EYES WIDE SHUT.

Night of Stone
Death and Memory in
Twentieth-Century Russia
Catherine Merridale
Viking Books, $29.95, 402 pp.

When my mother, a psychoanalyst, visited Russia three years ago, her university hosts were eager to explain the Russian mind. One woman, during a dinner gathering, thought a typical Russian joke would be a good way to begin. "Life is very, very difficult," the joke-teller said. She paused, took a dramatic breath, readying her audience for the punch line. "Fortunately, it is very, very short!"

The assembled Russians exploded into laughter. Or perhaps more accurately, the assembled Russians grunted their appreciation, threw back shots of vodka, and poured themselves another round.

Death is no joke in Russia, so much so that it has become a joke. As the Western media have reported, Russians are dying at alarming rates. Russia's population plummeted from 148.1 to 146 million during the 1990s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which also forecasts that the decline will accelerate, leaving the population at 118.2 million by 2050. The average life expectancy for a Russian man, says the World Health Organization, is fifty-six years. Deaths now outpace births by a ratio of about 1.5 to 1.

It is no exaggeration to say that in Russia today, death is more prevalent than life. For Western observers, especially those who believed that an infusion of capitalist democracy always makes the least off better off, and that the postCommunist era would usher in new prosperities, these statistics are troubling at best. But Russia's human decline also raises bigger political questions.

In Night of Stone, historian Catherine Merridale sets out to document the veritable parade of disaster that visited Russia and its neighboring republics during the twentieth century. A steady stream of blood it is, from the familiar goriness of the Stalinist purges and the Nazi siege of Leningrad to the little-known tragedies of dekulakization, in which the Communist Party killed or dispossessed countless undesirables in the name of collectivization, and the great famine of 1931-32, in which between 5 and 7 million people starved to death. That's not to mention the two other major famines, 1921-22 and 1946-47, and the shorter-lived but still fatal "hungers" of 1917, 1919, and 1924. That's not to mention World War I, which took between 1.6 and 2 million Russian lives. That's not to mention the postrevolutionary Red Terror, when the Bolsheviks began to execute, in what would become a perverse national tradition, their real and imagined enemies. And that's not to mention the brutality of the revolutions themselves, beginning with 1905's Bloody Sunday.

On these terms alone, Merridale's history is numbing--numbing because it is so bleak, but also because it's a secret history. The Soviets never told these tales themselves, at least not publicly. Though perestroika, glasnost, and later the dissolution of the USSR now make it possible to discuss such topics, Russians tend to keep quiet. The accounts of these tragedies have come in the form of individual autobiography. Certainly, Merridale is the first to lay out the damage in all its gruesome scope and impact. Her research leads to the only conclusion it can: Although it is impossible to number the dead, the dead somehow still exist in the land of the living.

So Merridale turns to the living to ask the hard questions. How have the Russians come to understand their last brutal century? How have they, to use a decidedly Western term, coped? What does it do to a person, and what does it do to a society, when the national pastime is waiting for the next bad thing to happen?

In interviews with witnesses and survivors, Merridale finds that the answers aren't easy to come by. Russians have made a habit of dissociating, of speaking in fragments and tangents, of interjecting, "Don't you want another cup of tea?" into difficult moments. Merridale tries to set up group interviews to make for better conversational flow, only to find that Russians don't do dialogue.

It is only when Merridale remembers the words of Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of poet-turned-prisoner-turned-casualty Osip Mandelstam, that she begins to break through. "In our sort of life people had to shut their eyes to their surroundings," Mandelstam wrote in her chilling memoir Hope against Hope. "To shut your eyes like this is not easy and requires a great effort." During the Soviet era, there was always a reason to be silent. There was always a reason not to talk.

The dead cannot speak. In Russia, often, neither can the living. Merridale learns to listen not to her interviewees' words, but to the spaces between their words. Within those silences, she unearths the bodies.

In the officially atheist, consciously mortal Soviet world, the dictate of eternality was: "The only thing we can call immortal is our labor." What does that mean for the Soviet experiment and for the former Soviets, then, when after seventy years of work that labor turns out not to mean anything? If that work was all a mistake, what did they do it for? And what is worth doing now?

Memory, for the Russians, can be a kind of nightmare. The urge always to look, like the diligent and eager workers in a Soviet propaganda poster, toward a utopian future--a future in which there is no past--might be the strongest legacy of a culture of death. But silence, Merridale tells us, has its own violence.

Susan McWilliams is a graduate student in political philosophy at Princeton.