This book begins in a mass burial ground and ends in silence. In between is a series of questions. "A lot of foreigners come here and ask stupid questions," a researcher in Moscow said to the author, the English historian and Russia specialist, Catherine Merridale. "What's different about you is that you ask stupid questions that we can't answer." Her questions - specific or abstract, always very searching - are about death and grieving, how the people of Russia and other regions of the former Soviet Union came to terms with the successive millions of violent deaths their society experienced in the 20th century.
Between 1914 and 1953 over 50 million Soviet lives were lost to the two world wars, state-created famine, civil war, epidemic disease and state violence. Many of these deaths could not be spoken about and were denied, and for millions of Russians the bodies of loved ones killed in purges are still missing, buried anonymously in mass graves far from home. In the past decade, as the Soviet past is being publicly reopened, some of these mass graves have been unearthed and the skeletons reburied; many more have yet to be located. The rites of the Russian Orthodox church, repressed by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, have been revived and schoolchildren are learning the truth about the violent history of their state and what their grandparents experienced - and perpetrated - under Stalinism.
What Merridale discovered, however, was that old habits of silence persist. For people who were forbidden to mourn, whose lives were ruled by fear, talking about death and grief did not come easily. ("The heart of this book is absence and loss.") For two years she travelled around Russia, interviewing survivors of "the main catastrophes of 20th-century Soviet history", as well as children of survivors, and professionals responsible for the care of the dying and bereaved. Oral history is crucial to her narrative, allowing us to hear the voices of Russian people telling their stories, in their own way.
At times, in her introductory and concluding chapters, Merridale seems almost defensive about her inclusion of these individual voices, as if anticipating criticism. But it is her sensitive interweaving of personal testimony that transforms Night of Stone sharply focused history of modern Russia into a compelling, emotionally engaged exploration of mentalities, of "the culture and the sense of self that shaped the way a people mourned, sustained and understood" mass mortality. While many histories of the Soviet Union have concentrated on aspects of ideology, Merridale insists that "the high politics of Communism and post-Communism should not be discussed without reference to the people and their memories, to human pain and endurance, brutality, trauma, mercy, bitterness and grief".
Her emphasis on individual experience is salutary, in the face of the overwhelming numbers of the dead. Chapter by chapter, the millions mount up: the first World War casualties, between 1.6 and two million men; the civil war with its mass slaughter of civilians, and the attendant starvation and cannibalism; the 1929-33 famine, which killed between five and seven million people, while the authorities denied it ever happened, describing it, chillingly, as a period in which "the decline of the mortality rate" was "reversed"; the five million who disappeared, either killed or sent to the Gulag, during the enforced collectivisation and "dekulakisation" of the 1930s; the Great Patriotic War (second World War) which claimed 25 million lives and was followed by another famine in 1947. Merridale focuses on the specifics of mourning, on the transition from the rich, all-pervading Orthodox Christian culture of death, with its beliefs about the soul waiting in "the other light" (the afterlife), to Bolshevism's Red Funerals for Revolutionary martyrs and substitute secular ceremonials. As the years passed, the state developed its own funerary rituals and paraphernalia, including bombastic memorials and crematoria, and its own hybrid eschatology, which could accommodate the embalming of the body of its patron saint, Lenin.
By the end of the Great Patriotic War death invaded life at every turn and people were becoming hardened to it: in the late 1940s little boys played football on the streets with the skulls of unburied soldiers, and corpses piled up outside the gates of graveyards. The war brought out new levels of cruelty and callousness among Russian soldiers, encouraged by jingoistic and hypocritical war propaganda. Starvation drove thousands of people to cannibalism, for which the Russian language has two words, distinguishing the eating of corpses from the act of killing specifically for food.
Throughout this catalogue of atrocity, Merridale highlights the stoicism, extraordinary courage and endurance of the Russian people, whose personal testimonies in the book stress the imperative of survival. She rejects the generalisation that they were brutalised by decades of war and political violence and, as a result, had little regard for human life. She is also sceptical about the persistent theme in Russian historiography that suggests that there is something specific to Russian history and culture, some ill-defined national characteristic, that lends itself to violence: that a thread of historical continuity links Ivan the Terrible to the violent repression of the last Tsar's regime, to peasant brutality and Stalinist purges. Such determinist interpretations leave us all off the hook, she argues, allowing us to imagine that the nightmare of 20th-century Soviet history couldn't happen elsewhere. While she carefully emphasises the particularity of Soviet history and its distinct culture, she reminds us that Russians "are not members of a different humanity".
WHAT is different, undeniably, is Russians' response to grief and emotional pain. In a society where mental distress is stigmatised and the existence of psychological trauma is simply not recognised, many of her questions seemed bafflingly irrelevant to her interviewees. The fact that her interviews failed to uncover evidence of profound psychological damage or breakdown, and that most people in Russia, including psychiatrists and psychologists, do not acknowledge the syndrome of post-traumatic stress could be characterised as "denial" - or, as the habit of a lifetime of physical hardship, crisis, state violence and its accompanying, ubiquitous, fear. People learned to forget and to endure in silence, bolstered only by collectivism and a sense of common purpose.
Russians have had no opportunity to bear witness, to define themselves as victims, or to release buried emotions in a safe, supportive environment; the Western psychotherapeutic language of wounds and healing is foreign to them, and, Merridale argues, should be applied with caution, if at all. Her rigorously analytical final chapter teases out questions about "different ways of being a person in radically different worlds". She is wary of "moral tourism", and suggests that the notion of trauma is a cultural construct. This valuable contribution to debates about cultural relativism in the literature of psychotherapy, victimhood, and the pathology of trauma adds to the fascination of Night of Stone. But what lingers is Merridale's humility and sensitivity in her deployment of evidence, her fusion of painstaking scholarship and personal inquiry, her questioning intelligence and her obvious passion and admiration for this "beautiful but tortured culture".
Helen Meany is an Irish Times journalist