The Best American Travel Writing 2018

Cheryl Strayed

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781328497697
• eBook ISBN:
  9781328501653
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Journalism

Everyone travels for different reasons, but whatever those reasons are, one thing is certain: they come back with stories. Each year, the best of those stories are collected in The Best American Travel Writing , curated by one of the top writers in the field, and each year they "open a window onto the strange, seedy, and beautiful world, offering readers glimpses into places that many will never see or experience except through the eyes and words of these writers" ( Kirkus). This far-ranging collection of top notch travel writing is, quite simply, the genre's gold standard.
 

Ian Frazier

What Ever Happened to the Russian Revolution?

from Smithsonian

Russia is both a great, glorious country and an ongoing disaster. Just when you decide it is the one, it turns around and discloses the other. For a hundred years before 1917, it experienced wild disorders and political violence interspersed with periods of unquiet calm, meanwhile producing some of the world’s greatest literature and booming in population and helping to feed Europe. Then it leapt into a revolution unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, a hundred years afterward, we still don’t know quite what to make of that huge event. The Russians themselves aren’t too sure about its significance.

I used to tell people that I loved Russia, because I do. I think everybody has a country not their own that they’re powerfully drawn to; Russia is mine. I can’t explain the attraction, only observe its symptoms going back to childhood, such as listening over and over to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, narrated by Peter Ustinov, when I was six, or standing in the front yard at night as my father pointed out Sputnik crossing the sky. Now I’ve traveled enough in Russia that my affections are more complicated. I know that almost no conclusion I ever draw about it is likely to be right. The way to think about Russia is without thinking about it. I just try to love it and yield to it and go with it, while also paying vigilant attention—if that makes sense.

I first began traveling to Russia more than twenty-four years ago, and in 2010 I published Travels in Siberia, a book about trips I’d made to that far-flung region. With the fall of the Soviet Union, areas previously closed to travelers had opened up. During the 1990s and after, the pace of change in Russia cascaded. A harsh kind of capitalism grew; democracy came and mostly went. Then, two years ago, my son moved to the city of Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains, on the edge of Siberia, and he lives there now. I see I will never stop thinking about this country.

As the 1917 centennial approached, I wondered about the revolution and tangled with its force field of complexity. For example, a question as straightforward as what to call certain Russian cities reveals, on examination, various options, asterisks, clarifications. Take St. Petersburg, whose name was changed in 1914 to Petrograd so as not to sound too German (at the time, Russia was fighting the Kaiser in the First World War). In 1924 Petrograd became Leningrad, which then went back to being St. Petersburg again in 1991. Today many of the city’s inhabitants simply call it “Peter.” Or consider the name of the revolution itself. Though it’s called the Great October Revolution, from our point of view it happened in November. In 1917, Russia still followed the Julian calendar, which lagged thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar used elsewhere in the world. The Bolshevik government changed the country to the Gregorian calendar in early 1918, soon after taking control. (All this information will be useful later on.)

In February and March I went to Russia to see what it was like in the centennial year. My way to travel is to go to a specific place and try to absorb what it is now and look closer, for what it was. Things that happen in a place change it and never leave it. I visited my son in Yekaterinburg, I rambled around Moscow, and I gave the most attention to St. Petersburg, where traces of the revolution are everywhere. The weather stayed cold. In each of the cities, ice topped with perfectly white snow locked the rivers. Here and there, rogue footprints crossed the ice expanses with their brave or heedless dotted lines. In St. Petersburg, I often passed Senate Square, in the middle of the city, with Étienne Falconet’s black statue of Peter the Great on his rearing horse atop a massive rock. Sometimes I saw newlyweds by the statue popping corks as an icy wind blew in across the Neva River and made the champagne foam fly. They were standing at a former pivot point of empire.

I’ll begin my meditation in 1825, at the Decembrist uprising. The Decembrists were young officers in the czar’s army who fought in the Napoleonic wars and found out about the Enlightenment and came home wanting to reform Russia. They started a secret society, wrote a constitution based on the US Constitution and, on December 14, at the crucial moment of their coup attempt, lost their nerve. They had assembled troops loyal to them on Senate Square, but after a daylong standoff Czar Nicholas I dispersed these forces with cannon fire. Some of the troops ran across the Neva trying to escape; the cannons shot at the ice and shattered it and drowned them. The authorities arrested one-hundred-some Decembrists and tried and convicted almost all. The czar sent most to Siberia; he ordered five of the leaders hanged. For us, the Decembrists’ example can be painful to contemplate—as if King George III had hanged George Washington and sent the other signers of the Declaration of Independence to hard labor in Australia.

One good decision the Decembrists made was to not include Alexander Pushkin in their plot, although he was friends with more than a few of them. This spared him to survive and to become Russia’s greatest poet.

Tolstoy, of a younger generation than theirs, admired the Decembrists and wanted to write a book about their uprising. But the essential documents, such as the depositions they gave after their arrests, were hidden away under czarist censorship, so instead he wrote War and Peace. In Tolstoy’s lifetime the country’s revolutionary spirit veered into terrorism. Russia invented terrorism, that feature of modern life, in the 1870s. Young middle-class lawyers and university teachers and students joined terror groups of which the best known was Naródnaya Volia, or People’s Will. They went around shooting and blowing up czarist officials, and killed thousands. Alexander II, son of Nicholas I, succeeded his father in 1855, and in 1861 he emancipated the serfs. People’s Will blew him up anyway.

When Tolstoy met in 1886 with George Kennan, the American explorer of Siberia (and a cousin twice removed of the diplomat of the same name, who, more than a half-century later, devised Truman’s Cold War policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union), Kennan pleaded for support for some of the Siberian exiles he had met. But the great man refused even to listen. He said these revolutionaries had chosen violence and must live with the consequences.

Meanwhile Marxism was colonizing the brains of Russian intellectuals like an invasive plant. The intelligentsia (a word of Russian origin) sat at tables in Moscow and St. Petersburg and other cities in the empire or abroad arguing Marxist doctrine and drinking endless cups of tea, night after night, decade after decade. (If vodka has damaged the sanity of Russia, tea has been possibly worse.) Points of theory nearly impossible to follow today caused Socialist parties of different types to incubate and proliferate and split apart. The essential writer of that later-nineteenth-century moment was Chekhov. The wistful, searching characters in his plays always make me afraid for them. I keep wondering why they can’t do anything about what’s coming, as if I’m at a scary movie and the teenage couple making out in the car don’t see the guy with the hockey mask and chain saw who is sneaking up on them.

The guy in the hockey mask was Vladimir I. Lenin. In 1887, his older brother, Aleksandr Ulyanov, a sweet young man by all accounts, joined a plot to assassinate Czar Alexander III. Betrayed by an informer (a common fate), Ulyanov was tried and found guilty, and he died on the gallows, unrepentant. Lenin, seventeen at the time, hated his family’s liberal friends who dropped the Ulyanovs as a consequence. From then on, the czar and the bourgeoisie were on borrowed time.

The Romanov dynasty stood for more than three hundred years. Nicholas II, the last czar, a Romanov out of his depth, looked handsome in his white naval officer’s uniform. He believed in God, disliked Jews, loved his wife and five children, and worried especially about his youngest child, the hemophiliac only son, Alexei. If you want a sense of the last Romanovs, check out the Fabergé eggs they often gave as presents to each other. One afternoon I happened on a sponsored show of Fabergé eggs in a St. Petersburg museum. Such a minute concentration of intense, bejeweled splendor you’ve never seen. The diamond-encrusted tchotchkes often opened to reveal even littler gem-studded gifts inside. The eggs can stand for the czar’s unhelpful myopia during the perilous days of 1917. Viewers of the exhibit moved from display case to display case in reverent awe.

One can pass over some of the disasters of Nicholas’s reign. He was born unlucky on the name day of Job, the sufferer. On the day of his coronation, in 1896, a crowd of half a million, expecting a special giveaway in Moscow, panicked, trampling to death and suffocating fourteen hundred people. Nicholas often acted when he should have done nothing and did nothing when he should have acted. He seemed mild and benign, but after his troops killed hundreds of workers marching on the Winter Palace with a petition for an eight-hour workday and other reforms—the massacre was on January 9, 1905, later known as Bloody Sunday—fewer of his subjects thought of him as “the good czar.”

The 1905 protests intensified until they became the 1905 Revolution. The czar’s soldiers killed perhaps fourteen thousand more before it was under control. As a result, Nicholas allowed the convening of a representative assembly called the State Duma, Russia’s first Parliament, along with wider freedom of the press and other liberalizations. But the Duma had almost no power and Nicholas kept trying to erode the little it had. He did not enjoy being czar but believed in the autocracy with all his soul and wanted to bequeath it undiminished to his son.

It’s July 1914, just before the beginning of the First World War: The czar stands on a balcony of the Winter Palace, reviewing his army. The whole vast expanse of Palace Square is packed with people. He swears on the Bible and the holy icons that he will not sign for peace so long as one enemy soldier is standing on Russian soil. Love of the fatherland has its effect. The entire crowd, tens of thousands strong, falls to its knees to receive his blessing. The armies march. Russia’s attacks on the Eastern Front help to save Paris in 1914. Like the other warring powers, Russia goes into the trenches. But each spring, in 1915 and 1916, the army renews its advance. By 1917 it has lost more than three million men.

In America we may think of disillusionment with that war as a quasi-literary phenomenon, something felt by the writers of the Lost Generation in Paris. Long before America entered the war, Russian soldiers felt worse—disgusted with the weak czar and the German-born czarina, filled with anger at their officers, and enraged at the corruption that kept them poorly supplied. In the winter of 1916–17, they begin to appear in Petrograd as deserters and in deputations for peace, hoping to make their case before the Duma. The czar and the upper strata of Russian society insist that the country stay in the war, for the sake of national honor, and for their allies, some of whom have lent Russia money. Russia also hopes to receive as a war prize the Straits of Bosporus and the Dardanelles, which it has long desired. But the soldiers and common people see the idiocy of the endless, static struggle, and the unfair share they bear in it, and they want peace.

The absence of enough men to bring in the harvests, plus a shortage of railroad cars, plus an unusually cold winter, lead to a lack of bread in Petrograd. In February many city residents are starving. Women take to the streets and march on stores and bakeries crying the one word: “Khleb!” Bread! Striking workers from Petrograd’s huge factories, like the Putilov Works, which employs forty thousand men, join the disturbances. The czar’s government does not know what to do. Day after day in February the marches go on. Finally the czar orders the military to suppress the demonstrations. People are killed. But now, unlike in 1905, the soldiers have little to lose. They do not want to shoot; many of the marchers are young peasants like themselves, who have recently come to the city to work in the factories. And nothing awaits the soldiers except being sent to the front.

So, one after another, Petrograd regiments mutiny and join the throngs on the streets. Suddenly the czar’s government can find no loyal troops willing to move against the demonstrators. Taking stock, Nicholas’s ministers and generals inform him that he has no choice but to abdicate for the good of the country. On March 2 he complies, with brief complications involving his son and brother, neither of whom succeeds him.

Near-chaos ensues. In the vacuum, power is split between two new institutions: the Provisional Government, a cabinet of Duma ministers who attempt to manage the country’s affairs while waiting for the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly, a nationwide representative body scheduled to convene in the fall; and the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, a somewhat amorphous collection of groups with fluid memberships and multi-Socialist-party affiliations. (In Russian, one meaning of the word “soviet” is “council”—here, an essentially political entity.) The Petrograd Soviet is the working people’s organization, while the Provisional Government mostly represents the upper bourgeoisie. This attempt at dual governance is a fiction, because the Petrograd Soviet has the support of the factory workers, ordinary people, and soldiers. In other words, it has the actual power; it has the guns.

The February Revolution, as it’s called, is the real and original Russian revolution. February supplied the raw energy for the rest of 1917—energy that Lenin and the Bolsheviks would co-opt as justification for their coup in October. Many classic images of the people’s struggle in Russia derive from February. In that month red became the color of revolution: sympathetic onlookers wore red lapel ribbons, and marchers tore the white and blue stripes from the Russian flag and used the red stripe for their long, narrow banner. Even jaded Petrograd artistic types wept when they heard the self-led multitudes break into “The Marseillaise,” France’s revolutionary anthem, recast with fierce Russian lyrics. Comparatively little blood was shed in the February Revolution, and its immediate achievement—bringing down the Romanov dynasty—made a permanent difference. Unlike the coup of October, the February uprising had a spontaneous, popular, tectonic quality. Of the many uprisings and coups and revolutions Russia has experienced, only the events of February 1917 seemed to partake of joy.

2

The city of St. Petersburg endlessly explains itself, in plaques and monuments everywhere you turn. It still possesses the majesty of an imperial capital, with its plazas, rows of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century government buildings receding to a vanishing point, glassy canals, and towering cloudscapes just arrived from the Baltic Sea. The layout makes a grand backdrop, and the revolution was the climactic event it served as a backdrop for.

A taxi dropped me beside the Fontanka Canal at Nevskii Prospekt, where my friend Luda has an apartment in a building on the corner. Luda and I met eighteen years ago, when Russian friends who had known her in school introduced us. I rented one of several apartments she owns in the city for a few months in 2000 and 2001. We became friends despite lack of a common language; with my primitive but slowly improving Russian and her kind tolerance of it, we made do. Now I often stay with her when I’m in the city.

When we first knew each other Luda worked for the local government and was paid so little that, she said, she would be able to visit the States only if she went a year without eating or drinking. Then she met a rich Russian American, married him, and moved to his house in Livingston, New Jersey, about ten miles from us. After her husband died she stayed in the house by herself. I saw her often, and she came to visit us for dinner. The house eventually went to her husband’s children, and now she divides her time between St. Petersburg and Miami. I have more phone numbers for her than for anyone else in my address book.

Her Nevskii apartment’s mid-city location is good for my purposes because when I’m in St. Petersburg I walk all over, sometimes fifteen miles or more in a day. One morning, I set out for the Finland Station, on the north side of the Neva, across the Liteynyi Bridge from the city’s central district. The stroll takes about twenty minutes. As you approach the station, you see, on the square in front, a large statue of Lenin, speaking from atop a stylized armored car. One hand holds the lapel of his greatcoat, the other arm extends full length, gesturing rhetorically. This is your basic and seminal Lenin statue. The Finlandskii Voksal enters the story in April of 1917. It’s where the world-shaking, cataclysmic part of the Russian Revolution begins.

Most of the hard-core professional revolutionaries did not participate in the February Revolution, having been earlier locked up, exiled, or chased abroad by the czar’s police. (That may be why the vain and flighty Alexander Kerensky rose to power so easily after February: the major-leaguers had not yet taken the field.)

Lenin was living in Zurich, where he and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had rented a small, disagreeable room. Awaiting developments, Lenin kept company with other expatriate Socialists, directed the Petrograd Bolsheviks by mail and telegram, and spent time in the public library. He did not hear of the czar’s abdication until some time after the fact. A Polish Socialist stopped by and brought news of revolution in Russia in the middle of the day, just after Krupskaya had finished washing the lunch dishes. Immediately Lenin grew almost frantic with desire to get back to Petrograd. His wife laughed at his schemes of crossing the intervening borders disguised as a speech- and hearing-impaired Swede, or of somehow obtaining an airplane.

Leon Trotsky, who would become the other major Bolshevik of the revolution, was then living in (of all places) the Bronx. With his wife and two young sons he had recently moved into a building that offered an elevator, garbage chute, telephone, and other up-to-date conveniences the family enjoyed. Trotsky hailed the February Revolution as a historic development and began to make arrangements for a trans-Atlantic voyage.

Both Trotsky and Lenin had won fame by 1917. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, which emerged from the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in 1903, after splitting with the more moderate Mensheviks, kept its membership to a small group of dedicated followers. Lenin believed that the Bolsheviks must compromise with nobody. Since 1900, he had lived all over Europe, spending more time outside Russia than in it, and emphasized the international aspect of the proletariat revolution. Lenin wrote articles for Socialist journals and he published books; many devotees knew of him from his writings. Trotsky also wrote, but he was a flashier type and kept a higher public profile. Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in the Ukraine, he had starred in the 1905 Revolution: at only twenty-six he organized a Soviet of Workers’ Deputies that lasted for fifty days before the government crushed it.

Lenin’s return to Russia required weeks of arrangements. Through German contacts he and a party of other exiled revolutionaries received permission to go by train via Germany, whose government encouraged the idea in the hope that Lenin and his colleagues would make a mess of Russia and thereby help Germany win the war. In pursuit of their political ends Lenin and the Bolsheviks acted as German agents and their policy of “revolutionary defeatism” strengthened the enemy. They went on to receive tens of millions of German marks in aid before the Kaiser’s government collapsed with the German defeat, although that collusion would not be confirmed until later.

The last leg of Lenin’s homeward journey led through Finland. Finally, at just after eleven on the night of April 16, he arrived in Petrograd at the Finland Station. In all the iconography of Soviet...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Introduction
• ELLIOT ACKERMAN: Goodbye, My Brother
• RABIH ALAMEDDINE: Hope and Home
• SAM ANDERSON: Peak America
• BIANCA BOSKER: Why Should a Melon Cost as Much as a Car?
• BRIN-JONATHAN BUTLER: The Ghost of Capablanca
• JENNIFER HOPE CHOI: My Mother and I Went Halfway Around the World to Find Each Other
• J. D. DANIELS: Signs and Wonders
• CAMILLE DUNGY: Traveling While Black
• MATTHEW FERRENCE: The Foxes of Prince Edward Island
• IAN FRAZIER: What Ever Happened to the Russian Revolution?
• RAHAWA HAILE: We Go It Alone
• NATHAN HELLER: The Digital Republic
• PAM HOUSTON: Some Kind of Calling
• ALLEGRA HYDE: Let the Devil Sing
• RYAN KNIGHTON: Out of Sight
• RICHARD MANNING: Over the River
• RACHEL MONROE: Outside the Manson Pinkberry
• EILEEN POLLACK: Righteous Gentile
• ALBERT SAMAHA: Looking for Right and Wrong in the Philippines
• GARY SHTEYNGART: Thinking Outside the Bots
• CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON: In the Home of the Bear
• BARRETT SWANSON: Notes from a Last Man
• ANYA VON BREMZEN: Counter Revolution
• Vacances
• Contributors’ Notes
• Notable Travel Writing of 2017
• Read More from the Best American Series
• About the Editors
• Connect with HMH