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rfmcdonaldThursday, I was lucky. Bart McDowell and Dean Conger's classic 1977 National Geographic book Journey Across Russia: The Soviet Union Today was one of the first books I ever read on the former Soviet Union, in the adult stacks in Charlottetown's Confederation Centre Public Library. Much to my surprise, I found a copy for sale, literally on the street at Bloor and Brunswick, for a mere five dollars. This copy even came with the classic two-sided ethnopolitical February 1976 map of the Soviet Union tucked away neatly in the back!
Journey Across Russia is a remarkable not least because of the date of its publication. In 1977, the Soviet Union was arguably reaching its peak relative to the United States, not that deep into the era of Brezhnevian stagnation at home while expanding its military footprint abroad. The Soviet model of course had its obvious flaws, but the Soviet Union did seem to work, did seem a viable alternative to the Western liberal democratic capitalist order. This book sought to communicate to Western readers something close to an insider's view of this fascinating, threatening, different society.
The biggest flaw of this book is that it doesn't deal with the ongoing oppression experienced by Soviet citizens. Reading Journey Across Russia from my particular position with my knowledge 36 years after its publication, I wonder what lacunae Intourist and state censors forced on the author. (The chapter including Crimea doesn't mention the Crimean Tatars, for instance.) Against this limitation in the depth of the book is the incredible breadth of this book, including interviews with people from a variety of social strata coming from all fifteen Union republics, and beautiful photos along with. And even the limitation in depth isn't so serious: again, reading with my post-Soviet mind, I see numerous indications of the ethnic tensions in Soviet society, with Georgians wanting to be seen as Europeans and seeing Russia as being as foreign as France, Armenians describing the way past Armenian sufferings influence the current generation's perceptions, the author's noting the quiet ethnic tension in Kazakhstan marked by Russophone incomprehension of said country's titular nation, and a Russian who tried to order a salad in Estonia ended up getting served with sliced eel while his American Estonian-speaking counterpart got smiles and the food he wanted. (Class tensions are lower-key.)
My main emotional reaction to this book is a sort of sadness. The picture of Soviet society that I got from the book is, in part, of a society that was devoted despite itself to its further development. The ambitious geoengineering projects--canals in the Turkmenistan desert, the overextensive development of the Soviet North, even plans to rechannel the Amur--are a case in point. They were environmentally potentially catastrophic, sure, but they did reflect a sort of ambition that liberal-democratic capitalist Westerners could identify with. I can almost understand why many Western leftists so overempathized with the Soviet Union as to be called on it later by Susan Sontag. Knowing how badly life would deteriorate for many of the individuals and entire peoples encountered in the book, I wished things could have been different.
This book has the flaws of its era, but in other respects transcends them. It's a fascinating worthwhile read, a look at a complex world power just a decade and a half before its fall. Recommended.
Journey Across Russia is a remarkable not least because of the date of its publication. In 1977, the Soviet Union was arguably reaching its peak relative to the United States, not that deep into the era of Brezhnevian stagnation at home while expanding its military footprint abroad. The Soviet model of course had its obvious flaws, but the Soviet Union did seem to work, did seem a viable alternative to the Western liberal democratic capitalist order. This book sought to communicate to Western readers something close to an insider's view of this fascinating, threatening, different society.
The biggest flaw of this book is that it doesn't deal with the ongoing oppression experienced by Soviet citizens. Reading Journey Across Russia from my particular position with my knowledge 36 years after its publication, I wonder what lacunae Intourist and state censors forced on the author. (The chapter including Crimea doesn't mention the Crimean Tatars, for instance.) Against this limitation in the depth of the book is the incredible breadth of this book, including interviews with people from a variety of social strata coming from all fifteen Union republics, and beautiful photos along with. And even the limitation in depth isn't so serious: again, reading with my post-Soviet mind, I see numerous indications of the ethnic tensions in Soviet society, with Georgians wanting to be seen as Europeans and seeing Russia as being as foreign as France, Armenians describing the way past Armenian sufferings influence the current generation's perceptions, the author's noting the quiet ethnic tension in Kazakhstan marked by Russophone incomprehension of said country's titular nation, and a Russian who tried to order a salad in Estonia ended up getting served with sliced eel while his American Estonian-speaking counterpart got smiles and the food he wanted. (Class tensions are lower-key.)
My main emotional reaction to this book is a sort of sadness. The picture of Soviet society that I got from the book is, in part, of a society that was devoted despite itself to its further development. The ambitious geoengineering projects--canals in the Turkmenistan desert, the overextensive development of the Soviet North, even plans to rechannel the Amur--are a case in point. They were environmentally potentially catastrophic, sure, but they did reflect a sort of ambition that liberal-democratic capitalist Westerners could identify with. I can almost understand why many Western leftists so overempathized with the Soviet Union as to be called on it later by Susan Sontag. Knowing how badly life would deteriorate for many of the individuals and entire peoples encountered in the book, I wished things could have been different.
This book has the flaws of its era, but in other respects transcends them. It's a fascinating worthwhile read, a look at a complex world power just a decade and a half before its fall. Recommended.
