“Purge”, a novel by Sofi Oksanen, a Finnish-Estonian author, spans three generations of Estonian women caught up in the traumas of world war, occupation and the break-up of the Soviet Union half a century later. It follows the story of Aliide Truu, an elderly lady who, in recently independent Estonia in 1992, takes in a dishevelled young girl she finds lying in the yard of her farmhouse. As the two women circle each other mistrustfully, we read of Aliide’s jealousy in her youth for her elder sister, Ingel, who found happiness in her marriage to Hans, a local peasant boy with whom she, Aliide, was infatuated. The family is broken apart by Soviet occupation during and after the Second World War. The girls’ parents are arrested and disappear, never to be seen again. Hans, having enlisted with the Germans fighting on the eastern front, returns to join the resistance to the Soviet occupiers in the forests, and is hidden by the sisters in the family home. Suspecting them of being in contact with Hans, the local communists interrogate, humiliate and sexually abuse the sisters, as well as the little daughter of Ingel and Hans.
Traumatised, Aliide marries an Estonian communist, Martin, in order to protect herself. Ingel and her daughter are deported to the far corners of the Soviet Empire, leaving Aliide, with Martin, to take over the family home. Unbeknownst to Martin, Hans, overwrought with grief for his wife and daughter, is still hidden in the house. Now Aliide has Hans to herself. She will look after him and, without Ingel to eclipse her, surely, she hopes, he will at last see her own virtues…
The young girl, Zara, a Russian who speaks Estonian, as Aliide observes, has also been a victim of political upheaval in the lawlessness of the breakup of the Soviet Union; trafficked, forced into prostitution and sexual slavery by men much like those who had abused Aliide decades earlier. Now they are gangsters, but one of them is ex-KGB. The times change; the men don’t. Zara’s experiences shock us with the appalling human degradation suffered by some amid the euphoria of the collapse of communism. Zara has fled their clutches, and now is desperate to make her escape complete before they catch up with her. As we guess from an early stage, and as Aliide eventually discovers, Zara is in fact the granddaughter of Ingel, who, in her desperation, has come to the only address she knows in Estonia, written by her grandmother on the back of a photo of a young Ingel and Aliide.
It is a powerful story about how lives are wrecked in the upheavals of their times; about how fraught times throw up pitiless people for whom no amount of cruelty is too much. And about the compromises and ambiguities that some are forced into. Aliide is abused. But in her fear and in her consuming jealousy of Ingel, she commits acts of great evil.
As to the men, they are less finely drawn than the main female characters, to some extent caricatures. Hans appears to be everything wholesome and noble in a man, the simple peasant, handsome, strong, devoted and loyal, who defends his country. The portrayal of Martin, by contrast, elicits not only moral disapproval, but physical revulsion. Oksanen dwells on his fetid armpits, the hair in them matted with sweat. The smell of his armpits sticks to Aliide’s hair and skin, and stays in her nostrils all day. Ingel comments that Aliide is starting to smell like a Russian, like the hordes of Russians pouring in to work in the new factories in Estonia. There are repeated references to the Russian habit of wiping their mouths on their sleeves, which Martin, and eventually Aliide adopt. The inference seems plain: the Russians are not just brutal occupiers; they are uncivilised barbarians. Without downplaying the terrible Estonian experience under Soviet rule, such images read like racial slurs. It is all a bit much.
The German soldiers who visit the family home during their turn at occupying Estonia are, by contrast, nice, wholesome, polite young boys. This is a not uncommon perspective in the Baltic states, where the experience of Soviet occupation is generally remembered as having been much worse than that of the relatively benign Germans. It is, of course, a view which can be sustained only if one forgets the slaughter of the Baltic Jews, in which some Baltic people participated. Oksanen makes only a passing reference to Jewish suffering at the hands of the Germans; a brief mention of a Jewish family that fled to Soviet territory before the German advance. The only other reference to Jews is that the man of the family, having returned with the Soviets, is present at one of the sessions of interrogation and abuse of the sisters at the town hall. This appears gratuitous. Only two references to a Jewish family, and they were after all collaborators in the brutality of Russian occupation.
Oksanen acknowledges the ambiguities and difficult choices that many had to make. Most notably Aliide, who accommodates herself to the regime that had abused her in order to survive, although her jealousy and spitefulness towards Ingel takes her well beyond the collaboration required for survival. Revulsion towards Martin is perhaps slightly mitigated by the fact that he is no hypocrite or cynic in his devotion to the communist ideal. A true and enthusiastic believer in the communist dream, and all its promises of a better world, in later life he struggles to come to terms with the emptiness of the dream brought home by the Chernobyl disaster.
It is a fine novel. But the unremitting negative stereotyping of Russians, even down to personal hygiene, mars the book. And it sits uneasily with the much more skimpy and positive portrayal of the German occupiers.
