Inge Kummant of Sewickley, Pa., has offered up a timely and valuable Reading List dedicated to the state and fate of Russia:
Leaves from a Russian Diary, by Pitirim A. Sorokin. A minor democratic political figure describes the first few years of the revolution in a 1924 volume. It depicts the self-defeat of the Kerensky government, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks, and hair-raising famine and terror.
Russia Leaves the War, by George F. Kennan. A classic case study of American diplomacy from 1956, written before Kennan disavowed everything he ever stood for.
Testimony, by Dmitri Shostakovich. Artists and intellectuals, the sycophantish and the incautious, are swallowed by Stalinism, their stories told by the composer in this posthumous 1974 memoir. In 1936, after he was the subject of two articles by Stalin himself attacking him, Shostakovich waited each night with his wife and infant daughter for the executioners to collect him. And when he went to an opera and criticized the tenor, he received a flood of threatening letters from the tenor’s fans, telling him Stalin would soon take care of him.
Life and Fate, by Vassily Grossman. This 1960 tome, published here in the mid-1980s, is arguably the greatest Russian novel of the century. It is the tale of the betrayal of the Russian people by the party as they rise to the heights of sacrifice during World War II. (Grossman is the subject of a new biography from the Free Press, The Bones of Berdichev, by John and Carol Garrard.)
