Hose have kept pace with shoes
Virginia Llewellyn Smith
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union ed. Archie Brown, John Fennell, Michael Kaser and H. T. Willets (Cambridge University Press £18.50) This is not an encyclopedia in the usual sense of the term. It is a single-volume compendium of information, non- alphabetically arranged, that begins with a section 'Territory and Peoples' and pro- ceeds through history and culture to a general survey of the Soviet Union as a world power today. Like the food in a Russian stolovaya (or `cliner'), this book is cheap, solid, and with few surprises. We already know that the Soviet system is not all it pretends to be: Judiciously indicated here are some of the gaps that have opened between theory and Practice. Statistics indicating a falling crime-level cannot be trusted, because of the necessity of maintaining an impressive incident/arrest ratio; unskilled manual labour, though considered ideologically superior to, for example, clerical work, is the last sort of job school-leavers want; of the great number of doctors, most are Women — and the reason is, it's a relatively badly paid occupation. Not that the last consideration would worry me were I the patient. There is ample evidence in this book of the Soviet Union's Lreai progress, not just in industrialisation uut in raising the literacy level and improv- ing medical care, especially among its non- Slav peoples. These are now breeding faster than the rest (since the 1960s Uzbeks have outnumbered Belorussians as the third- largest ethnic group in the Soviet Union), and space is duly allotted to a description of them. Properly, we are also given some conception of the degree to which the non- Slav elements are being russified — which is of course a mixed blessing. It has meant, for instance, for the Moldavians dislocation from their native Romanian culture, as symbolised by the clumsy adaptation of their language into cyrillic script. It has meant the adoption everywhere, in all the arts, of the spurious criteria of socialist realism. The Bol'shaya sovetskaya ent- siklopediya sees fit to include under 'art' a full-page colour plate of S.A. Chuykov's `Daughter of Soviet Kirgizia' who, text- book under arm, is striding away from that unproductive old steppe in the background (or would be, if her legs weren't cut off by the frame). What a cultural heritage such little girls are in danger of losing is made evident in the Cambridge Encyclopedia by illustrations of eastern art and architecture. This is an aspect of non-Slav culture that gets space, presumably, because of its in- fluence on Russian art (and, besides, it makes for pretty pictures). For other aspects of culture and history the focus is on Russia, the city-state that first dislodged the Tatar yoke.
Theoretically, a success story; but it would be difficult, after reading the history and literature sections of this book, to see it as such. If Russia's history, here necessarily compressed and oversimplified, seems to resolve itself into a series of rulers concern- ed only to keep the frontiers secure, the masses quiet and their own persons safe, that is still what ruling Russia basically comes down to.
The section on literature testifies to the scale of Russia's achievement, all the more remarkable for its accomplishment in the face of cynical or just philistine authority. Yet as one flicks over pages of writers neat- ly date-stamped, from Griboedov and Pushkin through Blok and Mayakovsky to Babel' and Bulgakov, the most striking im- pression is, paradoxically, one of waste: so many of them died young, or relatively young. It would be fatuous to pretend that all these deaths were linked to a hostile en- vironment — though in fact not all that many were entirely unconnected with exter- nal circumstances, as was Gogol"s, say, or Chekhov's. But what is certain is that the literature section of this book is peculiarly depressing, because while totting up all those deaths it reflects little of the glory. The strain of compression shows: the best articles are the. longer ones (for example, Tolstoy), and those on the early period (fewer competitors for the space). It does seem rather hard on the poet Del'vig, in allowing him only 22 words (and those in- clude his title, initials and dates), to make seven of them read: 'noted for the paucity of his output'. But on the whole the con- tributors have coped admirably with the limitations, and it is not their fault if there is little room left for analysis and none for quotation. It is simply not possible to con- vey the point about a work of art in the way statistics can convey reassuring truths such as we find in the section on the Soviet economy Chose have merely kept pace with shoes').
Illustrations can say some things better than the text. I think the book should have reproduced more examples of present-day public-education posters. This art-as- communication is ubiquitous in the Soviet Union, and it is very bad. It draws attention daily not just to the enfeeblement of a genre in which the native tradition was doing rather well about the time of the Revolu-
tion, but also to the unselfconscious con- descension of the regime that feeds this baby-pap to adults. And yet, take a mouthful of it and you will suddenly find yourself biting on something — the serious, deeply held conviction that the future of the state lies not so much in big machines as in moral improvement. In the article on socialist realism we read that the artist Yevgeniya Zernova was accused of 'for- malism' when she painted a tank taking up half the canvas and left the crew without facial expression. The indignant reaction of a critic that 'There is no new man here' is the sort of detail this book could do with more of: drawing the eye, it suddenly pulls the whole picture together.
That is a minor and perhaps an unfair criticism. What you mostly get here is what the blurb promises, and what one expects from an encyclopedia: factual information integrated with 'impartial comment', and a `balanced presentation': and I would trust these editors to get their facts as nearly right as the difficulties of extracting information from the Soviet Union and controlling a team of 'over 100 contributors' permit. Any businessman, student or diplomat who needs a basic introduction to Russia would find this one well worth its very reasonable price. As for the initiate — 'No expert on a particular aspect of the Soviet Union', states the blurb with quiet confidence, `could possibly know everything to be found in this book.' Even if you are aware of the theoretical distinction between
workers and collective farmers, your chances of also knowing the extent of gully erosion in the western USSR or which Soviet language is the 'fastest' in the world (able to convey complete information, such as word root and tense, in a single conso- nant) are slim indeed.
Consolingly, this is an easily readable book, nicely laid out, with good-quality paper and few misprints. It could teach the compilers of the vast Bol'shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya, which in the volume `USSR' needlessly reiterates a good deal of what is in the other 29 volumes, a thing or two about organisation and cross- referencing.
Rehearsing facts can of course turn into a retreat from realities — which might ex- plain why a Soviet encyclopedist should ap- proach his task as one painting the Forth Bridge. If there is a fault in the Cambridge Encyclopedia, it is basically a fault of the genre, ilmely a blandness in the writing. In the coverage of the sciences, where the first thing the reader might expect to want to know is 'is it any good?', value-judgments are perhaps not made often or trenchantly enough. The article on genetics stands out because, having the unhappy story of Lysenkoism to tell, it tells it as it should be told — critically, even bitterly. To sound authoritative it is sometimes necessary to snap, and a book like this, for the very reason that it seeks to provide a balanced overview, is the more valuable for allowing such divergences of tone.
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