There are no “wild imaginations”. The imagination has much more severe limits than it seems. Physicist Richard Feynman said that it is much more valuable to imagine what exists than to imagine what does not exist. The scientific method allows us to imagine what is measurable and concrete with enough precision, but beyond these certainties, which however never clear the gloom of the indeterminate, before the imagination lies a great darkness that is that of the extremes of human nature. and the limits of our ability to understand. The history buff accepts that there are facts of the past that can be known in a reasonable way, and others about which we will never have enough information, and also many others about which no documentary or material trace has been left. But even what we take for granted, what happened not too long ago, reveals itself full of uncertainties and blank spaces when we want to look at it in some detail: then we are overwhelmed by the breadth of everything we were ignorant of, and our love of knowledge history is strengthened, at the same time that we appreciate its limitations.
Opinions are cheap and easy, they appear with false brilliance in the flash of an idea. The facts, the data, the details require an arduous search full of patience, trained in the discipline of investigation. The historian composes the design of a puzzle, the insufficient tesserae of a mosaic on which others have already worked before him, and which his successors will undoubtedly continue to complete, and sometimes correct, because it is a task that never ends. For the historian, the imagination, anchored in the facts, is a working instrument, because it allows him to establish well-founded hypotheses about the complete form of a temporary landscape that is always fragmentary; and also because an effort of the imagination is needed to try to understand the lives that inhabit the historical account, to tentatively put oneself in the place of those who were the protagonists or suffered or witnessed the events. But there will always be a point beyond which neither knowledge nor imagination can venture; and there will even be some usurpation in the security with which someone who has not experienced certain extreme things tries to relive them, or pretend to feel them, that he fully understands them.
Novels, memoirs, documentaries, fiction films make possible a familiarity that has often had more of mythology than knowledge
A buff to the history of the 20th century tends to assume that he reasonably knows the times of the Russian Revolution of 1917, of the civil war, of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power. Novels, memoirs, documentaries, fiction films make possible a familiarity that many times has had more of mythology than knowledge. In the university film clubs of our youth we saw poor copies of The battleship Potemkin and of October, and Eisenstein’s visual splendor enveloped us in gales of epic fervor and the colossal misunderstanding that the Bolsheviks led by Lenin had brought down the tsarist autocracy. Now I read with a kind of grim obstinacy Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921, Antony Beevor’s latest book, and I realize that I actually knew much less than I imagined, partly due to a simple lack of information, but above all because the scale of the horror that befell the country in those years is so exorbitant that there is no imagination that can encompass it, no reason that can understand it. Beevor estimates that between 6 and 10 million human beings died a violent death in those four years, leaving aside the innumerable deaths from famine and epidemics that swept over the ancient Russian empire like a medieval plague apocalypse. The ideological orthodoxy in which many of us were educated for a certain time dictated that the revolution led by Lenin became oppressive and criminal during the years of Stalin’s purges, who would have perverted with his personal tyranny a noble project of emancipation and justice. Social. But Lenin, as Beevor recalls, had a cold genocidal determination since taking power that took immediate form in the creation of the Cheka, a political police dedicated to the planned practice of terror, torture and the physical elimination of anyone who be designated as an enemy, adversary, simple suspect. An eminent Spanish historian, José María Faraldo, has investigated first-hand the terrible history of the Cheka and its successive derivatives in the Soviet Union and in the countries of the communist bloc.
But in Beevor’s book, as in Faraldo’s, there are moments when the reader becomes aware of the collision of the historian’s conscience with that zone of blackness in which knowledge is no longer enough and imagination is paralyzed. It happens to Beevor when he recounts the extremes of cruelty to which members of the Bolshevik political police and red and white combatants alike reached on the battlefields and in the rearguards of the civil war. “Europe has not seen such ostentatious cruelty, used as a weapon of terror, since the wars of religion,” says Beevor. But then he only has questions: “Where did the extremes of sadism come from: hacking to pieces with a saber, cutting with knives, burning and boiling, scalping live, nailing uniform epaulettes to shoulders, gouging out eyes , soak the victims in winter so that they freeze to death, castrate, eviscerate, amputate…? Had the rhetoric of political hatred intensified to an unprecedented extreme the fury of revenge?
In Pasternak, in Marina Tsvetaeva, in Isaac Babel, in Iván Bunin we have been able to glimpse, always from afar, something of the horror of that time, of the sudden collapse of everything, of the arrival of famine and epidemics, of the irruption of a political system willing to immolate millions in human lives in the name of a millenarian utopia of universal emancipation. In their offices in the Kremlin, in the midst of the chaos of the civil war, Lenin and Trotsky looked at maps of Europe and expected that at any moment other Soviet revolutions would break out in Budapest, in Berlin, in Paris, in Warsaw. In this atmosphere of criminality and delirium, the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, drunk at the end of the year party in 1918, offered his pistol to Lenin and Kamenev and asked them to kill him, shouting: “I have shed so much blood that I no longer have the right to continue living.”
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