wanted: famous and soon-to-be-famous people

As you will see from this note from the marketing dept, of which I post an extract below, The Economist is looking for suitably important-sounding people to appear in an upcoming marketing video. If anyone meeting the description below is reading this blog (and also reads The Economist) and would be willing to spend a few minutes talking to camera about why they like the Economist I would be most grateful if they could get in touch with me at

edwardlucas(a tsign) economist.com


We are planning to do some video interviews with some of our more prominent readers and need a little help in identifying them.

We have two types of people we are trying to find:

a) top people of the ilk that have appeared on previous films - business leaders, heads of government, noteable entrepreneurs, etc; and

b) people who haven't made it yet but who are likely to do so within the next ten years.


Thanks

Edward

Belarus and realpolitik

Europe.view

The devil you know

Dec 21st 2006
From Economist.com

WESTERN strategy for toppling the authoritarian and murderous regime in Belarus is roughly this: “Have meetings, give the opposition money, have more meetings, give more money”.

You have to be pretty optimistic to think it is working. For two of the best-known opposition leaders, Alyaksandr Milinkevic and Michail Marynich, a photo-opportunity with President George Bush on the fringes of the NATO summit this month may have been a morale booster. Protests in support of another main opposition figure, Alyaksandr Kazulin, who has just finished a hunger strike, were inspiring. But they did not rock the regime. The big question is how best to exploit the widening split between the Belarusian leader, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, and his Kremlin counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

One paradoxical result of Mr Lukashenka’s eccentric and paranoid rule over the past 12 years has been to entrench a Belarusian national identity. It may be a perverse and retrograde one, it may have a strong Soviet whiff about it in places. But it is there, and support in Belarus for a planned merger with Russia has collapsed. That creates the potential for a real two-way row.

A trade war is under way already. Russia is telling Belarus to hand over half the national gas infrastructure to Kremlin-crony Russian companies, or else Russia will double the price that it charges Belarus for gas. Next year, presumably, Russia will bargain for the rest of the Belarusian system. Recently Russia started blocking imports of Belarusian sugar. The always flimsy tent of the Russian-Belarusian Union, which was supposed to accommodate the two countries in a marriage of equals, is so tattered as to seem beyond repair.

The current nonsensical arrangement whereby Russia and Belarus share a free trade zone without free trade, under a supranational authority with no authority, can’t last. Russia no longer wants to subsidise its backward neighbour. But nor does it want, at least right now, the trouble and expense of toppling the regime and swallowing Belarus whole.

The two countries share a free trade zone without free trade, and a supranational authority with no authority

As ties with Russia turn from cool to icy, the Lukashenka regime is desperate to find new friends: Iran, Azerbaijan, China—anyone who can help temper the cold wind from the Kremlin. Belarus is even putting out feelers westwards, albeit rather clumsy ones.

So far, these have been firmly rebuffed. The West doesn’t think about Belarus very often. When it does, it wants to isolate the regime, not befriend it.

But unofficially, people are talking about a new approach, variously described as “more astute” and “more realistic”: that the West should stop trying to isolate Mr Lukashenka, and instead offer him a deal.

Reuters

Let's see who's more cynical now

At its most cynical, this would mean leaving the old brute in power, but as a Western ally rather than a Kremlin one, creating a kind of Azerbaijan on Europe’s eastern fringe. A slightly cleaner variant would be for the West to buy Mr Lukashenka out, offering immunity and a dignified retirement in exchange for a peaceful transfer of power and eventual democracy. A third option would be to keep political ties frozen, at least for now, but to try to boost trade, investment and cultural links.

For the West to deal with Mr Lukashenka at all would be seen as betrayal by the Belarusian opposition, whose moral case is overwhelming. These are good people who have been beaten, and jailed, and seen their loved ones murdered. The West would be saying to them, in effect: “Sorry old chap. Given the geopolitics, it’s too good a chance to miss.”

There’s another problem too. Capricious, paranoid and devious, Mr Lukashenka is not a reliable dealmaker.

At this moment, shunning Mr Lukashenka’s approaches feels virtuous, and could well be right. But events in Belarus are unfolding remarkably quickly. There may soon come a time when thinking wishfully on the sidelines will look the worst option, not the best.

spy stories

Eastern European spies

State insecurity

Dec 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Spy scandals in eastern Europe reveal some damaging hang-ups

WHEN spooks start mattering, democrats start worrying. Eastern Europe has shed the planned economy and one-party rule. But the intelligence and security services still have disproportionate influence. Indeed, it seems to be growing.

In Poland reform of the military-intelligence agency, the WSI, has been the main achievement—critics would say the sole one—of the government in the past year. A commission charged with the job claims that the WSI was actively involved in influencing the media and business (particularly arms-trading and property), as well as government itself. The WSI has now been broken up into a military-intelligence and a counter-intelligence service. Some 300 Soviet-trained officers have been fired.

Across the border in Lithuania another scandal is blazing in the security service, the VSD. A top Lithuanian spy posted to Belarus, Vytautas Pociunas, was found dead in mysterious circumstances—an event that some link to feuds within the VSD over freight contracts. A muck-racking newspaper which published supposedly inside information about the VSD was raided. A parliamentary committee wants the VSD chief, Arvydas Pocius, to go. He has suspended his service's two top counter-intelligence officers, claiming that they “pose a threat to national security”.

Making sense of all this is hard. But one thread stretches back to the removal in 2004 of Rolandas Paksas, a president whose unfortunate choice of friends led Lithuania's allies to worry about the country's future. Mr Paksas was impeached after the then VSD boss, Mecys Laurinkus, told Lithuania's parliament about the president's Russian-related antics. That success may have made the VSD big-headed.

It is hard to find an ex-communist country in eastern Europe in which the intelligence and security services are depoliticised and uncontroversial. In Bulgaria the director of the department responsible for secret communist-era archives, which lawmakers have voted to open, was found dead at his desk in November, shot with his own gun. The authorities' delay in announcing the death, which leaked out in Brussels, prompted accusations of a cover-up. Two other senior figures committed suicide in October.

Romania's communist-era Securitate has proved the most pervasive and resilient, with extensive business and political connections. President Trajan Basescu recently sacked his intelligence chiefs in a row over the escape of a suspected triple agent who was also an arms-dealer and kidnapper (just another dull day in the Balkans). The president's critics wonder how, in communist times, he wangled a plum job abroad, in Antwerp, without help and encouragement from his or a foreign-intelligence service, something over which the files are oddly silent.

A common feature here is the weakness of eastern Europe's politicians and public institutions, which often fail to counteract the influence of those linked to the past. The old regimes of eastern Europe did not disappear in a sea of flags and euphoria in 1989. Many senior figures relabelled themselves, their money and their power—and are still doing nicely under the new system. It helps that decades of totalitarian rule leave people easily spooked. Few believe that the men in raincoats are under proper legal and political control.

One answer may be to start from scratch, with new recruits, something that Poland is now considering. Estonia, whose small, British-trained intelligence service is widely seen as one of the best in eastern Europe, did this in 1992. It also has a rule that politicians must never be spied on. “Such cases are for the voters to judge,” explains an official, sternly.

book review

Christmas tips

Problems you did not know you had

Dec 13th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Tying the Perfect Parcel: Everything You Should Know How To Do By Rosemarie Jarski New Holland; 304 pages; £9.99 Buy it at Amazon.co.uk

WHAT better to give for Christmas than a book that explains how to wrap presents, carve the turkey and wash up afterwards? That is doubtless the aim of the chirpy Rosemarie Jarski, a former au pair and author of this compendium of household and other advice.

Books filled with commonsensical tips on life and how to live it are numerous and mostly bad, with Martha Stewart's snobby and fiddly lifestyle guides being among the worst. Shirley Conran's 1975 “Superwoman”, with its advice to stop fussing, to buy proper equipment and household chemicals, and to concentrate on fun, was one of the best. “Life is too short to stuff a mushroom,” she famously said.

Ms Jarski's book would make Ms Stewart wince, and Ms Conran cheer. It is utterly unambitious in the kitchen department: the reader learns how to cook pasta, boil vegetables, make tea and carve meat, and little else. But that plain fare is leavened with titbits of knowledge of the world outside the kitchen that even the savviest reader may lack: for example, the terminology and etiquette of sushi, or the way that smelly books can be de-odourised with bicarbonate of soda (how they become smelly is not explained). Ms Jarski's recommendations for descaling a shower-head in situ are truly ingenious.

This is a wisely constructed menu. A list of tips, however necessary, aimed solely at the most dimwitted or ignorant readers would be too shameful to give, or to read. The trick is to provide the most basic information about life (for example, a solemn page on the correct use of lavatory paper: how to hang it and, worse, how to use it) in a format that looks amusing and stimulating for the general reader.

Ms Jarski's assumption—probably correct—is that skill in dealing with chores and household management does not travel as easily between generations as it once did. A mixture of convenience food, life on the hoof, indulgent parents and sulky teenagers means that, for example, students newly living away from home as they start university may be blessedly ignorant of the simplest domestic tasks. A book that unstuffily explains the basics of tidiness, hygiene and organisation may be surprisingly useful.

There are three weaknesses. Some of the advice is wrong, or incomplete. Lemon juice or vinegar is a much handier way of removing chewing gum from fabric than the eucalyptus oil that the author recommends. Second, some of the tips (making beeswax furniture polish) would have seemed arcane even 50 years ago and give a whiff of borrowing from other, older authorities. There is a suspicious lack of acknowledgments, let alone a bibliography. Third, the tone is so relentlessly bright that even the most laid-back reader may end up wanting to hurl the book into a pile of dirty laundry and retire to an unmade bed with a takeaway meal.

As for those parcels? The advice is excellent, if a bit demanding. Use foreign comics as unusual wrapping paper, or use a furoshiki cloth, Japanese-style (try a napkin, scarf or handkerchief). Less originally: put irregular-shaped presents in boxes to make them easy to wrap neatly.

Tying the Perfect Parcel: Everything You Should Know How To Do.
By Rosemarie Jarski.
New Holland; 304 pages; £9.99

Laar's star rises

Eastern Europe's stars

The dynamic duo

Dec 13th 2006 | RIGA AND TALLINN
From The Economist print edition

Europe's booming Baltic corner

DOUBLING your living standards every six years would seem a breakneck pace of growth even in east Asia. In Europe it is unheard of. But two Baltic countries, Estonia and Latvia, are growing at 11.6% and 10.9%, respectively. This speed is unexpected. Of 13 forecasts looked at last year by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the highest for Estonia was 6.4%; even Estonia's own central bank reckons that the long-term growth rate is only 7-8%.

The pair's high growth is an exceptional product of good luck and good policies. Both countries are stable, business-friendly and cheap, and lie close to large, rich markets. They have flat taxes, cleanish government, balanced budgets and stable currencies pegged to the euro. Foreigners like all this: Estonia is Europe's biggest recipient per head of foreign investment.

Consumption is soaring in both countries, as is credit. Estonia will see money-supply growth of 33% this year; in Latvia mortgage lending rose by 90% in the year to October, and credit-card lending doubled. That reflects the rise of a western-style financial industry that lends in a way yet to develop in most of eastern Europe. “Foreign banking is a big reason for our success,” says Andres Lipstok, governor of Estonia's central bank.

Can the good times last? Signs of a property bubble abound. The authorities want to tighten banks' lending. If a crash came, its effects should be contained by outside ownership of banks (99% in Estonia, and 80% in Latvia): foreign shareholders, not local taxpayers, would suffer if loans went bad. Both countries have huge current-account deficits (17.9% of GDP in Latvia and 12.5% in Estonia). But for poor economies trying to catch up on 50 years of development missed under communism, a thirst for imported technology is commendable. Balance sheets are strong—indeed, Estonia has no net foreign debt.

The bigger worries are twofold. Even as the Baltic hot rods scorch across the tarmac towards European living standards, they lack any brakes. Monetary policy cannot contain inflation (their currency boards give the two countries no independent control over interest rates). Fiscal policy works in theory but not in practice: Estonia already runs a big budget surplus, and Latvia is not far behind.

AP

Mart Laar: a star turn still to come

Wages are spiralling thanks to a boom in labour-thirsty industries such as construction, retail and tourism. Both countries are struggling to integrate Soviet-era immigrants, so importing more labour from the east is hugely unpopular. But tempting back the many locals—especially 100,000-plus Latvians—who have moved to work abroad is tricky. Latvia's president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga (herself a returned émigré), says it is not just the money: Latvians find that foreign bosses and colleagues treat them more kindly and respectfully than their compatriots do, and public services such as health care and transport are better abroad.

So far, soaring productivity growth has masked the labour market's tightness. But that will not last. The big task for both countries is to move to an economy based on brain not brawn. That requires a liberal immigration regime—at least for skilled foreigners—and a transformation of the calcified, self-satisfied education system. Neither is yet in sight: in both countries, smugness rules.

Latvia's coalition government, closely tied to local big business, shows little appetite for reform. Estonia, which has a parliamentary election in March, looks more hopeful. Its star politician, Mart Laar, is now leading the opposition after a break evangelising for the flat tax that he introduced when prime minister in 1994. His party slogan is “happiness does not lie in money”. That would once have been laughable. Now it sounds quite good.

Estonia and Amnesty

Europe.view

An excess of conscience

Dec 14th 2006
From Economist.com

Estonia is right and Amnesty is wrong

Get article background

AMNESTY International used to be an impartial and apolitical outfit, focused on the single burning issue of political prisoners. Your correspondent remembers its admirable letter-writing campaigns during the cold war on behalf of Soviet prisoners of conscience such as Jüri Kukk, an Estonian chemistry professor. He died in jail 25 years ago with the hope—then not widely shared—that his country’s foreign occupation would eventually end.

It did. Since regaining independence in 1991 Estonia has become the reform star of the post-communist world. Its booming economy, law-based state and robust democracy are all the more impressive given their starting point: a country struggling with the huge forced migration of the Soviet era. The collapse of the evil empire left Estonia with hundreds of thousands of resentful, stranded ex-colonists, citizens of a country that no longer existed.

Some countries might have deported them. That was the remedy adopted in much of eastern Europe after the second world war. Germans and Hungarians—regardless of their citizenship or politics—were sent “home” in conditions of great brutality.

Instead, Estonia, like Latvia next door, decided to give these uninvited guests a free choice. They could go back to Russia. They could stay but adopt Russian citizenship. They could take local citizenship (assuming they were prepared to learn the language). Or they could stay on as non-citizens, able to work but not to vote.

Put like that, it may sound fair. But initially it prompted howls of protest against “discrimination”, not only from Russia but from Western human-rights bodies. The Estonians didn’t flinch. A “zero option”—giving citizenship to all comers—would be a disaster, they argued, ending any chance of restoring the Estonian language in public life, and of recreating a strong, confident national identity.

They were right. More than 100,000 of the Soviet-era migrants have learnt Estonian and gained citizenship. In 1992, 32% of the population had no citizenship. Now the figure is 10%.

In 1990, before the final Soviet collapse, your correspondent tried to buy postage stamps in Tallinn using halting Estonian. The clerk replied brusquely, in Russian, “govorite po chelovecheski” (speak a human language). That was real discrimination. Estonians were unable to use their own language in their capital city. Now that’s changed too.

Reasonable people can disagree about the details of the language law, about the right level of subsidies for language courses, and about the rules for gaining citizenship. Nowhere’s perfect. But Estonia’s system is visibly working. It is extraordinarily hard to term it a burning issue for an international human-rights organisation.

Yet that is what Amnesty International has tried to make of it. It has produced a lengthy report, “Linguistic minorities in Estonia: Discrimination must end”, demanding radical changes in Estonia’s laws on both language and citizenship.

Amnesty's report echoes Kremlin propaganda in a way that Estonians find sinister and offensive

The report is puzzling for several reasons. It is a bad piece of work, ahistorical and unbalanced. It echoes Kremlin propaganda in a way that Estonians find sinister and offensive. But most puzzling of all, it is a bizarre use of Amnesty’s limited resources. Just a short drive from Estonia, in Belarus and in Russia, there are real human rights abuses, including two classic Amnesty themes: misuse of psychiatry against dissidents, and multiple prisoners of conscience. Yet the coverage of these issues on the Amnesty website is feeble, dated, or non-existent.

Amnesty seems to have become just another left-wing pressure group, banging on about globalisation, the arms trade, Israel and domestic violence. Regardless of the merits of their views—which look pretty stale and predictable—it seems odd to move to what is already a crowded corner of the political spectrum. To save Jüri Kukk and other inmates of the gulag, people of all political views and none joined Amnesty’s campaigns. That wouldn’t happen now.

europe view

EUROPE

Europe.view

The fog of the “new cold war”

Dec 7th 2006
From Economist.com

And guess who's winning, so far

Get article background

LIKE analogies involving the second world war, the “new cold war” is not a phrase to use lightly.

Or maybe at all. Russia is not now seeking military domination of Europe. It is not a one-party state. Nor does it claim to be the embodiment of an ideological success story. The once-towering edifice of Marxist-Leninist ideology is as ruined as social credit or syndicalism. An exposition of “sovereign democracy”, as the Kremlin now grandly calls its scheme of things, would barely fill a postcard, let alone a textbook.

To compare all this to the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev's era may look not only insulting, but absurd. The West’s differences with Russia seem mere nuances when set against the gulf between the modern world and the suicide bomber.

But to argue only that the old cold war is dead and gone is to risk missing the point. Whatever we end up calling it, a new period of deep-seated rivalry is approaching—and perhaps has already begun. As in the mid-to-late 1940s, such things take a bit of time to sink in.

Point one: Russia is different. Whether you think of it as Gazpromistan, or as Kremlin Inc, the Russian state now is as inelegant a creature as ever it was in communist times. It is an authoritarian bureaucratic-capitalist arrangement in which a squabbling elite, drawn largely from the security services, extracts enormous rents from raw materials, steals some, and uses the rest to vie for power, spouting nationalist and sometimes xenophobic rhetoric to maintain popularity.

In short, it turns wealth into power, and then power back into wealth. At home—and abroad.

Point two: Russia is a threat. The Soviet cocktail of communism and imperialism was a hard sell. Especially towards the end, it meant poverty and dictatorship, plus foreign domination. Russia’s main weapons now are more subtle and potent: cheap gas, and money for the right people. The orgy of greed and moral myopia in Moscow in the past 15 years has shown that lawyers, accountants and bankers are willing to forget professional ethics for huge fees.

Russia’s main weapons now are more subtle and potent: cheap gas, and money for the right people

Politicians can lose their bearings, too. Imagine that Helmut Schmidt, the German chancellor until 1982, had not only been great chums with Brezhnev, but in his final months of office had pushed through huge government loan-guarantees for a project that would increase his country's energy dependence on the Soviet Union. And then, as soon as he was out of office, he had taken a lucrative post running that same project.

Fanciful? That is what Gerhard Schröder did with the planned Baltic gas pipeline. Even if it is never built or used, it shows that Russia can brazenly co-opt a Western politician, and expect only a whimper of protest from others. The West is all the weaker for its addiction to wishful thinking. Surely it is better to negotiate and compromise with Russia, than have a messy and costly confrontation?

Even now, money can’t buy everything. So there’s always murder. A veteran Kremlin-watcher in Moscow wrote to your correspondent recently: “Anna Politkovskaya was killed to warn Russians against criticising the Kremlin, especially in Western media. Alexander Litvinenko’s murder was to warn defectors. The only question now is: 'who is next?'”

Surely the Kremlin is not that brazen or brutal? Maybe. But few have won money in recent years underestimating the brazenness and brutality that lurk beneath those onion domes. We face a systemic rivalry based on conflicting values and clashing geopolitics. Not a cold war, perhaps, but it’s getting chilly.

Irish Daily Mail piece

“Nyet faktov, tolko versii” [No facts, only theories] is a Russian saying that captures perfectly the difficulty of trying to fit the attempted murder of Yegor Gaidar, a former prime minister, together with the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko (a defector from Russia’s FSB security service) and the shooting of Anna Politkovskaya, a campaigning journalist.

They could hardly be more different. The other two were outspoken figures who already lived in fear of their lives. Mr Gaidar was widely respected in Moscow: at most a moderate critic, at least in public, of Vladimir Putin’s regime. Unlike most retired Russian politicians, he cared little for personal wealth: his energies were devoted to his free-market thinktank, where his rotund figure and beaming smile contrasted with his spartan office: undecorated, when I last visited, except for a pile of economic journals and a solitary holiday postcard.

Though he privately deplored the loss of political freedom in Russia in the past six years, Mr Gaidar was happiest discussing the arcane details of economic policy. Admittedly, many ordinary Russians loathed him, blaming his tough free-market policies in the early 1990s for the loss of their savings and the collapse of the Soviet-era economy. But few in the Kremlin would agree. Most rich and powerful Russians regard him as a hero, whose liberalisation of prices began Russia’s recovery from the planned economy.

What could someone like that—a cerebral, establishment figure—have in common with Mr Litvinenko, a shadowy ex-spook who publicly accused Mr Putin of paedophilia, and Ms Politkovskaya, a journalist whose incendiary articles regularly described the Russian president and his aides as war criminals?

The most terrifying explanation is that the Kremlin, or some other powerful faction in Russia, is systematically intimidating every kind of critic. Ms Politkovskaya because she was their best-known critic in the media, both at home and abroad. Mr Litvinenko because he was a defector. Mr Gaidar because his brainy liberal views undermine the Kremlin’s authoritarian and incompetent rule.

But it is puzzling that the poisoning was unsuccessful. Was this just a warning, or was it bungled?
Mr Gaidar, his daughter and his friends all say that they do not think Mr Putin’s Kremlin is behind the poisoning (if that is indeed what it was). British security officials are hedging their bets. They think that a “rogue element” of current and former FSB officers is at work.

If so, what do they want? Are they doing what they think Mr Putin will like? Are they trying to undermine him. Or perhaps to force his hand?

One of Mr Gaidar’s closest friends, Anatoly Chubais, now runs Russia’s giant electricity company, UES. He is publicly loyal to the Kremlin, but privately says he is increasingly worried that bad government is starving the country of investment. “It was a miracle that we kept the lights on last winter. And this winter will be even harder,” he confided recently to a visitor.

He believes that the murders “perfectly correspond to the interests and the vision of those people who are openly talking about a forceful, unconstitutional change of power in Russia.”

One possibility is that hardliners want to force Mr Putin from power, and replace him with someone more decisive and forceful, who will overtly rebuild the Soviet empire, rather than doing it behind the scenes as at the moment. But that seems unlikely. Mr Putin is the most popular politician in Russian history. It would be hard find anyone to replace him.

Alternatively, it could be an attempt by hardliners to force him into their camp. If relations with the West deteriorate sharply, then Russia’s only option will be to abandon any pretence of democracy and retreat into an alliance with rogue states such as Iran. But that hardly seems likely either. Russia has cultivated good relations with European countries such as France and Germany, in order to squeeze the countries inbetween such as Poland and the Baltic states. Why abandon that tactic when it is working so well?

The Kremlin’s own line is that the whole thing is got up by enemies of Russia, chiefly Boris Berezovsky, the London-based billionaire who was closely linked to Mr Litvinenko. Both men believe that the Kremlin blew up apartment blocks in Moscow in 1999 in order to blame them on Chechen terrorists, and create a public panic that would ease Mr Putin’s path to power.

One clue is that the Russian constitution says that Mr Putin has to stand down as Russian president in 2008. Inside its red walls, the Kremlin is abuzz with intrigue about how to manage this “problem”. One option is to change the constitution, to allow a third consecutive term. Another is to ignore it—by declaring a state of emergency—and third is to bypass it, by shifting Mr Putin to another job, and installing a figurehead as president. Somewhere in this maze of intrigue may lie the answer to the serial murders of Russia’s critics.

But the only thing that is really certain is that we do not know the truth. Russia’s security services are masters in the art of “maskirovka” [camouflage]. Whether the aim is to manipulate opinion in Russia or abroad, or to intimidate critics, or something else, enough false clues will be strewn that we are unlikely to see what is really going on until it is too late.


Edward Lucas is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.

book review

Bombing Germany

Bad, but was it wicked too?

Nov 30th 2006
From The Economist print edition

The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-45 By Jörg Friedrich. Translated by Allison Brown Columbia University Press; 532 pages; $34.95. To be published in Britain by Columbia in January Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

BOMBING German cities into a wasteland was terrible: anyone reading Jörg Friedrich's book, now published for the first time in English, will be in no doubt of the cultural destruction and human suffering that it caused. For many Germans, the experience of reading the unvarnished awfulness of their own, their parents' or grandparents' wartime experiences was cathartic. The translation will fill a gap in contemporary understanding in the English-speaking world of what happened in the air in the second world war. Mr Friedrich deserves credit for both his diligence and his descriptive powers.

For all that, the book is flawed. Many bad things happen in wartime and countries that start wars often experience the worst of them. Its implicit thesis is that the allied bombing campaign was a vindictive and unprovoked attack on a country that itself adhered scrupulously to the rules of war. That is not something a reputable historian would argue. The author's outrage, and the sarcastic and melodramatic prose that this fuels, dims any understanding of the context in which Winston Churchill and his air chiefs decided that the air onslaught on German cities was the best (or least bad) course of action, and stuck to this even when the cost, to both bombers and bombed, became increasingly awful.

With the benefit of hindsight, bombing smashed neither morale nor war production. But wartime leaders do not have the benefit of hindsight. The bombing proved dreadfully mistaken. But had it worked, it would have ended the war more quickly. It was not wicked or without reason.

Mr Friedrich seems to assume that the allied commanders always knew that they would win the war, and decided to accelerate victory for their own brutal reasons. Yet the truth is that the allies were not at all sure they would win, even once Stalin's huge army had begun to march westwards. Hitler's propaganda machine was boasting about new secret weapons which would change the course of the war. That proved to be vainglory. But there was no way of knowing this until the very end—and until that time came, it was vital to defeat Hitler as completely and as quickly as possible.

There are other weaknesses too. The book is badly translated, to the point that readers who do not know German will find some passages baffling. Worse, Mr Friedrich's desire to puncture Anglo-American self-satisfaction comes perilously close to suggesting that the Germans were right to defend Nazism, and the allies were wrong to attack it.