Surviving the Purges: Review of "Dark Star"

Dark Star by Alan Furst

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am beginning to become a serious fan of Furst's work. Dark Star is definitely a darker work than the last Furst I read The Polish Officer, and that really is saying something. I'm really not sure how accurately Furst portrays the thinking of a Soviet citizen living through Stalin's purges, but it is certainly believable. Furst proposes several theories for the purges as his main character, Andre Szara, tries to navigate the pitfalls of pre-war Europe. I wish I could measure the believability of these theories that Furst puts in the mouths of his characters. Unfortunately, when I tried to read the the seminal history of the Purges, Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, I just couldn't drag myself through it.

The most interesting contrast in the book was between the terror regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. In both countries, a knock on the door in the middle of the night usually meant a visit from the secret police and the disappearance of at least one family member, usually forever. However, in Germany, you had a pretty good idea of why you being arrested and on whose authority that arrest was happening. In Russia, the Terror was much less predictable. The state apparatus turned on minorities, dissidents, rivals, and even itself. Sometimes it seems clear that Stalin was targeting those he felt were a threat to him; at other times he seemed to be terrorizing the whole country into submission. Furst surmises that some portions of the purge were factional infighting within the government, with no clear hand from above.

All of this is buffered in the book by having Szara, spend most of his time in Paris, Berlin, or Poland, working as a semi-reluctant spy-master for the NKVD under the cover of his previous life as a journalist from Pravda. This plethora of settings hurts the pacing a bit. Dark Star is over twice as long as The Polish Officer, and it certainly felt it. Still, this novel felt a bit more solid than the very impressionistic and almost ethereal detachment of The Polish Officer. View all my reviews >>

A Japanese POW's Pictoral Diary

A friend alerted me to this little treasure trove. It is very well presented collection of drawings made by a Japanese Air Corps soldier during his time as a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union at the end of WWII.

It amazed me how positive this artist seemed to remain throughout the time he spent in Russia. The drawings feel more like those of the American Bill Mauldin than a soldier from a defeated empire.

One Dead in Fight Over Bronze Soldier

If you thought the controversy over the WWII Memorial in D.C. got heated, be glad you don't live in Tallinn, Estonia.

Estonian officials are trying to move a Soviet-built WWII memorial and military grave complex out of the center of their capital city. Estonian nationalists say that 'Bronze Soldier' is a reminder of the Soviet conquest and occupation of the Baltic States in 1940 (and again in 1944). As in many parts of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, partisans stayed in the wild to battle the Red Army after harassing the Nazis for years. Ethnic Russians in Estonia feel that the memorial simply honors the soldiers who died to defeat Nazi Germany.

Excavations have begun to move the memorial and at least one man is dead in the subsequent protests and riots. The Russia's upper house of Parliament is calling for a break in diplomatic relations with Estonia. Even with the threats and the violence, it looks like the Bronze Soldier can expect to find a new home in a military cemetery outside the city.