Molotov/Polonsky

The bloody age of Vyacheslav Molotov

Bullying bibliophile
Mar 4th 2010
From The Economist print edition


Stalin’s violent henchman and his library may have inspired a modern classic


Molotov’s Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History. By Rachel Polonsky. Faber and Faber; 388 pages; £20.

EXPATRIATE spouses living pampered lives in Moscow often think it would be nice to write a book about their time there. The material is irresistible: vastness, extremes, depths and delights. But the trite, coy and overly personal jottings that result often prove quite resistible. Rachel Polonsky moved to Moscow with her lawyer husband and stayed for a decade. Her perceptive and erudite book is the exception and sets a standard to freeze the ink in others’ pens.

Ms Polonsky was a fellow at Cambridge University who initially planned to spend her time in Moscow working on a follow-up to her previous book, a heavyweight study of Russian orientalism. Instead she has produced a spectacular and enjoyable display of intellectual fireworks for the general reader.

The book’s core is other books: the fragments of a library that Ms Polonsky discovers in her neighbour’s flat, which once belonged to one of Russia’s greatest monsters, Vyacheslav Molotov. Stalin’s most devoted henchman in the blood-drenched years of the Great Terror, Molotov signed a record 373 death warrants for senior officials, including his close colleagues. He also co-signed, with Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, another death warrant—the deal that dismembered the countries of central Europe and the Baltic states. Toasted by Molotov and Hitler at a banquet in Berlin, the Nazi-Soviet pact consigned millions to death, slavery and destitution.

The butcher was a bibliophile. His books, sometimes annotated, or even with his moustache hairs left, repellently, as page markers, are much in Ms Polonsky’s thoughts during her journeys to Russia’s bleak north, lush south and distant east. Her finely drawn literary travelogues on Taganrog, Murmansk, Vologda, Irkutsk and other places depict squalor, pomp, misery, exhilaration, heroism and brutishness, each cameo framed in its historical, cultural and physical context.

Some of the material comes from Molotov’s books, others from Ms Polonsky’s well-stocked mind. Few readers will have her encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Anna Akhmatova, Isaak Babel, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Herzen, Varlam Shamalov and Marina Tsvetaeva, to name but a few. But while reading the book they will feel that they do. Ms Polonsky wears her considerable learning lightly.

She has a knack for putting herself into other people’s shoes with empathy and skill. During a visit to Moscow’s luxurious Sadunovsky bathhouse she spots a fellow-bather reading Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West”; another is applying a home-made unguent consisting of cream and coffee grounds. Spengler, a German historian, thought that cities were ulcers on the body of Russia. What, she asks, would he have made of this scene? That prompts a captivating excursion into the mystical significance of the steam bath, from its rural pagan roots to modern urban body worship.

Ms Polonsky’s interest in the spiritual comes across strongly. She highlights the significance of Aleksandr Men, an inspirational Orthodox priest murdered as the Soviet Union died. Her description of the Bolsheviks’ desecration of the Savvino-Storozhevsky monastery in the midst of the last monks’ final liturgy is memorable. So is her icy account of the creepy religiosity, bordering on paganism, that is to be found in the upper reaches of the current Russian regime.

The contempt she feels for the greed, filth and viciousness that she encounters is all the more compelling for being understated. Her sympathy and affection for the finest bits of Russia’s past and present shine through—whether for the civic traditions of ancient Novgorod, for the aristocratic rebels of the Decembrists or for more modern martyrs such as the Mandelstams or Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist murdered in 2006. The reader catches only fleeting glimpses of Ms Polonsky herself. That contrasts pleasingly with the self-centredness that is present in so much other Western writing about Russia. As her book shows, the author has grit, charm and style—and a gift for traveller’s tales.

Asmus book review

Georgia and Russia

Ungodly suffering
Jan 21st 2010
From The Economist print edition


An American take on a war that fed conspiracies throughout Europe

A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West. By Ronald Asmus. Palgrave Macmillan; 250 pages; $27 and £20.

TWO points about the war in Georgia in 2008 have stuck in outsiders’ memories. One is that it was quite unexpected. The other is that Georgia started it. Both, in Ronald Asmus’s view, are wrong.

The real cause of the war, he argues, was Russia’s determination to block Georgia’s American-educated and America-loving president, Mikheil Saakashvili. He had embarked on “a crash course to turn Georgia from a semi-failed state into a reform tiger that could become the catalyst for creating a democratic pro-Western corridor in the southern Caucasus…it was a breathtaking vision.”

Mr Asmus’s metaphors may be breathtakingly mixed, but his big point is right. Situated on the most promising east-west route for oil and gas, Georgia was becoming an economic and political success story under Mr Saakashvili, who took power in the “Rose revolution” of 2003. Its pluralism was a profound challenge to the authoritarian crony capitalism taking root in Russia under Vladimir Putin.

Mr Saakashvili’s growing sway in two Russian-backed breakaway regions of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, was also an increasing nuisance for the Kremlin. He had restored Georgian control over a corner of Abkhazia and set up a loyalist administration inside South Ossetia—an untidy place with villages of varying ethnic and political make-up.

For Russia, that was intolerable, Mr Asmus argues. The Kremlin, therefore, deliberately provoked the Georgian leader into starting a war that he was bound to lose. Humiliating Georgia was also a way of paying back NATO for the recognition of Kosovo, a breakaway province of Serbia. And it signalled the limits of America’s role in Russia’s back yard.

Mr Asmus writes with authority. He is a former American official who masterminded the first enlargement of NATO to the ex-communist east. In his office, now at a Brussels think-tank, souvenirs include a commemorative sword given by the “grateful nation of Poland”. He has lobbied hard for new candidates, including the Baltic states, which joined NATO in 2004, and most recently for Georgia.

His book lays bare the dilemma facing Mr Saakashvili in the summer of 2008. Russian provocations against Georgia had been escalating for months, with a mixture of economic pressure, subversion and military attacks, chiefly by air. The West’s response was feeble. It made anodyne pleas to both sides to refrain from using force. It was not prepared to say unequivocally to Russia that destabilising Georgia would have serious inevitable consequences.

On July 29th 2008, Russia’s proxies in South Ossetia started shelling pro-Georgian villages there. What was Mr Saakashvili supposed to do? If he ignored the shelling, leaving his supporters to flee or be killed, the loss of prestige would be catastrophic. His pleas to the outside world to intervene were ignored. Moreover, Mr Saakashvili received intelligence (probably exaggerated) that large numbers of Russian troops were crossing into South Ossetia, perhaps as reinforcements, perhaps as a prelude to a full-scale invasion.

Mr Saakashvili decided to act at once, ordering troops into South Ossetia to stop the shelling but not to fight the Russian troops there. As Mr Asmus recounts with painful clarity, that decision was a disaster. The Georgian army lacked plans, troops, equipment, training and communications. All it had was hopes of a quick victory, of Russian hesitancy and of Western support. In fact, huge Russian reinforcements poured in, and within a few days were poised to take Tbilisi.

America stood back, though Mr Asmus gives an intriguing hint that at least some officials were arguing, albeit tentatively and unsuccessfully, for a military response to defend Georgia. That could have ended the war quickly—or led to a terrifying escalation. In the end, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, on behalf of the European Union, brokered a messy ceasefire.

The book’s detailed inside accounts of Georgian and Western manoeuvring before, during and after the war are gripping. Mr Asmus is caustic about the outside world’s failure to forestall the conflict. Hundreds of people died and many thousands of people lost their homes because of that. In particular he highlights the weakness of NATO (crippled by feuding over the Iraq war) and of the self-centred and complacent EU.

He is rather kinder—too kind, many might feel—to the Georgians. Many decisions and actions may have been mistaken and deserve scrutiny, he concedes. But the author flinches from condemning even the most lamentable mistakes outright. In particular, the heavy-handed crackdown on opposition demonstrators and media in November 2007 played a big role in tarnishing Georgia’s image abroad. This deserves more than the couple of sentences Mr Asmus devotes to it here. Mr Saakashvili’s exasperating habits were similarly damaging: disorganisation, self-indulgence, verbosity, favouritism and vindictiveness are just a few. Mr Asmus also ignores how far the Georgian leadership’s American cheerleaders, especially in some corners of the Republican Party, may have made it overconfident.

Insights from the Russian side are also missing (because officials in Moscow declined to talk to him, says Mr Asmus). What were the Kremlin’s real war aims? How badly did Russia’s military forces do? What conclusions did Russian leaders draw? The definitive book on that is still to come, but Mr Asmus’s work sets a high standard.

Berlin Airlift review

e Berlin airlift

Flying coal
Dec 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition


A human history of the allies’ airlift that saved West Berlin



Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of the Berlin Airlift, June 1948-May 1949. By Richard Reeves. Simon & Schuster; 304 pages; $28 and £16.99.

HEROISM, geopolitics and new technology make an ideal mixture for a popular historian. The story of the Berlin airlift in 1948-49 has all that and more. The Anglo-American decision to circumvent the arbitrary Soviet closure of road and rail routes to the German capital marked the start of the cold war. For the first time, the Western allies were signalling their willingness to resist the creeping Soviet takeover of the eastern half of Europe. The airlift’s end, with Soviet acceptance of a new West German currency in West Berlin, was a stalemate that remained in place in Europe until the collapse of communism 40 years later.

By the end of the airlift, an astonishing 2.25m tonnes of cargo had flown in and out of the city, more than three-quarters of it on American planes. Among the fatalities, the proportions were rather different: 39 British citizens and 32 Americans.

The airlift was not just the only time in history when large quantities of coal have been delivered by air. It also brought leaps in air-traffic control and cargo handling. It even featured a primitive but effective electronic data interchange, jury-rigged from telex machines.

But as the book’s title suggests, Richard Reeves’s main emphasis is on the human side. At centre-stage are General Lucius Clay, the iron-willed military governor of the American sector of Berlin, and the workaholic logistics chief William Tunner, who during the war had supervised a trans-Himalayan military airlift. Behind them stands the figure of Harry Truman, the American president who overruled his entire military, diplomatic and security staff to insist that Berlin be saved.

The veterans’ stark descriptions of flying in foul weather, the exhaustion and danger, the rickety under-maintained aircraft and the newly wed brides stranded on the other side of the world, are undimmed by time. (Indeed, in some cases, a sceptical reader might wonder if memory has honed the wisecracks and dialogues, transcribed verbatim after 60 years.)

In Berlin and the other Western-occupied parts of Germany, the airlift marked the start of a shift from life as a defeated and distrusted adversary to one as an inseparable friend and American ally. At the beginning of the blockade, Berliners were still a brutalised and resentful subject people, expected to doff their caps to the occupying forces. A year later, they were still cold and hungry and living in bombed-out cellars—but cheering the airmen who had saved them from starvation and slavery. Had the airlift failed, the revenge of the communist authorities on those contaminated by contact with the Western allies would have been ruthless. In passing, Mr Reeves mentions some hapless policemen from West Berlin arrested at the city’s town hall (in the Soviet sector); most were never seen again.

In one of the many compelling vignettes the author describes how the allies hired German mechanics and loading hands. Only three years earlier, American or British pilots shot down over Germany risked being lynched. Now they were trusting their lives to the Germans who maintained their planes and stacked the cargo.

Although highly readable, the book includes no groundbreaking historical research. It mentions no German-language sources. A prolific American author, Mr Reeves is writing for a home audience. But he gamely tries to widen his focus to include at least a bit of the British viewpoint. Few Americans will know that rationing in Britain was worse after the war than during it, making the cost of the airlift sharply greater. American pilots liked to drop sweets in little parachutes as a personal gift to the hungry children waiting at the airport’s edge. Their British counterparts had no sweets.

Chechnya book review

War in the Caucasus

A small corner, very bloody
Dec 10th 2009
From The Economist print edition


Chechnya may have been largely pacified, but it is far from being at peace


Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya. By Wojciech Jagielski. Translated by Soren Gauger. Seven Stories Press; 329 pages; $19.95. Buy from Amazon.com

FORMIDABLE, useful in war and, though picturesque, impractical in peacetime, the stone towers that dot Chechnya’s mountains could be regarded as symbols of its people. Wojciech Jagielski’s book sets new standards for gritty reporting of Russia’s most miserable corner, and the dreadful damage done to it by both outsiders and the Chechens’ own leaders.

Most readers will know something of the Chechen story: a toxic mix of terrorism, kidnapping, guerrilla warfare and reprisals. Two wars have ruined the country. Both began with attempts by Russia, over 100 times more populous, to restore order in what the Kremlin sees as a troublesome province. The first war, from 1994 to 1996, ended in a draw. The second, starting in 1999, has defeated the organised Chechen resistance, and installed a brutal local warlord, Ramzan Kadyrov, as Russia’s satrap. Chechnya is largely pacified, but it could hardly be called at peace.

What was all the bloodshed about? One point of view argues that the war was mainly a struggle against banditry. The tight-knit Chechen clan structure was ideally suited to running organised crime, first in the Soviet Union and then in Russia. Chechnya in the 1990s became the gangster capital of Russia, with a kidnapping industry that many believed was verging on organised slave trading.

Another viewpoint insists that this is a war about Islam, with the Chechens as fearsome harbingers of jihadism in the Caucasus. In the late 1990s no government recognised Chechnya or Taliban-run Afghanistan, but they had diplomatic relations with each other. Jihadist volunteers stiffened the Chechen resistance, and Chechens have repaid the favour in wars elsewhere. A third view dismisses all this as smears: the real truth is that Chechnya and its people are prisoners of the Russian empire, struggling heroically to regain the independence lost in the 19th century.



Mr Jagielski’s book shuns such stereotypes, while showing that all three perspectives have some validity. His first great asset is time spent on the ground. He is a journalist at Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s biggest independent daily. An heir of sorts to Ryszard Kapuscinski, he specialises, as did the older Polish reporter, in Africa, as well as Central Asia and the Caucasus. Whereas most journalists (foreign or local) visit Chechnya fleetingly, Mr Jagielski has lived there for repeated periods of many weeks, staying with Chechen families, slipping in and out of clandestine meetings with guerrilla commanders in safe houses under the noses of Russian troops.

The book brings to life the danger, squalor and misery of daily life in Chechnya with almost unbearable clarity. The partial stability of traditional clan practices was half-destroyed by the deportation of the entire nation to the steppes of Central Asia in 1944. The death and destruction of the past 20 years have finished the job—and opened the way for outsiders and youngsters, often with wilder ideas of their own.

That was an impossible challenge for the mainstream Chechen leadership—the dapper Jokhar Dudayev, the first president, and one of his ill-starred successors, Aslan Maskhadov. Both men had achieved high rank in the Soviet military (no small matter for Chechens, who tend to be distrusted and despised by Russians). They had exceptional military skills, but both were overwhelmed by the task of running a country in which personal and family honour counts for more than the law. Jailing a criminal, no matter how vile, is likely to cause a vendetta that will last for 12 generations.

Mr Jagielski paints memorable portraits of both men, and of their biggest headache, Shamil Basayev. The mercurial and brilliant unofficial military leader was responsible for some of the most revolting terrorist atrocities perpetrated in the Chechens’ name. Basayev, like the other more moderate Chechen leaders, was demonised by Russia and is now dead.

Mr Jagielski’s book is equally compelling about the lives of the more humble people among whom he has lived: Chechen fathers do not cuddle or play with their sons for fear of making them weak. Chechen women have become emancipated, unwillingly, by war: they spend a lot of time touring Russian prisons trying to recover their menfolk.

Kati Marton

Type your s
A child in communist Hungary

Little girls, big story

Nov 19th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Getty Images

Capitalist rulers are so much nicer

Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America. By Kati Marton. Simon & Schuster; 288 pages; $26. Buy from Amazon.com

COMMUNIST bullies had a nasty trick when dealing with opponents who had children: they took them away, sometimes to be adopted by childless party stalwarts, in nastier cases to be sent to orphanages and treated as the children of criminals, or even to be consigned to an asylum. In retrospect it seems astonishing that Endre and Ilona Marton, a married couple working for American news agencies in Hungary at the height of the Stalinist era, exposed their two small daughters to such risks, their greatest fear. But they did. Decades later the younger, Kati (pictured with Bill Clinton), has pieced together her family’s missing history, a series of torments that epitomises the human cost of the communist seizure of central Europe.

Ms Marton’s main source is the now declassified secret-police files compiled by the AVO, Hungary’s version of the KGB. They chronicled minutely her parents’ professional and social lives, which moved in ever-decreasing circles as the communist grip on Hungary tightened. Sometimes the result is welcome: an AVO snooper’s stolid note brings back long-forgotten memories of a summer picnic. More often it is grim: almost everyone, it turns out, was informing on the Martons, from neighbours to the nanny. Through it all, her father baffled his persecutors, who could not believe that the suave, stylish polyglot was just what he claimed to be: a hard-living, hard-playing newsman. His undoing came when a traitor in the American embassy reported that he had lent to officials there a copy of an official document, the state budget. Not exactly a secret, but pretext enough to send him to be broken in the AVO’s dungeons.

Few grown-ups come out well in this story. Hungarian officials were callous and uncomprehending. Friends proved unreliable. Mr Marton’s American employers dithered, while American diplomats doubted the Martons’ reliability. Mr Marton’s bravado remains incomprehensible, even to his adoring daughter 50 years later. In the midst of it all are two little girls, precociously aware of the dramas swirling around them, left crying on the pavement when their mother is snatched from their home to join their father in jail. A Utah couple, reading that the girls were being brought up by strangers, offered, in vain, to adopt them.

Ms Marton avoids being too self-centred or sentimental as she tells the story. She highlights uncomfortable discoveries—her parents’ infidelities, that her grandparents perished at Auschwitz—as well as noble ones. Her descriptions of Hungary, of communist history and of secret-police tactics are all sharply drawn. So is the portrayal of the family’s life in America: they managed to escape after the 1956 uprising. The happy ending comes as a great relief after so many nerve-racking pages.

Czechoslovakia and historical vinegar

Czechoslovakia

A chequered history

Nov 19th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Czechoslovakia was born out of trickery and died in failure. Only up to a point

Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed. By Mary Heimann. Yale University Press; 406 pages; $45 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

OUTSIDERS tend to have a soft spot for Czechoslovakia. Poignant music by Leos Janacek, Antonin Dvorak and Bedrich Smetana recalls the struggle for nationhood that culminated in the creation in 1918 of a commendably decent country. Western perfidy at Munich brought its dismemberment at Nazi hands. Stories of courage and anguish leap out from the pages of novels by Milan Kundera (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”), Josef Skvorecky (“The Engineer of Human Souls”) and Ivan Klima (“Judge on Trial”). Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright turned philosopher-president, exemplifies the magical triumph of the Velvet Revolution, 20 years ago this week.

Hooks for outside affection abound. Czechoslovaks were strongly Atlanticist. The country owed its existence to President Woodrow Wilson, and Tomas Masaryk, its first president, had an American wife. The combination of high culture and glorious architecture reminded Westerners that it was communist captivity that made “Eastern Europe” backward and miserable. Guilt chipped in too. The West betrayed Czechoslovakia in 1938. It stood by as the Soviet-backed Communists seized power in 1948, and again when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring in 1968. And Czech and Slovak dissidents were far more agreeable than their weird and prickly counterparts elsewhere.

Mary Heimann’s scalpel shreds this uplifting version of history. Inter-war Czechoslovakia was essentially a fraud, she argues, both in its composition and its reputation for liberalism. The wily duo of Masaryk and Eduard Benes (the dominant politicians of the years that followed) duped the victorious Western allies into agreeing to the creation of a new country. Named after only two of its ethnic groups, it ignored the interests of all the others: chiefly Germans, who outnumbered the Slovaks, and Hungarians. Its unjust treatment of the Sudeten Germans, stranded by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, ultimately caused the first Czechoslovak republic’s downfall.

After pointing out the intolerance, censorship and semi-authoritarianism of pre-war Czechoslovakia, Ms Heimann, an American-born historian at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, then highlights the anti-Semitism and autocracy that followed the Munich agreement. Sympathetic observers have tended to blame that on Czechoslovak disappointment with the West; she suggests that it was a culmination of existing tendencies. The Nazi occupation that came next met minimal resistance. Her vinegary attention then turns to the diplomatic manoeuvring of exiled Czechoslovak leaders such as Benes and Jan Masaryk, son of Tomas. History normally portrays them as exiled patriots engaged in a gallant struggle. Ms Heimann, however, sees a story of Czech guile and Western gullibility. How was it, exactly, that a bunch of failed émigré politicians were able to gain the status of a legitimate government-in-exile, she asks?

The three post-war years before the communist seizure of power in 1948 come across not as a blessed breathing space between two totalitarian regimes, but as a horrible period of racial revenge: rape, robbery and deportation inflicted on guilty and blameless Germans alike. The Communists then created what she rightly calls a “Stalinist hell”—but with the support of quite a large chunk of the population.

Nor is Ms Heimann fooled by the Prague Spring: not an exuberant experiment in creating “socialism with a human face” but the by-product of a factional fight in the Communist Party. Even the 1989 revolution, she argues, only accelerated the changes already being planned. Soon after, the invented country of Czechoslovakia fell to pieces; the reader can almost hear her applauding.

Myth-busting is fun but it can easily become tiresome.

Ms Heimann ably highlights the holes and contradictions in Czechoslovak history. Her archival research and attention to detail is exemplary. But she spoils her case by sounding spiteful. The story of the revival of the Czech language in the 19th century deserves more than mockery. Although she pays fleeting tribute to Mr Havel she cannot resist qualifying it by saying that he “appears to have had” moral courage in addition to “an idiosyncratic brand of ambition”; that, she argues, fooled the West into seeing post-communist Czechoslovakia more favourably. This approach shamefully underplays the gritty determination of the Communist-era dissidents and of their friends in the West, who often felt they were fighting a hopeless battle.

Ms Heimann is right to highlight the messy opportunism that surrounded the break-up of the Habsburg empire. Czechoslovakia was an artificial creation. But so, in the end, are all countries. Inter-war Czechoslovakia treated Germans badly. But it was still a far more attractive country in terms of civil rights (for example in the treatment of Jews) than any of its neighbours, especially Hitler’s Germany. The post-war punishment of the Germans was indeed deplorable—but the aftermath of wars is often horribly messy. Czechoslovak communists may have been exceptionally revolting; but the democrats were often magnificent. Clear-eyed historical reminders are always welcome. Like everyone, Czechs and Slovaks have plenty to be ashamed of. But they have plenty to be proud of too.

1989 books

The fall of Communism

Wall stories

Nov 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition

How communism in eastern Europe collapsed, and what came next. Scholars and journalists give their account

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment. By Stephen Kotkin. Modern Library; 197 pages; $24. Buy from Amazon.com

1989: The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall. By Peter Millar. Arcadia; 220 pages; £11.99. To be published in America by Arcadia in April 2010; $16.95. Buy from Amazon.com,Amazon.co.uk

The Year that Changed the World. By Michael Meyer. Scribner; 254 pages; $26. Simon and Schuster; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire. By Victor Sebestyen. Pantheon; 451 pages; $30. Weidenfeld and Nicolson; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

'89: The Unfinished Revolution: Power and Powerlessness in Eastern Europe. By Nick Thorpe. Reportage Press; 320 pages; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe. By Mary Elise Sarotte. Princeton University Press; 307 pages; $29.95 and £24.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

WHY all the fuss about 1989? Twenty years on, the idea of millions of people yearning for the humdrum joys of daily life in welfare capitalism no longer seems so startling or moving. Familiarity has dimmed the excitement of the freedoms won: to travel, to shop, to exchange currency, to change jobs, to move house, to think, to speak. Experience has scarred the belief that “Western” life is a self-correcting nirvana, where officials are efficient, politicians public-spirited and justice incorruptible. For about a third of the world’s population, the fall of the wall is probably history, not real life.

The best way to appreciate the significance of 1989 is to remember what it was a revolution against. The new edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic novel, “In the First Circle” (Harper Perennial, $18), captures better than any other work of fiction the quintessence of communist rule at its Stalinist peak: all-pervasive, paranoid, oppressive, incompetent, lethal.

By 1989 that system had become more rotten and less frightening, especially in the east European satellites of the evil empire. But the climate of fear and lies was still there, with political prisoners, murders, beatings and blackmail, especially in the grimmer places such as East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Eight hectic months in 1989 turned the winter so starkly described by Solzhenitsyn into spring.

The new edition of the novel differs subtly but importantly from the version published in English in 1968. That was based on a self-censored text that the author had prepared in the hope of getting it published in the Soviet Union. It left out the hero’s espionage for America, the Christian faith of his friend and other details that the Soviet authorities would have found utterly intolerable. The longer text is deeper and darker.

For all its malevolence, the Soviet empire was like a Ponzi scheme, dependent on ever-increasing amounts of money. When that ran out, its regimes imploded. That is the story told in Stephen Kotkin’s slender but snappy book, which concentrates on demoralisation and divisions in what he calls “uncivil society”, the circles of power. This side of life, he argues, was more important than the dissidents, who were lionised in the West as “civil society”, but ignored and unknown at home.

Mr Kotkin is right that bankruptcy forced some regimes to make concessions, but he greatly overstates his case. Czechoslovakia was under little immediate economic pressure to change. As the grim examples of Romania then and North Korea now both show, a sufficiently determined communist leadership can survive economic failure through repression. Moreover, 1989 is the story of people as well as processes. Although the reformers and ship-jumpers inside the regimes were important, in most countries it was the dissidents who forced the pace of change.

The real point, though, is that fitting a dozen complex stories into a single analytical straitjacket is a nonsense. Communism collapsed differently in every country, as the journalists who reported the story could see. Their accounts published for this anniversary are necessarily episodic: too much was happening for one person to witness it all. But each book carries the vital touch of personal experience.

The best read is the irreverent and engaging account by Peter Millar, who writes for the Sunday Times among other papers. Fastidious readers who expect reporters to be a mere lens on events will be shocked at the amount of personal detail, including the sexual antics and drinking habits of his colleagues in what now seems a Juvenalian age of dissolute British journalism. He mentions his long-suffering wife and children rather too often, but the result is full of insights and on occasion delightfully funny. The author has a knack for befriending interesting people and tracking down important ones. He weaves their words with his clear-eyed reporting of events into a compelling narrative about the end of the cruel but bungling East German regime.

View from the top

At the other end of the spectrum is the Olympian perspective of a former Newsweek bureau chief for Germany and eastern Europe. Michael Meyer ranges widely and not always deeply. His best reporting is on Hungary, particularly on the decision by the reform-minded leadership there to open the border with Austria. That destabilised the East German regime, first creating an embarrassing outflow of refugees, and then forcing the Berlin authorities to restrict travel freedoms still further. This is a competent and professional account—though it does not quite merit its claim to be the untold story.

A more solid and less pretentious book comes from Victor Sebestyen, who has covered the region since the 1970s. His book deals more thoroughly with both history and geography. He starts the story, rightly, with the election in 1978 of John Paul II, the Polish pope. He highlights Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the other two giant figures who ended the communist epoch. Unlike his rivals, the author devotes at least some space to developments in other continents.

Few journalists covering the region lived there in the communist era, inevitably giving their accounts a second-hand feel. An exception is Nick Thorpe, who moved to Budapest in 1986 and has mastered Hungary’s beautiful, impenetrable language. His account of the interplay between dissidents and reformists inside the regime shows a level of sympathy and nuance that is missing from more ambitious accounts—and makes his own chapters on events in other countries look skimpy.

Almost more interesting than his description of the collapse of Hungarian communism are Mr Thorpe’s insights into what came next, told through the unlikely prism of obstetrics. Abominable practices stayed in place after 1989, treating birth as a medical emergency in which painful and humiliating procedures such as episiotomy, shaving and enemas were mandatory. Parents’ wishes were habitually ignored. Mr Thorpe and his wife decided they wanted their children born at home: a normal procedure in western Europe but illegal in Hungary. The medical bureaucracy’s cartel-like resistance gives a pungent flavour of the lingering communist-era mindset that the region still has to shake off.

No whiff of the personal contaminates Mary Elise Sarotte’s scrupulous account of the high politics and diplomacy of 1989. With remarkable diligence, she has interviewed almost all the surviving participants, and quarried government archives and other libraries for documents that illustrate the decision-making (and lack of it) that year. The result is a tale of hypocrisy and indecision in high places.

Some of it, however, is commendable. After the Tiananmen massacre in June, communist leaders could not quite summon the willpower to use mass murder to stay in power. On the Western side, it is sometimes deplorable. For all her fiery freedom-loving speeches, Margaret Thatcher, then Britain’s prime minister, privately loathed the idea of German unification and tried to sabotage it, covering her tracks as she did so. The then American president, George Bush senior, comes across badly too, giving tepid and unemotional responses in public and missing the chances that 1989 presented.

Ms Sarotte debunks myths: the opening of the wall on November 9th was not planned, let alone forced. It was the result of a bungle: a bureaucratic rule-change misleadingly announced and over-excitedly reported. German unification was not inevitable: outsiders, the new East German leadership and many West Germans wanted something else. It came thanks to a combination of electoral pressure in the East and highly effective arm-twisting by the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl.

Missing in all this is a powerful voice from the countries concerned. Writers such as Solzhenitsyn, Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish poet, and Czech novelists such as Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima and Josef Skvorecky helped the world understand life under communism. But no writer from the region, in fact or fiction, has produced a matching account of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and its aftermath. The way in which the countries of central Europe, the Baltics and the Balkans emerged from communist captivity, made peace (mostly) with their history, and rebuilt the economic, legal, moral and psychological order destroyed five decades previously is a gripping story. It has yet to be fully told.The author comes across as more at home with her sources than with the region’s wider history. The pope, she writes, “continued to dominate the Vatican” in 1989. That is what popes normally do. In analysing the question of whether NATO’s eastward expansion broke a promise to Mr Gorbachev (it didn’t), she overlooks the worries of countries in central Europe about Russia’s ominous drift back to old habits in the 1990s.

Europe view 144 summer reading

EUROPE

Europe.view

Summer reading

Aug 6th 2009
From Economist.com

Investigations, analyses and a rediscovered novel

NOTHING happens in eastern Europe during August, save the odd war, coup or financial collapse, so people interested in the region have a whole month to catch up on good books, old and new. This summer brings a crop that should keep even a speed reader busy. “Revolution 1989”, by Victor Sebestyen, offers a digestible and colourful history of that miraculous year. Andrew Roberts’s “The Storm of War”, is a rare example of a British writer giving the second world war's eastern front proper prominence. “Londongrad: From Russia with Cash,” (pictured below) by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley, is a racy and alarming investigation of the effect of Russian money on Britain.

At the more specialist end of the spectrum, Tom Gallagher’s new book about Romania and the EU—subtitled “How the weak vanquished the strong”—gives a bleak and gripping account of how wily ex-communist bureaucrats bamboozled the outside world and swindled their own people. Those who read his previous book, the excellent “Theft of a Nation”, will know what to expect. Espionage aficionados will enjoy the densely written but convincing “Spies” by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, which tells the (true) story of KGB activities in North America.

Your columnist flirted with some ambitious ideas such as rereading Czeslaw Milosz in Polish, or finishing the Miklos Banffy trilogy about aristocratic life in pre-communist Transylvania. What he actually ended up packing was a newly republished (by Faber & Faber) edition of William Palmer’s neglected 1990 classic, “The Good Republic”. Good contemporary fiction about the region is rare (Tibor Fischer’s “Under the Frog” is an exception). Corny spy thrillers, littered with topographical howlers, unlikely plots and plonking sex scenes, are the standard fare.

Mr Palmer’s book set a standard for an east European historical novel that has yet to be matched—an especially impressive feat for an outsider.

It is mainly set during the Soviet takeover of the Baltics in 1939-40, so this year’s anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact makes it highly topical. Even more vivid than the deportations and executions are the descriptions of the swift decay of statehood and legality: the policeman trampled by pro-Soviet demonstrators, civil servants struggling to uphold the constitution, the sinister placemen issuing instructions, the president a prisoner in his palace. Then comes the Soviet retreat and the Nazi occupation—a sinister non-liberation, bringing a terrible fate to the Jewish population, and a moral abyss for those who directly or indirectly abet it.

All this comes as flashbacks, seen through the eyes of the young Jacob Balthus. At the start of the book he is a Baltic émigré in London, who has spent decades running the pointless and, by the 1980s, almost defunct “Congress of Exiles”. He returns at the invitation of the nascent pro-democracy movement in his homeland, where his father was a senior civil servant in the days of interwar independence.

The fractious and futile-seeming life of east European émigré organisations is well drawn, as is the trembling excitement of the late 1980s when once-forbidden contacts were first permitted and then flourished. But even better is the description of the (composite) pre-war Baltic country in which the young Balthus grows up, so solid from his point of view, so terrifyingly fragile for his wise, well-informed father.

Remarkably, Mr Palmer did not visit the Baltic states before writing the book; his research mainly consisted of reading transcripts of evidence given to congressional hearings by senior Baltic figures who had escaped to the West. It is a tribute to his novelist’s skills that anyone reading the book has the feeling of complete authenticity in both history and geography. Readers are left longing for a sequel.

Andrew Roberts book review

Andrew Roberts on the second world war

The road to hell
Jul 23rd 2009
From The Economist print edition


A British historian argues that Hitler lost the war for the same reason that he unleashed it—because he was a Nazi

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. By Andrew Roberts. Allen Lane; 712 pages; £25. To be published in America by HarperCollins in 2011.

ONLY a highly confident historian would set out to write a one-volume history of the second world war. And only a highly accomplished one could produce a book that manages to be distinctive but not eccentric, comprehensive in scope but not cramped by detail, giving due weight both to the extraordinary personalities and to the blind economic and physical forces involved.

Andrew Roberts certainly does not lack confidence and his talents are well suited to the task. His speciality is the bold sweep of narrative history, marshalling hard facts and telling anecdotes to support big judgments. For modern academic historians, his work is a bit adventurous: far safer to narrow down research to, say, the study of medieval nail prices in rural Wales.

The big theme of his new book is the interplay between Hitler’s personality and Nazi Germany’s fortunes on the battlefield. In brief, Mr Roberts argues that the war started when it did because Hitler was a Nazi, and that Germany lost it for the same reason. The Nazi leader’s blunders started when he began to turn his anti- Semitic rhetoric into practice, driving many of Germany’s best brains into exile. The allies won because “our German scientists were better than their German scientists”, was the pithy summary of the war’s outcome by one of Churchill’s closest aides, Sir Ian Jacob. Excellent German engineering and ruthless use of forced labour was not enough to make up for the drain of so many clever people into exile or concentration camps. A conservative-nationalist war leadership, unshackled by Hitler’s lunatic prejudices, could have developed advanced weapons far faster, perhaps even cracking the atom.

Hitler also started the war rather too early. A bigger and better U-boat fleet, for example, could have starved and crippled Britain. Sometimes he dithered, allowing the British army to escape from Dunkirk in 1940. More often it was impatience that was ruinous. Had the Axis powers finished off the British in north Africa first, they could have attacked Russia from the south as well as the east. Hitler’s “stand or die” orders gravely hampered the war in the east once the tide turned. His gratuitous decision to declare war on the United States after Pearl Harbour was another catastrophe (he regarded America as a military weakling). His failure to encourage Japan to attack the Soviet Union was similarly disastrous.

Mr Roberts likes punchy pronouncements and there are some fine ones here. After Japan’s initial military successes, previously contemptuous outsiders changed their minds: “From being a bandy kneed, myopic, oriental midget in Western eyes, the Japanese soldier was suddenly transformed into an invincible, courageous superman.” On Hitler’s geeky knowledge of military hardware, which led him constantly to second-guess his generals, he writes: “Because a trainspotter can take down the number of a train in his notebook it doesn’t mean he can drive one.”

The author’s research brings to light some startling facts. Even war buffs may be surprised to learn that the supposedly supine Vichy regime in France executed German spies, or that more Frenchmen fought on the Axis side than with the Allies. A nutty British official in charge of Malta put Sabbath observance ahead of unloading ships, at terrible cost. Another nearly lost the vital battle for Kohima, the gateway to India, because he wanted to keep to peacetime rules restricting the use of barbed wire. Orde Wingate, the hero of the Chindits’ campaign in Burma, was an ardent nudist who never bathed. (He scrubbed himself with a stiff brush, instead.) Mr Roberts is the first historian to gain access to a huge trove of personal letters and other documents assembled over 35 years by Ian Sayer, a British transport tycoon. Extracts provide Mr Roberts with some of his most telling personal anecdotes.

The most controversial part of the book will be the author’s unflinching judgments about the great controversies of the war. He briskly defends dropping atom bombs on Japan; after Okinawa, the price of a conventional assault looked particularly hideous. A test detonation would have been folly. America had only two bombs, and it was the second that (narrowly) persuaded Japan to surrender. On the allied bombing of Dresden he assembles a formidable array of facts and arguments against the post-war second-guessers who see it as a war crime. He notes that a German bombing raid on Yugoslavia in 1941 killed nearly as many people. Few remember, or complain, about that.

On other issues, though, he is more counter-intuitive. He does not believe, for example, that the Soviet army’s inaction during the Warsaw uprising in 1944 was a cynical attempt to let the Nazis deal with the anticommunist Polish resistance: the real reason was that the Red Army’s lines of communication had been overstretched by its rapid advance westward.

Mr Roberts hops nimbly between the Pacific and the Atlantic, though Asian readers may feel a bit shortchanged: the fighting in China gets particularly short shrift. Again and again he chides his readers for overestimating the importance of famous British and American battles in the West and overlooking much larger ones on the eastern front: more than 2m Germans were killed in the east, over ten times the number who died fighting in the west. “Britain provided the time, Russia the blood, America the money and the weapons,” he concludes.

He presents stylish penmanship, gritty research and lucid reasoning, coupled with poignant and haunting detours into private lives ruined and shortened. Mr Roberts shows boyish pleasure and admiration at the great feats of arms he describes. But the underlying tones of this magnificent book are in a minor key: furious sorrow at the waste of it all.

russian intelligentsia book review

Russia's intelligentsia under communism

Yearning to be free
Jul 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition


Illustration by Daniel Pudles


Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. By Vladislav Zubok. Harvard University Press/Belknap; 464 pages; $35 and £25.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE Soviet Union was a prison, especially for the lively minded, whose travel abroad and activities at home were dictated by the Communist Party’s cultural commissars. But in the period between the end of the Stalin terror and the start of the Brezhnev era’s grim stagnation, a lucky few enjoyed some wisps of freedom.

Cultural continuity between that period and a lost past is the central theme of “Zhivago’s Children”. The metaphorical reference is to Tanya, the child of Yuri and Lara Zhivago in Boris Pasternak’s great novel. Brought up by peasants, “she has no opportunity to inherit the tradition of free-thinking, spirituality and creativity that her father embodied.” How will she turn out? The novel leaves that fictional question unanswered. Vladislav Zubok’s book shows, with great sympathy and insight, what happened to Tanya’s real-life counterparts.

The Zhivago legacy is Russia’s “silver age”, when Anna Akhmatova, a poet, and Vasily Kandinsky, a painter, as well as others, flowered towards the end of the tsarist era and in the emancipated years immediately after the Bolshevik revolution. But Stalin, who liked uplifting stories and pictures featuring combine harvesters, banned their work as subversive and decadent. Many perished in the murderous frenzy of the 1930s. Yet enough survived to preserve at least some of the knowledge and traditions of the past.

The huge expansion of Soviet higher education after the war was supposed to create docile “cultural cadres”. What emerged were young people, marked by “boundless, sparkling optimism”, proud of their country’s achievements but open-minded to its failings. After Stalin’s death, their independent thought and behaviour became “oxygenated”. Tight-knit circles of friends, kompany in Russian, discussed love, life, letters and more. In one such group the young Mikhail Gorbachev struck up an instant, passionate and lifelong liaison with a bright culture-vulture called Raisa.

Writers such as Pasternak and Akhmatova were privately revered in these circles. But the real thaw began under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The World Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957 produced an orgy, sometimes literally, of contacts with thousands of visiting foreigners including from the capitalist West. In a society where such meetings had been as unlikely as a total solar eclipse, that had a huge impact. So did a freer press: the hard-hitting mass-market newspaper, Izvestia, and brainy, liberal-minded periodicals such as Novy Mir. As cultural iconoclasm swelled, Stalinist clichés (and the hacks who produced them) began to tumble.

Other controversies raged too, such as “lyrics v physics”. One camp believed that science would perfect society. The other sought answers from art and literature. Disagreement over that ended friendships and marriages. As the mental wounds of terror and war began to heal, the hardy survivors of the 1930s began to speak more freely to their young counterparts. Growing knowledge of the lies and crimes of the past barely shook the new intelligentsia’s faith in the Soviet system. Their world view was still Marxist, their patriotism genuine. Yet in their self-awareness and sense of mission, Zhivago’s children began to resemble the Russian intelligentsia of a century before.

Mr Zubok poignantly details the lengthy and bitter decline that followed. The earthy Khrushchev resented the cultural elite’s pretensions. Party bureaucrats saw them as subversive. The crushing of the Prague Spring destroyed faith in the Soviet system, and the intelligentsia splintered. A growing camp favoured Russian traditions and even chauvinism, denouncing the others as disloyal and cosmopolitan (and Jewish). Some writers collaborated out of cowardice or cynicism; others emigrated. A lonely few became dissidents, focusing intensely on support from the West, largely detached from everyday life in their own country. Similar divisions remain in Russia now.

The picture Mr Zubok paints so painstakingly is vivid. Yet it is only a tiny corner of the dreary canvas of Soviet life. A few thousand people in Moscow and St Petersburg had a nice and interesting time in the 1950s. But for many millions of their fellow-inmates, the Soviet decades were unrelievedly awful.

communism book review

Communism

Dead end
Jul 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition


Mankind’s biggest mistake


The Rise and Fall of Communism. By Archie Brown. Ecco; 736 pages; $35.99. The Bodley Head; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

WHY did communism take root? Given its sorrowful harvest, why did it keep spreading? And what ever enabled it to last so long? Archie Brown’s new history of communism identifies three big questions, perhaps even the biggest, of the past century.

At first sight, all seem puzzling. Communism was an impractical mishmash of ideas, imposed by squabbling zealots that promised much, delivered little and cost millions of lives. It is striking that 36 countries at one time or another adopted this system and that five—Cuba, Laos, North Korea, Vietnam and the biggest of them all, China—still pay lip service to it.

Communism’s first big advantage was that it played on two human appetites—the noble desire for justice and the baser hunger for vengeance. Mr Brown, emeritus professor of politics at Oxford University, traces communism’s idealistic roots in the struggle against feudal oppression and beastly working conditions. The moral weight of Karl Marx’s criticisms of 19th-century capitalism even won him praise from the high priest of Western liberalism, Karl Popper, a Viennese-born philosopher who emigrated to London. But the intoxicating excitement of revolutionary shortcuts attracted the ruthless and dogmatic, who saw the chance to put into practice Marx’s muddled Utopian notions—and settle some scores on the way. “The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in killing, the better,” wrote Lenin in 1922. Even so, many still resist the idea that the founding fathers of communism were murderous maniacs. Revolutions against corrupt and ossified regimes in countries such as Russia and China stoked a steamy enthusiasm that took decades to dissipate.

The communist block also had two bits of good fortune. The economic slump of the 1930s discredited democracy and capitalism. Then came Hitler’s disastrous attack on the Soviet Union. The victory over fascism in Europe gave the Soviet Union, an ally of America and Britain, renewed moral weight. Given what had happened in Russia under Stalin in the 1930s, that hardly seemed deserved. As Mr Brown notes, Stalin trusted the Nazi leader more than he trusted his own generals. The Soviet Union killed more top German communists than Hitler’s regime did. Yet in some countries, Czechoslovakia for example, Soviet forces were initially welcomed as liberators, and Stalinist regimes took power with a degree of popular consent. In other countries, such as Poland and the Baltic states, it looked different: one occupation gave way to another.

The promised communist nirvana brought a mixture of mass murder, lies and latterly the grey reality of self-interested rule by authoritarian bureaucrats. But it was a bit late for second thoughts. Communist regimes proved remarkably durable, partly thanks to the use of privileges for the docile and intimidation of the independent-minded. Another source of strength was tight control of language and information that deemed most criticism unpatriotic. Cracks came as information spread, especially about the system’s bogus history and economic failings. Nationalism was a potent solvent too, particularly in places such as the Baltic states, that felt they were captive nations of a foreign empire.

Mr Brown deals conscientiously with communism in Asia and the solitary Latin American outpost of Cuba. But his main expertise, acquired over decades of scholarly study, is in the Soviet Union and its east European empire. His account is studded with delightfully pertinent and pithy personal observations and anecdotes: the censors in tsarist Russia decided that Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” was so boring that it wasn’t worth banning. Lenin thought 1917 was too early for revolution in Russia. At the Battle of Stalingrad, 50,000 Soviet citizens, including turncoats, volunteers and conscripts, were fighting on the German side. An American communist agitator once began a speech with the immortal lines: “Workers and peasants of Brooklyn”. Nikita Khrushchev hated putting things in writing because he couldn’t spell.

It is easy to be polemical about communism. Mr Brown strives to be fair-minded. He gives careful weight to the achievements of the Soviet regime, particularly in bringing mass literacy to Russia, and unparalleled social mobility. But he is sometimes too lenient. Was the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev really just an authoritarian regime, rather than a totalitarian one? Saying that the Soviet Union “repossessed” the Baltic states in the secret Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 would strike most people there as a glaring misreading of history. And his discussion of economics is skimpy and clichéd.

Yet as a single-volume account of mankind’s biggest mistake, Mr Brown’s book is hard to beat. Readers over the age of 40 will find it an uncomfortable reminder of a dangerous and dismal past. For most younger readers, it will seem all but unimaginable.

Vilnius book review

Vilnius

Contested city

Apr 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Vilnius is an example to others—a contested city, but not a divided one

THE choice of name for the capital of present-day Lithuania—Wilno, Vilna, Vilne, Wilda, Vilnia or now Vilnius—shows who you are, or were. In the 20th century alone, it has been occupied or claimed by Germany, Russia, Poland and the Soviet Union, with only brief periods of Lithuanian autonomy.

Vilne, in Yiddish, was home to one of Judaism’s greatest rabbis, a saintly brainbox known as the Gaon (Genius) who gave his first sermon aged seven and kick-started the great Jewish intellectual revival in the 18th century. “Vilna is not simply a city, it is an idea,” said a speaker at a Yiddish conference in 1930. It was the virtual capital of what some call Yiddishland, a borderless realm of east European Jewish life and letters in the inter-war era. At times, the majority of the city’s population was Jewish. Their murder and the deportation of many Poles by Stalin meant that the city lost 90% of its population during the second world war. Present-day inhabitants of Vilnius may find much they did not know in Laimonas Briedis’s subtle and evocative book about their city’s history.

Poles mourn the loss of Wilno, one of their country’s great cultural and literary centres. Poland’s two great poets studied there: Adam Mickiewicz nearly two centuries ago, and in the pre-war years Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel prizewinner. Yet both men saw their Lithuanian and Polish identities as complementary, not clashing.

For Russians, Vilna had harsher echoes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky stayed there briefly, detesting the subversive pro-Polish sentiment of what was the third-largest city in the tsarist empire. Earlier it was centre stage in Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of 1812. Mr Briedis neatly sums up the city’s appearance in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. “A crossing through Vilna was like a passage of honour: to the east…lay Russia—a familiar land offering spiritual comfort and self-respect; to the west—Europe—a foreign territory prompting national self-doubt and embarrassment.”

In any of the dozen possible renderings of the city’s name, its roots evoke mystery. Wilda, its old German label, comes from the word wild. In Lithuanian come hints of the words for devil (velnias), the departed (velionis) and ghost (vele). That ambiguity is fitting. In its 700-odd years of recorded history, the city has been both capital city and provincial backwater. Outsiders have been struck by its filthy streets and shameless women, and also by its glorious architecture and heights of scholarship. Pilgrims flock to the Gates of Dawn, its most holy Catholic shrine. It has been the epitome of tolerance and a crucible of the Holocaust.

In a modern Europe Vilnius can seem peripheral. Mr Briedis, however, begins by noting that when French geographers recently plotted the mid-point between Europe’s cartographical extremes, they found the continent’s true centre was a derelict farmhouse just outside the city.

Foreign visitors have left few written accounts, but Mr Briedis uses them all as sources. A hapless papal delegation provides the first. In 1324 it tried and failed to persuade Lithuania’s great pagan ruler, Gediminas, to adopt Christianity. He showed no desire to forsake Perkunas the thunder god, berating his visitors for their intolerance. “Why do you always talk about Christian love?” he asked the pope’s men. “Where do you find so much misery, injustice, violence, sin and greed, if not among the Christians?”

Lithuania eventually adopted Christianity, along with a dynastic deal with Poland, in 1387. A cathedral was built on the pagan temple, the holy fires doused and the sacred groves felled. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania flourished. At its height in the 16th century it was a vast multiconfessional empire, stretching to the Black Sea, with no fewer than six legal languages, including Hebrew and Armenian. Even as that declined, the Vilnius style of Baroque architecture ripened in glory, a “splendid autumn” in one of Mr Briedis’s many well-turned phrases, that paid “a gracious farewell to its phantom golden age”.

The most poignant chapter is on cemeteries past and present, many of which were desecrated by the Soviets. Mass graves are still unearthed in Vilnius. They hold victims of Stalin’s NKVD, of the Nazis, and—as in one recent example—thousands of fallen soldiers from Napoleon’s shattered Grande Armée. Vanished civilisations and lost empires leave a city stalked by horror and steeped in wonder.

Eichmann book review

Adolf Eichmann

Manhunt
Apr 2nd 2009
From The Economist print edition



Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi
By Neal Bascomb



Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 400 pages; $26. To be published in Britain by Quercus in September
BRINGING old Nazis to justice was not a priority in the immediate aftermath of 1945. The three Western powers wanted to turn their zones of Germany into the Federal Republic, a functioning cold-war ally. Justice was delayed, denied or tied up in bureaucratic knots. But did that shabby, perhaps shameful compromise justify Israel’s action in kidnapping Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960 and putting him on trial in a country that did not exist at the time when he was planning and executing the Holocaust?

The unspoken assumption of Neal Bascomb’s book is that the Israeli secret service’s daring and risky plan was not only heroic and skilful, but also justified. It starts by retelling the long and frustrating hunt for Eichmann, whom sympathisers had helped flee to Argentina after the war (a shocking tale in itself). It was a chance remark by one of his sons to a girlfriend who, unknown to him, was half-Jewish, that gave the first clue. Even so, it took years to follow up.

Those who like to believe that Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is the epitome of spookish efficiency may find themselves blinking at some of the mishaps and near-disasters that its posse encountered in Argentina. Clumsy snooping alarmed the Eichmanns, though not enough to prompt them to go into hiding. Having caught their quarry, the Israeli spy chiefs risked detection by ordering a further, madcap attempt to find another fugitive Nazi, Josef Mengele, a doctor responsible for hideous experiments at Auschwitz.

Nonetheless, the operation was both daring and brilliant. Eichmann was snatched from the street on his way home from work. One of the kidnappers—in an unplanned move—managed to persuade him that it would be to his advantage to stand trial in Israel, and put his side of the story. He boarded an El Al plane without protest, disguised as a crew member.

Mr Bascomb’s understandable distaste for his subject does not prevent him giving a good flavour of Eichmann’s slippery arguments once he went on trial: sometimes denying that he did anything wrong, sometimes saying he was only obeying orders, sometimes pleading other extenuating circumstances. He brings out well the paradox of Eichmann’s genuine interest in Jewish history and culture (he greeted his captors with a Hebrew prayer), and the abominable crimes he committed.

Argentina, in those days infested with Nazi sympathisers, was furious at Israel’s action. So were some other countries. Israel was unrepentant. The book spends a bit too long on the minutiae of the hunt and skates rather too quickly over the legal and ethical issues that it raised. Was it really so impossible to put Eichmann on trial in West Germany? The book criticises the prosecution’s conduct at the trial, but with a frustrating lack of detail. A bigger flaw is the re-creation of dialogue 50 years on, a trick that gives the narrative immediacy but erodes the credibility that the author’s research has earned.

Eichmann himself comes across as a pathetic figure, dwarfed both by the evil he committed and the efforts made to catch him. Like most of his fellow Nazis, he was monstrous only when fate gave him power. Without it, he was just a crotchety émigré with unpleasant views on Jews. Yet the story remains a gripping one: the shadowy world of ex-Nazis hiding away in a far-off continent, Germany’s own struggle of memory against forgetting, and a young country’s clamorous desire for justice.

Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi.
By Neal Bascomb.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 400 pages; $26. To be published in Britain by Quercus in September

Warsaw Ghetto book review

The Warsaw ghetto

From beyond the grave

Mar 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition

A remarkable secret archive tells the story of life in the Warsaw ghetto

Who Will Write our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto By Samuel D. Kassow Vintage; 522 pages; $16.95. Allen Lane; £10.99 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

THE Nazis succeeded in exterminating millions of Jews. But they did not succeed in extinguishing their history. That is the story told by Samuel Kassow, an American historian, in a poignant and detailed account of the secret archive of the Warsaw ghetto.

In the autumn of 1940, Warsaw’s Jewish population, swollen by forced immigration, amounted to nearly 450,000 people, all of them walled into an area covering less than four square kilometres. By early 1942 about 83,000 had died from hunger. That summer 300,000 were sent away to death camps, mostly to Treblinka. In April and May 1943 the remaining 60,000 were killed, or captured and deported, in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, during which the Germans levelled that part of the city.

Mr Kassow starts his story amid the passionate arguments among Jews in the declining days of the three great empires: the German, the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian. Was the great dream to be integration? Was it in identification with the surging national consciousness of countries such as Poland, at that stage still partitioned? Was it emigration to a Jewish state in Palestine? Or in the hope of a socialist paradise based on a brotherhood of man rather than ethnic, religious or national affiliation? Or some mixture of the above? Was Hebrew the real language of Jews, or a snooty, artificial distraction? Was Yiddish a degenerate linguistic compromise, or the essential literary and political medium?

After the first world war, those arguments became more pressing. A Jewish state was taking embryonic form in Palestine. The Soviet authorities launched a rival Yiddish-speaking Jewish homeland, Birobidzhan, in a desolate corner of the Russian far east. The newly reborn Polish republic offered the chance of partnership with gentile Poles in a common homeland, albeit one marred by prejudice and discrimination.

The task for Jewish historians in those years was finding an account of their past that would help make sense of the arguments about the present. What role, for example, had Jews played in the Polish monarchy before its dismemberment in 1795? Was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth really a paradise of tolerance, or was that just another myth among so many others? Gentile historians’ accounts were inevitably partial. The Jewish collective memory, with its colourful, folkloristic stereotypes of poor beggars, rich merchants and pious rabbis, was a help, but not an answer. Documents were scanty or missing altogether.

That effort gathered pace after Poland regained its independence in 1918. A pioneer was the young Emanuel Ringelblum, a passionate activist in the left-wing Poale Zion movement. Starting as a student in 1920, he was to become one of his country’s best historians, up to his death in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944. Ringelblum is the central character in this book; although it is not a formal biography, the author does an excellent job of accumulating the scraps of information and recollection that have survived the human and archival destruction of the war.

With fine Yiddishist instinct, Mr Kassow does an excellent job too of evoking the atmosphere of those years, particularly the YIVO institute in Wilno (now Vilnius), which was founded in 1925 to give class and clout to Jewish scholarly efforts. The early chapters of the book, full of hope and productive energy, make the final ones all the more effective. The hugely subtle, interesting and complicated world of Jewish thought and culture boiled down to a bitter fight over bread or over scrappy permits; either might hold off death for another few days.

The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto could not prevent their own murder. But thanks to the Oyneg Shabes, the secret archive organised by Ringelblum and other historians, at colossal personal risk, they were at least able to record what they thought, felt and saw. The archive ranged from raw eyewitness accounts to scholarly histories, such as Ringelblum’s own lengthy analysis of Polish-Jewish relations. About 35,000 pages (only a fraction of the whole) survived the war, buried in milk churns and tin boxes. Some were carefully soldered shut; others had leaked, leaving an illegible soggy lump requiring painstaking conservation work. That the documents came to light at all is thanks to the persistence of Rachel Auerbach, one of only three survivors of hundreds of people involved in the project. It was she who went to Warsaw in 1946 and demanded that the cold and hungry survivors of the city’s destruction make the effort to dig out the caches from the ruins.

Locked up for years in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the documents have only recently been substantially restored. A full catalogue has yet to be made, but the papers about Ringelblum that Mr Kassow has studied give a vivid, sometimes unbearable, picture of the ghetto’s destruction at the hands of the Nazis, and of the efforts made to preserve a semblance of civilised life that had succumbed to the elemental desire for survival.

The archive also illustrates the tension that exists between the Jewish and gentile experience of the war in Poland. The summer of 1939 had aroused a remarkable sense of solidarity between both peoples; that soon gave way to harsher feelings. Some Polish gentiles outside the ghetto taunted its inmates for their passivity (while at the same time grudging them supplies of arms and ammunition). Nazi anti-semitic propaganda about “Judeo-Communism” had some effect. So did self-interest; dead Jews were unlikely to want their pre-war property back. A poignant short piece by a Jewish poet, Wladyslaw Szlengel, an ardent Polish patriot, sums it up. With no gentile Polish friends left to talk to, he takes comfort in telephoning the speaking clock.

How great it is to talk to you
No quarrels, no words
You are nicer, my little time clock
Than all my former friends.

It is a pity that the author does not give a little space to the view of the ghetto from the outside. And the use of “Pole” as the antonym for “Jew” may jar with some. Many of the people he writes about would have said they were both. But the book remains an informative and moving reminder of what was lost in the Holocaust and the ingenuity and heroism of those who tried to frustrate its perpetrators.

Cromwell book review

Oliver Cromwell

Headless story
Dec 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition



Cromwell's Head
By Jonathan Fitzgibbons

BEHEADED posthumously, as punishment for his part in the execution of Charles I in 1649, Oliver Cromwell’s fate after death matches his grippingly controversial life. Was it really his body that was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1658, with jarring pomp and ceremony? Was the same corpse exhumed and mutilated after Charles II came to the throne, ending Britain’s brief experiment with republicanism and military rule? Was it really the Lord Protector’s head that was rammed on a pike in Whitehall, to discourage regicides, only to be blown down in a gale and swiped by a soldier? And was it really that same head, battered and worm-eaten, with an iron spike still rammed through the skull, that became a souvenir, a vulgar curiosity, a treasured relic and was finally in 1960 secretly laid to rest in the chapel of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where the young Cromwell briefly studied?

Jonathan Fitzgibbons answers these questions ably. The head is indubitably Cromwell’s: though the provenance is a little cloudy in the early 18th century, it beggars belief that a fraudster of that era would be able to fool forensic science many years later. The body was embalmed before it was beheaded; and the skull measurements correspond almost exactly with extant portraits of the Lord Protector.



The interesting historical detective work, and some neat demolition of myths and conspiracy theories, bring Mr Fitzgibbons half-way through a short book. After that comes a potted history of the aftermath of the English civil war, starting with the botched scheming that led the maddeningly duplicitous Charles I to lose not only the military conflict but also his head.

The regime that succeeded him was an uneasy tussle between idealists and a would-be military junta. Cromwell himself, that walking paradox, was neither as austere nor as principled as portrayed in most textbooks. His behaviour was marked by an oddly prankish streak and outbursts of genuine jollity. His refusal of the crown was both his greatest achievement and his biggest mistake. The author sums up his subject’s gravest weakness as “nihilistic overconfidence”. Like so many other revolutionaries, his regime became tyrannical and collapsed when he died.

This work is part of a venture into the book trade by Britain’s National Archives. Unlike stingy private-sector publishers these days, they have indulged in such rarities as a proper index, footnotes, bibliography and colour plates. It is a pity that they seem to have skipped the copy-editing. Cromwell appears chattily as “Oliver”. “May” and “might” are used interchangeably. An Oxford anatomy professor is said to have been “pouring” over documents in 1875 to expose a fake. Britain’s republican hero deserves better.

The vertigo years

Europe 1900-14

Nov 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914
By Philipp Blom

Basic Books; 512 pages; $29.95. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £25

IMAGINE, suggests Philipp Blom, that a “voracious but highly selective plague of bookworms” had deprived us of all knowledge of 20th-century history after 1914. How would the early years of the last century look when taken on their own, rather than overshadowed by the cataclysm of the first global war?

Seen against the backdrop of what followed, the period 1900-14 was a golden evening of civilisation: a time of social stability, peaceful international relations, political reform and economic integration, leavened by startling technological and cultural progress. Yet as Mr Blom argues in his masterly and panoramic history of Europe in the pre-war years, to the “nervous generation” actually living through it, the era felt rather different. For them it was a time of jarring uncertainties, when solid 19th-century conceptions were corroded and eroded. Rudyard Kipling had mourned the already visible (to him at least) fading of British imperial power in his hugely popular “Recessional”. Matthew Arnold, whom Mr Blom quotes in the same passage, wrote of “the long, withdrawing roar” of declining religious faith in his poem “Dover Beach”.



Scientific notions such as radioactivity, and the spooky new business of X-rays, were turning things upside down too. So were philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig von Wittgenstein. “If scientific analysis made the world fall apart, philosophical reason poured acid over the remaining truths,” argues Mr Blom. But out of those uncertainties came the age in which we live now.

Mr Blom musters a rich array of details and sources to bolster his argument. His book gives a chapter to each year, stitching together developments in the German-speaking world (his forte) as well as neurotic France, reactionary Russia and self-confident Britain. His themes range from sex to science, from high politics to gruesome crime, from advanced art to popular literature, all dotted with entertaining nuggets of court and other gossip. As the reader reaches the economic and social decline of the English aristocracy after the death of Queen Victoria, it helps to be told that the libidinous King Edward VII was known as “Edward the Caresser” by his disrespectful subjects. Fans of Marcel Proust will be intrigued to know that the French literary titan was obsessed with motorcars: what would now be termed a “petrolhead”. And who will see Walt Disney’s “Bambi” with the same eyes in the knowledge, waspishly passed on by Mr Blom, that his creator, Felix Salten, was the anonymous author of a notorious pornographic novel?

It is a slight weakness of the book that smaller countries are almost ignored. As the narrative sweeps between the great powers of Europe, the reader is left wondering what happened in, say, the Netherlands (then still an empire), in Sweden or in Italy. A second criticism is a possible over-emphasis on sex. The era was indeed marked by an unbuttoning of Victorian sexual mores, by the activities of some brave if marginal feminists (such as the British campaigners for women’s suffrage), by increasing female employment and by a decline in the importance of male muscular strength. It is interesting to see problems ranging from naval shipbuilding to public health viewed through the prism of sexual angst. But it is quite a leap to maintain, as the Vienna-based Mr Blom does, that “all instinct is ultimately sexual.”

A third and more substantial point is that much of the then newfangled thinking that Mr Blom describes would have been regarded by most people at the time as deranged, freakish or irrelevant. Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf and Rudolf Steiner all had their followings; their popularity casts revealing light on the cultural and intellectual needs of the time. Their ideas are interesting even today. Yet in his excitement to portray the shock of the new, Mr Blom risks neglecting the fact that the previous century had left a solid legacy. For most people, it was that world—orderly, patriarchal and even devout—that still dominated daily life.

That should not deter the reader from enjoying Mr Blom’s impressive and thought-provoking book. His particular gift is to encapsulate complex historical and biographical events pithily and in an illuminating context. The story of Belgium’s monarchical colonists in the Congo is a gruesome tale of inhumanity (the bit about children’s hands being amputated to punish their parents for slow work is not easily forgotten). It is aptly compared with German and British behaviour in southern Africa. But it also gives the chance to explain how Edward Morel and Roger Casement launched what was, in effect, the first international human-rights campaign, using the mass media to bring an unstoppable torrent of public criticism to bear on the Belgian authorities.

The book brings the fears, enthusiasms and blindspots of the period brilliantly to life. If civilisation lasts another 100 years, perhaps an equally talented historian will one day compare the first decade of this century to its dizzying counterpart before 1914. If so, Mr Blom’s book is unlikely to be bettered as a source.

Attwood on debt

A cultural history of debt

Payback

Oct 16th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth By Margaret Atwood House of Anansi Press; 280 pages; $15.95. Bloomsbury; £9.99 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

WITHOUT debt there would be no capitalism; mankind would be living in caves and eating whatever it killed. But Margaret Atwood’s elegant and erudite canter round the literary, cultural and historical aspects of borrowing, lending, owing and repaying has less to do with economics than with human nature. Her new book is a collection of radio talks, conceived and delivered long before the current crisis, but its publication is remarkably timely.

Debt is as old as human civilisation. The first recorded laws had to do with repayments and repossessions. The idea of debt depends on a common sense of fairness: if you borrow and don’t pay back, justice is violated. That is not exclusive to humans; chimpanzees seem to have similar ideas. But debt is not morally neutral. Borrowing too much is a sign of depravity. So is being a merciless lender. Debt metaphors (“overwhelmed”, “drowning”, “crushing”) are dramatic. In the end, money is time, and you may pay with your life—if not through death, then through drudgery.

The best bits of “Payback” are about debts that do not involve money. What do people owe to the planet? To other people? To God? The author is particularly taken with Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”, a story usually read only as a sentimental fable. Ms Atwood strips it down and rebuilds it with the brisk pen of an expert literary critic. The Archangel Gabriel bears the same relationship to God as Bob Cratchit does to Scrooge, she argues. It sounds odd, but makes perfect sense when you read it.

Ms Atwood weaves in all kinds of literary references from nursery rhymes to modern fiction, from Aeschylus to Darwin, via Mary Poppins and Charles Kingsley’s “The Water Babies” (where the lovely Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby is the counterpart to the severe Mrs Be-donebyasyoudid). As one would expect from a novelist of Ms Atwood’s calibre, the phrasing is polished and the metaphors striking: revenge taken in red ink can be even more satisfying and gruesome than that taken through red blood.

One criticism is her caricature of Christianity, which has shaped Western thinking about the debt of sin and the means of redemption for the past two millennia. Ms Atwood’s apology for squashing Christian theological thinking into two chatty and disrespectful pages does not sound wholly sincere.

But the overall effect of the book is stimulating, if a trifle dizzying. Even Ms Atwood, scintillating wordsmith though she is, cannot quite patch holes in the logic. Her greenish, gently leftish convictions poke through rather too visibly sometimes. Ultimately, debt is a way that people bet on their own futures, placing a wager on their own ability, cleverness, diligence and luck. When those bets fail, the consequences for the loser can be sad. But the world is a better place, on the whole, if people have the right to make such wagers in the first place.