Nina's Journey: a Memoir of Stalin's Russia and the Second World War. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 5, 1990 by David Yount

Ordinary People

IN THE reign of Gorbachev, the bear that walks like a man increasingly behaves like a teddy bear. Yet Nina's Journey, a harrowing chronicle of Soviet life under Stalin, suggests that even in the kinder, gentler days of glasnost it is premature to feed the bears.

Here is the familiar Russian chronicle of brutal oppression, grinding poverty, mindless bureaucracy, untreated disease, mass starvation, arbitrary imprisonment, mutual mistrust, casual torture, and frivolous execution that the West has acknowledged, but would prefer to treat as ancient history. It is poignantly told by a war bridge who survived the purges of the Thirties, became a slave laborer in Hitler's Germany, and was a refugee hunted by the NKVD in postwar Europe. Narrated in a prose reminiscent of the Perils of Pauline, Nina's Journey offers cliff-hangers every few pages; of course, these horrors are not fictional.

Nina and her brother were born in a small town outside Moscow. Their father was a Muscovite; their mother a refugee from Latvia. Neither parent was a Party member, but Nina's mother was one of only twenty thousand touch typists in Russia at the dawn of the Revolution, initially gaining her a salary the equal of physicians' and university professors'.

Rather than share a worker's apartment with other famillies, Nina's family took a poor cottage in the woods miles from town, lacking electricity, running water, or an indoor toilet. When her father narrowly escaped arbitrary arrest in the purges, he persuaded a doctor to claim he was tubercular, gaining permission to move the family to Feodosia in the Crimea. Shortages in the provinces were so severe that the family made day trips into Moscow to stand in line for food, medicine, and cloth.

With the Hitler-Stalin Pact, scarce wheat was shipped to Germany, and Russians went hungry. When the pact failed and war began, there was famine. Nina's parents sold their wedding rings for 16 loaves of bread. Meanwhile two million Soviet soldiers surrendered to the Germans for promises of food and freedom. Stalin, to stem defections, decreed that the families of soldiers captured in battle would be subject to loss of housing, employment, and freedom. Russia recognized no Russian prisoners of war, and instructed the Red Cross not to attend to their needs in German camps. Indeed, Stalin threatened to mistreat German prisoners if Germans handled Russian prisoners humanely. Officially there could be no Russian prisoners of war, because Russians die bravely in battle rather than let themselves be captured.

Feodosia was invaded by the Germans, who reopened the churches, treated the wounded, and fed civilians, but murdered the town's Jews. Briefly the Soviets retook the town and devastated it. When the Germans returned, Nina's father, by now a middle-aged man, was drafted into the Red Army. Wounded and captured, he was never heard from again. The surviving family members agreed to go to Germany to work, after being promised housing and wages equal to those of Germans. When they arrived they realized they were, in effect, slave laborers, shuffled from one camp to another as Allied bombers destroyed the factories in which they worked.

Peace brought with it the forced repatriation of Russians. Nina joined a massive march of refugees pressing Westward in hopes of receiving the protection of the Americans. Eventually it was her mother's Latvian birth certificate and Nina's forged papers that saved her. She married a GI, and became an American.

Nina's story is not great Russian literature. Her heroes and villains have the consistency of cardboard, and she contrives dialogue as though, half a century later, she can remember every conversation, word for word, since childhood. Her chronology is casual, and too often she neglects to connect her story with events in the larger world--even to let the reader know what year it is. Of course, much the same criticism couuld be leveled at Anne Frank, and Nina's Journey is best read as the diary of a girl who knows full well the times are out of joint, yet has nothing normal to compare them to, and cannot possibly set them right. Like Anne, Nina attempts unsuccessfully to comprehend a worldwide tragedy. Yet no general or president, although possessing vastly wider perspectives, could convey the horror of totalitarianism and war more persuasively than these young women who were its victims.

Nina Markovna was an ordinary person living in extraordinary times. Adversity brings out the best and worst in people. Anne Frank believed that, at heart, all people are good. Nina Markovna's account more successfully illustrates that, when the chips are down, ordinary people may be as frequently transformed into villains as into saints.

Mr. Yount is president of the National Press Foundation in Washington.