Experimental Blog # 191

Quotations and comments from "Word for Word - A Translator's Memoir of Literature, Politics, and Survival in Soviet Russia" by Liliana Lungina as told to Oleg Dorman - translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon, assisted by A. Moore

"The entire sum of happy, trying, unhappy, bright, and bland moments you live through is the essence of life."

"From 1936 to 1938, during the worst of the terror, daily life seemed to improve, however strange it may seem."
"Suddenly, after Stalin uttered the words "Life has become happier," everything changed. The people obeyed."
"He never appeared to the people. He was invisible, like God. < > Ordinary people < > could only see him two or three times a year .."

In the summer of 1939 "On the front pages of all the newspapers there was a picture of Stalin shaking Ribbentrop's hand. Underneath was a caption that read: I know how the German people love their Fuhrer, and I drink to his health."
"Now its common knowledge, {but} less than two months prior to the outbreak of war{June 1941}, Stalin had destroyed the remaining top military commanders of the country. One of my friends lived in Lefortovo, next to the prison. < > for two nights in the beginning of May 1941 < > Rounds of rifle fire rang out all night long. They were executing those who had been imprisoned, for the most part, in 1937 .." An example of Stalinist eugenics?

"For the first time{when the author was with her mother in evacuation near Kazan in 1941} I saw a convoy of prisoners, they were women. Accompanied by guards on horseback, exhausted, bedraggled figures, almost all of them barefoot. Their feet swaddled in rags, carrying satchels of some kind, surrounded by packs of dogs. I felt I was watching some sort of horror film. It was hard to believe that I was seeing this in real life .."
"Svetlana Alliueva, Stalin's daughter, relates in her memoirs that she heard her father talking over the phone about a murder, and ordering that the death be made to look like an accident." This relates to the death of a member of the Jewish Antifascist Committee that Stalin had initiated.

This is a very vivid and informative book. It is also interesting that, in spite of how much they sometimes allowed the author to travel outside the Soviet Union in Western Europe, Liliana Lungina never seems to have gone to America, or even Britain.