Bitter Waters Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov Recounts His Personal

Bitter Waters

Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov recounts his personal experiences living in Stalinist Russia in his book Bitter Waters. Having spent nearly a decade in a Siberian labor camp during the early part of Stalin's regime, Andreev-Khomiakov had already held a jaded view of Soviet domestic policies decades before he would be able to chronicle his story. Released from the labor camp, suddenly, without any money or connections, Andreev-Khomiakov wandered around his homeland in search of work and livelihood. "During the years of my imprisonment all my ties with freedom had been severed, and it made absolutely no difference where I went," (2). However, Andreev-Khomiakov was prohibited from living in forty-one cities, including Moscow and Leningrad, so he first settled in a small rural town. The author in fact made many small towns and cities his home over the course of the next several years, and although he was freed from the shackles of labor camp, he never tasted freedom at all. He watched the Soviet Union degenerate into a corrupted and nefarious version of socialist ideals, only to then be invaded by the Germans in 1941 during the Second World War. Remarkably, Andreev-Khomiakov would spend more time as a prisoner after the invasion, for he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in Scandinavia and in Berlin. After the end of the war, Andreev-Khomiakov was finally able to pursue his writing career as an expatriate and his memoirs are captured in Bitter Waters. From economic instability to forced collectivism to political purging, Bitter Waters captures the failures and farce of Stalinism.

Economic hardship drove much of Stalin's policies and politics, but Stalinism drove the Soviet Union into economic despair, corruption, and chaos. When Andreev-Khomiakov was released from the Siberian labor camp, he experienced initial boon, having received a well-paying and fairly pleasant position. He notes, "The beneficence of fate was reflected also in the fact that it released me from the camps at a time when the storms of the First Five-Year Plan and '100% collectivization' ... were dying down," (8). Rations had been nearly abolished and the people were no longer suffereing from the ravages of famine. However, Andreev-Khomiakov's luck would turn, as would the fate of his homeland. Face-to-face with bureaucratic entanglements and restrictions, Andreev-Khomiakov also encountered the first signs of the new Stalinist regime. Stalin had forced his predecessor Trotsky into exile and usurped some of Trotsky's programs for rapid industrialization and exploitation of natural resources (28). Far from being a smooth or organized endeavor, Stalin's early economic plans proved futile, and would only turn much of the Soviet Unions into wasteland. Andreev-Khomiakov also experienced first-hand the nature of factory work under Stalin, who implemented his rapid industrialization plan with impunity. In sections such as "The Art of Socialist Accounting," the author also alludes to the inefficiency of Stalinist bureaucracies and their needless and sometimes inhumane rules.

Andreev-Khomiakov eventually moved to Moscow, where he had some friends and acquaintances to help him get settled. His friends also shared some of his political viewpoints, which became nurtured in Moscow. The author recalls, "An eavesdropping bystander might easily have accused us of anticommunism; our remarks and the tones of our voices were full of it," (127). Andreev-Khomiakov based his views not just on his experiences with the economic destitution in the Soviet Union but also on Stalin's foreign policies and military initiatives. For example, "Our march into Poland was evidence that Stalin was using this opportunity to initiate a grandiose plan of communist advancement," (129). Andreev-Khomiakov had held his anticommunist political points-of-view for years, and he admits that one of the reasons why he was imprisoned in the labor camps was due to his beliefs. The Soviet Union under Stalin solidified his points-of-view. Especially as he watched dissention be squelched by coercion and retribution, Andreev-Khomiakov could only come away from his experiences with a negative outlook on Stalin's quasi-socialist, quasi-communist practices. "Discontent with the system was everywhere," notes the author, but so systemic were Stalin's controls that there were few if any legitimate means of counteracting the status quo.