“In Russia, it was always better to leave the past alone. Here it had a way of poisoning the present.”
I don’t know if there’s a scarier or more fascinating time than a revolution. The American, the French, the Russian…the obvious terror of the violence, and then the abrupt shift in social norms and power dynamics is just so interesting. These are not the sort of times I’d personally want to live through, I enjoy peace and stability, but they’re always times I enjoy learning more about. Especially intriguing are the stories of people who have power, and how they lose it, and if they can regain it.
It’s unusual to find people who are in power both before and after a revolution: after all, the whole point is usually to topple the ruling class. But the title character is one such person in historian Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Sashenka. The author’s first work of fiction, it tells the story of the teenage daughter of a wealthy Jewish merchant who becomes, in spite of her class, a passionate Bolshevik. Alienated from her spoiled, reckless mother (part of the social circle devoted to Rasputin), Sashenka turns for leadership to her uncle, who gets her involved with the socialists, for whom she becomes a valuable asset. Her fiery true belief is rewarded when the revolution comes to pass, and she and Vanya, the comrade whom she marries, become high-ranking members of the new Communist order.
But in Stalin’s Soviet Union, no one is really safe. Even as the Georgian dictator pays a personal visit to a party at Sashenka’s home, meeting her two small children, the seeds of destruction are sown, as that is the same night she meets writer Benya. Her affair with him not only endangers her and her husband, but their children, who become separated from their mother. Sashenka and Vanya struggle keep their heads above water, but doom seems inevitable. Many, many years later, a young researcher named Katinka is hired by a wealthy older woman to investigate the half-remembered events of her childhood, and Sashenka’s story finally sees its end told as Katinka unveils the truth.
Modern Russian history is absolutely fascinating, and Montefiore crafts characters that provide perspective on many of the more dramatic highlights: the glittering world of the upper classes before it all comes tumbling down around them, the drama and urgency of the revolution itself, the constant suspicion and danger of the Stalinist era, the gulags, and then the uncertainty after the dissolution of the USSR. And Sashenka herself is an interesting person: she’s brave, smart, and dynamic, and even her disastrous decision to have an affair feels internally consistent. Unfortunately, Montefiore isn’t content to let it rest there, and falls into the predictable male-author trap of making sure that we know she’s hot, inserting multiple cringeworthy references to her bust size. Every time he did it, it took me out of the narrative.
The narrative is not without its own problems…it’s compelling during the portions focused on Sashenka, but lost a lot of steam for me when it turned to Katinka. She was not as well-developed (as a person, but also presumably in the chest area since we never hear about it) as the titular character, and it’s only the suspense of her investigation that keeps any urgency from a plot perspective. Major developments are telegraphed pretty obviously, and it’s only the promise of finding out the rest of Sashenka’s story that kept me engaged. I’ve noticed that non-fiction writers often struggle when they venture into fiction…building plot and characters are different skill sets than the ones they’ve honed through writing history, and it sometimes feels like they get lost in the details of creating an accurate world that complies with the historical record. Montefiore isn’t egregiously bad by this standard, or by any honestly, but there’s still a lot of roughness here. If you’re interested in the underlying time period, this isn’t a total waste of time to read, but be prepared for some clunkiness. If Russian history isn’t your deal, though, there’s no reason to pick this up.
