Ice Road
By Gillian Slovo
Little, Brown, 2004
544 pages, $29.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/30779
On the first day of December, 1934, Leonid Nikolayev brought the crisis of the Russian Revolution to a head. Nikolayev, an idealistic communist disillusioned with the betrayal of the revolution, assassinated Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party head.
Stalin had authorised the assassination as an opportunity to remove a popular rival and as a pretext to unleash a wave of arrests, deportations, show trials and executions against his opponents, culminating in the "Great Terror" of 1936-38, which completed Stalin's physical and political liquidation of the entire revolutionary generation of the 1917 revolution.
In Ice Road, novelist Gillian Slovo enters the mind of Nikolayev, once employed in the Institute of Party History but, unemployed after an ideological fall from grace, writes unheeded letters to Kirov and Stalin about their "theft" of the revolution. This makes him known to Stalin's secret police, who then literally put a gun in Nikolayev's hand and make him their pawn in Kirov's death and the consolidation of Stalin's power.
Suspicion and fear rule the land of Slovo's novel, with a vast, concocted, hysterical Stalinist conspiracy of the "degenerate, parasitic, White Guard, double-dealing, left extremist, right opposition, Trotskyite-Zinovievite foreign spies" wide enough to trap the careful and the unwary alike. Stalin's terror threatens all of Slovo's characters. Nikolai Kozlov, a model worker, falls foul of a denunciation by the jealous and sinister party functionary Dmitry Fedorovich, who sees a chance to steal Kozlov's lover, Natasha.
Natasha's father Boris Alexandrovich, a revolutionary from 1917 and now adjusting uncomfortably to the precarious upper-middle ranks of Stalin's bureaucratic machine, tries to help but backs off. "How did it come to this?", he reflects on the fear that prevents a Bolshevik from speaking freely within his own party. "How had he come to this", he reflects further on his own complicity in the purges through silence.
Alexandrovich's old comrade, Anton Antonovich Abramov, also asks the same questions. Abramov, an historian, remembers "how we used to boast that ours would be the generation to change history", but now, rather than making history he is reduced to faking it, to rewriting the past in accordance with the latest bureaucratic edict. This is an enterprise frought with danger, even (or especially) in his seemingly remote field of 15th century Georgian history, because no Soviet historian can predict what Stalin, a Georgian, would read into the historian's words about past Georgian rulers.
As well as Stalin, there is the Russian winter and Hitler to contend with. Natasha seeks a risky reprieve from her stultifying marriage to the architect of her husband's demise, Dmitry, by flirting with an American businessman. Ill and starving, she then flirts with death in an icy World War II winter in Leningrad, trapped, at the mercy of Hitler's military machine, in the 900-day siege that killed a million residents.
Throughout the novel, the pragmatic but wise Irina Arbatova (Slovo's commentator), plucked from obscurity as an illiterate cleaner to become an educated citizen on an ill-fated ice-breaker on a scientific expedition to the Arctic, reflects on the one question that subsumes all others — the question of survival. "We are a people of lowered heads. Eyes that turn away. Lips that tighten. Ears that close", she muses, even as she defies her own observation in small acts of humanity, and as defence against Hitler generates a forgotten courage.
Ice Road is an ambitious novel — aiming to explore the practical, political and philosophical lives of individuals in a tragically momentous period of history — but its ambition is ably matched by Slovo's artistic skill, imaginative power and scholarly veracity. Stylistically risky (she tells her story in the relentlessly energetic present tense for more than 500 pages), the result, in Slovo's hands, is a successful heightening of the immediacy and drama of her story.
Some of the subplots are left undeveloped, however, and there are some unconvincing characters whose literary purpose is not clear. Overall, however, Ice Road is a splendid achievement, a page-turner with class, from a writer who has felt the tragedy of politics (her mother, Ruth First, was assassinated by a letter bomb sent by the apartheid "security" services in South Africa).
"Times of happiness are history's empty pages", says Anton Antonovich in Ice Road, quoting the German philosopher Hegel. There is much grim history and not a lot of happiness in the Russia of the 1930s and 1940s, and Slovo's novel celebrates endurance over idealism. But she shows that even by enduring, the human spirit displays its strength against tyrants and their bureaucratic and military machines.