September 22, 2024

Children of the Revolution

Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I write about what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers.

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Just for fun, I’ve been reading a lot about the Russian Civil War lately. After deciding to write a historical fiction novel, I immediately lost the plot and, instead, proceeded to engage in a near infinite amount of research, so right now I’m reading Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, whose subtitle downsells itself as it covers the period from 1864 through the civil war. I’ve just finished Antony Beevor’s Russia: Revolution, Civil War, 1917-1921, after making a solid go at Laura Engelstein’s Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (hampered by audiobook narrator Anne Flosnik, an absolutely confounding choice since she seems utterly baffled by the Russian language). I’m also about a quarter of the way through Russia’s Sisters of Mercy and the Great War: More than Binding Men’s Wounds, by Laurie Stoff, which locks some of the fascinating information I’m looking for behind a scrim of academic prose. Lest you think I’m sticking to historical surveys, I’ve also got some period literature in the hopper: I’m past due for a reread of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (truly one of the best collections of short stories in history), Marina Tsvetaeva’s Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922, and Mikhail Sholokhov’s Cossack epic And Quiet Flows the Don. 

Basically, after a long period of Learning More About World War One, I’ve moved on to an inseparable but ancillary—and nearly as complicated—conflict. The Reds, the Whites, the Greens, and the collapse of the Provisional Government, and the warlords of Siberia, and the pogroms (so many pogroms!), and the militant anarchist peasant rebel Nestor Makhno, and the Baltics, and the Balkans, and Bela Kun and Milkos Horthy in Hungary… the mess that was the Eastern Front, the famines… And the Allies, both by sponsoring German marauders in the Baltics and aiding the White warlords in the East, beginning the subsequent century of anti-Soviet interventions with a vengeance. Red Terror and White Terror, the Cheka in its nascency turning the Lyublyanka Prison into a slaughter ground, the blithe, corrupt carapace of the Romanovs, how all this really started with the emancipation of the serfs… Everyone is incredibly drunk, and nobody has enough bullets. It’s juicy. It’s got so many moving parts. It will take years for me to have more than a nodding acquaintance. And best believe I am going to set my novel about a World War I Eastern Front nurse turned serial poisoner right in the middle of it.

I’m beginning to realize my addiction to audiobooks is a liability, and I’ve got to relearn how to read text on its own because there are simply no extant audiobooks for tons of this material. (Which is particularly upsetting in the case of Babel, because his work cries out for a good narrator). Still, I’m managing to read and learn a lot. And write quite a bit less—but I need a solid background before I really get into it—he says, in apology to the blank page.

I don’t really have an apposite moral lesson from all this except that all the people who are champing at the bit for a civil war in America (and there are an awful lot of them) could do with reading a book about a civil war, like, right now. Being horny for civil war makes a tiny bit of sense if you live in a prison of your own grievance; learning even a little bit about the impossibly grim realities of any civil war might be a tonic against that sort of thing. I’m talking about both the revolutionary fantasists and the doomsday preppers here; while there might be a state of affairs that justifies civil war, one thing’s for certain, it is truly not going to be a good time. Our own civil war was sufficiently grim, and learning about any additional examples can only be beneficial for those who are perennially hungry for violence. 

There are so many horrific stories that form their own narrative pockets in any civil war, but while the United States isn’t quite the size of the Russian Empire, it’s big enough to accommodate any number of People’s Republics, conflicting armies, and massacres both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary. We may have antibiotics now, but we also have bump-stocks and hollow-point bullets, and anyone salivating over the prospect of using them is not to be trusted.

Reading about Russia a century ago gave me a greater appreciation for Alex Garland’s recent film Civil War—when I originally watched it, I was mostly disgruntled at its frankly bizarre portrayal of photojournalists—because his purposeful omission of ideology makes more sense to me now, immersed in narratives about just how bad civil wars can be. What Garland wanted to show was the shock and the violence of mass graves in the middle of Virginia, armed checkpoints and admonitory hangings in the mid-Atlantic. He wanted to show how much more beneficial, by comparison, peace—even strained peace—is. As we stand on the precipice of the possible dissolution of democracy, and the illegal election-related fuckery mounts, it’s worth reminding ourselves–not as preemptive surrender, but rather as a motivation for proactive defense—of the social order we want and need. I’m learning a ton from these books, but most of all, it’s a reinforcement of a lesson I already knew, but which needed to be triple-underlined in fire: Civil war is worth avoiding, if you can.