My favorite books on Russia and the USSR from someone fascinated by their culture and history

If an international criminal court ever decides to throw the book at Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, then Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy is the book the prosecutor would pick up. Dawisha has followed up every trace of Putin’s activity since the KGB was officially dissolved and given, with varying certainty and assurance, the dates, the locations, associates, and outcomes of some twenty years of criminal activity — hit-and-run car accidents, fraud, misappropriation of national and international funds, chicanery, grand larceny, false accusation, torture, murder, war crimes, terrorism. The British reader could not for some years buy Dawisha’s book; in the UK it was rejected by a publisher afraid of being sued.

Rasputin’s ghost will rejoice to have the centenary of his murder marked by 800 pages of painstakingly researched, objective, accurate, and even sympathetic biography. For this authoritative work, Douglas Smith mined the entire Russian press of Rasputin’s last years, the reports of up to 5,000 the agents sent by authorities in the government and church to protect or to incriminate Rasputin, as well as every extant memoir. He has discounted many sensational and scandalous reports of this self-made monk or priest’s wild behaviour and magical powers. Rasputin’s sexuality, drinking, and propensity to violence, Smith insists, are much exaggerated. As police agents confirmed, he would visit two or three prostitutes a day; he bedded many of his female acolytes and petitioners. But, as others testify, he was no rapist or pervert. His performance was unimpaired by three bottles of Madeira. Understandably, he drank and whored heavily in the last four years of his life, after two serious assassination attempts by demented former admirers, when he feared a third, successful attempt.

The most compelling aspect of Mirror of the Soul is its analysis of the great poet Tyutchev’s bi-polar temperament and compulsive philandering. He was a forgivable Don Juan, in that he deeply empathized with his victims, although his misbehaviour shortened the lives of his first wife and of his most infatuated mistress. Morbidly irresponsible, he impregnated at least two mistresses and both his wives before marriage. Joy was for Tyutchev a thin veneer of light over misery and darkness; deaths of those close to him and contrition (if not guilt) finally reconciled him, in a death-bed poem, with a “punitive God” who removes everything — “breath, willpower, sleep” — leaving just an aggrieved, loving wife as his intermediary. Mirror of the Soul is beautifully written and edited. It will be, for a long time, the standard work on Tyutchev, doubtless in Russia, too.

Patenaude focuses just on the Mexican period, from January 1937 to August 1940, of Trotsky’s exile, although the previous stages of his exile — Kazakhstan in 1928, then Turkey for four years, France for another three, followed by interment in Norway — are dealt with in a series of flashbacks. In fact, the whole book is written as if Trotsky in Coyoacán were recalling his past, from his prosperous farmer’s boyhood to his underground militancy, his Civil War military brilliance, and his blundering incompetence as a Bolshevik power-broker. The danger that Patenaude flirts with is to let Trotsky’s charisma and undoubted genius charm him into overlooking his subject’s monstrous indifference to the suffering and deaths of others, sometimes even of those close to him, as well as his overweening conceit.

By dealing with the last phase of the tragedy, nemesis, Trotsky is seen to pay in fear, resignation, failure, and personal loss a price that may not be commensurate with the destruction of life that he himself caused between 1918 and 1922. Only Vladimir Nabokov might have written a more compelling account of Trotsky’s end (and its relationship to his beginnings). A dethroned Russian in exile, waiting for his killer to come from the homeland even while he is desperately trying to complete his biography of the killer (Stalin), is life imitating Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Invitation to a Beheading or Bend Sinister. Only Humbert Humbert’s murder of Quilty can match the sheer incompetence of the first attempt to murder the Trotskys — a group of Stalinists led by Siqueiros, the rival mural-painter to Diego Rivera, Trotsky’s protector, is let in by a young American traitor, rakes all the bedrooms with machine-gun fire but fails to see that the Trotskys, hiding under their bed, have survived unscathed — followed by clumsy success (almost requiring Trotsky’s collusion) in which NKVD agent Ramón Mercader, calling himself Jacson, a French Canadian sympathiser, despite a dubious French accent, enters the study unchallenged wearing a hat and a raincoat on a Mexican summer’s day and hits Trotsky on the head with the wrong side of an ice-pick. Patenaude’s narrative skill, however, keeps a wry smile, rather than a wicked grin, on the reader’s face.

Like Felix Krull, or Jonathan Wild, this is the story of a con-man, murderer, traitor, somehow redeemed by his charm and incidents of bravery The novel is at its best when Javakhishvili starts to describe Kvachi’s experiences with the Russians during the Revolution, the civil war and the early years of the Soviet state; it becomes clear that what has seemed a send-up of morality and a celebration of the picaresque is in fact equally valid as a cold assessment of revolutionary realpolitik. This is a wonderful novel, subtle and extravagant at the same time, seeming to fly by the seat of its pants but in fact consistently aware of exactly how to tread the line between structure and improvisation. It is extremely generous, bursting out of what appear to be its narrow confines to give us far more than we initially expected.