Between Shades of Grey by Ruta Sepetys

Between Shades of Grey is the story of a Lithuanian family that is deported to Siberia by the Soviets right before World War II as part of Stalin's efforts to "purge" the USSR of anti-Soviet elements.  It's also right up my alley.

I've always been fascinated by Russia, and a little creeped out by it as well.  It's so big, it's so cold, and it seems to be almost, but not quite, completely lawless.  Basically, you get to be in charge in Russia by having the correct combination of intelligence and ruthlessness.  No other country can make acronyms so scary; simple groupings of letters like KGB and USSR conjure up images of a shadowy foreign menace that is completely willing to drag you out of your bed and shoot you in the street if you happen to be guilty of a capital offense like, say, being the wrong kind of artist.

I first had the seed planted in my mind that Russia was scary when I heard the story of how my dad was in college and he won some kind of scholarship to travel to what was then East Germany, which was then still under the control of the USSR.  My Great Aunt Inge, who is German, was vehemently against him going because of the Russians.  Inge's father was in the German army during WWII, and she was a little girl when the Red Army came roaring into her country.  According to the family story, which I've never heard firsthand, Inge and her family were captured by the Russians, but there was a Russian officer who took an interest in Inge and wanted to marry her.  Inge said she would, but that she must be allowed to briefly return to her home to gather her things, and her mother must be allowed to accompany her.  The officer agreed, and Inge and her mother were able to somehow escape custody and eventually, in a way that's never been made clear to me, marry an American soldier, escape to the United States, divorce that American, and marry my grandmother's brother.  I'm sure there are details to that story that Inge hasn't told.  The upshot is that she insists to this day that Russians cannot be trusted.

This was reiterated to me by several of my Finnish friends.  I had one friend whose grandfather fought in World War II, and her lips would visibly curl when she heard Russian spoken in the street.  At the end of that war Russia had captured something like 10% of Finland's national territory, its second-largest city, AND forced them to pay reparations (which they were the only country to actually finish doing, by the way).  Think about it:  this would be like if Canada had annexed Illinois, including Chicago, then made us literally pay for it, and this had happened within living memory.  Finns seemed to see Russia as an enormous slumbering predator that could at any point awaken and menace them again.  They won their independence from Russia not even 100 years ago, after all, and have already had to fight them off once, with only limited success.

I had the awesome opportunity to visit St. Petersburg during my time in Helsinki.  Mostly my memory of that trip consists of competing with a large, mostly drunk crowd trying to get through customs at like 9 a.m., the occasional but very vivid smell of sewage as we walked around the city, visiting The Hermitage (which is mind-blowing), and screwing up the check-in process trying to get on the boat home.  The final item on that list triggered a brief but very intense panic while standing on the gangplank at the thought of somehow, someway, winding up in a Russian prison.

Such is my impression of Russia.  An ancient, huge gangster state that is fascinating to read about and mildly terrifying to visit.  Between Shades of Grey is an excellent entry point to the history of that time and place.  The writing was vivid and I found the characters interesting.  The story itself flashes back occasionally to show the protagonists before they were deported, which I thought was a great storytelling device.  The plot moves forward, but the author also takes time to develop the characters, which makes the hardships they endure more meaningful for the audience by making us more familiar with what exactly they had to give up.  When you simply describe the conditions of Russian prison camps, it's so unthinkable that it seems almost unreal.  To contrast it with the characters' previous lives makes it somehow more tangible (and also more horrifying).

My one quibble with the book, which I listened to on CD, is with the narrator.  For some reason, the producers selected a Broadway actress to read this book, so everything is over-enunciated and exaggerated in the style typical of (my opinion) overacted Broadway musicals.  Every "t" was a hard stop.  "Asked" almost sounded like it had three syllables.  Note to Broadway actors and actresses:  THIS IS NOT HOW PEOPLE TALK.  I understand that you are acting for the folks in the back row but recorded first-person narration does not require you to talk this way.  Also, please stop turning emotions into their caricatures.  But this is not the fault of the book, these are personal issues between myself and the theater.

My list of readalongs for Between Shades of Grey could probably go on for miles.  I love reading about Russia.  I'll try to keep it manageable though.

When I was in high school I happened to pick up a book called The First Circle by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.  It's a semi-autobiographical novel about Solzhenitsyn's time in the Soviet prison camps, and life during that time in Russia in general.  It's an amazing book, definitely one of my Top Five, and helped cement my mental image of Russia as a thoroughly interesting, quasi-terrifying place.  Solzhenitsyn made the mistake of criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend and was rewarded with a sentence of eight years of hard labor, after which he was exiled to Kazakhstan.  You could also start with the much shorter A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which won Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize.

For non-fiction, I recommend the highly readable Gulag by Anne Applebaum if you want to become familiar with life in the Soviet prison camps.  It's an exhaustively researched (but not dry) account that is seriously eye-opening.  It manages to convey the scope of the tragedy (which is really the only appropriate word for it) of Stalin's reign while also providing enough anecdotes that you get a feel for how it affected people at the ground level.

If you're interested in modern Siberia, I would point you toward Ian Frazer's Travels in Siberia.  It's a mix of his own personal travel narratives, along with some history and a little bit of current events.  It's funny, sharp, and educational (my personal favorite combination in a book, a la Bill Bryson or David Quammen).

For general history, I just finished Martin Sixsmith's Russia and it does an excellent job of explaining how Russia got to be the way it is, which is a fascinating story in itself (hint: the Mongols).  If you're interested in Josef Stalin, and want to know how any one person could go from robbing banks to running an entire country, I recommend Young Stalin  and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

I could go on, but I suspect I would begin to shed readers.  Go forth and discover.