Through fiction and fact, James Meek and Antony Beevor have both explored the state of 20th-century Russia. Aida Edemariam listened to their discussion
Over on the Segovia Stage, reached by dry walkways full of ambling festival-goers if you were patient, or straight through the churned-up mud if you weren't, James Meek and Antony Beevor were to be found discussing 20th-century Russia with the Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armitstead. Beevor is the author of the great marshallings of fact that are Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege and The Mystery of Olga Chekhova. Meek, once Russia correspondent for this paper, is the author of the novel The People's Act of Love, set in 1919 Siberia. Both agreed that reality in Russia is often far stranger than anything fiction could dream of.
Discussion ranged dizzyingly from the fantasies of Soviet-era film and TV to cannibalism on the steppe; from magical realism to anti-Semitism; from the "Eastern" (Russia's equivalent to the Western, in which a stranger arrives in a small frontier) to 1919 productions of the Cherry Orchard; from dying cavalries to the ways in which many Russians found themselves fighting on the German side in world war two.
Initially there were few questions -- the audience appeared slightly stunned at the vastness of the terrain covered, in all sense of that word - but then they rose to the challenge. Was Siberia ever a place where people went because they wanted to, because it had a future? Yes, said Meek. How reliable was any history of Russia, really, when archives were only just being opened - and closed again, added Beevor, who raised a laugh when he told of a portly Russian colonel informing him jocularly, "You tell us the subject, we choose the files." And then, as so often happens, the biggest question came at the end, Look at Russia now, said a woman near the back - increasing racism, against immigrants and Slav nations; rising neo-Nazism, and the ongoing decimations in Chechnya. What hope do you have for the future? Neither author was vastly hopeful, with Beevor telling an anecdote about a Russian who suggested the easiest solution would be to gas the Chechens, including their children (thus solving the problem of the next generation), and Meek worrying that modern Russia, with its increasing authoritarianism, was going the way of Yugoslavia under Milosevic. But, he noted, it had to be said they'd spent the last hour being down on Russia. It was also full of beautiful things, brilliant ideas and great people, and this should not be forgotten. And with that, we walked out into glorious evening sunshine.
