This is an unexpectedly charming book, all the more delightful because the writer, who describes herself as a “fugitive academic”, had originally intended to write a “scholarly masterpiece on orientalism” but meandered into producing a travelogue that unfolds at a leisurely pace over space and time.
Rachel Polonsky’s provocation for recounting what she calls “the wanderings among the muddle of past time that books and places make” was the discovery that the Moscow apartment above her’s had once been inhabited by Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister and feared henchman, later disgraced under Khrushchev.
In one of those exquisite ironies of history, the apartment of one of communism’s most terrifying defenders of the faith had been rented out by his granddaughter to a Texan investment banker, the sort who was crowding into Putin’s Russia. It was he who told Polonsky that parts of Molotov’s library were still intact there and gave her the run of the apartment to investigate. In it, she found a magic lantern — a certain generation of Indians will remember it as the bioscope — with its varying scenes of Russia, which gave her the idea for her book. “A look back at the past is a magic lantern show,” she writes.
But it is the crumbling remnants of this library that provide the underpinning for Polonsky’s “journey in Russian history”, with its eclectic and sometimes annotated collection of books from textbooks, lectures on revolutionary history, memoirs from Tsarist times, popular western novelists and even four editions of short stories by Rabindranath Tagore. One of these editions has this sentence tellingly pencil-marked from a short story: “The best defence for a person, just like an insect, is the ability to take on the colour of his surroundings.”
The annotations in some of the books and uncut pages of others reveal much about Molotov, that the second-most powerful man in Stalin’s Russia may not have cared to publicise. A volume ponderously titled The Collective Farm Movement: Its Past, Present Tasks and Significance and respectfully inscribed by its author to Molotov for his comments has only 80 of its 132 pages cut. Yet all the pages of Joseph Conrad’s novel Within the Tides had been cut.
Churchill’s multi-volume history of the Second World War had also been carefully read. Beside the British prime minister’s comment that, “If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons”, Molotov had put an exclamation mark. He had also attentively underlined Churchill’s description of him, which began, “Vyacheslav Molotov was a man of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness”, and ended, “I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot”.
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Polonsky’s travels begin in her own habitat, No. 3, Romanov Lane, once the luxurious residencies of Tsarist nobility, subsequently claimed by the communist elite as part of the revolutionary agenda of “usurping the usurpers” when the Bolsheviks shifted their capital to Moscow. It had since been home to much of the Soviet nomenklatura. Now, most of it is rented out to foreigners, diplomats, TV stars and the like.
No. 3, Romanov Lane and the houses around it, just off the Kremlin, are, in fact, bristling with history. “The men who lived in No. 3 had metro stations, institutes, cities, battle cruisers, tractors, auto plants, warhorses, lunar craters and stars named after them.” In the chapter titled Apartment 61, she recalls Trotsky’s two-month stay there before his arrest and deportation, and Molotov’s own fall decades later when his wife, Polina Zhemchuzina, was exiled. In her heyday, Zhemchuzina was famously fashionable, and no less “bourgeoisie” than the people her husband listed for deportation, torture and death during the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938.
Everywhere she goes, Polonsky is deftly able to run a narrative thread through literature, location and history, and contemporary politics. Her travels take her to Lutsino, an hour’s drive west of Moscow and home to the dachas of the Soviet elite. There she meets Nina Balandina, daughter of an academic who was tortured and then shot as a “socially dangerous element” in 1936 (Russia is replete with such an orphaned generation). She also visits Staraya Russa, north-west of Moscow, where an ailing Dostoevsky came in 1872 to finish his anti-revolutionary novel Demons, amidst spying Tsarist police. The town also provided the setting for his apocalyptic The Brothers Karamazov.
The worth of the book lies in the fact that Polonsky goes well off the tourist track, visiting places like Vologda, where “any individual who ever opposed the power of the state is likely to have passed through”, Arshan and Irkutsk on the borders of Mongolia, to Ulan Ude and Kyakhta, the Siberian wasteland of exile that served the Tsars, communists and contemporary Russia alike (including oligarch Michael Kordovsky who financed opposition to Putin) and Archangel and Barentsburg on its northern tip.
Polonsky, who is British, is a Russian scholar of no mean repute and she deploys her deep knowledge of Russian literature and history by weaving the lives and writings of its writers and poets — many of them persecuted by either the Tsarist or communist states — with the follies, foibles and ironies of Russia’s history and contemporary evolution. She writes with delicate grace, easing the weight of scholarship and information with prose that is faintly ironic and insightful but always affectionate. As an introduction to Russia, this is an entertaining start.
MOLOTOV’S MAGIC LANTERN
A Journey in Russian History
Rachel Polonsky
Faber and Faber
369 pages; Rs 1,266
