"In America you can have everything but no freedom. The only free country in the world is the Soviet Union." - Štefan Dubček
As you watch three hundred Czechs, Slovaks and other Czechoslovak fellow citizens embark on a several-week train journey to the Kyrgyz-Chinese border to help build the Soviet Union, you sense that this cannot end well. As the subtitle of the book, "The Czechoslovak Commune of Interhelpo," suggests, it is about the cooperative that more than a thousand of our compatriots passed through from the 1920s to the 1940s and that was made famous by one of its child residents, the future leader of communist Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubček.
The young Slovak journalist Lukáš Onderčanin, AKA Onďo, who incidentally hosts the likeable travel podcast Všesvet, has done a ton of hard work on his debut. He collected private letters, interviewed witnesses, and even traveled to Bishkek to describe the motivations, disillusionments, successes and failures of those people who left their homes, set off with young children to a remote country with an inhospitable climate and an incomprehensible language, and believed it was a good idea. It shows how difficult the social situation was in our country in the 1920s and how important a role was played a hundred years ago by political convictions, agitation, the belief that in the USSR they would experience what they lacked at home - respect for workers and enough work, and above all the power of human dreams. But even more precious passages than the digressions into the history of Czechoslovakia itself are the memories of Stalinism, which found our compatriots even in the foothills of Tian Shan with all that went with it, including denunciations, collectivization, Stalinist purges and gulags, to the point of complete disintegration.
Utopia in Lenin's Garden has been beautifully rendered in graphic form by the exceptional Žilina publishing house Absynt, which is the only one in the Czech-Slovak space to specialise in publishing literary reportage and is trying to bring this genre, rightly popular in the world, to our country. This is also thanks to the fact that the founding publishers Juraj Koudela and Filip Ostrowski are close to the absolutely legendary Polish tradition of literary reportage, the former having been born to a Polish mother and the latter in Krakow, where he still lives with his Slovak wife.
The book won the Readers' Choice Award in Slovakia's most prestigious literary competition, Anasoft Litera 2022. Not top world literature for me, but among the top Slovak ones of that year, I guess.
"Between February 1930 and December 1931, the authorities deported more than 1.8 million dislocated peasants. During this period, the wheels of the train at the station in Frunze, just a short walk from the textile factory and the homes of the Interhelpo members, whistled more and more frequently. The images of the events at the station were also etched forever in the memory of ten-year-old Alexander Dubček. When the train doors opened, dead bodies fell out. "Even those who were still alive, including the children, looked like corpses. They were so starved that they were eating pig and poultry feed that was crawling with maggots," Dubček recalled in his memoirs. As a child, he didn't understand what was going on - he went to school, the adults worked hard, and Interhelpo had a life of its own. And a few meters away from it all, he saw unreal horrors. "I'll never forget the dead man with the bloated belly. I asked my mother what the man died of and she said: 'From hunger.'"
The famine caused by forced collectivisation, coupled with extreme drought, eventually claimed more than five million victims in the Soviet Union and especially in Ukraine."