Inside The Stalin Archives is so important because it demonstrates the return of Russia under Medvedev and Putin to the Soviet thought patterns never erased by an acknowledgement of or even a study of the downside of Soviet history in Russia itself.
A major reason that this book is so topical lies in its slow and brilliantly detailed descriptions of the author, a book editor of Yale University Press, becoming acclimated to Russia after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The book begins in 1992 and author Brent, who has never been to Moscow before and knows little Russian, finds himself competing with major book publishers from around the world for the rights to make a major publishing series on the Soviet Archives. Brent discovers immediately in '92 that old habits die hard, and that many of the functionaries who run the Soviet Archives have not bought into perestroika, glasnost, or any other reforms that Yeltsin is trying to develop in a newly democratic Russia.
The book covers over a decade of Brent's slow development of a group of allies within the Archives, and in the process discovers and shares with the reader the many ways that Russia has never in its history been run by a democratic frame of mind. He peels off the layers of what I'd call "bureaucratic authoritarianism" that pervades all of Russian society, even during a period when Moscow is evolving from a drab dour dingy city to a place with at least good restaurants, hotels, and a glitzy flashy superficial night life dominated by oligarchs with convoys of limos filled with highly-armed bodyguards. Putin has given capitalism the nod, but Brent discovers that it is a capitalist system that is barely a mixed economy---the state provides very few functions, but still exercises authoritarian control over all aspects of civic and media functions. Brent notes how journalists must still tread lightly on Putin's territory, and the mysterious deaths and frequent open assassinations of investigative journalists repeat what the Soviet era did to dissidents outside the Soviet Union right inside Moscow.
Brent's overall take on post-Soviet Russia is sobering and thoughtful without being maudlin or overly grim. Russia has always been a top-down society and any references to "democracy" must be accompanied by a gigantic asterisk. Because in Brent's understated analysis, Russians are accustomed to being told what to do by their leaders and any demonstration of small-"d" democracy is regarded as weakness. Hence Putin's rapid re-centralization of all of Russia, erasing even tiny efforts at federalism by local elections of regional governors, is simply a return to the "status-quo-ante" the liberation of the "captive nations" occurring in the late-'80s. Russia wants to dominate the CSR, or FSU, or whatever group is devised to delineate former Soviet regional republics. And in the case of Georgia, he will employ brutal military force to re-establish Russian hegemony over its former territories.
Brent's analysis ends in 2006, but the series of books Yale Press was able to put together with joint authorship by Russian archivists was a brief glimpse into the Russian past during the Soviet era. Putin and his successor Medvedev have re-shut the doors of the Archives [whose name characteristically changes during the period covered by the book at least three times by my count] to western scholars who don't pass a zampolit test by Russian-leadership gatekeepers. Brent writes well and gives great psychological portraits of individuals whose lives were dominated by a brutal censorship most of their careers, but who retained humanity and integrity throughout. Brent sees a fu
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