‘The date of publication and the format of books is the only exact knowledge there is,’ Anatole France once remarked. The dates of publication of this edition of the encyclopedia were 1949–58, years full of event in Molotov’s life: the arrest of Zhemchuzhina; Stalin’s death; Zhemchuzhina’s release from the Lubyanka by Beria on the day after Stalin’s funeral (Molotov’s birthday); Beria’s execution; the testing on the Kazakh steppe of the Soviet H-bomb; Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ to the XXth Party Congress denouncing the crimes of Stalin and the ‘cult of personality’; Molotov’s demotion to ambassador to Mongolia and expulsion from the Central Committee with his comrades in the Stalinist ‘anti-Party group’ which had opposed Khrushchev’s leadership in the hope of reinstating the ‘harsh unquestioning discipline’ that they believed necessary for the triumph of communism. By the time the last volume of this encyclopedia appeared, history had conspired to disintegrate the claims to ‘exact knowledge’ that its entries embodied.
I read the entry on the medieval philosopher Abelard, savouring the poised and surely intended irony of these few sentences, written perhaps by some remnant of the ancien régime or secret Trotskyite at the height of the Stalin cult: ‘Abelard’s autobiographical work, The History of My Misfortunes, was widely known (Russian translation 1902), describing the cruel fanaticism of the Catholic Church and the merciless persecution of the smallest manifestation of free thought’. On the opposite page, under the entry for the Soviet republic of Adzharia in the Caucasus, was a picture of the young Stalin as a member of the revolutionary underground, posing, in 1902, with the workers of Batumi.
I looked up ‘Molotov’ in the ‘M’ volume, which came out the year after Stalin’s death. The encyclopedia related that he was born in 1890 into the family of a shopkeeper, and joined the Party in 1906. Then the prose began to swell and roll in waves of hypnotic totalitarian cliché: all Molotov’s strength, knowledge and vast experience had been dedicated to the great aim of building communism in the Soviet Union, as faithful disciple and comrade-in-arms of the great Lenin and comrade-in-arms of Stalin, he had faithfully served the cause of the workers, the cause of communism, all his life long, earning through his fruitful work for the good of the socialist Motherland the ardent love and respect of the Party, the workers of the Soviet Union, strugglers for peace, democracy and socialism, and so on and on. I turned the page, and there were more Molotovs: cities, towns, villages, streets, river ports, theatres, libraries and schools, pharmaceutical and medical institutes, across the length and breadth of the mighty Soviet Union, to south, north and east across the vastest territory on the planet. Even as this volume was printed, these names were about to change again: the city of Perm in the pre-Urals which had been renamed to commemorate Molotov’s fiftieth birthday in 1940; the industrial port Molotovsk, named for him in 1938, a creation of the war, where most of the Lend-Lease materiel was unloaded, at the mouth of the White Sea near Archangel; Nolinsk, his father’s town, where there was a house museum dedicated to Molotov; four villages named Molotova in the Ferghana Valley; and the towns of Molotovobad in Kirghizia and Tajikistan, one of which lay on the river Isfaram on a branch of the Kokand–Andizhan line, on the road to Stalinobad. I carefully unfolded a pull-out map of the Molotovsk Region; curled in one of the folds lay a grey hair.
I closed the encyclopedia, leaving the single hair in its paper mausoleum, relic of an old man’s physiological need to read of the greatness his beloved Party had so abruptly confiscated. Next I took down the most dilapidated books on the shelves. As I touched the pages of Lemke’s famed edition of the works of Alexander Herzen, pieces of decaying paper, worn to tissue, came away from their edges onto my fingers. Many of the twenty volumes of this sought-after rarity were published during the period of ‘war communism’ after the Revolution, when market relations (and even, briefly, money) had been abolished and the state controlled every aspect of the economy. The introduction to the first volume likens the hunger for books among the people to their desperate hunger for food. Herzen, a bitter opponent of tsarist autocracy, was taken up and canonised by the Bolsheviks as a worthy forebear. In 1920, a commission charged with ideologically appropriate nomenclature for the main thoroughfares of Moscow renamed Bolshaya Nikitskaya (the wide street off which Romanov leads) Herzen Street. A note in the first volume of Lemke warns that anyone who tries to sell it for anything above the marked price will do so ‘under terror of the law’.
Books have their fates, and here was one that heroically staged its own drama. This was what I had been hoping to find in here: ink markings. (Shalamov, who learned in the Gulag that a graphite pencil was a ‘greater miracle than a diamond’, associated ink with the evil powers of the state. ‘What kind of ink is used to sign death sentences …? No death sentence has ever been signed simply in pencil.’) Dozens of entries in the index were marked in different-coloured ink. Here was the fierce hunger of the autodidact, who craves all knowledge, and wants no end to the feast. ‘Emperor Augustus’ was underlined in green ink; ‘Agrippina’, ‘Addison’, ‘Bach’, ‘Balzac’ and ‘Beethoven’ in faint lead pencil; the Decembrist ‘Bestuzhev’, ‘Shelley’, ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Count Sheremetev’ in blue. Besides the index, only volume 13 contained any markings. This volume, which contained Herzen’s Past and Thoughts, was published in 1921, the year the Civil War ended, when the national hunger for books was at its most acute. Shalamov remembers the arrival that year in his native Vologda of a single copy, one for the whole town, of the poetry of Nikolai Nekrasov, printed faintly on paper as fragile as gift-wrapping tissue.
Against a passage on page 15, the reader had drawn two long parallel lines in purple ink that had bled deep into the porous browned paper. From a chapter titled ‘Return to Moscow and Intellectual Debate’, the passage was a long complaint by Herzen against Hegel, father of the idea that history has its own inner direction, its own secret cunning. Hegel was afraid of the light of day, writes Herzen, he ‘confined himself within the sphere of abstractions’ in order to avoid ‘practical applications’. The only area in which Hegel dared to apply his theories in practice, Herzen complains, was in the realm of aesthetics. The philosopher came out into the light like an invalid, and even then, he left behind in the ‘dialectic maze’ all questions of most interest to modern man. His disciples were feeble, complacent and limited in outlook. Dialectics should have been about ‘the development of reality itself’, Herzen railed, but Hegel left it as nothing more than a system of logical gymnastics, like the philosophical pursuits of the Greek Sophists or the medieval scholastics. If these purple ink lines were made by Molotov, their point is clear. They register the fear of all those who face the prospect or the memory of years spent over books: the fear that their reading might be no more than a sterile game, an escape from life, leading nowhere, as thought dissolves to nothing with the passing of time. The purple lines mark the defiance of a bookish revolutionary in the face of that quiet terror. Dialectics, that magical art, was not to be kept in libraries, as a scholastic matter, applied only to the realm of art and beauty. Books and thoughts should change the world. The fulfilment of history itself is at stake in dialectical theory, though it may rely on pen, paper and print. Dialectics serve political action, revolution, ‘necessary’ bloodshed.