Less than five years before the start of the Irish Civil War, the fratricidal terror that followed Russia’s October 1917 revolution reached the Cossack hometown of 12-year-old Nikolai Borodin, who soon witnessed or heard about neighbours, teachers, schoolmates and a local priest being shot dead or fatally slashed depending on whether they were Red revolutionaries or White Tsarists.
In the mass famine that followed during the freezing winter of 1921-1922 people died “like autumn flies”, Borodin recalls in this searing memoir. “If it had been possible they would have eaten the lice that crowded over them, but the lice were stronger and ate the people, infecting them with typhus. Death reached the exhausted at work, at home, in the streets, doorways, platforms of railway stations and public lavatories,” he writes.
The teenage Borodin was “swollen with hunger”. Money lost its value. People were murdered “for a piece of bread” and “there were too far many corpses about for anyone to take any notice”.
The Communist Party became “the only power and spirit existing in the country”. Rudimentary secondary education in bomb-damaged schools led to university where social origin trumped brainpower. Qualifying as a microbiologist, Borodin knew that working with a virus could be fatal. He dealt with the Political Police as he would with pathogenic bacteria.
He avoided infection or liquidation while friends, colleagues and bosses were killed or imprisoned under Stalin’s purges. “There was almost no Party or Government Body in the whole country where the chiefs and their associates did not fall like grass under the sharp sickle of the great purge, which intended to leave no people in power who would in any way oppose the Great Leader,” he writes.
Leadership in the Red Army after Germany invaded Ukraine and Russia in 1941 earned him the highest military and civilian order in the Soviet Union, but disillusionment over ongoing purges under Stalin led him to commit high treason, renouncing Soviet citizenship during a state-sponsored assignment in London in 1948.
His lucid and harrowing memoir was published in 1955 in London, but this first reissue is slightly flawed by the absence of an afterword on his post-defection life and reflections.
