Book review: Lost and Found in Rusiia

Published on Friday 24 July 2009 13:58

Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in A Deep Heartland by Susan Richards IB Tauris, 320pp, £17.99

RUSSIA EXERTS A PECULIAR PULL for English travellers, from the Victorian governesses teaching the Czar's ill-fated offspring to Gaia Servadio's 1970s (still readable) Siberian Encounters. A host of "Discovering Russia" tales covers every fraught stage of the country's melancholy journey.

One abiding theme is a desire to understand the "other Russia" behind the carapace of failed state socialism: the worlds of the provinces, whose residents combat the natural world and the haphazard challenges of everyday life.

Susan Richards's version shines because she knows her subjects very well. These are stories of friendships across the miles, not just brief encounters plundered for material.

Her Volga journey – to Saratov, the twin urban undelights of Marx and Engels, and the "loop" back through Kazan to Moscow – is relatively familiar, but she takes her time, lingering in the lives of people in a Russia markedly different from the show-cities of Moscow and St Petersburg. It's an area that has a particular self-awareness, aspiration and even now, a knocked-about pride, visible in the daily battles of intelligent liberal Russians with the corrupt officialdom and dereliction all around them.

A particularly vicious gang killing in Saratov is committed by "gangsters", sons of families where they "bring flowers on Mother's Day and wash their hands before eating". People are cut adrift, politically and morally, by the end of Communism, without real belief that a democracy worth the name can work for Russia.

The Uncle Vanya-ish pessimism is catching: Richards thinks with hindsight liberal democracy could "never work" in Russia. Where then, does that leave her brave and clever friends and their internet-savvy children? I share her fascination for the backwaters of Russia, where, for all the privations, talents stubbornly thrive and there's an intelligentsia that puts a lot of educated Britons to shame; but this extended Putin era is not the end of the story.

What we do learn to do is stop predicting. "We'll live a little longer, and then we'll see," goes the Russian saying and wise observers learn to accept it.

The book covers a period of intense physical, as well as social, change in the 1990s and beyond. I like the description of the new Moscow: "Postmodern turrets, smokey glass cathedrals to capitalism – it looked as if a team of make-up girls had done over the old buildings." Indeed, one of her writerly gifts is the ability to evoke visual tableaux of the isolation and natural grandeur of the great river and its towns. She searches hard for unspoiled beauty "rare in European Russia, where the most beautiful places have been despoiled by man's messy pursuit of an unrealistic ideal".

The oldest ideas survive in hidden corners of the vastness: Old Believers still living a quasi-religious existence based on a schism in the 17th century. Faith in the past and its rituals and superstitions is, she commonly finds, a response to the enforced hyper-rationalism of state socialism.

If there's a flaw, it's one that better editing should have expelled. Not many clichs are left unturned – lots of men with "twinkling eyes" and "bushy beards". But the narrative survives because she understands and empathises with communism's lost sons and daughters, searching for a redemption which – other than for a fortunate or commercially gifted elite – never comes. This tale, with all the absorption and detail of the genre, is also the story of an entire country, still bowed under the weight of a magnificent, dreadful history.