[This
entry could not possibly be written without my father going public in Russia
with his firsthand historical reminiscences, published during the first decade
of the new millennium. Needless to say, his main focus has always been Stalin,
and the two of his most important books are titled appropriately: I Remember
Stalin and Conversations About Stalin (co-authored with his
journalistic interviewer Ekaterina Glushik). However, his earliest
published work, in 2003, was a collection of four stories Tales of an
Artillerist, based
on his personal experience in Russia’s Great Patriotic War against Germany.
Ironically, these stories were written by him as early as half-a-century before
their publication, and I read them all back in 1967 in exactly the same form as
they were printed thirty-six years later. (No editing was done for the
publication.) To sum it up, my father was made a member of the Russian Writers’
Organization, and deservedly so. The only question can be asked, why was it
done after so many years, during the last five years of his life, and not
before?…
In
so far as my father’s published writings are concerned, I intend to use the
most interesting parts of them in this and in later sections of this book, and
perhaps a few years down the road I will find the time to direct my effort
toward a good translation of his published works from Russian into English,
with extensive comments on my part. Alas, I have no time to do it right away,
since my work on my own material is still very much in progress, and it is
bound to consume all my time for several years to come.]
Before
I move on with my peculiar version of history, I must first discuss what I call
“my father’s version of history.” It goes without saying that my father
General Artem Fedorovich Sergeev-Artem belongs to a very special club counting
very few people who have the right to their own version of history.
Furthermore, my father’s credentials in this club beat mine hands down. Yet,
between the two of us, my presentation of world history (albeit secondhand)
beats his (albeit firsthand), and even worse, his is virtually
invisible, except for a handful of declarative points, such as to reiterate at
every opportunity that Comrade Stalin was a great man.
My
father was indeed a devoted Stalinist as much as he was a Russian patriot, as
for him, just as for Stalin, the name Stalin was not the name of the
man, but a symbol of Russia’s historical glory. Unfortunately, in terms of his
historical approach, my father was a narrow antiquarian, apparently, with no
interest in monumentals. I, on the other hand, see monumental history as the
highest form of history, and I use the antiquarian’s lens only as a tool of
studying my clay, from which the monumentality arises, up close, like a
sculptor. (See my entry Antiquarian Of
The Monumental, posted on this blog on July 22, 2013.)
Because
of my father’s deliberate choice of narrow antiquarianism, he is extremely
reluctant to generalize or to put things in a broad historical perspective. He
is quite satisfied to deliver his earthshaking history in a small and
unassuming manner. One may find certain merit in his approach (I want to stick to the basic facts of my
immediate experience, and let others generalize as much as they like!), but
I find it objectionable, as the more merit and value your historical material
possesses, the more compunction you must feel toward the prospect of leaving it
to others, rather than yourself, to make their own conclusions and
generalizations, which will almost certainly be incompetent, misconstrued, and
otherwise insidious.
There
is another huge and most regrettable historical deficiency in my
father’s published memoirs: He picks and
chooses material from the warehouse of his memory, quite disingenuously at
that. There are layers upon layers of priceless historical knowledge, which he
is not going to touch at all. For instance, his direct involvement with the
greatest mystery-woman of the twentieth century, La Passionaria, his
mother-in-law, is completely off-limits, which is a terrible loss. Very
disingenuously and, to put it mildly, untruthfully, he claims that he had no
personal contacts with Stalin after the end of WWII, which objectively and
logically cannot be true, as his direct involvement in Stalin’s postwar plan to
install Dolores Ibarruri as the president of Spain, and thus to establish
Soviet control over Spain via her son-in-law, that is, Artem, could not be done
without Stalin’s direct interaction with his adoptive son. Had Artem’s
connection to Ibarruri been revealed by him in his memoirs, any perceptive
reader would have questioned his assertion about his and Stalin’s lack of
personal communication at exactly the time when Stalin’s Spanish Card was being
played out…
(This
is the end of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)
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