Souls under the Bolsheviks.(Requiem for the East by Andrei Makine)

Requiem for the East, by Andrei Makine; Sceptre/Hodder & Stoughton, 2001, $49.95.

THE UNDOUBTED JOY I--along with many others--It felt at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communist rule in Europe, was tempered by the knowledge that millions of people--irreplaceable, unique human beings--died in the eighty-year reign that was the Bolshevik empire. And died for what? For nothing at all, it seems. And yet, if their lives and deaths are to be truly remembered, then we cannot think that. For that reduces people to the level of lemmings, or worse still, faceless numbers.

Too often, the huge numbers of deaths in the cataclysms of human history, such as the Nazi madness and the Bolshevik terror and prow fighting that was the Cold War, dull the senses and the morals and the heart to the reality that each of those millions was a person, with a history, dreams, hopes, fears. Today, we see this happening again. Too often, opposing sides have played these ambit-claim games of "my rollcall is bigger than yours" without stopping to consider the simple, heartbreaking, terrible fact of the extinguishment of individual lives. And the triumph of the West--such as it was, and short-lived as it was, now that history and suffering have got us all by the throat again--was all too often a complacent one, and prone to humiliating the erstwhile enemy, now characterised as incompetent, foolish and even never really a danger at all! Russia the Demon, then Russia the Buffoon and Basket Case--neither gives the country and its people any individuality or dignity.

Andrei Makine's novel Requiem for the East is a complete corrective to the ant farm version of history; each of his people is clearly defined, pulsing with life, yet at the same time somehow able to tell, within the trajectory of their lives, the story of the suffering of the Russian people. And in doing this, he has created an unforgettable, gripping story that lodges deep under your skin, and makes your heart ache without losing an atom of intelligence's crystal clarity.

There is fury, there, too; fury at the inhumanity not only of the butchers and the torturers, the manipulators and arms dealers, the megalomaniacs and egotists and rogues and betrayers and vile creatures who inflicted such horrors on fellow human beings, but also a cold, deadly fury against the complacent intellectuals and fatcat Western analysts and planners who dissect what they see as the death-throes of Russia, all with a curled lip and a complete lack of understanding of suffering and greatness. But as well as fury and grief, there is also an intense tenderness, a love of the world, and of the small pauses in suffering in which human beings can show our love for each other, our boldness and courage and extraordinary friendship. This is a story that celebrates human life as well as showing us its pain.

This is the story of the footsoldiers of the empire. It is centred around the unnamed narrator, once a doctor, ...