Francis Spufford on 20th-Century Russia

Before we start with your choices, what is it about 20th-century Russia that hooked you in?

I think because it offers this frightening and strange yet still familiar cousin to the 20th century that I grew up in, as a safe comfortable Westerner. The Cold War was the ordinary shape of the world when I was young. I was born in 1964 and I am old enough to have had the absolutely conventional nuclear apocalypse nightmare which was a standard part of being a teenager in the 1980s. I took that to be the shape of things, then the world changed suddenly and drastically in the late 80s and the early 90s, and I found myself very interested in what was happening while the 20th century was so radically divided between the different groups. There were these different visions of how the world can be, and I like to look at what we can learn from both halves now they can be laid side by side.

Your first choice is about one of Stalin’s henchmen – Khrushchev: The Man and his Era by William Taubman.

Khrushchev started off a miner’s son and had one of those rocket rides in the social stratosphere that could happen once Stalin had got rid of all the old Bolsheviks and needed a completely new political class. He went being from being a semi-literate party member out in the country to the deputy mayor of Moscow in about five years, and he finally ended up as one of Stalin’s inner circle. He worked closely with Stalin for nearly 20 years and approved thousands of arrests and executions and then went on to lead Russia during the Cold War.

For me this is a magisterial biography and strangely funny. Khrushchev was a funny guy – it is one of the things about him which was appealing and then, when you think about it, more worrying still. Of all the Soviet leadership Khrushchev is the one who is recognisable as a human being. He had that rare gift among politicians of remaining recognisable, thinking on his feet and cracking jokes. He had an almost Clintonesque gift of the gab, which really wasn’t a crucial skill among high-level Stalinists. In some ways I would guess that he survived at the top of Stalin’s Russia in spite of it.

He was assumed to be too nice and too much of a peasant to be threatening, as a result of which he outwitted all of his contemporaries. One of the things I like about this biography is that as well as being the best record of Khrushchev, with the most use made of the archival stuff that has become available in the last 20 years, it is also a continuous lively attempt to think through the man, to keep fitting the new stuff you find into a picture that makes sense of him.

There is a wonderful passage about Khrushchev succeeding as Stalin’s henchman which talks about just how often he records what nice guys the other members of the group are, and not just to butter them up but in conversations as well. Taubman makes the point that some of these people were the worse mass murderers of the 20th century. And Taubman concludes that what he was doing is reflecting a genuine part of his personality on to them. Compared to his colleagues it was important for him to seem a ‘nice guy’ despite everything he was doing.

Khrushchev was a true monster and he also had an undestroyed conscience, which was a very awkward combination, and once he had fought his way ruthlessly to the top and succeeded Stalin he tried his best to undo the worst excesses of Stalinism and to justify the suffering of the past by a genuine effort to deliver everything that the revolution had promised. He was not an immensely clever or subtle man but he really did believe that the land of milk and honey was coming in the Soviet Union.

Your next choice is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman.

Grossman was a Ukrainian Jew and a war correspondent for the Soviet military paper, the Red Star. He seemed to be a good Stalinist but while he was writing very conventional socialist realist novels, he was storing up in his head ways of describing Russia that didn’t at all fit the compulsory official mould. And in the 1950s he secretly wrote this book Life and Fate which, most strangely, is a sequel to one of his official novels, For a Just Cause. It has got the same characters in it and continues the story. But it’s as though suddenly a switch has been thrown – it is alive and committed to truth telling. It is about the secret similarities between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and about the strange interval of freedom during the Second World War in which the Soviet regime had to trust its people because it couldn’t compel their loyalty, and how that narrow window of freedom closed again.

It is also just a wonderful epic portrayal of the Battle of Stalingrad. It was used by Antony Beevor in his Stalingrad book and Beevor is partly responsible for Grossman’s rising profile in the West. It is a fabulous piece of military re-creation. It is a wonderful piece of writing about the Holocaust and although it is still quite a creaky conventional piece of Soviet realist writing it’s animated by the most powerful possible truth-telling urge, and once it followed its Jewish characters all the way to the gas chambers you are put where Vasily Grossman wanted you to be, which is, despite everything, immeasurably grateful to the Red Army for destroying that particular evil, even at the cost of cementing the other one.