Eisenstein or the plays of Chekhov. And any overview of 20th century art and music will prominently include Malevich, Kandinsky, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. But this influence also has a dark side. The Russian version of communism was a virulent ideology during a major part of the twentieth century, its global impact so profound that it has rightly become the source of countless studies and extensive documentation. While this focus on Russian communism is invaluable and completely justified, it too often overshadows the many other aspects of Russian life. There is still an unknown Russia, a Russia comprised of private lives as opposed to public history. This Russia includes the stories of real people who lived during the turbulent one-hundred years between 1890-1991, people from diverse backgrounds, a broad geographic spectrum, and various educational and socio-economic levels. This volume, which brings together letters, diaries, personal sketches, and memoirs—most of which are appearing in English for the first time—was put together to tell that fascinating story.

Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, with the rapid growth of cities and industry and Russia’s entrance into modernity, and proceeding chronologically to the collapse of the USSR in August 1991, the stories presented here do not simply trace linear change punctuated by great convulsive events. Those are the peaks of history. These accounts have been written by people who lived in the shadows of those peaks but who strived to make meaning of their lives. The selections speak in an intimate and personal voice of immediate experience rather than of the distant, general flow of history.

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Introduction

Personal matters—privations, suffering, joys, achievements—are recounted with candor and insight.

This book is not an examination of Russian reality in terms of Western ideas, concepts, or norms but an evocation of twentieth century life through the personal voice. The English-speaking reader will elicit for her or himself the values in Russian culture, both latent and manifest, which shape the attitudes and guide the behavior of Russians.

All too often the Russian experience has been presented as either horrific or heroic, absorbed in persecution and “victimology.” The field is replete with Gulag accounts. This volume goes beyond that approach and deals with the personal and intimate—love, sexuality, courtship, marriage, family life, work, faith, and education. In choosing these selections, we were not guided by “historical objectivity” but rather by subjectivity, by an emphasis on the subject or the unique self. This approach intentionally counters and supplements the vast majority of existing works devoted to Russian history and culture. We offer the reader no great individuals, no overarching story lines, no plots conceived by an omniscient author. The private selves who wrote their own life stories did so in a language of common experience and common values without awareness of a greater meaning beyond the intimate particulars of their lives. In this sense the naive and unaffected recorder of history is its authentic witness.

It is a given in anthropology that a culture’s collective self-view tends to be idealized and that such an idealization becomes a lens through which history and experience are viewed and understood. It is also true that a member of a given culture presents himself to outsiders in terms of that idealization. Many observers, both non-Russian and Russian, see only the idealization, the defining myths, and respond to them according to their own pre-existing needs and desires. Such needs and desires may be positively or negatively charged, but in either case they promote linear, monocausal interpretations of what has been observed, at the expense of the complex, contradictory, and even paradoxical realities of life. In 1943 in Amsterdam, confined to a secluded space, Anne Frank lived simultaneously in fear of the Nazis and in love with Pieter van Daan. To assume that she lived only in terror, that terror was the singular emotion of her life, would be to deny her full breadth of being and her full human dignity. Anne’s case cautions us to be wary of simple explanations of human behavior and sensibility.