This occurred at the same time that George Orwell’s 1984 was
introducing Western readers to a terrifying new reality, one that
resembled the nascent Kaliningrad more closely than Orwell could have
imagined. As Kaliningrad crawled to its feet out of the rubble and ash of
Königsberg, it did so in the Stalinist image of urban development and
social control. Replacing medieval towers, parapets, and gargoyles were
bleak and poorly built concrete apartment blocks enlivened only by
statues and murals of Lenin’s goateed visage that oversaw one’s every
move and bannered slogans that intruded on one’s private thoughts.
Lenin may have envisioned it, but Stalin mastered it: the ability to
disorient and disconnect individuals and large populations, not just from
their physical surroundings and core communities but, ultimately, from
themselves. Kaliningrad was a case in point. After being flattened,
purged, and renamed, both city and province were repopulated with
ethnic Russians. Markov’s parents were part of this mass geopolitical
revision and, in their case, it wasn’t a random assignment. Ilya Markov
was a ship’s mechanic who, though seriously injured during the war, was
needed for service in the Baltic Fleet. Markov’s mother had worked to
support the war effort, too, and one can only imagine the Orwellian fever
dream she now found herself in: raising a family under Stalin, often
single-handed, in the ruins of a stolen medieval city that had been
transformed into a military zone and then sealed off from the outside
world.
The Great Patriotic War had scarcely concluded before the USSR
began rebuilding and retooling for the Cold War. While Soviet engineers
and scientists perfected the now ubiquitous AK-47 and tested the
country’s first nuclear weapons, the general population reeled from the
catastrophic synergy generated by six years of war and the seemingly
endless nightmare of Stalin’s psychotic reign. During the two decades
prior to Markov’s birth, the Soviet Union lost approximately 35 million
citizens—more than one fifth of its population—to manufactured
famines, political repression, genocide, and war. Millions more were
imprisoned, exiled, or forced to relocate, en masse, across vast distances.
With the possible exception of China under Mao Zedong, it is hard to
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(Ron)
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