Night of Stone

Be warned; this is a hard book to read. The author started off intending to emphasize what role Russian Orthodoxy played in Soviet history but part way through the book decided to include the stories of the survivors of the Civil War, dekulakization, famine, collectivization, show trials, WWII, Stalinization, the gulags, repatriation, the Afghan War, glasnost, and the cult of Putin. Is it possible to tease out the connectivity between Russia’s triumvirate culture of suspicion of strangers, orthodoxy, and autocracy without descending to cultural generalization and racism? From the thousands of interviews the author held with citizens, former soldiers, pensioners, gulag survivors, and others; a single commonality of historical events show more emerges; murder dissenters, suppress informers, and deny loss. Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian author, stated, “Suffering for the Russian soul is the crucible of redemption.” In other words; to be a Russian, you must suffer and so you shall. Nationalist writer Victor Astafev wrote of, “… the soullessness and obstructiveness of our own immoral and criminal leadership” while a pensioner of the Red Army freely admitted, ““We like to think we have lessons to teach the world, but the only thing we can really teach you is how not to do it.” Will Russia and Russians every change? No, for it is in their nature to eat themselves. show less

For anyone who wants to understand ordinary Russians today this book by a British academic is vital reading. The book is not really a book about politics, though politics is an important background. For many Russians, our concept of post traumatic stress disorder is a way of life and almost every family has a history of profound grief. Russians don't smile as much as we do and for many, it is surprising that they smile at all. This book is not about current life which is generally quite tolerable, but the history of families, the experience of loss, and the devastating effects that can last for generations.

Canadians and Americans live in countries where there is no living memory of war on our soil. Neither do we have a history of show more friends and family disappearing with no knowledge of what happened or why or where their body lies.

Ms Merridale talks to ordinary Russians and studies the organizations and government programs which try to resolve grief and bring closure by providing information and, if possible, identifying bodies. The Russian people lived through 2 horrific world wars on their soil and don't forget that the loss of Russian lives exceeded all of their allies combined. Then there has been political upheaval, the revolution, Stalin, which resulted in further loss of life and lack of security. Pick any Russian, a minor civil servant for example, and ask about their family history. You will usually hear grief and loss, "my father simply disappeared during the Stalin years, we never knew why and we don't know where his body lies today" or " my grandparents starved to death during the war". Russians struggle not only with daily life , but with their past, memories of horror and heartbreak and loss of loved ones. In our countries, people who have suffered from violence or lost family members to it are treated with sympathy and are unusual. Not so in Russia where it is unusual to find someone whose hasn't experienced a traumatic loss.

This book asks you to reflect and understand the Russians as people, as members of families, and victims of circumstance. They really are no different than us, but they have suffered grief and loss on a scale that we can only imagine. Read the book, imagine, and try to understand. show less

Night of Stone evokes a variety of responses, the first of which is perhaps best described as confused annoyance, not with the author and certainly not with the contents of the book but with the fact that the secondhand copy I purchased from Thriftbooks was marked “Withdrawn” from a community college library. I found the book to be replete with information on events in Russia from Lenin's time, i.e., World War I, through the Great Patriotic War (the Eastern Front of World War II), and through the Russian war in Afghanistan right up to the end of the 20th century. Were I to create a recommended reading list of books which would further the knowledge of students who really do want to be educated (as contrasted with those who want a show more diploma with as little study as possible to get a “good-paying” job), Merridale's Night of Stone would be on it. I regret knowing that at least one college library no longer has a copy available to its students or its instructors.

Having read Night of Stone, the reader better understands Russia's internal strife following the abdication of Czar Nicholas II. The country was certainly not pre-destined to be governed by the Bolshevik Party, and even within the party, various factions opposed one another. The transition from czarism to Socialism was anything but smooth.

This is a comparatively minor point, but I will observe that sections of the book dealing with disposition of Lenin's body are rather fascinating—and certainly not as morbid as the topic suggests.

Of more importance than Lenin's corpse, the state's efforts to avoid demoralization of both troops and the general public despite Nazi advances into the country during World War II tell us much of government-sponsored repression, diversion and manipulation of facts before they are allowed to become public. The fate of veterans of a much later war, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, included a substantial measure of derision from the veterans of the Great Patriotic War as well as the public inasmuch as that war was one “that no one really understood and few supported” (Page 284). The parallels between Russia's adventurism in Afghanistan and that of the United States in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, while not belabored by Merridale, are inescapable.

The author insists that hers is not a history book per se, and indeed her emphasis is on the Russian people and how they mentally survived almost unending abuse throughout the 20th century. Of course, czarist rule had not been beneficent by any stretch of the imagination, and perhaps it was the fact that people were accustomed to an arbitrary and dictatorial ruler that enabled them to persevere through Bolshevik rule, Stalin's murderous regime, and the somewhat more tolerant leaderships of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, to arrive in the glasnost of Gorbachev in 1985. (Yes, I know that Andropov and Chernenko were in that list, but their terms of office were brief and they seemed inconsequential.)

That list of leaders does make me wonder if the book is perhaps of greater interest and even of greater comprehension to those of us who are old enough to recognize those names (okay, maybe not Stalin—I'm not that old) which appeared frequently in newspapers and radio and television news broadcasts through the Cold War era. Maybe the events in Russia mean more to those of us who actually participated in “duck and cover” drills in our U.S. elementary schools. The significance of the book, however, is of equal or maybe even greater importance to younger readers who have no personal recollections of U.S. - Russian/USSR relationships throughout the previous century. For them, books such as Night of Stone offer illumination where personal memory is dark.

I do not find Merridale's writing style overly captivating, but her subject is intriguing, important and relevant to our understanding of the population of a major world power, a population that is anything but monolithic and that simply cannot be accurately stereotyped. Russians are as diverse in their handling of adversity as are the citizens of every other nation on Earth, and Night of Stone certainly helps us see them in a more accurate and comprehensive light. The book is definitely worth a read. show less