The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

In its rich complexity human character is a source of numerous eventualities. So is a culture. When we try to understand a culture different than ours it is a mistake to assume that what is observed in a particular context or at a particular moment represents the totality of that culture. In fact, at any given moment most of a culture’s characteristics and make-up lie latent, waiting to manifest themselves at a particular juncture or in a particular context.

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In this volume we have let the writers decide what is to be revealed. They speak of events which endure in their memory. Often it is of universal human experience, the consciousness of self in the face of inevitable death. It is at such times that anguish, transformed by intelligence into recollection, loses its power to injure their hearts. Whether in its religious sense or removed from it, “bearing witness” stimulates a desire in every writer to open her or himself to other eyes, to testify and thus transform the sting of memory into some greater tempering idea which frees the rest of their lives from the burden of secrecy. In the process, their liberation becomes our gift.

All too often Russians, as well as other observers, assume Russia to be a homogeneous and corporate cultural entity. Such a view was doubtlessly influenced by the monolithic political structure of the Soviet Union as it drove to homogenize its subjects. Communist ideology tended to see human beings as a commodity and an instrument. Coercion and violence were used against those with contrary views. The result, to some degree, was an actual but also a presumed uniformity.

In cultures which tend toward uniformity and homogeneity the collective self-view and the self-image of the individual largely coincide. Such coincidence becomes especially apparent as one recalls descriptions of small and isolated cultures such as those of insular tribes and contemporary “cults” in which the individual is submerged within a corporate sensibility. In contrast, American experience is very heterogeneous and broad in spectrum. In a monolithic realm a people’s culture is not only the sole source of self-identity but also the primary means of knowing the external world. This is not the case for Russia. It does not have a monoculture. If anything, its culture is far more heterogeneous than the cultures of its neighboring nations. Language, especially its lexicon, is an objective indicator of the openness and permeability of a culture. Russian, by borrowing from languages as diverse as Iranian, the Turkic group, the Scandinavian group, Greek, Bulgarian, Tatar and Mongolian, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, German, French, and English, demonstrates its rich and productive variety.

In some minds such variety raises the question of whether a coherent, cognizable, and explicable Russian culture exists at all. This book does not attempt to answer that question nor define the culture but rather suggests the shape of its dynamic. In a classic formulation A.L. Kroeber affirms that every culture “derives most of its component elements from its own past” but also “tends to absorb new elements . . . and reshape them in accord with its own patterns.”1 In a thriving culture both processes are at work simultaneously. It has always been a debate among Russians what the proportions of the old and the new elements should be. This was the argument between the so-called “Slavophiles” and the

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“Westernizers” in the nineteenth century and is currently the debate between the isolationists and the integrationists. The debate seems largely political but is driven by inchoate, deeply rooted attitudes and values.

The would-be fusion of the old and new elements always creates tension. And it is a tension which permeates the life of most Russians. Even though there is a saying in the language which proclaims that “The destiny of one person is the destiny of a whole generation,” the epic and the private do not run an identical course. The line between collective and personal destiny may be difficult to locate, but it does exist.

This volume looks at private life, its satisfactions and discontents, its joys and sorrows. Yet, while looking at such life we do not presume that the mundane and the routine determine all. Russian life in the hundred years before 1991 did include much violent change and great hardship. We want to dispel the notion, however, that Russian life was one disaster after another, an endemic and unrelieved tragedy. Life, after all, is not lived in disaster. It may be lived through a disaster, but even then life assumes a routine, though perhaps an altered one.