Russia, A Chronicle of Three Journeys in the Aftermath of the Revolution (review)

Abstract

260 Reviews German occupation authorities "his very complete dossiers of all persons suspected of Republican sympathies. . . ." Actually, by the time the Germans had reached Athens Maniadákis had fled to the Middle East as a member of the first government in exile under the Venizelist Tsouderós. The first Soviet post-liberation ambassador arrived in Athens not "at the height" of the December 1944 revolt but after the fighting had stopped. More significantly, Shafer's principal interpretations are extracted from two valuable but hardly balanced studies: Lawrence Whittner's revisionist critique of United States policy in Greece and C. M. Woodhouse's volume on the Greek civil war in which the U.S. military role is systematically downplayed. Shafer's theoretical scheme is useful: it works well when applied to the United States' involvement in Vietnam and perhaps in the Philippines as well. But the inclusion of the Greek case detracts from the effort and raises more questions than it attempts to answer. Instead of providing a convincing analysis of U.S. policy, it reveals the weakness of academic theory when it confuses what the American government did with what the theorist believes the government ought to have done. John O. Iatrides Southern Connecticut State University Nikos Kazantzakis, Russia, A Chronicle of Three Journeys in the Aftermath of the Revolution. Translated by Michael Antonakes and Thanasis Maskaleris. Foreword by Theofanis G. Stavrou. Berkeley, California: Creative Arts Book Company. 1989. Pp. 271. $18.95. With all the changes happening in the Soviet Union today, it is perhaps unlikely that a book written in the late 1920s will teach us much about the reality of communist Russia. Yet Kazantzakis' idiosyncratic travelogue should be of interest both to the general public concerned with Soviet affairs and to specialists in Greek intellectual history. The general public will be intrigued by Kazantzakis' perception, very heretical for its time, that the Russian Revolution was not a break with the West but, contrariwise, the fulfillment of western tendencies toward rationalism , industrialism, and centralized state control. The Soviet ideal, he perceived , was complete Americanization—in other words, the development of a materialistic civilization in which productivity is king. Specialists in Greek intellectual history may be interested in the fact that Kazantzakis was the first Greek man-of-letters to experience the Soviet experiment directly. At the colossal celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Revolution in 1927, he was the only Greek invited. He traveled the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, living there for three extended periods that totaled almost two years, and writing newspaper reports that he later reworked Reviews 261 to form the travel book Ti είδα στη Ρουσία (1928). In addition, he used the same experiences to create a fictional treatment of Soviet reality in the novel Toda Raba (1929). Kazantzakis' impressions were hotly debated by both proand anti-Soviet elements in Greece itself, with the self-styled idealist faction accusing him of materialism and the Marxists accusing him of idealism. In truth, he did fall between the two stools, exasperating everyone since he refused to treat the Russian experiment as either black or white. Although he came away basically disillusioned because Soviet materialism appalled him, he refused to become a Soviet-basher for the simple reason that he considered the alternative, western European civilization, equally decadent. So he developed a doctrine that very few Greeks understood—"metacommunism," the hope that the excessive materialism in Russia would evolve beyond itself into a revived spirituality. But Russia is much more than an essay in political theory. Kazantzakis in his lifetime was most esteemed as a travel writer, and this book exhibits fully his customary energy, curiosity, and perspicacity in that genre. He seems to have gone everywhere, to have interviewed every sort of person. We have chapters on workers, peasants, soldiers lawyers, schoolteachers, women, artists , journalists, Jews, Christians and other minorities. He examines Soviet justice, education, marriage, propaganda, literature, theater, as well as the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky, and the legacy of Lenin. Moreover, the characteristic rhythms and energy of Kazantzakis' Greek prose cross the language barrier owing to Antonakes' and Maskaleris' careful, artistic translation, as in this passage about the oil wells of Baku: We...