Mammoth Undertaking

As a build-up to my departure on a field trip this Friday, I'm trying to stick to a common theme for such posts as may appear this week. Churchill is probably second only to Wilde for quotable epigrams (and wouldn't Oscar be glad I have mentioned him?). Churchill's phrase "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" has become memorable to the point of cliche, and there are no shortage of the latter when it comes to Russia. But stereotypes are, paradoxically, easy to understand, which tends to make Churchill's apercu, well, difficult to understand. There is a Russian saying "You live for a hundred years, you'll be learning for one hundred years..." So far, so humdrum; after all, the English say "You live and learn". The quintessential Russian pessimism comes at the end of the expression: "... and you'll still die a fool." More than half my existence has been devoted to learning about Russia; whilst I'm 66 years shy of the first target, I'm well on course for the other. I hope to share some of that ignorance with you over the next few days.

One of the recurring images of Russia is the woolly mammoth disinterred in perfect condition. A very similar image opens Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's equally archetypal depiction of the horrors of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago. The archipelago metaphor refers to the fact that the prisoners were essentially inhabitants of a country within a country - a chain of islands of incarceration - of which the wider population ostensibly knew nothing, yet of which the initiated could detect signs in day-to-day discourse. The example is a report in Pravda of an archaelogical expedition which found extremely well-preserved specimens of prehistoric salamanders in the permafrost. Those accompanying the scientists, the report continued, devoured the thawed samples with relish. It is this enthusiasm with which the salamanders are eaten that reveals to the narrator that he is reading about labour-camp inmates - who else than a starving convict, he reasons, would let meat thousands of years past its sell-by date even pass their lips, let alone eat it with relish? [1] If you have read the book, you will know that the remarkably calm narrator goes on to describe events that make this opening seem like the opening of a Fortnum and Mason picnic hamper. Even if you have not, the labour camps are one of the abiding images of the Soviet Union - a state of the worst kind of murderous bureaucracy.

There is no shortage of bloggers keen to invoke Orwell's jackboot in relation to the Soviet Union, and rightly so: to ignore the impact of state terror on the country would be to ignore a particularly large elephant, indeed, a mammoth in the room. Never let it be forgotten that the
Soviet Union suffered the largest gross losses of any country during the Second World War - at least 20 million military and civilian deaths. An appalling toll, completely disproportionate to that of any of the other Allied countries. And yet, and yet, the scholarly consensus is that the Soviet Union was itself responsible for the same number of deaths again, which it inflicted deliberately on its own citizens. That is a fact that is less well-known, but if anything still more horrifying.

So your first enigma is how such a dreadful regime could also sanction such touching and human cartoons as the following. Even for those who don't speak Russian, the plot is still relatively transparent: a young mammoth wakes after millennia asleep in the ice. See? I told you it was an archetypal image. What does a good Soviet mammoth do in such circumstances? The same as any other lost child, anywhere - he misses his mum. It's a simple story, but very movingly told:



The obvious answer, of course, is that the Soviet Union was a complex place. As well as the organisations involved in coercing the population into accepting the regime, there were structures dedicated to persuading the populace that the promised Communist future was close at hand, while the existing Socialist present was also pretty good. Hence a cartoon that promised lost children would be looked after. But even that is too glib a reading: people working in the entertainment industry within the Soviet Union were able to slip certains things past the censor - this cartoon is, after all, a fairly overt allusion to children waking to find their parents vanished...

[1] My soon-to-be brother-in-law's father worked in a Soviet cold-store in the 1970s, and swears they had carcases with 1950s date-stamps still in storage.