Mikhalkov obit

Sergei Mikhalkov

Sep 10th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Sergei Mikhalkov, the Kremlin’s court poet, died on August 27th, aged 96

TALENT without flexibility was a dangerous thing in the Soviet Union, as thousands found to their cost. Sergei Mikhalkov had talent aplenty, as a poet, playwright, children’s writer and satirist. But, more important, he was flexible.

Mr Mikhalkov penned the words to two versions of the Soviet national anthem, one glorifying Stalin and one ignoring him. After Russia shrugged off communism he wrote a third version, to the same tune. In between he denounced two of the country’s greatest writers, Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Every regime he served gave him medals.

Servility towards power is a ubiquitous phenomenon. An 18th-century English song, “The Vicar of Bray”, tells of a country clergyman who changed his allegiance with the times, Romish under James II, strongly Protestant under the Hanoverians, through every other point of the ecclesiological compass. The chorus runs:

And this is Law I will maintain
Until my Dying Day, Sir.
That whatsoever King may reign,
I will be the Vicar of Bray, Sir!

Mr Mikhalkov offered a Soviet version of the theme.

He was born in the Russian empire to a noble family, with admirals and princes among his forebears. Many of that breed fled from the Red Terror that followed the Bolshevik revolution; those that stayed behind had their lives blighted, or ended, by the communist hatred of “class enemies”. But young Sergei slipped through that net, working humbly in a Moscow loom factory and writing poetry on the side. That was his ticket to the new aristocracy of proletarian cultural workers. He remained, at heart, a courtier and a cynic.

He gained his first success with a children’s verse fable about the exploits of a very tall policeman, “Uncle Steeple” (Dyadya Styopa). Given what the real-life police were doing in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, it should probably be classed as escapist fiction. A little later, he wrote a poem praising—he claimed—a girl with a dark-blond plait whom he had met at the House of Writers. Her name was Svetlana. Since that was also the name of Stalin’s daughter, the poem brought the tall, tinny-voiced, stuttering young man to the dictator’s notice.

In 1944 he was commissioned, along with Gabriel El-Registan, a Soviet Armenian poet, to write the words for a new national anthem to replace the “Internationale”. The rousing hymn of the international workers’ movement—freedom thundering against oppression, starvelings rising to end the age of cant—was felt not to fit the needs of the contemporary Soviet Union.

Its replacement, set to a stirring tune composed by Alexander Alexandrov, was a sentimental and militaristic ditty that gave equal weight to Lenin and Stalin:

Through days dark and stormy where Great Lenin led us
Our eyes saw the bright sun of freedom above
and Stalin our Leader, with faith in the People,
Inspired us to build up the land that we love.

Admittedly, national anthems rarely make great literature, and other Soviet poets, including on one occasion even the great Anna Akhmatova, found it expedient to put their pens at the service of the regime. But Mr Mikhalkov’s loyalty was exceptional. A good example of his work is “I want to go home”, a 1948 propaganda play about post-war orphanages in Germany, in which sinister British officials try to brainwash and kidnap Soviet children to use them as spies and slaves in the imperialist cause. The plot is foiled by heroic and kindly Soviet officers. The truth was exactly the other way round: it was the Soviet secret police who organised ruthless repatriations, often dividing families.

Songs without words

Mr Mikhalkov’s lyrics did not long survive Stalin’s death in 1953. From then until 1977 the anthem was played without words, neatly illustrating the Soviet Union’s ambiguous attitude to Stalinism. Mr Mikhalkov adapted to the times, becoming a pillar of the Soviet literary establishment and a notable enforcer of party discipline in its ranks. He wrote, in 1970, some new lyrics to the national anthem. To mark the introduction of the new Soviet constitution in 1977, the authorities adopted them. They ignored Stalin, praised Lenin and highlighted Russia’s role in welding the “unbreakable union of free-born republics”.

The union proved anything but. Given a whiff of freedom under Mikhail Gorbachev, the captive nations of the Soviet empire bolted for the exit. They found, or restored, their own songs. But Russia was tongue-tied. It dumped the Soviet anthem and adopted a resonant tune by Glinka, called simply “Patriotic Song”. It failed to catch on. In 2001 Vladimir Putin ordered the restoration of the Soviet tune—and it was Mr Mikhalkov’s turn to write, once again, the words. The anodyne doggerel that resulted is no better (and certainly no worse) than other countries’ national anthems. It praises Russia’s uniqueness, mentions God, and concludes: “Thus it was, is, and always shall be!” Except that it isn’t, and wasn’t. Few knew that better than the wily Mr Mikhalkov.

Kolakowski obit

Leszek Kolakowski
Jul 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition


Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish-born Oxford philosopher, died on July 17th, aged 81

HIS life was learning—about history, about his times, about himself. Like some other erstwhile true believers, he became one of most cogent critics of his former faith. Having spent his youthful years as an ardent communist and atheist, Leszek Kolakowski, one of the great minds of the modern era, turned into Marxism’s most perceptive opponent, and one with a profound respect for religion.

His intellectual life started in the misery of Nazi-occupied Poland—he had to study in secret, mostly alone—and finished in one of the nicest places imaginable: Oxford’s All Souls College. In a university tailor-made for gifted misfits, Mr Kolakowski was happy: he was left alone to read, write, and, less often, talk. All Souls provided a glorious academic retreat: the only obligation is to dine there regularly. His distinctive hat, craggy features, idiosyncratic English and perspex walking stick established him as a landmark even in a city studded with oddities and treasures.

“Philosopher” was his usual label, but not a wholly accurate one: historian of ideas would be better. Mr Kolakowski showed little interest in the Oxford tradition of analytical philosophy; like his great Oxonian philosophical contemporary, Isaiah Berlin, he formulated no grand scheme of ideas. His forte was to explain the development, attractiveness and shortcomings of political ideas and systems, particularly the communism invented by Karl Marx and practised across the Soviet empire.

His magnum opus was the three-volume “Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution”, published in the 1970s. It calmly and expertly demolished the pillars of Marxist thought: the labour theory of value, the idea of class struggle, historical materialism and the like. He also pointed out, again without unnecessary polemics, the practical shortcomings of communist systems. Stalinism was not an aberration, he argued, but the inevitable consequence of pursuing a communist utopia. For that, powerful left-wing voices such as the historian E.P. Thompson berated him as a traitor to the noble socialist ideals that he once espoused.

Against the devil

Both his experience and beliefs made such criticism seem patronising. Mr Kolakowski had lived under two kinds of totalitarianism, Nazism and communism; his ideas had been censored even in the supposedly more liberal communist Poland of the late 1950s and 1960s. What finally drove him, and his Jewish wife Tamara, to emigrate was the communist-inspired anti-Semitic campaign of 1968. Few if any of his leftist critics had such experiences. In a spirited rejoinder to Thompson, Mr Kolakowski wrote: "The only medicine communism has invented—the centralised, beyond social control, state ownership of the national wealth and one-party rule—is worse than the illness it is supposed to cure; it is less efficient economically and it makes the bureaucratic character of social relations an absolute principle."

His opponents in that argument seem to have landed on the dustheap of history. But Mr Kolakowski’s distaste for communism did not make him an evangelist for free-market liberalism: he was too inquisitive, sceptical and irreverent to support any particular doctrine strongly. He was particularly critical of those who relied solely on science for answers to the big questions about life. He criticised too the emptiness of secular materialism. Increasingly, he became convinced that religion, in some form or other, was a necessary part of human existence. He was no churchgoer, but asked what his next target would be after communism, he replied, only half-jokingly, “the devil”.

For those involved in the struggle against communism, on both sides of the iron curtain, he became a guru, ranking along with Czeslaw Milosz, the émigré Polish poet whose book “The Captive Mind”, published in 1953, unpicked the mind-mangling effects of communist thought.

In those early days, of course, Mr Kolakowski was still a loyal, if critical, party member. Some of his fans preferred to forget that. They also overlooked his youthful tirades against Poland’s Catholic church. As a zealous party member when the remnants of wartime anti-communism were still strong, he used to carry a pistol for fear of assassination. Remembering his father’s murder during the Nazi occupation, the young Kolakowski accepted communism as an alternative both to Nazi militarism and to the failures of Poland’s pre-war system of semi-authoritarian capitalism. Indeed his country’s post-war communist rulers saw the brainy, determined youngster as a prize prospect and rewarded him with a trip to Moscow in 1950 to experience the delights of Soviet rule.

That backfired. He wrote later of the “material and spiritual desolation” he saw there, though it took two decades for his faith in Poland’s socialist system to erode entirely. In the late 1960s, he made his way to America but found the radical campus leftism “pathetic and disgusting”; no place to bring up his daughter, he felt. He visited America regularly, though, and it was in his Jefferson lecture, the highest honour the federal government gives for intellectual achievement, that he coined his best-known aphorism: “We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.”

Boris Fyodorov Obituary

Boris Fyodorov
Nov 27th 2008
From The Economist print edition


Boris Fyodorov, a Russian economic reformer, died on November 20th, aged 50

MOST of Russia’s super-rich spend their summer holidays on yachts in the sunny Mediterranean. Boris Fyodorov preferred visiting English country churches, the older, the better. The buildings, and especially the gravestones, fascinated him. He saw in them symbols of an historical continuity that Russia had lost under communism. Born in poverty as a factory caretaker’s son, he delighted in making discoveries among his aristocratic roots: trinkets unearthed at his family’s ruined estate, a (Polish) coat of arms. His dacha outside Moscow was notable not for pet wolves or other fashionable extravagances, but for his valiant attempts to create a weedless, stripy English lawn in a hostile climate. He flew a Russian flag there too, scandalising the neighbours, who insisted he needed a permit.

Visitors to his office sometimes wished the chairs had seat belts. Conversation would ricochet from Russia’s recent economic history to the tragedy of the aborted reforms brought in by his hero, Pyotr Stolypin, one of Tsar Nicholas II’s prime ministers. It would touch on the lamentable failure of the Kremlin under Vladimir Putin to promote proper corporate behaviour in the boardrooms of Russia’s big companies, bounce to the hypocrisy of Western bankers who failed to pay their taxes, and come to rest with a robust inquiry into the virtues of cylinder mowers compared with the rotary kind.

The chat would be in muscular, fluent English. Mr Fyodorov’s job in the declining years of the Soviet Union had included monitoring the world economy by reading the Financial Times. This had left him at ease with the jargon of the new age, and also well placed to be finance minister of Russia (still just a part of the Soviet Union) as the planned economy entered its death throes. He briefly represented Russia (after it had become an independent country) at the World Bank in Washington, and then spent a year as deputy prime minister and, for a short while, as finance minister too.

Practitioner, not politician

It was not a great success. Like several other reformers of the time, he had a firmer grasp of economics than of politics: he was too unworldly, too impatient and perhaps too cerebral for the murky world of Russian government. Even so, he helped to create, almost from scratch, a Western-style financial system with capital markets, payments systems and a semi-independent central bank. Despite the wholesale theft-by-privatisation that followed, these achievements look more impressive now than they did in the chaos of the time.



Once out of office, Mr Fyodorov published, among other books, a useful encyclopedia of financial terms. Some were recovered from pre-revolutionary Russian, others were neologisms. As a Russian patriot, however, he detested the practice of simply adapting an English word. Ofshorky (offshore accounts) was a pet hate, particularly because of its association with tax evasion. As head of the tax service, briefly, in 1998, he tried to decriminalise tax collecting, already well on its way to becoming an extortion racket, and also to broaden its reach to the rich and powerful—many of them all too familiar with ofshorky. Bravely, he set his inspectors on such prominent figures as Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a clownish extremist with connections to Russia’s rulers. He also tried to scare expatriate bankers into paying taxes on their salaries (amounting to $5 billion a year, he thought) and their local landlords into declaring the rents extracted from such foreigners ($1 billion).

Mr Fyodorov had by this time also gone into business, founding United Financial Group, an investment bank, with an American friend in 1994. Yet neither wealth, connections, nor the flashing blue light on his black limousine (a hallmark of status in Russia) made Mr Fyodorov quite typical of the elite that moved so smoothly from burying communism to embracing capitalism red in tooth and claw. On the contrary, he despised such people for their lack of scruple. Without a moral basis, he said, capitalism would just become the means by which the powerful would concentrate their wealth.

That was prescient. Mr Fyodorov’s last great cause before dropping out of public life was to try to make big Russian companies treat their shareholders properly, rather than serving the interests of bureaucrats and cronies. As a director of Gazprom, Russia’s vast gas monopoly, he attacked the practice of issuing two classes of shares, one for domestic investors and one for foreigners. That depressed the true value of the company. His own bank made tidy profits from intricate schemes through which foreigners could act as though they were Russian shareholders. Eventually, once its two-tier share system was abolished, Gazprom became one of the world’s most valuable energy companies.

But it remained one of the worst run, much to Mr Fyodorov’s disappointment. For another of his aims was to strip away the intermediary firms that loot cashflow and assets from large Russian companies with the connivance of the management. One of his targets at Gazprom was closed down as Mr Putin and his friends gained control, but others soon took its place. Mr Fyodorov used to lament the fact that even he could not find the right phrase in Russian for “corporate governance”.

Rakowski obituary

From The Economist print edition


Mieczyslaw Rakowski, a Polish communist journalist and politician, died on November 8th, aged 81

CLUNKY cogs in the propaganda machine, communist journalists in eastern Europe were a dreary and dutiful lot. Mieczyslaw Rakowski was different. Polityka, the magazine he edited for 24 years, was the most readable official publication in the Soviet block: cogent, insightful, sometimes irreverent.

To foreigners reporting on the long slow death of the Soviet empire, Mr Rakowski was still more interesting in person, giving candid and waspish assessments of the communist regime’s political, economic and personal shortcomings. He was amusing and friendly company, at a time when congeniality was as scarce in the east as toilet paper or matches. Unlike most senior communists, he was not pompous, bullying or hidebound: you could easily believe that he was just another human being, not a defender of a system based on lies and mass murder.

Mr Rakowski did a less impressive job, however, dealing with the people who would eventually run Poland. He habitually sneered at Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity trade union, calling him “Dr Walesa” in a dig at the shipyard electrician’s lack of formal education: a big deal in intellectually snobbish Poland. The Gdansk accords of 1980 gave Poland a few precious months of free public life, but broke down because of Solidarity’s demand for freedom to decide on Poland’s future, and not just to discuss it. Mr Rakowski, by then deputy prime minister and ostensibly representing the interests of the proletariat, memorably lost his temper with the workers’ representatives: “You’d be herding cows if it wasn’t for this system”—pause—“and so would I.”


In that sense Mr Rakowski symbolised Poland’s post-war story. A peasant’s son and a teenage lathe operator, he was talent-spotted by a communist regime which, installed by Soviet military force, was hungry for brain power. He rose through the system in the 1950s, at a time when Poland’s rulers struggled for wiggle-room inside the Soviet block and showed something of a human face at home. For many, the modernisation and industrialisation the regime brought were welcome, regardless of the political label attached to them.

Fried snowballs

Mr Rakowski was usually seen as an arch-trimmer, a prime example of the collaboration forced on Poland by its history. His ability to blow with the wind was best described in a scalding article (published abroad) called “The hairstyles of Mieczyslaw Rakowski”, which noted how the tousled blond locks of the youthful idealist gave way to the grizzled grey of the apparatchik. To Norman Davies, a British historian, the “crumpled faces” of Mr Rakowski and his like revealed their story: “pliable Greeks in a world ruled by cruel Roman savages, whom they serve with infinite regret and infinite agility.”

But it was not all trimming. In the 1960s Mr Rakowski publicly opposed the death penalty, then a heretical and dangerous stance. His finest hour came in 1968, when a quarrel between two factions in the communist party bubbled over into a public anti-Semitic (ostensibly “anti-Zionist”) frenzy. Mr Rakowski stood firm and refused to sack any Jews. Asked to reprint a pre-war article critical of Jews, he refused, saying their ashes were “scattered in the fields around Auschwitz”. Many Poles thought their Nazi and Soviet tormentors were two sides of the same coin; it was remarkable for a senior communist to agree in public, even in part.

But unlike some, he did not leave the party, either then or after martial law was imposed in 1981. With scores killed and thousands jailed, Mr Rakowski became the right-hand man of the country’s new military leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski. He was ambiguous about whether he still truly believed in a democratic form of communism; Leszek Kolakowski, the exiled philosopher, rightly described that as “fried snowballs”. Mr Rakowski preferred to argue that communism protected Poland from the Soviet Union, whereas full-scale opposition would be futile. The anti-communist fighters had died in the forests; the pre-war government, in exile in London, was a husk; the Catholic church was a reactionary force. If history had placed Poland in the communist camp, then hope lay only in being its happiest barracks.

Mr Rakowski’s great ambition was to lead the communist party. He eventually became first secretary (as the job was called), but he was last as well as first, acting as the party’s undertaker in 1989 after the round-table talks paved the way for freedom and true independence. Usually celebrated as an unalloyed triumph, that transfer of power had its drawbacks. Privatisation, launched by Mr Rakowski in the dying years of communism, had allowed influential insiders to start turning power into money to safeguard their positions. Dodgy foreign trade outfits, linked with military intelligence, flourished. Party funds that Mr Rakowski had shipped out of the country returned (via a KGB courier) to launch a new post-communist party.

Mr Rakowski’s career fizzled out, fittingly, in an abortive bid for the Polish senate in 2005. His successful opponent was Radek Sikorski, now foreign minister, who had fled Poland as a political refugee from the martial law that Mr Rakowski so steadfastly defended.