A glimpse of terror

Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History

WHEN Rachel Polonsky moved from Britain to Moscow, little did she expect that she would soon be leafing through the personal library of one of Soviet Russia’s most ruthless characters. Even less did she expect this to set her on a peculiar journey across the country to visit the Russia evident from those books.

Moving in the 1990s with her family, she planned to write a monograph on orientalism. That never came to fruition, but Molotov’s Magic Lantern emerged in its stead, born of the fortune to move into the building once home to the Soviet elite and the apartment beneath Vyacheslav Molotov’s, which still contains many of his possessions.

One is a magic lantern, an early image projector. Polonksy uses Molotov’s books and their contents as an extension of the projector. Molotov’s magic lantern contains images of a long-lost Russia; her book works to uncover more images of a Russia similarly lost.

It is not a biography of Molotov, Stalin’s ruthless foreign minister who signed the agreements with Nazi Germany in 1939 and the Allies in 1942. It is not history. It is not journalism.

It is, in Polonksy’s words, her “wanderings among the muddle of past time that books and places make”.

It is essentially a travelogue based around chasing up leads and trails found and obscured in dusty old books.

There are beautiful descriptions of the frozen north and accounts of her visits to small oddities and barely known sites, such as the Museum of the Diplomatic Corps in Vologda, the pet project of an obsessive old academic.

Polonsky, who has made an extensive study of Russian literature, draws on the entire Russian oeuvre to punctuate and colour her narrative of her travels across the vast country. Unfortunately, this proves to be something of a distraction.

She writes beautifully and every selection is perfectly weighted, but the deluge of names and colourful quotations can be a barrier at times and the book is not in a strict chronological order.

Polonksy, an academic at Cambridge, describes one late academic’s books and papers as the “ruins of a private civilisation”.

While this is not an exploration of the “ruins” of Molotov’s own civilisation, it is a glimpse beneath the surface of a Russia that might otherwise remain private.

* Extras: Molotov’s speech to the Soviets after signing the pact with the Nazis: http://tinyurl.com/3kmuqpj