Reviews

Merridale (history, Univ. of Bristol), the author of Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: The Communist Party in the Capital, 1925-32 (1990) and Perestroika: The Historical Perspective (1991), offers a history of the Soviet Union from the perspective of the Russian view of death. The plodding beginning (a 30-page foreword) gives way to insightful historical perspective. This work is in line with recent histories by Gregory Freeze (Russia: A History, LJ 5/1/98), Martin Malia (Russia Under Western Eyes, LJ 2/1/99), and Robert Service (A History of Twentieth-Century Russia, LJ 3/1/98)) but adds new information about the purges of the Thirties and Forties, the liquidation of the Kulaks, and more contemporary pogroms and ethnic cleansings of Chechnia. Chapter 4, "Transforming Fire," begins to set this book apart from earlier works of Sovietologists; its treatment of the USSR funeral industry during the Twenties and Thirties is, in my reading, unique. Merridale's reason for writing is to help comprehend the feelings and actions of the present day. "Confusions about loyaltyhelp to explain why it is that some people still remain within the grip of memories that torment them. They were not happy in the past, but they cannot approve of the present either." Recommended for academic libraries. Harry Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. Syst., Iola Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

"Russia's story of death has been obscured so often," explains Merridale (Perestroika: The Historical Perspective; Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin). The extraordinary scale of the violence and loss in modern Russian history has been shrouded in secrecy; indeed, the government has only recently acknowledged the hundreds of thousands killed under Stalin. "For 50 years," Merridale writes, "until the fall of Communism, families had kept bereavement of this kind to themselves.... It was dangerous, after all, to mourn the passing of an enemy of the people." Paying particular attention to the ways that Orthodox religion and Soviet atheism have affected Russian bereavement, Merridale explores Russian perceptions of death and afterlife from before the Bolshevik Revolution, through both world wars and the great famines of the 1930s and into the present. Her fascinating study is based on intimate conversations with bereaved Russians, as well as interviews with gravediggers, funeral directors, social workers, doctors and priests, and meticulous readings of imperial archives, Soviet propaganda, letters, memoirs, literature and government documents. (As Merridale points out, much of this research would have been impossible 20 years ago.) Merridale scrupulously avoids imposing her own ideological or cultural prejudices on her subject. By turns solemn and grisly, empathetic and scholarly, this inspired work provides a unique window on Soviet history through the brutality, ceremony and silences of death. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.