HISTORY: Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian HistoryBy Rachel Polonsky, Faber & Faber, 388pp, £20
CAN READING have the power to civilise? Stalin’s most loyal and trusted henchman, Vyacheslav Molotov, was a voracious if undiscerning reader who claimed 10,000 books to his name. Much of his collection was housed in his Moscow residence, an impressive eclectica ranging from Pushkin to morally improving tracts on collectivisation. From what remains of the collection, the journalist and Russia expert Rachel Polonsky has sought to glean some insight into the emotional life, hatreds and enthusiasms of Stalin’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, party member Molotov, who sent millions of his compatriots to their death in the Gulag.
Polonsky also, intriguingly, uses the Molotov library as a springboard for her own journey across post-communist Russia, from the frozen immensity of Tartar territory to Archangel and Murmansk in the north. Fortuitously, in the 1990s, she had lived in the same Moscow apartment building as Molotov, where she was able to scrutinise the apparatchik's collection and conceive her own book, Molotov's Magic Lantern.
The result is an eccentric work, daring in conception, peculiar in construction, that incorporates all Polonsky’s teeming scholarly knowledge of Russia and the Russian people.
As a Stalinist, Molotov had played a zealous role in the extirpation of "vermin" (Trotskyists, kulakior peasant proprietors) from pre-war Russia. In 1939, with Machiavellian adroitness, he masterminded the non-aggression pact with Hitler which carved up Poland and the Baltic states between the two powers. On Molotov's approval, 22,000 Polish officers were subsequently executed in the Katyn forest as "anti-Soviet elements".
Yet this brutally compliant Stalinist expressed a great love of Chekhov, even though the playwright had flinched from political histrionics and portentous overstatement. No matter: the possession of the Russian classics was one of the greatest privileges of political power under Stalin, Polonsky reminds us. Stalin himself boasted a familiarity even with Oscar Wilde, yet at the same time he cultivated the Bolshevik virtue of tverdost – hardness. (“Death solves all problems,” Stalin infamously said. “No man, no problem.”) Hardness was indeed the Bolshevik way; in Russian, Molotov means “hammer man”.
Molotov was born plain Skryabin in 1890. Polonsky finds few signs of his presence in the Moscow collection, though she does discover a hair in an encyclopaedia that might have belonged to his actual head. (Timothy Ryback, in his not dissimilar book, Hitler's Private Library, found an inch-long hair in an architectural guide that appeared to have been from a moustache.)
Rather than yield with humility to writers and their books, Molotov used them merely to bolster his preconceptions. One essential dislike, formidable in its simplicity, pervaded his soul: the bourgeoisie. So he took what he wanted from Chekhov, whom he claimed was “for socialism”, yet Chekhov was of course too much of a libertarian and gentleman to have submitted to the red devil in Moscow.
Again like Stalin, Molotov considered himself a thinker, though he read selectively from the great writers he cited. Dostoevsky, for example, was no proto-Stalinist, yet Molotov used Dostoevsky’s tormented Russian messianism as justification for Soviet ideology and, later, anti-western policy. Russia’s current president, Vladimir Putin, himself harbours a quasi-Dostoevskian vision of Russia’s redemptive power, suggests Polonsky, for Dostoevsky is a writer who still looms large over Russian nationalism.
In Staraya Russa, the spa town where the author of Crime and Punishmenthad lived in the 1870s, Polonsky muses on Putin's Slavophile bias and devotion to the "Great Nation".
In pages of fine-crafted prose, she goes on to consider the rise of the American market in Russia (McDonald's, Nike, Microsoft). In Moscow today, legions of shaven-headed security guards in pointy shoes are seen to work for a wealthy few Noviye Russkie(New Russians), who cruise around in their Mercedes 600s while pensioners haggle over scrag-ends. For all their nationalist-inflamed nostalgia for Orthodoxy and the tsars, Putin's oligarchs are concerned more to have their imported delicacies and the bling accoutrements of Versace.
In the course of her travels, Polonsky visits monasteries, dachas, sanatoriums and bath houses. Her chapter on Siberia in particular offers a meticulous reportage tinged with poetry, in which almost every page radiates gem-like images and an impressive literary craft. Occasionally the prose dwindles to sub-Proustian flimflam ("All past time is present. Everyone returns, called by name, transfigured"), yet Molotov's Magic Lanternremains a magnificent achievement, in which Russia emerges as less a nation than a marvellous region of the mind.
Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi won the Royal Society of Literature WH Heinemann Award 2003. He is working on a history for Faber Faber of the Baltic city of Tallinn during the second World War
