Very few countries have gone through the kind of economic and political upheavals that Russia did from 1961–1991, going from being a super power that many admired to an empire that collapsed altogether. Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar chronicles this period of dramatic change in Russia in The Dark Side of the Earth: Russia’s Shortlived Victory over Totalitarianism.
Zygar says that the USSR hit a scientific and cultural peak in 1961, when it became the first nation to put a man in space, Yuri Gagarin. It was a period of relative openness and harmony. While the arts and media were still controlled, Nikita Khrushchev had loosened Stalin’s reign of terror and brought back many of the people he had exiled.
Even as the US got entangled in Vietnam and Europe faced revolts in Africa, a large section of the world, including literary figures like Jean Paul Sarte, was actually looking at the Soviet Union as a sort of perfect state—peaceful and with equality for all.
However, it was all downhill from there, barring minor rays of hope, such as Gorbachev’s rise to power and attempt to add a more humane touch to socialism. The 560-page book details the fall of socialist Russia, but does so not through simple narration, but by looking at the lives of a number of Russians, many of them famous, some less so, during this period of change.
As Zygar says, “this book is not about politics. It is about people—villains and victims, heroes and bureaucrats, poets and soldiers.”
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, holds his wife Raisa’s hand as they arrive at the State Department in Washington on Dec. 9, 1987 for a luncheon in their honor. (AP, file)
We read how Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa struggled with conditions in 1960s USSR. Mikhail managed to save enough money to buy a dress for Raisa for their wedding, but she still had to borrow shoes—they simply had no money.
We also learn how Andrei Sakharov (the man behind the hydrogen bomb) changed his mind about the efficacy of nuclear weapons, and actually shocks the authorities by writing an essay titled Reflections of Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, which effectively gets him removed from the nuclear project he himself created.
Then there is celebrated author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who hides his work from the authorities, sees it confiscated, writes again, and finally gets published against all odds.
It is a vast canvas, encompassing science, art, economics, politics, and everyday life in the USSR, and Zygar handles it very well, breaking each chapter into a number of incidents and passages of time involving different people. He often adds his own experiences of growing up in the USSR to give it a memoir-like touch. Zygar also has a flair for the dramatic, often dropping a sentence that will surprise the reader.
For instance, in the opening chapter, he points out how different people reacted to Gagarin’s historic trip to space, and then, after telling us what a thirty-year-old Gorbachev and a thirty-nine-year-old Sakharov were doing or planning to do, he adds: “Finally, eight-year-old Vladimir Putin goes to school, and in the evenings, fights bullies in his troubled neighbourhood.”
We also learn how Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev stays relatively sober through drinking binges by following a careful diet and even vomiting to clear his stomach. Like Bob Woodward, Zygar also consistently uses active speech, which makes the book read more like a novel than the usual dry non-fiction.
The Dark Side of the Earth is the story of a nation slowly but steadily losing faith in the ideals on which it was formed. Zygar points out how, even at the peak of socialism, government officers and bureaucrats treated citizens with scant (if any) respect, and how basic items like clothing and even food were hard to come by.
However, while the citizens of the USSR bore their problems without too many complaints in the 1960s and 1970s, sustained by their faith in the founding principles of their state, their faith was shaken in the 1980s and replaced by cynicism, and was all but gone when the Soviet empire finally collapses in 1991.
“The Soviet Union fell when belief in communism ran dry. The state no longer had the money or strength to continue spreading its ideology,” Zygar writes.
The book concludes with the fall of the USSR, and rather aptly with another space mission. This time it is Sergei Krikalev, who arrived at the USSR’s space station Mir in May 1991—before the coup (to remove Gorbachev), before Yeltsin was elected President of Russia, before Freddie Mercury died in November, and before the end of the war in Iraq—and returns in March 1992 to a changed nation.
Unlike Gagarin, he is not celebrated or seen as a success. Instead, he is actually the last citizen of the now-defunct Soviet Union, and says naively, “nothing much seems to have changed,” on his return.
Zygar’s decision to end the book at that point (around 1992) is a little disappointing, as so much has happened since then, some of which Zygar himself has written about in other books. Zygar does write an epilogue, covering the rise to power of Putin, but it is a brief one, which does not sit well with the detail of earlier chapters.
The Dark Side of the Earth is a book for those who want to know more about how a nation that was built on an idea flourished and then floundered and was finished, as belief ebbed off.
Zygar signs off with a grim warning about the current rulers in Russia, and indeed all around the world: “And not just in Russia—perhaps such people hold power across the world today. They boldly call tyranny ‘freedom’ and election fraud ‘voting.’ They are convinced that democracy is obsolete. They speak of ‘conservatism,’ ‘traditional values,’ and ‘greatness,’ all the while knowing that the most comfortable stance is to believe in nothing at all.”
“In history, there is no final point—no happy ending, no tragic conclusion. Yesterday’s victors may become tomorrow’s losers. The bright side can one day turn dark, and then, just as suddenly, shift back again.”
We do not think he will be welcomed back in Russia any time soon. But The Dark Side of the Earth is worth reading for all those interested in history and humanity.