Finding God in the Gulag

In college, I borrowed a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s famous work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, from the BYU library, and read it.  This was remarkable on two counts.  First, this was not assigned reading for a class; it was of my own free will and choice.  Second, it was fascinating!  It was an engrossing story that pulled the reader in.  I could easily imagine myself right there alongside the title character freezing to death in a work brigade and dealing with the guards and fellow inmates in the barracks.  It brought to life the horrid conditions of Soviet labor camps, something that the world hasn’t entirely gotten away from yet.  It was something I found interesting enough to want to know more about.

Finding God in the Gulag: A History of Christianity in the Soviet Penal System by Jeffrey S. Hardy (ISBN: 978-0-19-775167-1) is a book that gives readers a chance to know more about life in the Gulag.  Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s based-on-a-true-story novel, this book is an academic look at Christianity in the Soviet camps from the earliest days under Lenin to the dying days of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev with a little post-script about a few things in the post-Soviet times.  It catalogs both attempts by inmates to life and express their religions and attempts by the prison management to suppress religion.  It was interesting to note that efforts to extinguish religion in prisoners was not uniform in the Soviet Union.  It was more lax in some camps than in others.  There wasn’t always a central policy that camp managers could look to, so they did it their own way.  Sometimes that meant believers were beaten and spent time in solitary confinement.  Sometimes that meant a Christian guard did nothing when a prisoner prayed or sang a hymn or made an icon.  There was a short section on faith among thieves and other such common criminals, including a few paragraphs about the fascinating world of Russian prison tattoos.  The book also catalogs people losing their faith, which was unsurprising, and one that is not judged neither by the author nor by most prisoners who are cited in the book.  They tended to believe the camps were inhumane and that one should not be judged too harshly or even at all for what they did in the camps.  There was also a little proselyting that happened in the labor camps.  This was especially true of Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but Orthodox and Catholic priests also preached and even baptized people.  Toward the end of the Soviet regime, religion was sometimes encouraged because it generally had a good influence on prisoners and mediated their violent behavior.

The book was an interesting read and would be interesting to people interested in Russian or Soviet history or religion.  It only briefly discussed non-Christian religions, which are major players in Russia, but either weren’t the focus of the book or weren’t such a concern in the Gulag.  I did think the book was slightly disorganized and it felt like the narrative jumped around a lot, but I am not sure how I would’ve better organized it.  I thought the stories about people finding faith and maintaining faith despite great psychological and physical pressure were inspiring.  People sacrificed a lot to maintain their belief in God and to live it according to their conscience.  It’s worth looking to many of these people as examples of standing up for what’s right no matter the consequences.

   

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Wallenberg

World War II is probably most famous for the atrocities of the Nazi regime in Germany.  It’s other claims to fame are not much better, including the general death, mayhem, and destruction that are an inevitable part of war.  While those are real, true parts of war and human nature, wars and other dire situations also bring out the best in some people.  Two pieces of literature taught me that early in life.  First was the Winged Watchman, a book about the Dutch resistance during World War II.  It is based on true accounts of Dutch efforts in the war.  I read and re-read it as a kid, easily placing myself in the roles of the main characters.  Second was the Diary of Anne Frank.  The family that hid her continues to have my greatest admiration.  These books inculcated a sense of duty and sacrifice that are the exact opposite of the destruction the war with which the war is most commonly associated.

Wallenberg: The Incredible True Story of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Jews by Kati Marton (ISBN: 978-1-61145-337-9) tells one of the positive stories from World War II, one that definitely fits the mold of duty, daring, and sacrifice.  Wallenberg is the story of Raoul Wallenberg, a member of a wealthy Swedish dynasty, who was unafraid to use his position to augment his natural abilities to help save Jews from Nazis and Hungary’s Nazi-supported regime.  Wallenberg, an orphan, did not have the usual family resources available to him, and, with his grandfather’s help, charted his own course after his early years, one that included extensive travel and schooling abroad.  He later tried banking, but was unfulfilled.  He worked with the Swedish foreign ministry and Western organizations toward a higher purpose in Hungary, where he devised various systems to help preserve the lives of Hungary’s Jews.  He provided them with Swedish documents, sometimes as Jews were being loaded on trains to Nazi death camps.  He provided Swedish-flagged housing in Budapest and met with Hungarian and Nazi dignitaries, always looking for a sympathetic ear and sometimes finding one, which lent him a little more time.  As the Russians closed in on Budapest, he figured his mission was not over, but the Russians believed otherwise, especially since he got some of his money from Western organizations.  They arrested him and sent him to the Soviet Union, where he languished in the Gulag until he died, having made the ultimate sacrifice in his efforts to love and serve his fellow man.

The book, coming highly recommended, did not disappoint.  Every part of it was interesting, even the discussion of Wallenberg’s family history and early years and some of the post-war intrigue from the Soviets.  The Soviet portion of the story was actually pretty sad, especially once Stalin had died.  It seemed to me that there was no real reason to hold Wallenberg any longer, but the Soviet system and leaders weren't up to releasing him, somehow viewing that as an affront to them.  The story of Wallenberg's daring and sacrifice was exhilarating and inspiring.  That may be the book’s largest contribution.  The reader is uplifted and gets a glimpse of what it means to do the right thing when doing the right thing likely comes with a very steep cost.  Wallenberg's example is one worth emulating.

 

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Reagan and Gorbachev

Ronald Reagan was technically the second president in my life, Jimmy Carter being president until 1981, but I really don’t remember much about any president from my life before George H. W. Bush.  In fairness to the presidents, I don’t remember a whole lot before 1989 anyway, just sporadic incidents, and some of those are somewhat nebulous memories that lack a lot of specifics.  I certainly wasn’t paying attention to politics.  Later in life, I started to learn about Reagan and have come to greatly admire him and much of what he did while in office as the president.  I was slightly more aware of who Mikhail Gorbachev was because he was at the helm of the Soviet Union when it fell apart, and the Eastern Bloc’s downfall holds a rather prominent place in those few early memories of mine (in part because some of it was broadcast on TV and because of a strong family history tie I have to Germany that made some of those happenings seem interesting to me).  I remember the Russian words glasnost and perestroika being bandied about in the American press, but was largely unaware of most of the events leading up to those policies and then to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended by Jack F. Matlock, Jr. (ISBN: 0-679-46323-2) is a very detailed, play-by-play recounting of most (all?) of the diplomatic events leading up to the end of the Cold War.  Matlock was a career diplomat that served on the National Security Council.  This position and his academic and diplomatic career as a specialist on Russia provided him with an insider’s perspective on the processes that led up to the end of the Cold War.  The book chronicles, often in great detail, various meetings, negotiations, summits, and communications that involved leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union.  The focus was, of course, on what the two countries’ leaders, Reagan and Gorbachev, did, including their preparations before their meetings, their political efforts in their home countries in order to secure the ability to push their preferred policies forward.  Matlock talked about the papers prepared for Reagan and how Reagan studied them.  He talked about the negotiation processes.  He recounted meetings between secretaries of state and foreign ministers.  Those meetings, though, and the preparations were made possible by the leaders’ efforts to put people in place that would assist them.  The preparations were made because the leaders desired that, something that was not always the case with the leaders who came before them.  While Matlock endeavored to explain that so-called summit meetings weren’t the most important things in the diplomatic arsenal, those are what got headlines and what, ultimately, required the most preparation and resulted in the headline deals that moved the West and the Soviets away from nuclear war and toward peace.  He, therefore, spent most of the book talking about these meetings that took place in Moscow, Washington, Geneva, and Reykjavík.

The book was interesting since it presented a lot of detail about the diplomacy the two leaders were involved in, but was not what I expected since it presented so much information on the processes and not as much about the two leaders themselves.  I realize that they have had so many biographies written about them that new information might be difficult to present, so respect the author’s decision to explain more about how they drove the process and how their respective personalities influenced politics and people toward their ultimate goal of peace.  The agreements reached were significant by any standard and led to the end of the Cold War, a seminal event in the history of the world that continues to shape today’s world.  The level of detail was sometimes excessive, I thought, and it felt like I had to push through some passages.  In general, though, the writing and information presented were relevant to the story and points being made, and it was kind of interesting to read about the great level of effort required on so many levels to bring a couple heads of state together.  The book only cemented by opinions of these two men further.  They were visionary and extremely able politicians.  They made mistakes on the way, but learned from them and ultimately reached their goals (Reagan more than Gorbachev, but Gorbachev is worthy of a lot of credit since his policies led to even greater changes).  In today’s world where the East and the West are set against each other, there may be something to learn from Reagan and Gorbachev’s efforts to lessen conflict in the world.

   

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The Czech Black Book

I first heard about Czechoslovakia as a kid because it was part of the Eastern Bloc, countries allied with (in some cases, maybe better described as under the control of) the Soviet Union.  I cheered against the Czechs anytime they were in an international sports competition along with the U.S. like the Olympics.  Later, a great uncle and aunt of mine served a mission in the post-Soviet Czech Republic, but I didn’t know my grandma’s extended family well, and that was really just a footnote in my life.  When I married a Czech, I figured that, out of courtesy, if nothing else, I should learn a little more about the country.  It’s proven more interesting than just that cursory look.  One place I started learning about the history of the Czech Republic was with the Prague Spring.

The Czech Black Book, edited by Robert Littell, is a collection of original source documents from the first week of the invasion.  There are press releases, official announcements, and news stories that were curated in response to Russian propaganda that claimed Russia and other Warsaw Pact countries came to Czechoslovakia to help and at the request of the Czechoslovaks (the Russians called their collection the White Book, hence the Czech one being black).  The documents from the Czechs show a much different picture.  The news reports feature interviews of high-level Czechoslovaks as well as from men on the street, and the feeling is that they simply wanted to be left alone and chart their own course through history unhindered by the Russians, whom they had previously considered friends.  There was often a feeling expressed that the invasion had done unrepairable damage to that relationship.  The government press releases and communiqués showed a government united around the reformers in the Czechoslovak Communist Party and a total disdain for the few leaders who preferred the Russian socialist path.  The Czechoslovak leaders weren’t ready to throw communism or socialism away (it reminded me of Gorbachev a little), but they certainly wanted to be able to choose their own way, and the Russians weren’t ready for their satellites to have that level of independence.  Trade unions, clubs, and other organizations also called on the citizens of Czechoslovakia to resist the invaders, although not violently, but by the interesting peaceful means of ignoring them.  They were to refuse to help the Russians whenever possible, to continue their everyday lives as if nothing was happening around them since strikes and other resistance would simply give the Russians the excuse they needed  to escalate the action.  Even when a few Czechoslovak citizens lost their lives, were arrested, or otherwise assaulted, the general population kept its cool, and the Czechoslovak leaders attributed the end of the invasion, in large part, to this reaction (or non-reaction, as the case may be) by the people.  In the end, negotiations were carried out, and the invaders left, although not under the conditions that the Czechoslovaks would’ve desired.

The book was interesting to read, but not at all the narrative that modern history books are.  This was simply a collection of documents.  It was dry in places.  Overall, though, I thought that there was a story being told.  The story was one of resistance and one of man’s yearning for freedom.  The Czechoslovaks had tried to break away in a slight way from the Soviet version of Communism because they felt it would work better for their country.  The Soviets rightly perceived that such a taste of freedom would only lead to Czechoslovakia moving further away from the Soviet sphere of influence.  It was interesting to read of the Czechoslovak resistance and the relative united front presented by the people and government.  At the end of the book, it was sad to see that despite this united front for freedom, the desire for liberty was crushed by the Soviets, and what the leaders and people had fought for did not come to fruition for another twenty years.  It was also a warning to us because it shows what not having freedom is like and what not letting an individual country chart its own path is like.  Signing away sovereignty is not something that leads to the best outcome.

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Русская Прага

I often think that my interest in many things Russian started with my time as a missionary there for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but I sometimes think that the interest started earlier (or, to take a more Eastern approach, I was fated to be interested), when I chose to learn about Russia for a fifth-grade country report.  My mission introduced me not only to Russia, but to a wider world (in part thanks to coming in contact with missionaries from Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and Mongolia), and I learned that there was so much more to learn.  Meeting my wife, who was from the Czech Republic, I was introduced to another fascinating people, culture, and country.  Unsurprisingly, since both the Czech Republic and Russia are in Europe, there are commonalities and overlaps in their respective histories.  Learning about some of those seemed like an interesting thing to do.

Русская Прага (Russian Prague, my translation) by Natalya Ivanovna Komandorova (ISBN: 978-5-9533-3746-5) presents an overview of some of the common history between Russia and the Czech Republic.  It starts in tsarist times and ends with a small section about post-Communist interaction between the two countries.  The medieval links between the two countries were focused largely on trade with a little religion thrown in, typical for a time when church and state were intimately intertwined.  The many interfamilial marriages and constantly changing alliances during the 1700s and 1800s resulted in some interaction between the two nations, and academic and intellectual interests were added to the subjects of correspondence.  These reasons for a Russian presence in what was then Czechoslovakia exploded in the early 1900s as Russia experienced what is nowadays referred to as brain drain when the Bolsheviks came to power.  Czechoslovakia, and Prague in particular, proved to be a welcoming place for Russian academics, politicians, and intellectuals who wanted to escape persecution and restrictions on their freedoms in Soviet Russia.  There were links between the two countries in the post-World War II era, too, but they tended to be less positive.  The Soviets worked to keep tabs on and even control the Russian diaspora.  Russian-Czechoslovak relations took a hit they would never really recover from when the Soviets invaded in 1968.  Modern relations between the two countries have returned to the medieval focus on trade with a significant level of distrust toward the Russians on the part of many Czechs.

The book, written in Russian, was not really what I expected, and disappointing for a couple different reasons.  The biggest fault I had with the book was its focus on pre-Soviet history.  I thought a chapter or two would have sufficed.  Instead, there were only a couple chapters that discussed ties between the two countries during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.  The post-Soviet era really only got a few pages.  For a book that was published in 2009, there should’ve been a lot more on this timeframe (20 years!).  I also found the section on the imperial times to be rather boring since it just seemed like short biographical sketches of various Russians that were either expatriates in or frequent travelers to the Czech lands.  Finally, the book was presented from a fully Russian viewpoint.  That isn’t necessarily a surprise given that the author is Russian, but a more nuanced approach would’ve served the book well.  The last section, which told of the author’s travel to Czechoslovakia as a university student, was particularly disappointing.  She seemed to discount the experiences of the one Czech in their group who was willing to say aloud what many of his countrymen thought about Russia post-1968.  It also seemed that the result, according to the author, of the interaction between the two countries was a benefit for the Czechs, while there was almost no discussion at any time of what the Russians gained from the two countries’ relations (other than that those who went to Czechoslovakia to avoid the Soviets were benefitted).  It was interesting to learn more about the ambassadors and emissaries pushing national interests in the medieval times and to see how much of a friend to liberty the pre-World War II Czechoslovak country was, but, overall, the book was relatively dry.
 

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Iron Curtain

My whole life, Eastern Europe has been of interest to me.  The Soviet Union and the countries of what was called the “Eastern bloc” were the enemies of America when I was a kid.  After the fall of the Soviet Union, I got to watch those formerly oppressed peoples give democracy a try.  Thanks to serving a mission in Russia and marrying a Czech woman, the interest in Eastern Europe has never really disappeared.  Considering the state of Russia’s government today, not to mention the regressions made in Western societies toward authoritarianism, it seems the subject of oppressive regimes is still very germane to modern life.  One thing that was always pretty clear to me, even as a kid, when I imagined people across the Soviet Union being told what their jobs were being something along the lines of graduating from high school and instead of getting a diploma, you got directed to your job, the worst one in my mind was someone whose job it was to endlessly go around an office building emptying the trash cans under everyone’s desks, was that, in most cases, it was those in power who were at fault for the lack of liberty, and not the everyday people.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 by Anne Applebaum (ISBN: 978-1-4000-9593-3) discusses just how Communist regimes came to power in Europe following World War II.  The book chronicles how the Communists came to power in Eastern Europe, focusing on Hungary, Poland, and East Germany, with a fair number of examples from Czechoslovakia and occasionally Romania.  The Communists rose to power quickly in post-war Europe through a comprehensive strategy that thoroughly encompassed the lives of the people.  This included the police, youth organizations, the media, political organizations, the arts, and the economies of the countries where the Soviet Union was victorious over Germany.  In many cases, a combination of factors worked together to make the Communist takeover work.  First, it was the Soviet Union that was in control in these areas.  Even in places where there was arguable Allied control, it was the Soviets doing the day-to-day administration, so they worked to install people and organizations that were compatible with their ideas of how things should work.  Second, there had already been strong support for Communist, socialist, and other Left-leaning ideologies before and during the war.  This only continued after the war.  Third, the activists were the ones most involved.  They were also the ones who were willing to use violence to reach their goals.  While most regular people were concerned about getting a job, rebuilding their homes and businesses, and helping their friends and families, activists were getting involved in politics, unions, youth and religious organizations, and the media.  This helped them make sure that things were done they way they wanted.  In the rare cases when there was some push-back, the activists, often with help from the police or the newly formed secret police organizations, violently quashed any dissent.  Applebaum does discuss resistance a little, but this is a short section, which seems to accurately represent the proportions of active and passive support or acquiescence to the regime and resistance.

I thought the book was interesting, but not quite as impressive as Gulag: A History, Applebaum’s impressive earlier work.  I thought the book was comprehensive, and it was nice to read about the many different areas in which the Communists operated in order to come to power.  One area I thought it might have been nice to explore further was how such a small number of people could so quickly overtake these countries.  Of the three abovementioned factors, the author focused on the third, the activists and Communist party members, but I was often left pondering how such a small fraction of the total populations got so much power so quickly.  On the other hand, that factor is probably the most relevant to today’s political climate, especially in the West.  The book should serve as a warning to those who fall to the right of socialists on the political spectrum.  If they are too slow to step up their involvement and are too willing to be cowed by the Left’s willingness to resort to violence, it won’t be too long before books about “the crushing of Western Europe” or “the crushing of North America” will be possible to publish.

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Next Stop Execution

If one spends very much time doing anything connected to Russia, the topic of spies will undoubtedly come up.  As one who was born before the Cold War had ended and as one who served a church mission in Russia, Russian spies are something I’ve often heard about.  On my mission, I served in the mission office for a while.  Missionaries who were serving in the city of Kaliningrad (I, sadly, have never been able to visit that intriguing place) once sent the office a copy of an editorial cartoon published in a local newspaper that depicted missionaries for our church asking local Russians about missiles.  Thanks to the Cold War, all Americans knew there was a vast intelligence complex in Russia, bent on suppressing dissent in Russia and recruiting spies abroad.  It seems that the American news has often dealt with the topic, too, thanks to traitors like Robert Hannsen and Edward Snowden or people that catch the media’s attention like Anna Chapman.  There have been a few Russians willing to help the West, though, even if we seem to not hear as much about them.

Next Stop Execution by Oleg Gordievsky is the account of one of those Russians.  The book is an autobiography or memoir, and takes the reader through Gordievsky’s life from his early childhood to his post-defection life in England.  He seemed to have a fairly normal childhood, although his father was somewhat enigmatic since his father worked for Stalin’s intelligence organ, the NKVD.  Gordievsky did well in school and happily joined up when the intelligence services came calling.  He enjoyed being pushed by his training and quickly assimilated to the system, including bureaucratic idiosyncrasies.  He had a talent for languages, and ended up being posted abroad, where he enjoyed life and started to get a taste for Western democracy.  Gordievsky chronicles his home life, including an unsatisfying first marriage and then a second marriage.  He explains how he had suspicions about inefficiencies in the Soviet system and outright lies about Communist doctrine early in his training since he had access to Western publications.  Those doubts didn’t lead to much until he saw the Berlin Wall go up and Czechoslovakia invaded.  After that, he decided to take action and responded positively to overtures from the British and Danish intelligence services.  Eventually, he would go on to spy for quite a while for the UK, before being outed.  He says he figured out on his own that something was about to go down since he was unexpectedly called back to Moscow from London, where he had been posted.  Gordievsky made the decision to get out of Russia then and there.  He left his wife and kids, surviving extended family, and homeland with the help of the UK via a harrowing ride to Finland.  That story includes all the stuff of movies, including being smuggled across borders in the trunk of a car.  Gordievsky’s life in the UK, he says, has been interesting, presenting information to many Western governments, but not without some sadness since his longtime separation from his second wife resulted in them splitting up.

The book was interesting and a good read.  I enjoyed reading about his childhood and schooling and probably could’ve handled more information about everyday life in the post-WWII Soviet Union.  Having lived in Russia as a missionary and having experienced everyday Russia, information expanding my views on that is always nice to have.  I enjoyed reading about some of his disdain for the processes his agencies made their employees go through.  As an American, I often participate in the time-honored tradition of complaining about bureaucracy, and it was good to see that Russians do the same.  The middle part of the book, about his work and home life, was maybe a little less interesting, and I thought a little on the egotistical side.  His philosophical evolution was interesting to read about, especially from the standpoint of current international relations.  He was intrigued by the West because of democracy and economic opportunity.  It is worth asking is we are doing all we can today to preserve those two ideals.  The final section of Gordievsky’s book, about being hunted by his own employer and his escape to freedom, was riveting, although, as mentioned above, a bit sad because of the need to leave his family behind.  That, too, though, is a lesson, not unique to this book, about the value of liberty and the need to sacrifice in order to have liberty.

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In Europe’s Shadow

As a kid, I knew little about Romania.  It was connected to the famous book Dracula, which I read in high school for English sophomore year and was left unimpressed.  During the 1980s, Romanian gymnast Nadia Comenici was all the rage when the Olympics were discussed.  I was born too late to see her groundbreaking performances in 1976.  Romania was part of the Soviet bloc, so I knew it was a Communist country and an enemy to the United States, but I felt no threat from the Romanians, unlike the Soviet Russians.  In 1989, the Communist world came tumbling down, and Romania was part of that world-changing spate of events.  I very clearly remember watching on TV as Romanians take to the street waving their flag with the Communist symbol cut out of the middle, leaving a large hole.  I had to be pulled away from the TV to go to a family Christmas party.  Even as a young boy, I realized I was witnessing history in the making.

In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-year Journey through Romania and Beyond by Robert D. Kaplan (ISBN: 978-0-8129-8662-4) is a wide-ranging survey of Romanian history, focusing on the post-World War I XX century and the first decade or so of the XXI century.  Kaplan has written and traveled widely, but is somewhat of a Romanian expert.  He writes history as a travelogue, which provides an interesting narrative as he explains the history behind what is happening in modern-day Romania.  Romania’s history, long intertwined with that of the European empires and the Ottoman Empire, plays a large role in what is happening today, especially because, according to Kaplan and many of the people he interviews, the same players are in the game.  The European empires have been replaced by the European Union and Putin’s Russia.  Romanians seem to recognize that they are still a borderland between these powerful entities.  This is especially true because of Romania’s neighbors, Moldova, a place where there is a greater Russian influence and which is home to one of the many frozen conflicts in the post-Soviet sphere, and Ukraine, which recently became the latest casualty of Russia’s desire to keep things as unstable as possible on its periphery.  Kaplan paints (and “paints” is the right word as he is a masterful writer, helping the reader see themselves there with him in dingy Communist hotels or on bright, lively Central European town squares) a picture of a Romania that has progressed a long way since the exciting fall of Communism in 1989, but still recognizes that there is room for further improvement.  Kaplan’s Romania leans strongly to the West, but knows its past and is wary of the East, home to Russia, which is altogether too happy to meddle in Romanian affairs.

Although I had read Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, I didn’t realize he was such a Romaniaphile.  The Romnia-centric material in the book made it a little dry in places, but I found myself coming back to it again and again because I found it incredibly relevant to the current events of 2020, both in the U.S. and on the international stage.  Early in the book, it was about the American experience and Kaplan’s defense of the individual.  He had seen, up close and personal, how Communism destroys the individual in favor of a mass thinking alike.  There is not room for dissent.  As a borderland, Romania has long had struggles of an ethnic nature, and while that seems to be far from the case now, the lessons are worth learning: stifle the individual, enhance the groupthinking mass, and ethnic tension is almost a given.  I also found his commentary on global culture reducing the importance of everything to be accurate.  Finally, his take on Russia was brilliant: Putin seeks instability.  Where this is instability and shadiness, Putin thrives, usually at the expense of the West.  I have long posited that Russian foreign policy was simple: instability.  He noted that although Russia used military power in Georgia and Ukraine, its political use of energy and great willingness to meddle in elections and politics made it a much greater threat, especially because those methods of fighting are harder to deal with in open, democratic societies.  The book was well written and interesting, but one that is likely more appreciated by those interested in Romania first of all and Eastern Europe and Russia second.

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Spy Dust

The world of spies, probably because it’s so shrouded in mystery, has always been intriguing.  I think this holds true for most people, as evidenced by the abundance of books advertising themselves as historically accurate as well as the standard fiction.  Both genres have seen success as movies.  My interest in spies typically does not dwell in the world of fiction, but in the realm of history and current events, although I did read and mostly enjoy the original Bourne trilogy.  World War II and the Cold War have always interested me, and that is also true as far as spying goes.  I actually heard about the book Spy Dust a few years ago, but never read it, thinking the title was maybe just a little bit too outlandish to really be about something that was real.  (It turns out that it really is a real thing and something not just used by intelligence services, but police departments, too.)

In Spy Dust: Two Masters of Disguise Reveal the Tools and Operations That Helped Win the Cold War (ISBN: 978-0-7434-2853-8) by Antonio and Jonna Mendez with Bruce Henderson, spy dust itself plays a rather minor role.  The two authors and their craft, disguises, get the majority of the attention.  The story follows both authors in their CIA careers a few years before they came to know about spy dust through an operation that saw them defeat the theretofore undefeated powder.  Antonio was a master of disguise with years and years of experience; Jonna more of an extremely talented up-and-coming star in the CIA.  The book focuses on their teamwork to exfiltrate someone they claim was a well-connected and high-placed Soviet spying for the U.S.  The operation included a handful of Americans and the Russian and his family.  They used all their disguise know-how, which includes a lot of things that aren’t so much about disguises, but simply about how one ports oneself and how people are not able to notice every little thing if what one is doing mostly follows the normal routine.  The daring operation defeated the Russians’ spy dust and got everyone out of the country safely.

In general, I enjoyed the book.  I thought the main story as well as a couple of the smaller operations discussed in the build-up to the one that gave the book its title were very interesting.  When they finally got to telling about that final operation, it was actually pretty exciting reading, and I think I whipped through it pretty quickly with great anticipation, even though it’s obvious the book wouldn’t have been written had the operation gone south.  My big complaint with the book was that it was slow in some parts.  This is especially true when it comes to discussions of the romantic relationship between the two authors, who eventually married.  They talk about it having an impact on their work, but that still seemed to me to be a minor detail and not something that needed to take up scores of pages.  Maybe shorter books don’t sell?  I personally thought the big operation in Moscow could’ve handled a little more detail, and with the discussion of the authors’ personal lives left out, the book would’ve really been cool.  It was an interesting look at one small but important piece of the Cold War, but probably could’ve more than just interesting.

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The Long Walk

In eighth grade at Kaysville Junior High, a rather unpopular teacher named Mr. Rice showed us Escape from Sobibor, a movie that tells the story of an uprising in a German concentration camp.  I remember sleeping through some of it, but I also remember being intrigued by it, having learned much earlier about Anne Frank and the underground activity she and her family were involved in.  Later, I learned about the Soviet prison camps, the Gulag.  As with the story behind the movie I saw in junior high, the idea of escape from a vast system, stereotypically cruel and secure in most people's minds, has always been intriguing.  (To be completely honest, escapes from modern-day prisons are pretty intriguing.)  There is something redeeming and inspiring in hearing of people who were willing to sacrifice their lives for the chance — not necessarily freedom itself — just the chance of freedom.

In The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom (ISBN: 978-1-59921-975-2) by Sławomir Rawicz, one can read about just such an escape and one that combines World War II history, the Gulag, and adventure travel into one.  Billed as a true story, the reader follows Rawicz, a Polish cavalry officer, from Moscow's notorious Lubyanka to the a small outpost of a prison camp in northern Siberia, and then about 4,000 miles south, to India, after his escape.  The escape itself is one of the few truly exciting scenes in the book, as the rest reads much like a travelogue, but it is all adventure after adventure as the small party of fugitives walks through Russia and then the wastelands of Mongolia and China.  They pick up a fellow escapee near Lake Baikal and experience Oriental hospitality over and over again in their travels through the deserts and mountains of western East Asia.  These usually touching, sometimes comical, visits are a major reason the travelers made it to India alive.  As is to be expected, they lose a few of the party along the way to starvation and exhaustion.  In the end, though, their desire to be free is triumphant, as they walk out of the hills and into the arms of a British Indian patrol.

I enjoyed the book, which reads like a novel.  The story was exciting, intriguing, and exhilarating.  It was interesting to read the story of torture at the hands of the Russians, the hardships experienced by the prisoners during the prisoner transfer operation across the vast expanses of Russia, and the way the labor camp was organized.  The escape and the adventures that laid therein were also fun to read about and did give off the sense of the indomitable human spirit.  The only thing that may be a bit of a negative about the book (aside from some mild strong language typical of Englishmen (Rawicz settled in England after the war)) is that it likely doesn't live up to its billing as being a true story.  The epic adventure has gone under the microscope of investigators and researchers a few different times.  Since the author lived in England, the BBC did a bit of research, as well as an American woman who wrote a book about her efforts and her inconclusive results.  The one thing that has been established is that Rawicz likely did not make the trek.  After that, one is left to make one's own conclusions including a number of possibilities ranging from him doing part of it to others completing the year-long hike and from the story being a compilation of others' adventures to it simply being a prisoners' tale that became, thanks to the horrors of war and the Gulag, impressed so strongly in people's minds that they genuinely believed the story was theirs or their acquaintances'.  I am personally partial to the latter two ideas, but think that the book was a great story regardless of veracity and even though I went into my reading of the book knowing about the controversy, and therefore approaching it as fiction, it does cause one to think about freedom, liberty, and the indomitable human spirit.

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Russia’s Revolution: Essays, 1989–2006

Russia is a fascinating country.  I am not sure when I really started to think that.  It was probably when I was very, very young.  I remember getting glimpses of the winter Olympics in 1988 (I admit that my memory is fuzzy on this one, and it might’ve actually been 1984) on an old black and white TV perched precariously on a bookshelf in the family living room and wondering why the Russians wore hockey jerseys that had “CCCP” emblazoned across the front.  What could that possibly mean?  I mean, everyone knew how you spelled Russia.  Even the abbreviation of the unweildy official name of the country — USSR — didn’t match up with CCCP.  Only later did it process in my head that they spoke Russian in Russia and it wasn’t until even later that I learned they used the Cyrillic alphabet.  Early Olympic viewing was mixed with coming to understand that in Soviet Russia, one didn’t get to choose one’s profession (this was, of course, an oversimplification, but sometimes such statements still do an adequate job of explaining things).  My young mind imagined a country full of people assigned to do household chore-style jobs (those were really the only jobs I was familiar with) from the time they graduated from high school until the end of their lives.  I felt especially bad for the guy stuck with emptying the garbage cans day in and day out.

Leon Aron, author of Russia’s Revolution: Essays, 1989–2006 (ISBN: 978-0-8447-4242-7), was always interested in Russia because he was born in the USSR.  Although he emigrated and came to America after the Soviets started letting Jews leave, he remained interested in his homeland and became a respected commentator and scholar on the land of Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, and now Vladimir Putin.  Aron has written extensively on all things Russia, and in this book, he compiled essays that take the reader through life in Russia from the early days of Boris Yeltsin through the middle years of Putin’s first term in office as Russia’s president.  Aron describes Yeltsin and his democratization efforts.  He is quite a fan of Yeltsin, praising his statesmanship and ability to hold together a country that had partially fallen apart and threated to completely implode on a daily basis.  Aron touches on every aspect of Russia reborn, including food, oil, politics, oligarchs, literature, the military, and international relations.  All of these vastly different aspects of life in the post-Soviet Russia give an idea of what was happening in the country at the time the essay was written.  Aron finishes up his compilation with discussions of Putin, a — to put it mildly — controversial figure and one of Russia’s largest struggles during the 1990s, Chechnya.  Aron’s point, even with the various negatives that Putin and Chechnya seemed to usher in, was that much good has happened since the Soviet Union fell apart in Russia and even though there have been and continue to be bumps in the road (and they’re often big bumps), things are probably going in the right direction, but the only way to tell is to wait and see.  The West didn’t get to its heights in 20 years, and Russia won’t either.

I wasn’t quite sure how relevant a book of essays about some stuff that took place over twenty years ago would be.  As I read through the first half to two-thirds of the book I was even a little put off because the author came across as so excited about the prospects of Russia’s future.  Even during Yeltsin’s presidency, I wasn’t overly impressed with the direction Russia was going.  The discussions of food and literature were interesting and showed Aron’s skill in writing about a wide variety of subjects, but I found the discussions of the oligarchs, Putin’s so-called reforms, and the failings of Russia’s military to be the most relevant to today’s situation.  I thought the writing was very solid, but I liked the overarching point of the work, too.  I have always been a proponent of the idea of giving democracy and capitalism in the ex-Soviet space a lot of time before they take hold, let alone blossom.  Aron takes that long-term view, too.  The only depressing thing about the view is that Aron directs his commentary to the West in a hope to convince both everyman and policymakers that the typical view of a Russia ready to implode and bring the world down with it isn’t quite true, but it’s not really Americans or western Europeans that need to adopt this long-term view.  Regular, everyday Russians need to be more patient than they probably are.  (Not just Russians, but most people in the post-Communist world.)  There are going to be problems as Russia tries to emerge from its past, but it’s going to take a lot of time and multiple generations before things are at the same level as the West (and to be honest, the West is digressing, but that’s a story for a different day).  Average Russians need to be patient and keep working to make things change before they decide that the new order of things is a failure and that the old methods of authoritarianism, top-down control of the economy, and a lack of many basic freedoms were better for whatever reason.

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Gulag: A History

If one has ever studied or read about Russia, even if only to a very slight degree, one has heard about the Gulag. While Gulag (sometimes written GULag to more closely represent the Russian acronym, ГУЛаг, from which it derives) technically indicates the Soviet government agency in charge of forced labor camps, it has come to mean the entire system of prisons and camps that the Soviets, especially Stalin, used to so brutally abuse their own people from the time Lenin took power to the end of Gorbachev’s reign. I had probably heard about it throughout my life, but it really captured my interest and became something I wanted to learn more about as I learned about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writings (at BYU I even read, in English, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). The idea of reading other Gulag memoirs has also fascinated me.

Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning and critically acclaimed-by-everyone book, Gulag: A History (ISBN: 978-1-4000-3409-3) is, obviously, not a memoir. Instead, it draws heavily on memoirs and other existing literature, including what little has been made available by the Russian government in their state archives, to give the reader an idea of just what the Gulag was, how it functioned (or didn’t function, as the case may be), who ran it, why they ran it, who the prisoners were, and why it, like the Soviet Union, eventually came crashing down as the result of an implosion more than anything else. The history is quite detailed and dutifully footnoted. It takes the reader from the pre-Bolshevik use of forced labor in imperial Russia through the very end of the system with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Every angle of the story is explored, some of them in more detail than others, but always in such a way that the impact of a particular decision or event is clearly seen. The individual anecdotes that make up a significant portion of the book are both colorful and illustrative, often giving an even more detailed look at what it was like to live, work, and sometimes die (interestingly, it wasn’t all bad, and there was time in some camps for music, theater, and storytelling) in the notorious prison camps of the Soviet Union. One comes away with not just a basic overview, but probably an intermediate-level understanding of the Gulag thanks to the complete coverage of the subject by the author.

I enjoyed the book and found it to be well-written history. As with all things having to do with the Soviet Union, the stuff about the October Revolution and the early struggles by the Bolsheviks to stay in power did little to hold my interest. However, the book had my full attention by the time it got to Solovetsky, the first official camp of the Gulag. I found most of the stories telling about day-to-day life in the camps to be fascinating. It seemed to me that Applebaum had her favorite sources, though, and I wish she would’ve quoted from a wider variety of memoirists. Sometimes I felt like I was reading Evgeniya Ginzburg’s book and not Anne Applebaum’s. Still, it was an impressive work. It was well-written and kept your attention. As with any grizzly subject, the book has sections that describe in detail torture (a favorite Soviet, especially in the early days, interrogation technique), the sexual depravity that is typical of prisons, and death. It is often somber reading because of the fact that it is a constant reminder of the ability of man to debase and treat with such cruelty and absolute disregard his fellow man. It is in this department that I have my largest quibble with the author — she concludes her work by saying that we don’t necessarily need to study the Gulag so we can avoid repeating it in some form or another in the future, since somewhere it will undoubtedly be repeated; we must simply remember it and try to understand it. One needn’t study something in great detail to remember it or memorialize it. Since Applebaum is not a philosopher, but a historian, she doesn’t even touch on the real reasons this cruelty happens (she sticks to political and economical explanations). The problem is, of course, that we can learn from it. Others can, too. In a best-case scenario, such a book will cause elites around the world to rethink their policies toward their political enemies. While that is unlikely, it can help each and every one of us rethink our individual commitments to avoid cruelty toward others in our own lives. It does no good to study history if we aren’t going to learn from it, apply its lessons, and avoid the same deadly mistakes.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXI John Pruess.