A sincere and insightful dig through Russia’s past and present.

Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia
By Jonathan Brent
Atlas & Co., November 2008; Hardcover; 336 pages; $26.00

Although the subtitle of Jonathan Brent’s book is Discovering the New Russia, the text has plenty to offer as far as the “old Russia” is concerned. Thankfully, he chooses quotes that give past events a potent immediacy, as when he delves into Tsaritsa Alexandra’s 1918 diary (“I had a bath at 10. Lenin gave the order that the clocks have to put [sic] 2 hours ahead … so at 10 they told us it was 12”), and when he takes the reader line by line through the underlined words and annotated marginalia of the books in Stalin’s library. “Stalin had an orderly, methodical mind,” Brent writes, “but he didn’t simply make lists and sort things into meaningless, bureaucratic categories. One senses the driving will of the man in every stroke he makes on the page.”

The author also grapples with a more recent but still irretrievably lost Russia — the one that existed in 1992, the year Brent first began making his frequent trips to Moscow in order to research, make connections and strike publishing deals for Yale University Press. He spends a good portion of the book relating his reactions to that turbulent period with a sincerity and candor that only an outsider could bring. He describes in great detail the smell of Moscow at that time and the idiosyncrasies of the people he encountered. If he ever passes judgment in his accounts, he does so with full disclosure of his own foreignness or inability to fully comprehend what Russia’s own citizens were (and still are) trying to grasp. Brent eventually gains access to some of Russia’s “members only” sectors. In the figurative sense, this means that he makes new friends and establishes a familiarity with their old haunts. In the very literal sense, well, he gets his hands on KGB files. The findings are at times chilling, as in the chapter where Brent offers insight into the arrest, trial, and execution of free-thinking writer Isaac Babel. The author is careful to make neither heroes nor villains of the ghosts he summons from the archives, incorporating flawed personalities into stories of unthinkable injustice.

Inside the Stalin Archives doesn’t need a unifying thesis. Its fluidity of thoughts, subjects, and theories works to its advantage. Brent comes off as educated and inquisitive, but never overconfident in his explanations. Nor does he let an air of condescension seep into his arguments; a remarkable achievement for an American writer taking on the arduous task of “discovering Russia.” (We’ve all read those books, haven’t we? This isn’t one of them.)

While Inside the Stalin Archives is more discussion than dissertation, the text does make room for a few formal hypotheses. Among Brent’s most pertinent assertions concerns Russians’ regard for laws: “Many will argue that for Russia at this time stability is more important than laws, and there is some truth in this. But once the new Russia begins to go down a path of institutionalized lawlessness — and it is already fairly far along — it will not be possible to reform itself. Its past truly will overtake its future.”

Without blatantly saying so, Brent makes a compelling case for his subtitle. To talk about the New Russia with any authority, after all, one must devote most of the conversation to the Old.

Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia (Hardcover) [Amazon]