bob <thanatos@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >I didn't tell Borodin's stories exactly right. He went to georgia but
> >it might have been the transcaucasus where the bureaucrats ratted on
> >each other. Etc.
>
> Long answer to a simple question but it was interesting. Borodin. I'll
> look into him.
The book is for sale various places online, used. I found one link that
quotes something from it.
http://books.google.com/books?id=d5b689wW7qwC&pg=PA125&lpg=PA125&dq=borodin+%22one+man+in+his+time%22&source=web&ots=5wFQaM_skS&sig=ynLRfTgOEr4s-WHIpFqbD-7o1Is&hl=en
When I think about it, some of his stories seem kind of grotesque but
when I was reading the book it all followed naturally from the
situation. Like, right after the war he traveled through Stalingrad and
visited friends who lived there. The three of them were lying in their
sleeping bags in their basement home and the husband told him a story
about how his wife worked in the hospital and brought meat home. She
said it was rat but it was kind of squishy and watery, nothing like rat.
And she still got it sometimes after rat was rare and completely
unaffordable. Those occasional packages probably made the difference
that kept them from starving. And later he finally found out what it
was. It was placentas! Even in the worst of times there were women going
into labor and the medical staff divided up the placentas....
Borodin had a friend in the secret police, and as a special favor his
friend let him read his own file. It was a thick file that described a
lot of his life. There was one very damaging incident in it that no one
could have known about except a Red Army officer that Borodin had
thought of as a father. During the purges his friend fell under
suspicion himself and was arrested. They let Borodin visit him in his
cell. The man was sitting in his cell going over dossiers, deciding who
should be arrested, even though he had been arrested himself. He was
trying to do a particularly good job because he believed his results
would be carefully checked and would stand in his favor. As the man's
optimism dwindled he begged Borodin to give him a poison pill. Borodin
thought that was dangerous, he could get in a lot of trouble if he was
suspected of helping a known wrecker and saboteur kill himself. But he
owed the man who wasn't ready to kill himself yet anyway. So Borodin
gave him a capsule full of baking soda and never went to visit him
again.
Borodin seems in some ways less than honorable, but he's very good at
describing the interactions that led to the results he saw -- the
starving times, the anarchy, the ruthless suppression, the purges, the
war, etc. It didn't take secret cabals making things happen, just people
trying to do their jobs in difficult times. Just trying to get by. At
the end he described the british socialists he met -- people eager for a
better world -- and they reminded him precisely of the ones he'd known
in the early days after the Revolution. Decent sincere people who had
all died in the purges or before. He described that in terms of
ecological succession and it was obvious that he had the concepts! Of
course he understood succession, being an oldstyle microbiologist, and
he'd applied it to society just as I had. And whatever concepts of honor
or altruism or civic responsibility you might want to blame him with
simply don't apply. He was a product of his times, and he was the sort
of person who could survive those times and re****t about them.
On the other hand he could have been a wonderfully literate piece of
fiction created by, say, MI7. His stories could be partly rumors that
were spreading at the time and partly made up from scratch. I don't know
how to tell. The claim is that after he defected he changed his name.
He'd be at least 95 now, if he was alive. The russian records might have
his name but I don't know how to check them online. But if he's a
forgery he's a particularly thoughtful one. (I could say the same thing
about Ken Ling and _The Revenge of Heaven_. This is the pseudonymous
account of a chinese Red Guard who later defected. It's known to have
been edited by a Nationalist intelligence service. But it's still widely
quoted as a primary source, and eyewitness account, and usually left
completely unquestioned. But as a literary work it's far far better than
I would expect from any bureaucracy.)
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