What I Just Finished Reading
Khrushchev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalin, which is one of those speeches that I've read about for years but never actually read. Sometimes in this situation, the real thing seems quite at odds with the things that I've read about it; but this was not one of those times. It really is pretty much a speech about how Stalin was treated as "a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to a god" (to quote the introductory paragraph), despite the fact that (1) this elevation is foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism and (2) Stalin was actually a paranoid control freak who devastated the Soviet Union's military preparedness right before the Nazis attacked.
The one thing that did surprise me is the number of personal anecdotes about Stalin that Khrushchev scattered through the speech. One gets the impression that he spent the last five years or so of Stalin's life gritting his teeth about the fact that he had to work for this nincompoop, and is now finally - finally! - letting out some of that pent-up frustration.
I also finished reading volume 1 of The Gulag Archipelago, which is bristling, porcupine-like, with little slips of paper marking passages that I wanted to note down. To do what with? I don't know. I just felt they needed to be marked somehow.
Writing of a rumor that the Petrograd Cheka fed condemned prisoners to zoo animals during the Civil War years: "How else could they get food for the zoos in those famine years? Take it away from the working class? Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn't their deaths support the zoo economy of the Republic and thereby assist our marsh into the future? Wasn't it expedient?
That is the precise line a Shakespearian evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear."
(Ideology, for Solzhenitsyn, is "what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.")
Or on the fatalism of prisoners: "Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy to take a step you would reproach yourself for - all this freed the prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled him."
On a rather different note, I also read Ruth Goodman's How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life, which is unique in that Goodman supplements her book research with her work as, essentially, a period reenactor. So she's actually lived a lot of the advice that sounds so odd to us, like keeping clean by wearing full-body linen underclothes and changing them rather than washing yourself (it works much better than most modern people expect, apparently).
For instance, the ambient temperature of the houses of even the wealthy was much cooler than in most houses today, which is something I think most people know - but knowing this fact doesn't mean that we've thought through all the implications, like the fact that wearing layers and layers of clothes actually makes sense in that environment, or that the (to our eyes) appalling fattiness of much of Victorian food is actually a way to cope with that.
Quite an interesting book! It's not often that a history book surprises me not merely with its information, but with its research method. Definitely worth a look if you're interested in that sort of thing.
What I'm Reading Now
The second book of The Gulag Archipelago.
What I Plan to Read Next
Probably the third book of The Gulag Archipelago. What? There are other books in the world, you say? LIES.
OH! But actually, I do have another book to read! The second Veronica Mars mystery (someone on my flist mentioned it; I can't remember who, but whoever you were, thank you!): Mr. Kiss and Tell. I intend to save it for my next day off to immerse myself in the glory of Veronica.
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