You were born in the year of the Russian revolution and joined the communist party 73 years ago. what does communism mean to you personally?
well, when I joined the communist party, we didn’t know anything about it, strictly speaking. I called myself a communist when I was seventeen. I ran as a communist candidate in my university’s debating society. but for the most part we were against it, or it was a generalized feeling of the left.
You are reading: Best books on communism
let’s move on to your first book, a day in the life of ivan denisovich, by solzhenitsyn.
yes, let’s do it, since I have a lot to say about the old solzh. it was a critical book, a totally objective account of a victim in a labor camp. just one day in an ordinary labor camp. not exaggerated, not even a particularly unpleasant day. the most extraordinary thing is how it is printed. it went against everyone in the communist party in russia, but novy mir editor tvardovsky slipped a copy to khrushchev and said: ‘this is terribly good, you should publish it’. and he did. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck. And once it was printed, as Galina put it, “The Soviet government had let the genie out of the bottle, and no matter how hard they tried later, they couldn’t put it back.” After a day in the life, Solzhenitsyn didn’t publish anything for a long time, but in the meantime he was amassing the real killer book: The Gulag Archipelago. when he posted that, he was arrested and sent west in handcuffs. I met him there, in Zurich in 1976.
How would you define that genius?
The curious position is that we can handle terror, but the worst is not terror, it is not torture or the killing of millions, as Stalin did; in a way, it is simply the intrinsic evil of the regime that is not yet fully understood (a real key is the film the lives of others). After a day in the life Solzhenitsyn did not publish anything for a long time, but in the meantime he treasured the real killer book – The Gulag Archipelago. when he posted that, he was arrested and sent west in handcuffs. I met him there, in Zurich in 1976.
what was it like?
solzhenitsyn was a lot of fun, not that haggard fanatic effect you get in pictures, but a calm and warm atmosphere. I was relieved to find him a huge fan of Conquest, with stories of how he and Sakharov read The Great Terror together. we ended up after four hours with bear hugs, kisses on the cheeks, rough beard and all. when he was leaving, he asked me to translate “a little poem” of his. I said yes, and it turned out to be 2,000 words, about his experiences in East Prussia during the war (later published in both languages as Prussian Nights). he still asks me his widow natalia to go to events in moscow to celebrate.
what did solzhenitsyn do with russia in the 90s and after?
Well, it’s hard to say. he certainly was not a liberal; he was more on the patriotic right. what he would say is, ‘russia has to get rid of that horrible past’, which doesn’t sit well with ordinary super patriots. but now that position is erratically supported by the official regime, which is a big change.
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her next book is memoirs of galina vishnevskaya, the opera singer. I just listened to her songs, they are beautiful.
She was extraordinarily pretty, as well as a wonderful singer. and another reason to read her book is that the photographs are particularly good. she and her husband put solzhenitsyn when he was writing the gulag archipelago, so they’re all connected.
What can we learn about communism from his memoirs?
Well, the first thing is that it gives the feeling of Russian sanity about what the truth was. she had many unpleasant experiences with the literary and opera apparatchik machinery of the party. she gave him a lot of trouble. but her personality of hers was such that she could answer them, and she did. she sometimes got her way, and finally she left the soviet union, in 1974. she russia has gone through many people who were silenced, but there were some people who managed not to be. It really is a very Russian story, it has a lot of Russia in it.
your next book, the new class, is a side move to yugoslavia. Milovan Djilas was part of Tito’s regime, before he started advocating democracy and was purged. What is his thesis?
djilas observed that instead of getting rid of a ruling class, as was supposed to happen, party members became the ruling class themselves. but it is not a class analysis in the sense that we generally mean. In Russia you can be a peasant or a worker. you couldn’t be an intellectual because it didn’t count as a class. but if it didn’t count as a class, then why were hundreds of thousands of them persecuted? then it is quite curious from a Marxist point of view. Marx would almost certainly have disapproved of it, but he disapproved of just about anyone.
is the new djilas class theory still relevant when talking about china etc.?
Of course it is. and china is still relevant when talking about yugoslavia. obviously there’s a connection between, say, pyongyang and marxism, and cambodian terror and so on. one cannot say that those regimes can be justified by Marxism, but somehow the connection is there, or at least the regimes thought so, even if it is not a rational connection.
So, is it useful or misleading to think of communism in terms of Marxism?
It’s hard to say. Of course, this list really should include the works of Marx. but the communist manifesto doesn’t have much to do with what i thought marx was, or what someone else thought marx was afterwards. it’s just a piece of old-fashioned politics. and das kapital is one of those books that people claim to have read, but no one has actually read to the end. even so, it accumulated into a creed.
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let’s talk about the book by anne applebaum, between east and west.
In this book, Anne Applebaum delves into the area between the former Russian Empire, Germany, and the former Turkish Empire, and looks at how it has developed. in 1800, there was not what I would call a Ukrainian nation, let alone Belarusian. they become nations when their educated classes come together and form a nationality, around the end of the nineteenth century. i have a railway map in my house of europe in the 1840s. you can see all the countries, but similarly for the balkans and turkey, it just says “various nomadic tribes”.
love applebaum’s description of the man who was born in poland, raised in the ussr and now lives in belarus, but never left his home town.
That happened to a lot of people. at some points, people didn’t know who they were or where they really came from. at that time, would you have known that belarus would become an independent country? I bet you didn’t.
You’re right.
all borders changed. and that is a cultural point that is quite extraordinary. If you went from West Germany to East Germany, after the wall fell, within ten miles you were in a completely different country. the same with finland and vyborg. anne applebaum captures very well the feeling of regression under the soviets.
finally, roland hingley, the russian mind. What can we learn from this book?
hingley analyzes the whole context of russia: history, literature, what society is like. he knows russia very well, but he does it like an englishman who knows russia very well, and it’s good to see how different the russians are. Russia has these curious incongruities, from extreme boredom to hyperactivity. hingley enjoys the strange, in life and literature, and brings us stories from literature. one by gogol begins with an official looking in the mirror one morning and discovering that his nose has disappeared. just talking about it tempts me to go back and read it all over again.
me too! one last question: all his books have been about the soviet bloc, but what is different about communism in north korea, vietnam, laos, cuba, etc.?
is a good question. in a sense they are curious because they continued with communism after the russians abandoned it, so it was local, in the sense that it was not imposed by russia. but there is something in common between all communist countries. i remember when i was in bulgaria during the inauguration, and one of president kolarov’s entourage asked: ‘could you get me orwell’s book?’ that meant his first book, animal farm. when I gave it to this party veteran and he read it, he said either he must have come from a communist country. but of course orwell didn’t, so it was possible to understand communism without having been there.
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