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Каменная ночь: смерть и память в России ХХ века
Исследование британского историка Кэтрин Мерридейл посвящено смерти и памяти — сразу двум непростым темам, тесно связанным в истории России ХХ века. Специально для этой книги автор взяла интервью у сотен выживших свидетелей массового голода, войны и репрессий в СССР. Их голоса и составили основу этого исследования, в котором Мерридейл попыталась понять, как стало возможно огромное количество смертей, случившихся в годы советской власти, и что сегодня чувствуют люди, пережившие опыт массового насилия.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
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892 people want to read
About the author
Catherine Merridale
9 books90 followersCatherine Anne Merridale, FBA (born 12 October 1959) is a British writer and historian with a special interest in Russian history. Merridale was Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary, University of London from 2004 to 2014. She has been a senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, since her retirement from full-time academia in 2014. Having retired from her academic career, Merridale became a freelance writer in 2014. She has also contributed to BBC Radio.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
January 13, 2019
Page 153 – my book
But it was in Red Square that the late leader’s [Lenin] presence would be most visible for the rest of the twentieth century. Soviet power, which sought in so many ways to deny the power of death, turned the heart of its capital, the ceremonial core of its government, into a grave. The rebels who had forced open the coffins of the orthodox saints now jealously preserved a relic of their own. They strenuously denied the continuity with religion, with the past. But the irony was inescapable… they could not admit that life was crudely rational and finite. Or not, at least, for those whose memory they needed and revered. The rest, the millions, were not a problem. They might as well have been dust.
This is a history of the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. It’s a very sad book due to the cataclysmic events that occurred – World War I, the revolution accompanied by a civil war – then the advent of Stalinism and World War II. There were also several famines with the last famine in the late 1940’s. The death toll from these is staggering.
There were several problems with trying to uncover the human toll of this. The Soviet Union was a repressive and secretive society – so much of what happened was not only not talked about – but could not even be mentioned. The famine in Ukraine during the 1930’s was one – and it should be added that this famine was much like a civil war because the initial attempts at collectivization were fiercely resisted and violently oppressed.
One of the chapters in the book is called “The Great Silence”; the silence of the many famines, the Gulag, and even certain topics of World War II (sometimes called the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union) were forbidden.
Page 233
Later on, as the German army was retreating, citizens of the territories that it had occupied, including the Chechens and Crimean Tartars – entire nations – were accused of collaboration. Either way, the total number of men, women, and children who would suffer deportation in the years of the Patriotic War was not less than 2 million. Their stories, their losses, separations, and the deaths of thousands of their people, were not the ones that shaped the public image of heroic struggle.
Many party adherents continued to believe in the future communist utopia.
Page 252 after the war
There was no time for introspection. But the result was a society in which the secrets were innumerable – stories of hunger, theft, and cannibalism, memories of the disappeared, tales of wartime slaughter, the bullet in the comrade’s back, of rape and butchery across civilian Prussia – while silence was the overwhelming rule.
Almost half of this book is up to the time of the death of Lenin. There were times when I found passages to be tedious with awkward sentences (purple prose). The latter half of the book became more interesting. I had issues with the author’s methodology, which she herself acknowledges. Interviewing up to five people in a room is not the best way to get personal and intimate details. She herself says that often interviews subjects would veer off topic or start to control the conversation. It is often difficult to discuss brutal events that affected one personally. Also, these interviews were often over fifty years after the events took place like the Ukrainian famine, World War II… And this book encompasses a momentous and extensive time frame.
Nevertheless, there are many rewarding and revealing passages. There is an interesting section on the veterans of Afghanistan who appear to be suffering from PTSD – another taboo area in Soviet Union/Russia.
But it was in Red Square that the late leader’s [Lenin] presence would be most visible for the rest of the twentieth century. Soviet power, which sought in so many ways to deny the power of death, turned the heart of its capital, the ceremonial core of its government, into a grave. The rebels who had forced open the coffins of the orthodox saints now jealously preserved a relic of their own. They strenuously denied the continuity with religion, with the past. But the irony was inescapable… they could not admit that life was crudely rational and finite. Or not, at least, for those whose memory they needed and revered. The rest, the millions, were not a problem. They might as well have been dust.
This is a history of the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. It’s a very sad book due to the cataclysmic events that occurred – World War I, the revolution accompanied by a civil war – then the advent of Stalinism and World War II. There were also several famines with the last famine in the late 1940’s. The death toll from these is staggering.
There were several problems with trying to uncover the human toll of this. The Soviet Union was a repressive and secretive society – so much of what happened was not only not talked about – but could not even be mentioned. The famine in Ukraine during the 1930’s was one – and it should be added that this famine was much like a civil war because the initial attempts at collectivization were fiercely resisted and violently oppressed.
One of the chapters in the book is called “The Great Silence”; the silence of the many famines, the Gulag, and even certain topics of World War II (sometimes called the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union) were forbidden.
Page 233
Later on, as the German army was retreating, citizens of the territories that it had occupied, including the Chechens and Crimean Tartars – entire nations – were accused of collaboration. Either way, the total number of men, women, and children who would suffer deportation in the years of the Patriotic War was not less than 2 million. Their stories, their losses, separations, and the deaths of thousands of their people, were not the ones that shaped the public image of heroic struggle.
Many party adherents continued to believe in the future communist utopia.
Page 252 after the war
There was no time for introspection. But the result was a society in which the secrets were innumerable – stories of hunger, theft, and cannibalism, memories of the disappeared, tales of wartime slaughter, the bullet in the comrade’s back, of rape and butchery across civilian Prussia – while silence was the overwhelming rule.
Almost half of this book is up to the time of the death of Lenin. There were times when I found passages to be tedious with awkward sentences (purple prose). The latter half of the book became more interesting. I had issues with the author’s methodology, which she herself acknowledges. Interviewing up to five people in a room is not the best way to get personal and intimate details. She herself says that often interviews subjects would veer off topic or start to control the conversation. It is often difficult to discuss brutal events that affected one personally. Also, these interviews were often over fifty years after the events took place like the Ukrainian famine, World War II… And this book encompasses a momentous and extensive time frame.
Nevertheless, there are many rewarding and revealing passages. There is an interesting section on the veterans of Afghanistan who appear to be suffering from PTSD – another taboo area in Soviet Union/Russia.
June 18, 2025
Between 1914 and 1950 an estimated 50 million people under the control of the Russian state - Czarist, then Soviet - died unnatural deaths, from combat, starvation, epidemic disease, political purges, and genocide. Two wars with Germany, and a war each with Poland, Finland, and Japan; the civil war, the Holocaust; three major famines and at least four pronounced periods of state terror. Merridale devotes most of Night of Stone to trying to understand how Soviet citizens grieved, coped, rebuilt, and remembered under a government that was more or less hostile to traditional religious consolation and funerary culture; a government that, even when it was not directly culpable, tried its utmost to conceal the extent of death, to exile witnesses and survivors, to at worst prohibit, to at best ideologically edit and co-opt, public mourning and commemoration.
Though it obviously lies outside of this 36-year span (a trough containing Solzhenitsyn’s entire pre-arrest life, for one), and though its body count is comparatively miniscule, the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-89) and its aftermath strikes me as one of the most revealing tragedies Merridale examines, a paradigmatic Soviet disaster in which the state sent masses to their deaths; denied and concealed as much of the truth about losses and failure as it could; and cynically, callously counted on the homefront to silence and stigmatize the returned survivors. The Soviet state had done this, on a larger scale, many, many times before, was well-practiced in atrocity and cover-up; but by the 1980s the conditions that had encouraged previous generations to dissociate, to forget and to carry on, no longer prevailed. The Soviet future was dying, the empire was obviously falling behind its rivals, and the “old diversions - flag waving and hard physical work - were losing their efficacy.” Merridale continues:
That turning to the West occupies much of the closing chapters, in which Merridale describes the reception of the clinical language of post-traumatic stress in late 1990s Russia. As of her writing, that diagnosis hadn’t made much of a purchase, and Merridale thought that it was but one of many ways to understand the words of her respondents. Finishing the book, I wished for a sequel, an update, another round of interviews with the activists and physicians who have by now an additional quarter-century of reflections on Russia to share.
Though it obviously lies outside of this 36-year span (a trough containing Solzhenitsyn’s entire pre-arrest life, for one), and though its body count is comparatively miniscule, the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-89) and its aftermath strikes me as one of the most revealing tragedies Merridale examines, a paradigmatic Soviet disaster in which the state sent masses to their deaths; denied and concealed as much of the truth about losses and failure as it could; and cynically, callously counted on the homefront to silence and stigmatize the returned survivors. The Soviet state had done this, on a larger scale, many, many times before, was well-practiced in atrocity and cover-up; but by the 1980s the conditions that had encouraged previous generations to dissociate, to forget and to carry on, no longer prevailed. The Soviet future was dying, the empire was obviously falling behind its rivals, and the “old diversions - flag waving and hard physical work - were losing their efficacy.” Merridale continues:
Cynicism was widespread. Full employment, post war reconstruction, had given way to a world in which, as the joke goes, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” There was not much community spirit to be found in Brezhnev’s tower blocks. The Soviet Union, on the verge of final crisis, entered a war that no one really understood and few supported. In 1945 the veterans of the Patriotic War had warmed themselves in the enduring glow of moral victory. The Afghantsy, as the soldiers who fought in the mountains came to be called, would not be able to do the same. They would have to find new ways of thinking about wartime loss, and some, ironically, would turn to the West for help.
That turning to the West occupies much of the closing chapters, in which Merridale describes the reception of the clinical language of post-traumatic stress in late 1990s Russia. As of her writing, that diagnosis hadn’t made much of a purchase, and Merridale thought that it was but one of many ways to understand the words of her respondents. Finishing the book, I wished for a sequel, an update, another round of interviews with the activists and physicians who have by now an additional quarter-century of reflections on Russia to share.
September 10, 2011
A difficult, harrowing and depressing book but also a very necessary one. The author traces the way death was seen in pre-Soviet Russia to a short extent then examines the horrible, frequent, and many deaths in early Soviet times, World War II, and Stalin's purges. Her view of death as a historian well-versed in Russian culture and Soviet history allows us to see how the Russian people by the time of Chernenko were nearly utterly resigned to famine, loss, and death. We still see this in the heavy drinking, recklessness of Russian youth today—I've seen Russian kids do things that no matter what dare-devil mentality you may have (and I have myself), are pretty insane. How does a culture that suffered so much respond to that? Dr. Merridale gives a good idea of how and also why.
August 16, 2014
I wanted to like this book more. The author begins by saying she is going to devote most of the book to personal interviews, but not much of that really happens; partially I guess because almost all groups, the political prisoners (who could have been good Communists the day before), the WWII veterans, those who were unfortunate enough to have been prisoners in other countries (exposure to the West= imprisonment), those who suffered from famine and other highly debilitating circumstances brought on by the Party.....the list goes on and on. I guess the remarkable point is that the party line was so insistent, so deeply ingrained in many, that they did not perceive themselves as victims. Or the Party as being responsible for the horror of almost everyone's life. They also felt little or no unity with their fellow sufferers. Decades of oppression had rendered them almost callous and without empathy. This is interesting, and often seen in those who endure unremitting suffering. But the one point is made over and over. Just not enough material for a book. The author is an academic who had written papers and done talks on this subject, and she maybe should have left it at that. My favorite Soviet book so far is, of course, The Gulag Archipelago.
May 8, 2012
Am struggling with whether to assign four stars or five. Have selected five because of the power with which I recall this book almost ten years after having read it. As I have said elsewhere, I read this as a part of my personal grieving process the year after losing my husband a few weeks prior to 911. For me, it was a way of putting my personal loss in a much larger context of the God-awful horror with which death is still perpetuated by human upon human on this globe of ours -- and the emotionally wrenching and oft physically dangerous ways those left behind must deal. The book is written with great dignity and seems based on heart-rending scholarship of high order. My own records have some fourteen pages of notes that I captured during reading -- that is a high number in my journals for a book of this length (347 pages plus notes and footnotes), albeit a dense one.
December 19, 2023
Night of Stone evokes a variety of responses, the first of which is perhaps best described as confused annoyance, not with the author and certainly not with the contents of the book but with the fact that the secondhand copy I purchased from Thriftbooks was marked “Withdrawn” from a community college library. I found the book to be replete with information on events in Russia from Lenin's time, i.e., World War I, through the Great Patriotic War (the Eastern Front of World War II), and through the Russian war in Afghanistan right up to the end of the 20th century. Were I to create a recommended reading list of books which would further the knowledge of students who really do want to be educated (as contrasted with those who want a diploma with as little study as possible to get a “good-paying” job), Merridale's Night of Stone would be on it. I regret knowing that at least one college library no longer has a copy available to its students or its instructors.
Having read Night of Stone, the reader better understands Russia's internal strife following the abdication of Czar Nicholas II. The country was certainly not pre-destined to be governed by the Bolshevik Party, and even within the party, various factions opposed one another. The transition from czarism to Socialism was anything but smooth.
This is a comparatively minor point, but I will observe that sections of the book dealing with disposition of Lenin's body are rather fascinating—and certainly not as morbid as the topic suggests.
Of more importance than Lenin's corpse, the state's efforts to avoid demoralization of both troops and the general public despite Nazi advances into the country during World War II tell us much of government-sponsored repression, diversion and manipulation of facts before they are allowed to become public. The fate of veterans of a much later war, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, included a substantial measure of derision from the veterans of the Great Patriotic War as well as the public inasmuch as that war was one “that no one really understood and few supported” (Page 284). The parallels between Russia's adventurism in Afghanistan and that of the United States in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, while not belabored by Merridale, are inescapable.
The author insists that hers is not a history book per se, and indeed her emphasis is on the Russian people and how they mentally survived almost unending abuse throughout the 20th century. Of course, czarist rule had not been beneficent by any stretch of the imagination, and perhaps it was the fact that people were accustomed to an arbitrary and dictatorial ruler that enabled them to persevere through Bolshevik rule, Stalin's murderous regime, and the somewhat more tolerant leaderships of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, to arrive in the glasnost of Gorbachev in 1985. (Yes, I know that Andropov and Chernenko were in that list, but their terms of office were brief and they seemed inconsequential.)
That list of leaders does make me wonder if the book is perhaps of greater interest and even of greater comprehension to those of us who are old enough to recognize those names (okay, maybe not Stalin—I'm not that old) which appeared frequently in newspapers and radio and television news broadcasts through the Cold War era. Maybe the events in Russia mean more to those of us who actually participated in “duck and cover” drills in our U.S. elementary schools. The significance of the book, however, is of equal or maybe even greater importance to younger readers who have no personal recollections of U.S. - Russian/USSR relationships throughout the previous century. For them, books such as Night of Stone offer illumination where personal memory is dark.
I do not find Merridale's writing style overly captivating, but her subject is intriguing, important and relevant to our understanding of the population of a major world power, a population that is anything but monolithic and that simply cannot be accurately stereotyped. Russians are as diverse in their handling of adversity as are the citizens of every other nation on Earth, and Night of Stone certainly helps us see them in a more accurate and comprehensive light. The book is definitely worth a read.
Having read Night of Stone, the reader better understands Russia's internal strife following the abdication of Czar Nicholas II. The country was certainly not pre-destined to be governed by the Bolshevik Party, and even within the party, various factions opposed one another. The transition from czarism to Socialism was anything but smooth.
This is a comparatively minor point, but I will observe that sections of the book dealing with disposition of Lenin's body are rather fascinating—and certainly not as morbid as the topic suggests.
Of more importance than Lenin's corpse, the state's efforts to avoid demoralization of both troops and the general public despite Nazi advances into the country during World War II tell us much of government-sponsored repression, diversion and manipulation of facts before they are allowed to become public. The fate of veterans of a much later war, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, included a substantial measure of derision from the veterans of the Great Patriotic War as well as the public inasmuch as that war was one “that no one really understood and few supported” (Page 284). The parallels between Russia's adventurism in Afghanistan and that of the United States in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, while not belabored by Merridale, are inescapable.
The author insists that hers is not a history book per se, and indeed her emphasis is on the Russian people and how they mentally survived almost unending abuse throughout the 20th century. Of course, czarist rule had not been beneficent by any stretch of the imagination, and perhaps it was the fact that people were accustomed to an arbitrary and dictatorial ruler that enabled them to persevere through Bolshevik rule, Stalin's murderous regime, and the somewhat more tolerant leaderships of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, to arrive in the glasnost of Gorbachev in 1985. (Yes, I know that Andropov and Chernenko were in that list, but their terms of office were brief and they seemed inconsequential.)
That list of leaders does make me wonder if the book is perhaps of greater interest and even of greater comprehension to those of us who are old enough to recognize those names (okay, maybe not Stalin—I'm not that old) which appeared frequently in newspapers and radio and television news broadcasts through the Cold War era. Maybe the events in Russia mean more to those of us who actually participated in “duck and cover” drills in our U.S. elementary schools. The significance of the book, however, is of equal or maybe even greater importance to younger readers who have no personal recollections of U.S. - Russian/USSR relationships throughout the previous century. For them, books such as Night of Stone offer illumination where personal memory is dark.
I do not find Merridale's writing style overly captivating, but her subject is intriguing, important and relevant to our understanding of the population of a major world power, a population that is anything but monolithic and that simply cannot be accurately stereotyped. Russians are as diverse in their handling of adversity as are the citizens of every other nation on Earth, and Night of Stone certainly helps us see them in a more accurate and comprehensive light. The book is definitely worth a read.
March 13, 2018
For a book of history to earn a 5 star rating from me, it has to both be written in a compelling manner, and teach me something, or give me perspective on an aspect of history I was unaware of before. This book does just that. Russia/Soviet Union in the 20th century endured one of the most prolonged series of episodes of bloodshed and death of any nation in the age of civilization (that wasnt destroyed in the process). And yet, we still, I think, have a tendency to view the multitude of stolen Russian lives through the lens of statistics, or perhaps anti-communist works of history. What the discourse in the 'West' has lacked is an inside view on the personal stories, coping narratives, and hidden tragedies of those that endured the bloody years of 2oth century Russia. Merridale's book offers this perspective, and it is at once humanly compelling, well written, and historically informative. This book shines in its episodes of personal narrative, some of people interviewed by the author, and others taken from secondary and tertiary sources, which give a human face to the suffering. Lest we forget.
5/5 stars Pros for : writing quality, depth of human interest Cons: Lack of political background (admittedly, there are many other books that offer this information)
5/5 stars Pros for : writing quality, depth of human interest Cons: Lack of political background (admittedly, there are many other books that offer this information)
June 26, 2020
I had to read this book very slowly. It is written very clearly but the content is so dense and often so moving, that it has to be taken in smallish sections, and each section needs to be given time to sink in. It is a quite remarkable book, dealing not only with how Russian people have regarded death but also what it means to be a person, and what it means when collective memory is silenced. The author interviewed many people, both singly and in groups, and asked questions which others would not dare to ask. Some of her students accused her of not maintaining sufficient detachment - but detachment would have been false in her attempt to penetrate the mental and spiritual world of people from a culture not her own, during the most terrible ordeals of their history, and to balance the discipline of a historian with the compassion of a fellow human being.
June 17, 2020
An excellent in-depth look at a subject not often fully explored. A morbid read that sets a Halloween mood, this is certainly something that needs more hype and acknowledgement. The revelation that hit the hardest was that during Soviet times, these people had to overcome trauma and death without religion. While that is an obvious fact, it is never fully directly stated in its raw power with other historical collections. A must read!
July 11, 2021
This lady certainly loved to see herself type. Repetitive, heavily-larded prose drowns out the voices she purports to be lifting up.
September 17, 2007
I bought this book for my "20th Century History" class Spring of 2003. I skimmed enough to do my assignments and participate in class discussions. It was interesting from what I read. I fully intend to finish the book, but as it is focusing on the historical viewpoint of the way Russians deal with death. It covers how the Orthodox religion and Soviet atheism affects mourning. It also looks at how Russians understand death and afterlife prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, during both world wars and the 1930s famine up to present day. This book is an accumulation of notes from personal interviews with families, doctors, priests etc etc; Imperial and Soviet archive materials; letters; memoirs. I will write more of my opinion once I've actually finished the book.
December 7, 2007
It took me awhile to finish this book because it is so sad. Each chapter talks about death and memory in a different period of Russian history in the last 100 or so years. It's essentially tragedy after famine after war after mass murder, etc. I watched a documentary about former Khmer Rouge prison guards right as I was on the last chapter. It is pretty startling how so many communities and individuals participated in these atrocities. I think I need to read the Gulag Archipelago and some Hannah Arendt.
April 2, 2008
For those who learned from Drew Faust's 'The Republic of Suffering,' here's another staggering volume. While Faust treats the culture of dying and death that developed in the US over the five years of the Civil War, Merridale treats the same dimension of the Soviet experience over 80 years, a period over which at least 50 million persons died of war or mass murder or starvation or disease, rather than a relatively insignificant number such as 600,000.
December 18, 2010
Beautifully written and deeply personal for the work of an English speaker writing about Russia. Especially valuable are all of the interviews Ms. Merridale conducted. These put a human face to the unimaginable statistics. It takes a book as rich as this to show how poor most histories really are.
December 23, 2010
"You really have to be in the right mind set to read this one. The pain of having a loved one yanked out of your life suddenly and never seeing them again is a difficult event in your life. Living in the terror and under tthe cloack of the secretive paranoia that existed in the former USSR is something we can only begin to imagine."
October 3, 2007
A ponderous survey of Russian attitudes on death particularly death caused by human actions which Russia has seen more than its share of in the past century. Adequately written but its real power is the grisly history itself. The cover of the trade paper edition is absolutely beautiful.
October 25, 2011
This is an incredibly good read. While the subject matter is stark and painful, Ms. Merridale does an excellent job of providing context. The research is amazing and the voices are clearly heard. Well done.
February 7, 2012
Brilliantly researched. A breath of fresh air on the academic market as she speaks Russian and is interested in listening to everyday Russians, and not simply relying on the archives and libraries. Conclusion is somewhat abstract, indicative perhaps of the subject material.
March 6, 2007
one of my favourite non-fiction books. explores the culture of suffering that pervades the russian people. Filled with interviews, it doesn't drag as much as you think it might.
February 12, 2009
A stunning book. As in stun gun. As in holy shit. As in jaw sagging. As in...
March 2, 2010
Compassionate, big history of death in Russia.
Want to read
September 3, 2010epub version
March 20, 2012
Fantastic! I loved reading this. The last chapter is what made the whole thing a really beautiful read. Depressing, of course, but good.
March 21, 2014
Excellent book...so sad...very helpful watching the events unfold in the Crimea and Ukraine. This book details the way Russians deal with death, burials, and remembering the dead.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews