The Red Wake explores the Soviet Union’s complex legacies, exposing both the West’s totalitarian narrative and Russia’s increasingly revisionist history. It was the USSR that built the world’s first power-producing nuclear reactor, beginning a period of nuclear idealisation: nuclear technology would revolutionise every industry from medicine to geo-engineering. But when Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 exploded in 1986, no one at the power plant or in the government fully understood the dangers. Firefighters on the scene later died in a secret hospital in Moscow. Soldiers were sent to deal with the fallout by shooting animals, washing buildings and burying topsoil; they were told to drink vodka to protect themselves. Visiting Chernobyl’s most devastated sites, including the reactor itself, author Kurt Johnson weaves the facts of the disaster into his descriptions. His tour guide announces ‘Here is a kindergarten. You must try as hard as you can to follow my steps because some parts have bad radiation.’ From there, Johnson describes a scene typical of a horror movie:

Everything was dead or in ruin, the short fence either side of the path had a graze of moss and had begun to fall over in places, its paint flecking off. In the distance a child’s merry-go-round, once brightly painted, was rusting. We could not go up to it: the radiation was too high. Off the path amongst the leaves was a child’s doll with no arms and only one leg.

Twenty-five years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Johnson journeys through Russia and many of its former satellite states tracing Soviet legacies like Chernobyl, and how these legacies continue to affect people, including his own family. When the Wall came down in Berlin and one by one nations voted themselves out of the USSR, capitalism rushed in to fill the void. But whereas Soviet citizens had been defined by what they produced, Western capitalism connects individual identity to what we consume. As Johnson describes, this new ideology hasn’t been fully embraced:

Time and time again on my journey, I came across disappointment, as if the West had not lived up to its branding. I spoke to people convinced that the West had welched on some vague deal, and they missed a time when the Party had taken care of the details of life, no matter how shoddy the result.

Though politically defunct, the USSR is in no way gone, he argues. When Russia invaded Crimea, the political division of East and West re-emerged, ‘as if the corpse of Soviet history was being exhumed and reanimated’. The Red Wake captures a turbulent point in the post-Soviet world, caught between East versus West narratives. While the Western tendency is to overlook Soviet successes (for example, the Soviet contribution to the Axis defeat in World War II), in Russia there is a movement to rebrand Soviet crimes as ‘mistakes’. The risk of praising Stalin for his wartime management strategies is that these ‘mistakes’ – the repression, the dictatorship, the gulags – will be repeated, as some interviewees point out to Johnson. The legacy of the gulags may be forgotten more quickly now that the last of them is gone. Johnson managed to visit the only preserved gulag, Perm-36, before it was repurposed to showcase the region’s timber contribution to the WWII victory. On his visit to Perm-36, Johnson describes the system of forced labour camps ‘digesting’ ‘millions and millions of ordinary citizens’. He writes:

On a scale that still seems unreal, the spirit of the country was ground into harmless feed for industrialisation. It was a cataclysm every bit as terrible as the Nazi Holocaust and one the Russian soul has never fully recovered from. Perhaps this was because the country had little opportunity to mourn the loss.

There’s a touch of voyeurism in reading about the Soviet state terror and the men who created and propelled it. General Andropov, for instance, had anyone who rejected socialism committed to an insane asylum, and ‘Iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky ran the first Soviet terror apparatus (Dzerzhinsky may have once ordered the execution of 1500 prisoners in a single night because of a miscommunication with Lenin). Yet these details offer a valuable reminder of what individuals and societies are capable of – and they’re especially important to record and share given the current threat of their being glossed over. Some people today, especially those in Russian intelligence, remember Andropov as a hero. Johnson contrasts the East–West tensions in places like Latvia (where pro-Western attitudes are still seen as part of an anti-Russian conspiracy) with the spirit of cooperation aboard the International Space Station. In Kazakhstan, he manages to covertly witness a space shuttle launch that sends an American, a Russian, and a Japanese astronaut to the ISS. He traces issues of identity and nationality in the unrecognised independent territories of Pridnestrovie, an eastern slice of Moldova that aligns with Russia, and in Nagorno-Karabakh, an area of western Azerbaijan populated by Armenians. His investigations often require cautious framing when crossing borders and speaking to locals. Even so, he raises the suspicions of the KGB in Belarus (where the national intelligence agency has kept its Soviet name). The Soviet legacy isn’t only ethnic strife, state-sponsored terror and nuclear disaster – though there is a lot of each: on a tour called ‘Nightmares of the USSR’, Johnson compares Chernobyl to the Polygon in Kazakhstan, the testing site for 40 years’ worth of nuclear weapons; and he only makes passing mention of the Holodomor, Stalin’s forced starvation of as many as seven million people in Ukraine. Alongside questions such as ‘How can we use nuclear bombs to geo-engineer lakes?’ the USSR also asked ‘How do we construct Utopia through art?’ Soviet artists founded constructivism, a style that derived art from mathematics and rejected its function as beautification for the rich. Art was reduced to geometry, which led to an entire Soviet aesthetic. This aesthetic was absorbed into Western advertising. The reduction of images to basic geometric shapes is often the basis for logos, for example, a surprising legacy of Soviet thinking. Ikea furniture design is another application of Soviet design, as Johnson demonstrates when he juxtaposes Soviet modernist art galleries with Swedish furniture showrooms. In considering art and other less blood-soaked legacies, Johnson highlights the complexities of the Soviet mark on the world. He also shares his sympathies for some of the rationales of communism. Under Soviet occupation, his great-grandfather’s spacious summer house in the former Czechoslovakia was converted into a school. While his family still feels indignation, Johnson’s perspective is more nuanced:

The destruction of an historical edifice was a crime, but a crime against heritage. I searched my soul and still felt it was obscene for a massive building to be occupied by a single family (as a summer home, no less) … Ugly as the [refurbished] interior of this building was, and as questionable its means of appropriation, I had a difficult time taking issue with the intention behind it: education of the young.

The Red Wake blends travel and history in Johnson’s own journalistic style. His careful balance gives readers enough context to appreciate the significance of the sites and cities he visits, and enables him to create a portrait of the both the historic USSR and its long shadow. Johnson uses descriptive, inventive language (he compares one building to a ‘giant, repressive cake’) to take readers to places that are more challenging or radioactive than the average traveller might be inclined to visit. In the process he provides a fascinating account of the unsettled fallout of the Soviet social and political experiment. Kurt Johnson The Red Wake: A hybrid of travel, history and journalism Vintage 2016 PB 340pp $34.99 Ashley Kalagian Blunt has written for Griffith Review, McSweeney’s and Right Now. She teaches writing and public speaking, performs stand-up and has written two memoirs. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter: @AKalagianBlunt. You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here. To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.  

Tags: Chernobyl, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Kurt| Johnson, Soviet Union