Diletant — “Oleg Budnitsky / A Person Against the Background of an Era / Book Casino. Stories”

Oleg Vitalyevich Budnitsky is a writer and Soviet and Russian historian specializing in Russian history of the second half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is a Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor, director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences at HSE University, a member of the Academia Europaea, and editor-in-chief of the annual “Archive of Jewish History.” The new episode of “Book Casino” features Oleg Budnitsky, Doctor of Historical Sciences. The host is Nikita Vasilenko; literary critic Nikolai Alexandrov also appears with his regular “Little Books” segment.

N. VASILENKO: Saturday, April 16, the Diletant YouTube channel; Nikita Vasilenko at the microphone. Welcome to all viewers of our program. And, as always, “Book Casino. Stories” is in its usual place. Let me remind you that your support matters to us, so please subscribe, share the video, send it to your friends, and give it a like. I also want to introduce the director helping me today, Alexander Lukyanov. My thanks to him. And do not forget that we have books in our online shop. Today we will also be talking about books from that shop. Many have already sold out, but we are constantly renewing our selection.

Last time on this broadcast, on our program, we met with Lyudmila Ulitskaya. We spoke with her about how to remain human amid terrible upheavals. Again and again, the entire conversation came back to historical parallels and examples from history. I thought that for the next episode — today’s — it was important to invite someone who understands history, and I am very happy to welcome to our virtual studio the author of “People at War” and “Another Russia,” Doctor of Historical Sciences Oleg Budnitsky. Oleg Vitalyevich, hello!

O. BUDNITSKY: Hello.

N. VASILENKO: We will begin our conversation now. Let me make a small announcement right away. Oleg Vitalyevich also has a third book, a new one, which we will certainly discuss, but for the moment I will keep it a little secret from you. I wanted to start with theoretical questions. Oleg Vitalyevich, how fair is the claim that history moves in a spiral?

O. BUDNITSKY: Not very fair, in my view. Of course, over a very long historical span one can find certain similarities, parallels, and apparent repetitions. In reality, history is unique; that is what distinguishes it from, say, physics or chemistry, and the humanities in general from the exact and natural sciences. In those fields there are certain regularities that operate always and everywhere. In history, everything is determined by the actions of particular people in particular circumstances. And everything can go quite differently from how it seemed it ought to go. It may go for the worse, it may go for the better, but it will not go in the same way. All historical analogies limp. There may be similarities between particular regimes or historical personalities, but overall everything is individual and unique. That is both the interest, the charm, and, if you like, the horror of our discipline.

N. VASILENKO: Then a second theoretical question. The personalized approach to studying history, especially our history: as students and schoolchildren, we constantly encounter the practice of studying everything that happened through the prism of the rule of whichever leader headed the country at the time. In your view, does this personalized approach do more good or more harm?

O. BUDNITSKY: Neither. Those are not really the categories a historian uses — more good or more harm. What is a historian’s task, after all? First, to understand what happened, and second, why it happened. The second is much harder than the first. Naturally, in history we study society, the economy, so to speak, various social strata, psychology if you like, and so on. And we study the actions of specific individuals.

Why is so much attention paid to individuals in Russian history? Because, unfortunately, this personalist element has been very strong in our history. Let me remind you that the country was an autocracy until October 17, 1905. Then it supposedly ceased to be autocratic and supposedly became a constitutional monarchy, although the emperor’s power remained enormous and was only very weakly constrained by institutions such as the State Duma. In the Soviet period, to some extent this model was reproduced. The power of the General Secretary — at least in the Stalin period, and also under Lenin — was practically absolute and, incidentally, significantly exceeded the power of Russia’s absolute monarchs, at least those of the post-Petrine era. So studying personalities is unavoidable, and it actually explains a great deal.

N. VASILENKO: And now I want to turn to one of the books I have already mentioned, “People at War,” published by New Literary Review. Already in the introduction there is a question: why do people seem like faceless extras in the battle of states and leaders? One of the sources that removes this depersonalization is, of course, diaries — the diaries of witnesses and participants in events. So I have two questions at once: what is the value of a diary, and can we say that, for example, the diary of a Marshal of Victory and the diary of an ordinary soldier are of equal weight in the historical context?

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, they are equal in that sense. As for a marshal’s diary, in fact, I think we know of only one such diary — that of the future Marshal Yeremenko. Even he kept it rather irregularly, which is understandable: he commanded fronts, was wounded, and so on. Such sources allow us to understand different levels of events, different levels of people’s feelings and actions in war. For a very long time, in the Soviet Union and also in the post-Soviet period, the viewpoint of gods and heroes predominated and continues to predominate: what this man did, what that man thought. Let me remind you that series of military memoirs were extremely popular in the Soviet period. For the most part these were generals’ memoirs, usually not actually written by the generals themselves. Marshal Zhukov’s famous memoirs were, to a considerable extent, shaped by literary editors, and where Zhukov’s own voice ends and the polished text begins is a major question — not to mention the many censorial cuts, insertions, and so on.

As for diaries, what is their value? They are among the most authentic sources not only for the history of war but for history in general. People wrote here and now. A person making an entry often did not know whether he would live until the next day, or even until that evening. Such diaries exist. Take the diary of Georgy Slavgorodsky, for instance. I write about him in this book; he was a very unusual person. He noted the date on which he intended to make his next entry, and he did not live to see that date. This was January 1945, already in Poland. He was killed at the end of January 1945 and posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. He kept a diary. He was a new kind of Soviet intellectual from the provinces, from Rostov Region: pedagogically trained, a teacher of Russian language and literature. Yet he wrote absolutely dreadful Russian, which says something about the level of that education. He dreamed of becoming a writer, perhaps a new Leo Tolstoy. He wrote in his diary that he would create a new “War and Peace.” But what he did best was not writing, but fighting. He even wrote: “I have become absorbed in war again.” He rose from sergeant to major and battalion commander, which was not especially common. He was an excellent warrior, although he dreamed of something entirely different — love, peaceful life, drinking with friends, and writing books. All of this is reflected in his diary, which is a remarkable text. It tells us about people at war and about the war itself: what it was like, how people perceived it. Slavgorodsky began fighting in 1941 and left remarkable entries about the first, extremely difficult months of the war and about the Battle of Stalingrad, in which he took part. Sadly, his life ended in January 1945.

N. VASILENKO: Oleg Vitalyevich, you have given the example of Slavgorodsky and his diary. Are there diaries that helped historians rethink particular events of the Great Patriotic War and World War II — not necessarily diaries of our compatriots, perhaps those of people abroad?

O. BUDNITSKY: You know, I would prefer to focus on our own history. There are in fact many diaries that were kept abroad, for example in Germany. Here, keeping diaries, or indeed making any kinds of notes, was not encouraged, to put it mildly. In Germany, by contrast, it was permitted and even encouraged, and a fairly extensive body of literature survives that shows the formation of the psychology of these would-be conquerors of the world and so on. Here, although there was no formal order prohibiting diaries, as a rule they were not permitted under the general requirements of secrecy. In some cases, of course, no one paid attention to it.

Diaries vary greatly. Vladimir Gelfand’s diary, which I edited, is a huge volume — 750 pages with commentary. There is also an essay about Gelfand in “People at War.” He kept a diary from before the war, from his last school year, until 1946, when he was an officer in the Soviet occupation army in Germany. It is an astonishingly interesting diary because he was such a naive young man. When the war begins, what does he write? “Well, yes, apparently I’ll have to spend my vacation differently now.” That is the first thought that comes to him. For someone who went through the war, this is the diary of a very naive, candid young man who also dreamed of becoming a writer. Many diary keepers dreamed of becoming writers later and made notes with that in mind. He records things that an adult, or a more prudent person, probably would not even have put down on paper, even for himself. A diary keeper senses, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he is not writing only for himself. It is extraordinarily interesting: everyday life and manners in the army and outside it, and people’s attitudes toward what was happening.

He was Soviet to the marrow of his bones, a Komsomol member and later a young Communist. Yet he records with a degree of horror... The action takes place on the Don, where the Civil War had once raged, where attitudes toward Soviet power had been very complicated, followed by dekulakization and all the rest. After fighting there for several weeks, he writes that for the first time he heard the word “ours.” The Red Army had come to liberate the area, but people there spoke of “Russians” and “Germans”; they did not call the Red Army “ours.” That is a rather revealing entry. He also records, for example, the enormous level of antisemitism in Soviet society and in the Red Army during the war. It is a paradox: the army that defeated Nazism, liberated Auschwitz, and so on. He personally experienced antisemitic manifestations. And his diary from the German period is absolutely unique. It is tremendously interesting. That part of the diary devoted to Germany was first published in German and sold in an enormous edition there, more than 80,000 copies. Only after that was the complete version published in Russian, prepared by my colleagues and yours truly. It is a cross-section of the history of the war that could be recorded only by people who were in the thick of it and who did not yet know how one was “supposed” to write about the war; there was no official canon yet. Although at times they slip into official language, as a rule these are notes about what a person actually felt.

N. VASILENKO: And all those expressions like “Long live our leader, long live Comrade Stalin” — is that fear breaking through somehow?

O. BUDNITSKY: It varies. Gelfand, for instance, as I said, was Soviet to the marrow of his bones. He sees all sorts of horrors, disgraceful things, and so on, yet he does not connect any of it with Stalin personally. After the war, during some new elections to the Supreme Soviet or something of that sort, he writes: “Stalin is my great sun.” That is exactly how he puts it. Everything good in life is associated with the leader, while everything bad somehow happens contrary to the leader. That was a more or less standard psychology.

In some diaries neither the motherland, nor the Party, nor Stalin is mentioned at all. Not at all. Such things are simply outside people’s sphere of interest; they live from day to day and write things down. One very interesting example is the diary of Sergeant Pavel Elkinson. It is essentially one notebook, perhaps a notebook and a half. Why did he start keeping a diary? He had been fighting since 1942 and was at the front. Then he found himself abroad: his unit crossed the Prut. He writes, “I will probably never be abroad again in my life, so I ought to record my impressions.” A kind of interesting wartime “tourism.” He traveled through Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria and described his impressions of meetings with people, daily life and culture, and women. The subject of women, naturally, runs like a red thread through almost any soldier’s diary. In his remarkable memoirs, which many people know, Nikolai Nikulin — writing thirty years after Victory and for the desk drawer, because such texts obviously could not have been published under Soviet rule — wrote that the main topics of soldiers’ conversations, and therefore of their interests, were death, food, and sex. That is exactly what we see running through the diaries. People are interested in what was truly most important in their wartime lives.

N. VASILENKO: What about fantasies about the future, dreams?

O. BUDNITSKY: Sometimes. I spoke about Georgy Slavgorodsky’s dreams and those of other people. Very often people live from day to day, and some clearly keep diaries not only to record impressions but out of loneliness, like Gelfand. He writes, “Diary, dear friend.” He is utterly lonely and does not get along well with people. That is not only a problem of the people around him; it is also his own problem — he was quite egocentric. It is very difficult to plan ahead, especially in diaries written by people who were actually involved in fighting, people at the front line or very close to it. Georgy Slavgorodsky, for example, was an infantryman; Vladimir Gelfand was a mortar man — only infantry was worse, this was the very front edge, as they say. Pavel Elkinson was an artillery scout, someone who corrected fire and therefore occupied a dangerous position. Yet they still managed to write. Elkinson has one absolutely astonishing entry in his diary. It is Hungary. They are crossing the Danube, and there is very heavy fighting. The fighting in Hungary in 1945 was extremely hard; the siege of Budapest lasted 120 days and the assault was very costly. In one day four of his comrades are killed. He writes: “When will it be my turn?” He does not particularly expect to survive the war, and this is already January or February 1945. So there are dreams about the future, but I would not say that this is a main theme. There is very little of it.

N. VASILENKO: I would like to talk about other sources — official documents. In the context of the Great Patriotic War, most often we recall the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and I would like to use it to discuss verification. Even after the pact and the secret protocols were declassified, many people still refuse to believe they are genuine. Yes, some categories of people have accepted the documents and say that this was what had to be done, that it bought time, preserved resources, and so on. But others say that Khrushchev rewrote it, or Gorbachev, or Yeltsin, I do not know — and they are not prepared to believe that such documents existed. So, verification: how do you convey to an ordinary person that this document exists and is authentic?

O. BUDNITSKY: You cannot. It is a matter of faith. Of course we have the original. You probably do not remember the story from 1989, when the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocols was observed. There is nothing criminal in the non-aggression pact itself between the USSR and Germany. The “criminal” part is the secret protocols to it. In my view, this was the greatest mistake Stalin made, because it was, of course, his personal decision to sign those documents. In one of the essays opening the book, I analyze what Germany gained and what the Soviet Union gained. Germany clearly benefited enormously from the pact. If we look at what the Soviet Union acquired — purely pragmatically, setting aside the moral dimension — it was Western Ukraine, Western Belorussia, the Baltic states, part of Finland, and a few pieces such as Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia. What did Germany get? France, Belgium, Holland, and so on down the list, with their powerful industries, resources, and so forth. Germany benefited enormously from the agreement by ensuring that it had no eastern front. Of course, the bill had to be paid in 1941.

As for authenticity or inauthenticity, throughout the Soviet period it was always denied that there had been any agreements; everything was supposedly a lie. It is understandable why. An agreement with Nazi Germany was, in my view, the most devastating blow to the reputation of the Communist regime in general and Comrade Stalin personally. So it was always denied. The texts were published from photocopies that the Americans discovered among materials of the German Foreign Ministry and related records. They were published when the Cold War began. The matter was not discussed at the Nuremberg Trials; it was simply brushed aside. When the Cold War started, the protocols were published. In the USSR, an historical memorandum called “Falsifiers of History” was printed in an enormous edition. It practically did not even mention the protocols themselves, so that no knowledge about them would seep, so to speak, into the masses.

N. VASILENKO: Just to create informational noise, a kind of curtain.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, yes. The whole business was simply denied. Then in 1989, at the Congress of People’s Deputies, a proposal was made to denounce those secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the whole arrangement. At first the deputies voted against it, because, after all, the protocols supposedly did not exist. What were they supposed to denounce if there was nothing there? It was a scandal. Then, if I recall correctly, Alexander Yakovlev, who was responsible for the historical side of the matter, appeared and said, “Well, you know, our comrades looked around and found them.” He produced the documents themselves. And here is one of the most astonishing parts of the story: this document, which in my view compromised Soviet power, had not been destroyed. It had been preserved. Where? In the General Secretary’s special secret file.

N. VASILENKO: So it was passed down from one secretary to the next.

O. BUDNITSKY: Precisely, it was passed down. And then they could say: look, here they are, they really do exist. The protocols were denounced. After the fall of the Communist regime, the journal “Questions of History” published facsimiles of the secret protocols, and they have been reprinted many times. There are actual facsimiles: anyone who does not believe can take a look. Of course, one can invent a theory that those too were forged, but that is already outside historical reasoning; it is a matter of faith.

N. VASILENKO: Then let us leave that question in the category of faith, and let it be unto you according to your faith.

O. BUDNITSKY: By the way, I would like to say something here about archival documents. One has to understand that there is a naive notion that once the archives are opened... The archives are already open to a very substantial degree. In fact, we now have so many documents that if historians set themselves to studying them all, neither their own lives nor the lives of their children and grandchildren would be enough. These are enormous bodies of material. The issue is selecting what one considers more important, less important, and so on. But a great deal remains closed — that is absolutely true. Many things remain inaccessible: materials held in the FSB archive, some documents of the Main Political Directorate of the Red Army, and so forth. Nevertheless, we know a very great deal. And one must understand that an archival document is not the ultimate truth. People wrote documents for particular purposes. They used those texts to explain something to superiors, to persuade them of something, or conversely to deflect something.

An archival document must be subjected to historical criticism. One has to understand why it was written. A text by itself is, so to speak, mute; it has to be placed in context and interpreted. That is the historian’s work. This is important to understand. When I write and attach special importance to diaries, I mean that if we write history only from official documents, we will neither write nor understand real history. When we combine official documents of many different kinds — operational records, political reports about morale, materials from military tribunals, reports from the NKVD and NKGB and later SMERSH about attitudes — then together they give us a mosaic, polyphonic, very complex picture. Personal testimony is extraordinarily important here. Without it we will never understand what really happened. The canon created then, and which many now try somehow to preserve or revive, actually has very little in common with the real history of the war.

N. VASILENKO: Now I would like to move to the prewar period and to “Another Russia.” That is also the title of your book, which has touched a nerve and become very timely. My question is this. There really was another Russia, an alternative to Bolshevik Russia, made up of emigrants. They were scattered around the world. Europe probably had the largest number of representatives of this other Russia, and they took enormous resources with them. These were not only human resources; there were also gold reserves, which we will discuss as well. But here is the question: why did they never manage to create some powerful center, a headquarters of resistance to Bolshevik rule, outside the country?

O. BUDNITSKY: I understand. But first I do want to show which books we are talking about. This is “People at War,” which we have discussed, published by New Literary Review in the series “What Is Russia?” And this is the beautifully produced book we are discussing now, “Another Russia.”

Look, first of all, one must understand that no one has ever changed a regime inside a country from outside, from emigration. Only people who live in the country, who are inside it, can do that. Of course, émigrés can exert enormous influence. One man, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, had a tremendous influence on Russian society and thought and founded the free Russian press. Or take the Social Democratic publications of the early twentieth century — the universally known “Iskra,” for example, or the Socialist Revolutionary paper “Revolutionary Russia.” They had influence, but ultimately everything is decided by people in the country itself. Emigrants have never, anywhere, managed to change everything from outside.

That is the first point. Second, there was no single center of emigration. The émigrés carried abroad all the contradictions and disputes that had existed among people in Russia. The emigration was extremely diverse. There were monarchists; there were socialists of tendencies different from the Bolsheviks; and there was a huge mass of people who simply fled the Bolshevik regime, terror, lawlessness, hunger, and so on. There is an image, a myth, that they were all members of the elite. That is not true. The overwhelming majority of emigrants were ordinary people: soldiers, Cossacks, participants in various anti-Bolshevik armed formations — Whites and non-Whites, Greens, anarchists, whoever you like. Among the émigrés were Generals Denikin and Wrangel, Krasnov — a Cossack ataman and general of the Imperial Army — and, for example, Batko Makhno. They were very different people. There were liberals, Cadets, Pavel Milyukov, Vasily Maklakov; socialists, revolutionaries, anyone you like. There was no unity, and there could not have been a single headquarters. There were attempts to organize struggle in Russia from abroad, but they generally ended in failure, especially because the emigration was riddled with GPU and later NKVD agents.

The best-known story is Operation Trust, when a fictitious organization was created and Boris Savinkov was lured into Russia, where he was arrested. Or take a more sinister example: General Skoblin, the last commander of the Kornilov Regiment, was an NKVD agent. He took part in arranging the kidnapping of General Miller, head of the Russian All-Military Union, who was taken to the USSR aboard the Soviet ship Maria Ulyanova. This happened in 1937. Miller spent two years in the Lubyanka under the name Ivanov. At first they had no time for him because they were shooting their own people. In 1939 they finally got around to him, and he was executed.

Or take Sergei Efron, Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband. He was a former volunteer and member of the Volunteer Army who came to believe in the correctness of Bolshevik ideas, became an NKVD agent, and eventually had to flee, returning to Soviet Russia. Sadly, he was ultimately executed there in 1941. We know what became of Marina Tsvetaeva. She too was forced to re-emigrate to the Soviet Union because she had become ostracized within the émigré community.

That, by the way, is why no such center emerged. On the other hand, I do not want to contradict myself so much as qualify what I said. I said there is a myth that the elite made up the majority of the emigration. No, certainly not. But never before had such a large stratum of the elite — of many different kinds — found itself among emigrants. We know most about the cultural elite: writers, artists, publicists, poets. I do not think I need to remind you at length, but still: the first Russian Nobel laureate in literature, Ivan Bunin, was an émigré. Even today, in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, there are folders labeled “correspondence of White émigré Bunin with so-and-so.” Those archival files were described in an era when the archives were administered by the NKVD, then the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and so on. Large numbers of lawyers left, because genuine jurisprudence was no longer needed at home. Entrepreneurs left; some managed to take out certain capital and engage in business, which I have also written books about. Sometimes they were successful. Diplomats left. In short, a mass of professionals, professional military people, and others departed. There arose a kind of... another Russia, made up to some extent of people from the past, but also of people who might have built a new Russia. I discuss this in the book as well. It is a book about the search for ways to overcome Bolshevism and about different projects for what that new Russia ought to be. I write about the dialogue between Vasily Maklakov and Boris Bakhmetev; an essay about them opens the book, together with a general survey of the history of the emigration. What did they imagine the new Russia would be like, and on what foundations should it be built? In my view it is an extraordinarily interesting project. I think there was even a competition under Boris Yeltsin to formulate a national idea for Russia. One might have read the correspondence between Boris Bakhmetev and Vasily Maklakov; the idea is formulated there very clearly. But we are still a very, very long way from realizing it.

N. VASILENKO: In Russia one has to live a long time, as the classics used to say.

O. BUDNITSKY: That is true.

N. VASILENKO: I want to recommend something to our viewers. I have not yet seen it on sale, but I saw a publication in the journal “Znamya.” It is Sasha Filipenko’s novel “Cremulator,” the story of a White émigré and White officer, Pavel Nesterenko, who later returned to Soviet Russia and became director of Moscow’s first crematorium. If you want to recreate in your imagination and see the hardships of emigration in that era, I strongly recommend this novel.

And we cannot hide from our viewers that you, Oleg Vitalyevich, have a new book, “Kolchak’s Gold.” There have already been many questions in the chat. I will not ask you to reveal all the secrets or all the conclusions of the historical investigation you conducted; I will simply ask you to separate myth from fact. Kolchak’s gold: what is it, where is the truth, where are the myths? Which myths, if any, are the most popular?

O. BUDNITSKY: Here is the book; I received my own copy literally three days ago. It too was published by New Literary Review in the “What Is Russia?” series. What was Kolchak’s gold? It was a large part of the gold reserve of the Russian Empire. More specifically, if we speak in terms of the sum, it was 645 million gold rubles, to reduce it to a common denominator.

N. VASILENKO: Can that be converted into today’s terms, for comparison?

O. BUDNITSKY: First let me explain what it meant at the time, for clarity.

N. VASILENKO: Please do.

O. BUDNITSKY: What was a gold ruble? It represented 0.774 grams — plus additional decimal places — of pure gold. That is what a gold ruble meant. As for gold coins — their photographs are reproduced in the book, by the way — Russian coins included the imperial, a 15-ruble coin, the half-imperial, 7.5 rubles, and the most popular coin, the gold chervonets. The Russian Empire’s gold reserve consisted mainly of gold bars and coins. There were coins from thirteen countries; German Reichsmarks were the most numerous, incidentally. There were British sovereigns and many other coins as well. Two gold rubles — taking roughly the 1917 level, because later the ruble of course was no longer quoted and there was only a notional exchange rate — equaled one U.S. dollar, itself tied to gold in the age of the gold standard. Ten rubles equaled one pound sterling. At that time sterling was the main world currency, and most international trade was conducted in pounds or dollars. In weight, the reserve amounted to 490 metric tons of gold. Converting it into present-day money is not easy. Gold rubles no longer exist, so by convention we compare them with dollars, but there have been so many devaluations and other changes. We are talking at minimum about several tens of billions of dollars, perhaps more.

N. VASILENKO: Let us leave that question to the economists.

O. BUDNITSKY: I discuss it in the book. I have detailed tables showing changes in various exchange rates and changes in the price of gold on the London market, so anyone interested can look. I provide different figures, but one has to understand that purchasing power changes enormously, the range of goods changes, and so on. Still, these were very large sums, I want to emphasize that once more.

So what is the mystery? Of that gigantic amount — 645 million gold rubles — gold worth 409 million rubles eventually fell into Bolshevik hands. It is easy to see that the difference was the very substantial sum of 236 million gold rubles. What happened to it? Where did that gold go?

N. VASILENKO: There are many questions in the chat: how was it taken out?

O. BUDNITSKY: That I can answer easily. First it was transported in train echelons from Omsk, where it was stored, to Vladivostok.

N. VASILENKO: So, from Kolchak’s headquarters, essentially.

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes. There is a film about a certain “gold train” that has nothing to do with the reality. In fact there were five gold trains carrying the gold to Vladivostok, and from there it was sent onward by ship. Some went to Hong Kong, to the vaults of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation — actually a British bank — and some to the vaults of French banks, because French bankers bought the first gold from Kolchak’s government. Gold was sent to Japan, to Yokohama Specie Bank and Chosen Bank. Banks extended credit to Kolchak’s government and gold was sent as collateral to British and American bank vaults. Ataman Semyonov seized gold worth 43.5 million rubles in Chita, so one train never reached its destination. In short, gold worth roughly 190 million rubles was sent abroad.

Who spent it and how? This is a completely detective-like and fascinating story. How did they sell it? Just try selling gold: this was a state gold reserve, and no private bank would dare buy it without its government’s consent. Kolchak’s government was not recognized by anyone. What right did it have to dispose of this gold reserve? Eventually some government would establish itself in Russia and make claims. It was a very complicated story. The first shipment was sold at a large discount. In short, it is a fascinating plot. One of the most interesting parts is that some of the gold not spent during the Civil War on arms, uniforms, and all sorts of other things, right down to school textbooks, remained in the hands of émigré diplomats. Some was spent on aid to Russian émigrés, while some was intended to be preserved for a future government of post-Bolshevik Russia. I traced how that gold was spent all the way to the end of the 1950s. That is essentially what the book is about: what happened to the gold and how. Some of it really was stolen, but that was only a very small portion.

N. VASILENKO: Oleg Vitalyevich, we literally have a minute left. Again, I am not asking you to reveal all the secrets; let the reader discover them in the book. But did any of the gold, in any form, return to Russia?

O. BUDNITSKY: No.

N. VASILENKO: That settles it. We have talked about very different historical phenomena, and I think this broadcast is something we will still have to watch again and think over. I say goodbye to you, Oleg Vitalyevich. Until we meet again!

O. BUDNITSKY: Yes, thank you. All the best.

N. VASILENKO: Let me remind everyone that the books we discussed were “People at War,” “Another Russia,” and “Kolchak’s Gold.” All were published by New Literary Review.

And we continue our broadcast. Very soon Nikolai Alexandrov will join us, and another live review of “Little Books” awaits you. We also had a little homework assignment, let us call it that. Lyudmila Yevgenyevna Ulitskaya planted the thought that the big novel had exhausted itself, and I asked Nikolai to give us his opinion on the question, which he promised to do. And it seems Nikolai Alexandrov is already with us. Nikolai, can you hear me?

N. ALEXANDROV: Nikita, hello! I hear you perfectly.

N. VASILENKO: Hooray! I can hear and see you too, and viewers in the chat are sending their greetings. I have already reminded everyone about our conversation concerning the big novel. And most importantly, we are waiting for your book review.

N. ALEXANDROV: Well, if by the “big novel” we mean the classical large-scale novel, the canon that took shape throughout the nineteenth century and, incidentally, continued to flourish in the Soviet era, then over the past thirty years we have seen many examples of that kind of novel. One of the most recent is Viktor Remizov’s “Permafrost,” devoted to the construction of the Salekhard-Igarka “Dead Road” and the tragic events surrounding it. Let me remind you that the railway was never completed. It was the last of Stalin’s utopian projects: a railway intended to connect two northern, polar cities. It cost thousands of lives, and its remains can still be seen both from the Krasnoyarsk side and from the Salekhard side. Yet the narrative itself, oddly enough — or perhaps not oddly — now seems somewhat old-fashioned, simply because a novel demands wholeness. A novel always depicts for us a world in which certain laws operate.

One could give many examples. Take Andrei Bely’s “Petersburg,” which appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although it was not written during wartime, it was filled with a premonition of impending catastrophe, and Bely therefore wrote it in a manner entirely different from that of the canonical Russian novel. He did, incidentally, experiment with the canonical novel — “The Silver Dove,” for example. Many other examples could be cited.

A special universe, destroyed and reduced to ruins, is created by Sorokin in the novel “Doctor Garin,” which refers back to “The Blizzard.” Although in form it is a typical love fairy tale, it is nevertheless a world in which we encounter fragments. The world begins, if you remember, with an image of a psychiatric hospital — called “Altai Cedars,” by the way — where we find former rulers of the world. They are all recognizable. Angela, for example, or Vladimir, whose only line is “It wasn’t me,” which he repeats throughout the novel. The former rulers of the world appear in this strange form.

One novel that seems to follow Sorokin’s trail, trying to join together scraps of very different worlds, is Alexander Sobolev’s relatively recent “Griffins Guard the Lyre,” published by Ivan Limbakh Publishing House. It is set in a Moscow of the 1950s that escaped the revolutionary catastrophe. The novel did not exactly go unnoticed — critics certainly paid attention to it. I recommend it to everyone, although I have spoken about it before, especially to those who have not yet encountered it. Remarkably, this strange alternative world also ends with a premonition of war.

And, incidentally, Ivan Limbakh Publishing House will soon release a new novel by Alexander Sobolev, and I think we will have time — I hope, at least — to discuss it separately. It is called “A Shadow Behind the Right Shoulder.” The action takes place in 1916. I draw your attention to that date; it too is significant. I will not say anything more about the novel for now or reveal its plot and situation, but I think we will still have time to talk about it.

Indeed, this strange condition of a ruined world, fragments, and fragmentation leads to an odd mixture and unexpected coincidences. I mention this for a reason, because at the same Ivan Limbakh Publishing House... Forgive me, today is going to be a day devoted to the St. Petersburg publisher Ivan Limbakh. I apologize to all the other publishers. Usually I combine books from many different houses in my review, but this is just how it turned out today.

N. VASILENKO: They have earned it, let us admit it honestly.

N. ALEXANDROV: Yes, yes. A collection by the remarkable St. Petersburg poet Viktor Krivulin has just appeared, called “Angel of War.” These are poems from the 1960s and 1970s, a collection that reads completely differently today and is permeated by a sense of war and catastrophe. Viktor Krivulin was born in 1944 in a military hospital. This, if you like, genetic experience, this memory of war, fills all his poems, even those dealing with very different things. It is clear that 1968, for example, was extraordinarily important to him: ashes spreading across Europe, and Czechoslovakia itself in his lyrical expectation seemingly about to turn to ash. All of this reads quite differently today. I began speaking about it because literally the day before yesterday I was given a two-volume edition of Viktor Krivulin that was published in Israel. It was prepared by his widow and first wife, Anna Katsman. It contains two handwritten notebooks by Viktor Krivulin that were lost and then found half a century later. And, incidentally, I hope my mentioning this will in no way cause a copyright dispute — another conflict is the last thing we need. I hope that can be avoided, because naturally there are some overlaps between these collections.

The poem that opens Ivan Limbakh Publishing House’s book “Angel of War” is itself called “Angel of War.”

The weak will survive. And the angel Golden Hair will descend into the bomb shelter, shedding a sweet light, at the hour when the jaws of days close on the wrist and the clocks stop.

The sleeper beneath a barely glowing yellow bulb will survive, the bulb caged in wire — fear’s black muzzle. The angel will appear to him, and at the transparent sweep of its wings he will tremble like grass.

The mortal awakened by the shiver of the soul will survive. He will see himself naked upon the outspread concrete slabs. The angel will bend over him, and two lonely planets rise in their orbits, washed with tears; in each, the resurrected man is reflected as in dark water.

I did not manage to mention one more book. Perhaps I will say just two words, because I will probably return to it later. It is being prepared by Ivan Limbakh Publishing House. The author is Jonathan Schneer; the title is “The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination and Counter-Revolution in Lenin’s Russia.” The book will appear soon. It deals with attempts to overthrow Bolshevik power in 1918. I think it will interest many people. I hope a fuller discussion of it also awaits us in the near future.

N. VASILENKO: Today we spoke about affairs of the past, things long gone, but I could not shake the feeling that we were simply looking out the window. Nikolai Alexandrov, “Little Books.” Thank you very much.

N. ALEXANDROV: Thank you, Nikita.

N. VASILENKO: And I say goodbye to all our viewers and remind you that we are not ending our broadcasting for today. At four o’clock there will be the program “Dithyramb” on the “Zhivoy Gvozd” channel. Olga Zhuravleva will speak with Iosif Raikhelgauz. So come back at four; we are not saying goodbye for the day. And do not forget shop.diletant.media, the latest issues of Diletant magazine, and interesting new books.

Oleg Budnitsky 
A Person Against the Background of an Era 
Book Casino. Stories 
16.04.2022