Donald Rayfield

Letters to the Editor

The Readers of Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past

By

Harvard University Press 431pp £40.95 order from our bookshop

It is not easy for nations to come to terms with an oppressive or brutal past: in most cases, they prefer to cast it into oblivion or to fictionalise it either as a golden age or a painful but necessary and beneficial surgery. In the few cases in history where there has been objective exploration of what happened, penitence and reconciliation occur after the regime has been thoroughly destroyed by its enemies, external or internal. That leaves us with Germany and South Africa. We shouldn’t be surprised: criminals come to terms with their crimes when they have been caught, convicted and sentenced. And in the case of Japan, catastrophic defeat and trials for war crimes still fail to keep alive the memory of, let alone remorse for, the massacre of Nanking.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'One of the reasons for its longevity is that it has virtually nothing to say about science and technology at all,… ,
    • 'The characters in many of these stories are trapped in the obsessive present tense of their own thoughts; in the m… ,
    • 'Libraries, for much of their existence, have embodied in microcosm many of the characteristics of the totalitarian… ,
    • 'Moss and Cynthia buy several properties through which to launder their ill-gotten gains, take lots of drugs, have… ,
    • 'Never mind the imperial cult. This is the cult of Boris. What happened to Rome?' From the LR archive:… ,
    • Thirty-two years ago this month, we published Muriel Spark's short story, 'A Playhouse Called Remarkable' Read it… ,
    • Time travel, bicycles and white horses populate @WomackPhilip's roundup of children's books by @marcussedgwick,… ,
    Follow Us