The Shoemaker and His Daughter

Title: The Shoemaker and His Daughter – One Ordinary Family’s Remarkable Journey from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia
Author: Conor O’Clery
Publisher: Doubleday Ireland, 2018 (First)
ISBN: 9781781620434
Pages: 357

The socialist empire in the Soviet Union threatened capitalism in the post-World War II period when even the US apprehended that the communists might take over most of the globe. But the concern was a bit premature. Margaret Thatcher once famously said, "the problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of other people's money". It did exactly that in the Soviet Union. Decades of mismanagement and ridiculous economic logic shattered the economy whose coup de grace came in the form of the oil price slump in the early 1980s. Three general secretaries died in quick succession in 3 years and a reformer named Mikhail Gorbachev took the chair. His structural changes got out of hand and ended up in the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991. It took hardly 6 years to dismantle the communist regimes in eastern Europe. This book follows the life story of a master shoe-designer-cum-maker who weathered the storms of living in a strictly controlled society and still flourished. His daughter studied hard and earned high academic credentials. Incidentally, she is the author's wife and he tells the story of his in-laws in this book which is actually a mirror to the scourge of communism in the Soviet Union and proves that the communist system was founded on lies and monstrous crimes. Conor O'Clery is an Irish journalist and writer. He worked for the Irish Times for 30 years and represented them in many countries including the Soviet Union where he met his wife. He has authored many books.

Stanislav Suvorov was a shoemaker who led a prosperous life in Grozny, Chechnya by making bespoke shoes which were highly prized. He was sent to prison for a charge that was a crime only in a communist polity. The prison term had a devastating effect on the family’s prestige. It migrated to Krasnoyarsk, Siberia to start a new life where too Stanislav led a good life. His wife Marietta hailed from Nagorno-Karabakh which was beset with ethnic tensions between Armenians — to which our family belonged — and neighbouring Azeris. His daughter Zhanna studied diligently and conformed to the norms of a socialist society. She joined the communist party’s youth wing and eventually joined the party itself. She represented a district in the legislative body of Krasnoyarsk. But she still harboured resentment about how her father suffered at the hands of communist officialdom. She married a friend, but gradually drifted apart from him. During her absence from home for her PhD program at Moscow, her husband gets killed in a drunken brawl over an illicit relationship. She meets O’Clery in Moscow as a Russian tutor and the relationship grew. O’Clery was a divorcee with five children but they marry and he adopts her daughter. This occurred during the critical time of USSR’s disintegration. The author and Zhanna relocated to other countries following his transfers to various places and they used to visit her parents occasionally. On the rich tapestry of the family’s story, the author carefully crafts the history of the Soviet Union and how the system affected the life of the family in unexpected ways.

Readers wonder at how inefficient the Soviet system was managed according to the politico-economic theories of communism. With private enterprise curtailed, shops relied on deliveries from central warehouses that were far distant. Provisions were snapped up as soon as they appeared, so it was advantageous to be at the head of the queue or be friendly enough with the manager to buy goods at the back door. A party membership usually helped in such situations. Usually, articles were rare and queues very long that people joined a queue and only later asked what it was for! Scarcity moulded the Soviet people in grotesque ways. The Ukrainian peasant soldiers who invaded Romania which was capitalist in 1944 are reported to have wept when they saw the pretty houses, the fattened cattle and the well-stocked barns. They wept for a way of life and a prosperity that could’ve been theirs if not for communism. The party crushed religion, but even with its suppression, it was rare for an Armenian child who has not been secretly christened, even in communist households. A form of consumer apartheid prevailed. Special shops called Beryozka which stocked food unavailable elsewhere which was open only to holders of hard foreign currency. There were shops reserved for party functionaries that were not accessible to common people. Strict obedience to authority was drilled into the people. People witnessing a state-sponsored unjust act did so in silence, avoiding eye contact with other people. In Stalin’s Russia, no one spoke to strangers about matters that did not concern them.

Communism shunned any kind of enterprise — however small — coming from the people who were meant only to toil hard as per the commands of authority figures. It was essential that they should not think for themselves, or more practicably, not have time to think. As a result, private enterprise was not only discouraged, but penalized too. After seven decades of this madness, party bosses wondered why their economy was in shambles. Even the modest shoe and boot business of Stanislav (the author's father-in-law) was forced to run low-key because it thwarted the state's aspiration to own and control all the means of production. He restricted services to only the customers he knew. He was detained one day for selling his used car at a higher rate than the approved one which amounted to speculation that was a punishable offence. Article 154 of the criminal code made punishable any act such as 'buying up and reselling of goods or any other articles for the purpose of making a profit'. Punishments were very harsh. Stanislav was arrested and sentenced to seven years in jail. His new car was confiscated and re-assigned to a party functionary. The judiciary was subject to directives from the Kremlin on penal policy. Judges served 5-year terms and their continued careers depended on the party's assessment of their conformity.

Not content with nipping private initiative in the bud, communism sought to wipe out individuality as well, encouraging conformity to a goal set from on high. All kinds of creative literature wilted as a result. Central planning did not allow for individual architectural expression whose spin off was the almost identical cities and towns across the country. All residential blocks looked the same. Each city had its statue of Lenin and streets named after Lenin and Marx. The shops were all the same, carrying numbers rather than names. Dissimulation was the norm when portraying 'achievements' of the Soviet system to outsiders and quite ironically, to its own citizens as well. In speeches cataloguing the milestones, the word 'and' was never put before the last item so as to give the impression that the list can go on and on. Legislature was a total mockery of that democratic function. The role of deputies in legislative forums was to endorse the decisions of the hierarchy. As a rule, discussion was minimal and endorsements unanimous. Every time a vote was required, a voice called out, "those for" and all hands went up; 'Those against', no reaction; 'Those abstaining', no reaction; 'Motion passed' and the exercise ended. Foreign travel was a state-controlled privilege and only certain categories of citizens with proven party loyalty were allowed. The state didn't even allow people to talk to international contacts and telephone calls could be made only through an operator. Direct international dialling was introduced in Moscow for the Olympics in 1980 for the convenience of foreign athletes, but was discontinued immediately afterwards. The academia was constantly reminded of their place in the socialist system. Even in the 1980s, students and faculty of academic institutions were forced to help with the harvesting on state farms. They would toil on distant stretches of muddy fields with no facilities and primitive sleeping arrangements.

The interval in which communism crumbled was miraculously short as to be unbelievable. The fleeting nature of its collapse was telling on the flimsy foundations and the rot to the core. Brezhnev managed a consumer spending boom due to the high price of oil which brought in hard currency. Gorbachev introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction). He granted Soviet writers unprecedented freedom because he wanted the Intelligentsia on his side to discomfit the hard-line conservatives who were obstructing his reforms. Reassessment of historical figures, past events and revelations became ever more frank. This openness was genuinely believed to be capable of reforming the party and the existing system. Even in 1989, the party believed that perestroika was designed to fully use the potential of socialism and that only with a renewed and revitalized party in the vanguard can the Soviet Union move to a renewal of socialism and a bright future. Unfortunately for the party, Gorbachev was unlucky. It was his misfortune that oil prices had fallen but consumer expectation couldn't be lowered. He allowed constituent republics to get in touch with foreign partners and thereby unknowingly pushed them on the road to independence. With Khrushchev's thaw and Brezhnev's consumer society, people became less afraid to speak openly than the previous generation which had a memory of Stalin's arbitrary and cruel punishments for even a hint of dissidence.

O'Clery makes an analysis of the Soviet system's transformation to a market economy for which it suffered enormously. As Solshenitsyn said, 'whatever the communists told about their socialist system was false, but unfortunately, whatever they told about the capitalist system turned out to be true'. Hyper-inflation which followed the fall of the Soviet Union wiped out entire life's savings, turning millions of Russians into paupers. It was a humiliation for the generation that defeated Hitler to learn that war widows were getting Red Cross parcels from Germany. Russia entered the modern consumer era in the 1990s, with everything available in the stores, but it became a dangerous place with increased crime, financial chaos and no respite for the poor while a few powerful Russians syphoned off national wealth and the former captains of communism transformed themselves into oligarchs of capitalism. The book also provides an overview of the Russian society. Family ties were intense and close, which almost feels like India, in the importance it accorded to the extended family. Fathers were typically not appreciative of their daughters' boyfriends and we read about Zhanna's father breaking the finger bone of one when he gives the poor lad a 'firm' handshake after he caught them kissing! Parents offered financial help to their children to buy homes and donated furniture. Whatever the Soviet society lacked in some material comforts, they compensated for it in intangible things. Zhanna was accustomed to the discipline and respect shown to teachers in Soviet schools and she was taken aback to find her American pupils taking chewing gum in class and putting their feet up on the desks.

The book shares chilling details of how Islamic fundamentalism took hold in Chechnya once the central hold weakened that eventually made the non-Muslims flee from the province. It's true that Russia established itself there by resorting to brutal policies and stubborn suppression, but it does not justify the Chechen attempt to establish an exclusive religious state. When the author and wife visited Grozny in 1991, the Russians were living in fear that 'if incited, hitherto peaceful Muslim neighbours might turn against them overnight' (p. 279). Street graffiti threatening Russians came up quickly which warned them with dire messages such as 'RUSSIANS DON'T LEAVE — WE WANT SLAVES' and 'DON'T BUY THE APARTMENT FROM MISHA (meaning any Russian) — HE WILL BE GONE SOON ANYWAY'. This looks exactly similar to what the Kashmiri Pandits underwent in Kashmir at around the same time. The script was the same and universal with slight, local variations. Non-Russians were not exempt as seen in another slogan: 'RUSSIANS BACK TO RYZAN, ARMENIANS TO YEREVAN'. This exposed the true colour of the Chechen pogrom that it was not against Russians alone, but against all Christians. The book is structured in an engaging way where two stories unfold at the same time — that of the Suvorov family and that of Soviet Union itself. The writing style produces an intimacy to the characters among the readers. Family photographs are interspersed throughout the narrative. The story is presented in a charming present tense that appear contemporaneous to readers and attracts tremendous interest.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star