Moscow, 1937 by Karl Schlögel (review)

Moscow, 1937 needs the Internet. Its scope and depth reflect astounding, fascinating scholarship, but it is likely beyond the imaginative and conceptual grasp of the average reader without additional images. The book attempts to re-create, in both form and milieu, the Russian capital in that year. It is an extended attempt at what Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” although Schlögel refers to it as “a chronograph.”

Whatever the rubric, Moscow, 1937 cries out for hyperlinks; no book publisher could possibly provide the number or variety of photographs and maps and illustrations Schlogel’s work demands. Without them, readers who are familiar with modern Moscow have some slight chance of re-imagining the city as Schlögel describes it — or as it really was in 1937; those who have never been there will be hard-pressed to picture it.

For more than 550 pages of text about events that took place in a city during more than a year, there are three maps and a two-page aerial view of the city in 1937. One map, in a short section subtitled “Moscow as a City on the Enemy Map,” is about one-fourth the width of the page and accompanied by a lot of very small print. A second is a geological map of the Soviet Union. The third, which appears inside the front and back covers, shows the entirety of the city with dots representing forty locations.

Schlögel opens the text, moreover, with a long, interpretive re-capitulation of the midnight flight of Margarita from the iconic novel of Stalinist Moscow by Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. It is clearly intended to orient the reader to the form, tempo, and temper of the city, but those who haven’t read Bulgakov’s work recently or closely likely will find themselves lost in allegory and allusion. There is no map.

He then proceeds to narrate thirty-seven other events of the year relating to Moscow. Some of these will be known to casual students of Soviet history: the role of the USSR in the Spanish Civil War; the story of the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris; or the opening of the Moscow-Volga Canal. Others are more general pictures of everyday life and culture: Moscow as a construction site; Moscow as a shop window; a day in a Moscow factory; a day in a Moscow park. Not a few are esoteric.

Schlögel goes to great lengths to provide context, and his breadth and erudition are simply incredible. The detail is vivid, and the stories he tells are often compelling. But they cry out for images, of which there are only about forty in the whole book, and none in colour. This is, of course, a common shortcoming of books; however, Schlögel works so hard, and comes so far in making Moscow, 1937 come alive, it seems a pity that only those who already know the city intimately can really see it.