Better Dead Than Read

Gregory Claeys - Marx and Marxism

Sven-Eric Liedman - A World To Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx

The Wall Street  Journal, July 5, 2018

Two centuries after he was born in the otherwise blameless German city of Trier, on May 5, 1818, Karl Marx is enjoying a moment. He and his writings have had such moments before—many other moments, with all too few intervals, since the 1840s. Most recently, the 2008 financial crisis boosted sales of the old revolutionary’s works, if not necessarily the numbers of those who have read them—not the first time that this has been a problem. In “Marx and Marxism,” London-based historian Gregory Claeys reports that “on first encountering” Marx’s “Das Kapital,” Ho Chi Minh used it as a pillow. Fidel Castro, a dictator made of sterner stuff, boasted of having reached page 370, a milestone that Mr. Claeys reckons was “about halfway”—a fair assessment if we ignore volumes two and three of an epic that often reads better with its pages unopened.

Mr. Claeys presumably timed his book to coincide with Marx’s bicentennial. In China President Xi Jinping, an erstwhile Davos guest star, hailed the anniversary by describing Marx as “the greatest thinker of modern times.” Trier marked the birthday of its most notorious citizen with a conference as well as the unveiling of a heroically styled statue, presented by the Beijing government. Luxembourg’s unmistakably bourgeois Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, turned up in, somewhat ironically, a Trier church to praise Marx’s “creative aspirations” and to absolve him of responsibility “for all the atrocity his alleged heirs have to answer for.” So that’s all right then.

Mr. Claeys, although writing from a position quite some way to the left, does not shy away from the horrors committed in Marx’s name. But he never provides a definitive answer—perhaps no one can—to the extent of culpability a 19th-century philosopher can have for tens of millions of 20th-century dead. In the course of the second part of this book—a brisk survey of Marxism after Marx—Mr. Claeys doubts whether Marx would have supported the Bolsheviks beyond the “securing of the revolution.” But he admits that such a claim “remains contentious.” As for there being any continuity between Marx and “the official ideology of the Stalinist epoch”—well, that’s “debatable” for Mr. Claeys, but his acknowledgment that there could even be a debate will be sacrilege to many of today’s Marxists. Stalin? Nothing to do with us, comrade.

“Marx and Marxism” is concerned more with Marx the thinker—a topic Mr. Claeys handles well, given the constraints of a shortish book—than Marx the man. (Those looking for a more conventionally biographical approach could do worse than opt for Francis Wheen’s “Karl Marx: A Life,” a shrewd, sympathetic and entertainingly Dickensian retelling from nearly 20 years ago.) Nevertheless, Mr. Claeys provides enough information to give a good summary of the story.

Marx was descended from a long line of rabbis on both sides; his father, Heinrich (né Hirschel) Marx, had converted to Lutheranism to avoid anti-Semitic restrictions limiting his ability to practice law. His son was, as Mr. Claeys relates it, a so-so student (other accounts are more complimentary). Not long after commencing his university studies, Marx switched from law to philosophy, a regrettable decision both for the world and for his finances.

Despite a happy marriage to an attractive and clever aristocrat—we’ll overlook the child he fathered with their long-serving housekeeper—Marx lived not so much hand to mouth, as hand to will, and hand to other people’s pockets, in particular those belonging to his wealthy cohort and collaborator, Friedrich Engels. An often desperately hardscrabble existence was made trickier still by Marx’s tendency to spend too much of the money he did obtain on less than proletarian niceties—or, more appropriately disreputably, on handouts to fellow revolutionaries, including on one occasion a substantial sum to fund the purchase of arms for discontented German workers in Brussels.

Mr. Claeys tracks both the development of Marx’s thought—a perennially dizzying work in progress—and the evolution of his career: early success as a radical journalist in Germany and France, involvement with new parties of the left, intermittent periods of exile or expulsion from this country or that. The Prussian authorities, increasingly alarmed by the revolutionary activity that had begun spreading across Europe in 1848, banished this troublemaker the following year. He settled in Britain, and London was to be his home for the rest of his life, a safe space from which he could plot, feud, politick and, despite being beset by procrastination and perfectionism, write and write and write, including “Das Kapital,” a pillow for Uncle Ho, perhaps, but a book that changed history.

Reading Mr. Claeys’s description of Marx the man—someone he evidently, if far from unconditionally, admires—it is both easy and reasonable to conclude that Marx’s personality set the tone for some of the most lethal strains in the regimes he inspired: “He was . . . almost totally unwilling to see anyone else’s viewpoint. The essence of democracy—compromise and the acceptance of opposition—was often beyond his capacity.” From his earliest years, Marx would tolerate very little dissent, and the sometimes lengthy, frequently inventive and sporadically repulsive abuse to which he subjected those with whom he disagreed (especially on the left) contain more than a hint of the prosecutors’ diatribes at show trials to come.

Marx died in 1883. Eleven people attended his funeral, but, as Mr. Claeys notes, “a year later . . . some 6,000 marched to the gravesite.” The cult was on the move. Something more than the cult of personality already emerging while he still lived, it came with echoes of earlier eruptions of millenarianism—a term that has long since expanded beyond its original theological definition to include, among other varieties of judgment day, the complete overthrow of society and its replacement with, in essence, heaven on earth. These similarities have been identified by scholars since at least the mid-20th century, but too often ignored.

Mr. Claeys, who is also a historian of Utopianism, is well equipped to avoid that omission. He acknowledges that millenarianism seeped into aspects of Marx’s philosophy, including both his view of history and his conveniently hazy vision of the communist paradise to come. This line of inquiry would have been worth pursuing further: Millenarianism is an ancient, proven formula that will find an audience as long as the credulous, the discontented, the jealous and the unfairly treated are among us—in other words, forever.

As monuments to cults go, another book, written from a perspective seemingly even further to the left than Mr. Claeys’s, the massive “A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx” would be hard to beat. The University of Gothenburg’s Sven-Eric Liedman “has been reading and writing about Karl Marx for over fifty years” and published this book in Swedish in 2015; it was released in America this year in a translation by Jeffrey N. Skinner.

Those searching for a truly detailed discussion of Marx (nearly three pages are dedicated to a letter young Karl wrote to his father in 1837) should turn here. Mr. Liedman has criticisms of Marx, but his overall opinion is—how to put this—enthusiastic: “No social theory is more dynamic than his.” Yet the fact that Mr. Liedman’s book is something of a shrine (“we need him for the present, and for the future”) isn’t all bad, from this reader’s point of view. A lucid, scholarly guide to an overelaborated, frequently opaque, often misguided but historically important set of ideas is of obvious value. And so is an erudite, closely reasoned defense of those ideas: An apostle can help explain a messiah.

Mr. Liedman’s reverence can, however, cloy: Marx’s “unwillingness to compromise of course had another side: the magnificence of the project.” While Marx undeniably possessed both an astonishing mind and—when he wanted—a brilliant prose style, Mr. Liedman overdoes the hosannas: “a festive pyrotechnic display of words,” “one of his very finest aphorisms,” “a remarkable brightness around these few lines,” to take but a few.

A characteristic of millenarian movements is that when their prophecy proves false, the failure tends to matter far less than it should. Marxism has proved no exception, but maybe with a touch more reason than most. For all his failed predictions, crackpot theories and rococo blind alleys, Marx was also very early to understand the ever-accelerating productivity unleashed by “bourgeois” capitalism as a truly relentless, unprecedentedly revolutionary force. But the consequences of this revolution would, he believed, eventually bring down its own creators. That cataclysm has been a long time coming, and, if it ever arrives, there will be a distinct twist to the script.

In their hunt for (Marxist) promise today, Messrs. Liedman and Claeys emphasize mainly contemporary income inequality. They should pay more attention to technology. As automation grinds through jobs, wages and up the social ladder, a landscape with some disturbing resemblances to that foretold by Marx is coming inexorably into view.

The Red Broom

Anne Applebaum - Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine

National Review, November 27, 2017

Nearly 40 years ago, I met the parents of a graduate-school friend. They were exiles, Ukrainians, a people said not to exist, not really. Their son had told them that I took an unfriendly interest in Soviet history, and that I knew a little about their lost homeland.

The father asked if I’d heard about a famine there in the early 1930s. I had: something to do with collectivization.

“There was more to it than that.”

In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum, a prominent journalist and the author of fine histories of the Gulag and the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe, recounts just how much more there was. Red Famine is powerfully written, extensively researched, and, frequently, painful reading. It tells of a meticulous annihilation that tore a nation away from its traditions, its language, its morality, its past, its future, its everything: “A woman whose six children died over three days in May 1933 lost her mind, stopped wearing clothes, unbraided her hair, and told everyone that the ‘red broom’ had taken her family away.”

Her life had unraveled, her culture had unraveled — there’s accidental symbolism in that unbraiding — and she unraveled. The land around her unraveled too: once a breadbasket, now a wasteland, a domain of the dead and those waiting to die, Muselmänner, as they were known in Auschwitz.

Neighbor was set against neighbor, cannibalism was far from rare (yes, you read that right).

By the time — it took less than a year — the red broom had completed its 1932–33 sweep (there were smaller sweeps before and after), roughly 3.9 million Ukrainians were dead: a decimation, and more. Countless others were deported, many to a Gulag that had plenty of demand for slave labor. Large numbers never returned.

Some of this came with collectivization, Stalin’s decision to impose larger collective or state-owned farming across the USSR. Even Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent and a reliable shill for the Soviet dictator, admitted that collectivization had been a “mess”; still, he said, while there had been casualties, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” And quite often those casualties were not unwelcome to the regime. Communism, like the millenarian movements it succeeded, rested on the notion of a great sorting between sinners and saved. Collectivization could be used to weed out enterprising, more successful private farmers, the relentlessly demonized “kulaks” (a category regularly expanded to include peasants who owned, say, a cow or a pig more than their fellow villagers), who were too smart to be won over by deceptive promises of the bounty that Communism would bring to agriculture: They were another of the Soviet Union’s disposable classes, “former people” in the sinister and, all too often, prophetic terminology of that era.

In Ukraine, the noose was drawn far tighter than anywhere else — a fact still denied by today’s Kremlin and its apologists. The millions who starved to death there, like those who died in famines elsewhere in the USSR at that time, were, it is maintained, the victims of a reckless agricultural experiment, nothing more. Applebaum agrees that the “chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine,” but rightly goes on to argue that neither chaos, nor the weather, nor crop failure can account for the death toll in Ukraine, and especially that terrible spike in the spring of 1933. For that, the better explanation is a series of measures enacted by the regime that can only have been intended to kill. There’s a reason this famine is known to Ukrainians as the “Holodomor,” a term, Applebaum explains, derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger and extermination.

Stalin, writes Applebaum, “launched a famine within the famine, . . . specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.” It was not enough to hit the region’s faltering farms with grain-production targets they had no chance of meeting and then to requisition what they had managed to grow. Seed corn was often seized too, as were livestock, potatoes, and, eventually, just about anything else that someone might have hoped to eat. Houses were repeatedly ransacked in hunts for any hidden scraps. Cooking utensils (and other goods) might well be taken, too. Tight controls were imposed to restrict movement out of the countryside into hungry cities (which were often unable or unwilling to help in any case), let alone out of Ukraine. Exports of grain, however, continued. Millions in hard currency were worth more than millions of lives.

Traveling to find work elsewhere was out of the question. Farms and villages judged to have fallen particularly short of production quotas — no small number — were “blacklisted”: burdened with yet more restrictions, confiscations, and prohibitions, and denied credit, essential services, and the right to barter or trade. The peasants were trapped, cut off. Not to be starving was a sign of guilt, inviting another search.

Applebaum records how a Polish diplomat crossing the border from rural Ukraine into an adjacent Russian province in May 1933 was left with the impression that he had crossed into “Western Europe,” so great was the contrast. Ukraine had, quite clearly, been singled out.

And the reason for that was Stalin’s recognition that Ukrainians’ belief that they were a people distinct from their Russian neighbors was authentic and thus potentially dangerous. The confused period that followed the Bolshevik Revolution had seen two attempts to establish a separate Ukrainian state as well as a massive peasant uprising that had evolved into a war of all against all — and a serious threat to the nascent Soviet regime. When the Bolsheviks finally secured their hold over the country, they first played, by their dismal standards, nice. Ukrainians were led to believe that their Soviet Republic would, in a real sense, be Ukrainian and, often, run by Ukrainians.

That was never likely to be a solution acceptable to Stalin, that paradoxical Georgian enforcer of Russian imperial control, a man who knew a thing or two about nations — and how to break them. When, in 1925, Stalin declared that “the peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question,” it was Ukraine that was on his mind. If Ukraine was to become “a true fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic,” which Stalin had said that he wanted, the uncomfortably large, uncomfortably independent peasantry, the repository of so much of Ukrainian tradition and, in some sense, Ukraine’s soul, would have to be ground down.

But Ukraine would have to be decapitated, too. Applebaum details the silencing and, often, destruction of much of Ukraine’s intelligentsia, and the purge of a Ukrainian Communist Party with a membership too prone, the Kremlin suspected, to go its own way.

The Holodomor is properly understood only when it is understood as part of a broader, deeper assault on the Ukrainian national idea. Applebaum records how, even as “the famine was raging, . . . Stalin’s de facto spokesman in Ukraine forced through a decree eliminating Ukrainian textbooks as well as school lessons tailored to Ukrainian children” — another warning that Moscow had not finished with Ukraine. Taken as a whole, Stalin’s multifaceted onslaught on Ukrainians as a peoplewould (as Applebaum points out) “certainly” pass the test established for genocide by Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who coined the term. Indeed, Lemkin acknowledged as much. Whether it would meet the narrower definition of genocide set out in the U.N. Convention on Genocide is, Applebaum contends (perhaps too cautiously), a different matter, but, as she notes, that convention was heavily influenced by a Soviet Union that had no interest in being asked to answer for its crimes.

The final stage of genocide or ethnic cleansing — call it what you will — is usually the replacement of the old population with a new one. Russian peasants started to move into the emptied villages, the beginning of what Applebaum describes as a “slow-motion movement of Russians into a depopulated Ukraine” that was to last for decades, further blurring the idea of a Ukrainian Ukraine in a way that helped the Soviets then, and helps Vladimir Putin now.

The Holodomor was unmentionable in the Soviet Union until just before the USSR’s collapse. And shamefully, indifference in the West played a part in greasing its transformation from a topic that was forbidden into one that came close to being forgotten. Applebaum rightly highlights the role played in the original Soviet cover-up by Times man Duranty, not least the way he so effectively smothered the reporting of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who stepped off a train at a place he wasn’t meant to, walked for three days through the hell the Holodomor was creating, and told the world what he had seen.

Memory can sometimes outlast efforts to repress it. When, in the late 1980s, it finally became possible to talk about the Holodomor in the USSR, the long-buried memories of those years played their part in paving the way to Ukrainian independence in 1991. This was perversely acknowledged by the “Russian-backed separatists” who (Applebaum relates) destroyed a Holodomor memorial in the occupied eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne in 2015. It was a desecration that also echoed the Kremlin’s attempts to escape the consequences of the past by evasion and denial, a would-be rewriting of history that makes this compelling book all the more timely — and all the more necessary.

Proletarians, Painters and Propagandists

The Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2017

The poet Vladimir Kirillov vowed to ‘burn up Raphael for our Tomorrow’s sake’ but didn’t say what would come next. The Bolsheviks’ was a supremely didactic revolution, intended to produce a new kind of man. Artists were ready to help out. Even before the revolution, painters such as Kazimir Malevich had taken abstraction to new extremes, pursuing what he called the ‘zero of form’—a rejection of everything that had gone before and a timely anticipation, it might be thought, of the Bolshevik ‘year zero’ that lay just ahead.

‘Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932’ (Royal Academy Publications, 320 pages, $65) is a beautifully illustrated account of art that followed upon, but was ultimately discarded by, the revolution. It closes with a 1932 exhibition commemorating the artists of the new order’s first 15 years, a swan song for an avant-garde rapidly being eclipsed by the inspiring banality of Socialist Realism.

While “Revolution” focuses on painting, the lavishly produced ‘Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test’ (Art Institute of Chicago, 324 pages, $65)takes a broader approach with regard to types of artistic expression, documenting theater productions, posters, periodicals and other ephemera as well as painting, photography and design. The works are often of remarkable quality, raising uncomfortable questions about how we are to regard great art that was the accomplice of totalitarianism.

The earlier part of ‘Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922-1992’ (Yale, 278 pages, $55) highlights the debate between those who pushed art’s frontiers forward toward Utopia and those who believed that the masses needed something more easily understood. Stalin, no Utopian, took the latter side, to the delight of artists such as Evgeny Katsman: After a meeting in 1933 to discuss this controversy with the Soviet leader, Katsman rhapsodized in his diary over Stalin’s ‘sweet face’—a vision that only a Socialist Realist could see.

The Road to Red October

The Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2017

‘Few apocalyptic millenarians live to see the promised apocalypse, let alone the millennium,” writes Yuri Slezkine in “The House of Government” (Princeton, 1,104 pages, $39.95), a brilliant retelling of, mainly, the first two decades of the Soviet era in a sprawling saga centered around a famous and infamous Moscow apartment building created for the new elite. The Bolsheviks were a millenarian sect if ever there was one, as Mr. Slezkine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates. And, even if the millennium proved elusive, they were able to set off an apocalypse in Petrograd, then Russia’s capital, almost exactly a century ago.

That old-time millenarian ardor smolders away in “October” (Verso, 369 pages, $26.95), China Miéville’s history of what he calls the “ultimately inspiring” Russian Revolution: “This was Russia’s revolution,” he writes, “but it belonged and belongs to others, too. It could be ours. If its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.” It is? After the hecatombs created in communism’s name, such a call to arms is evidence of a faith untroubled when prophecy fails again and again.

Mr. Miéville is a respected Britain-based writer of science fiction but also a man of the far left, and “October” is deftly written but so skewed that the book risks tipping over into alternative history. “I am partisan,” writes Mr. Miéville, a confession that comes as no surprise; but “I have striven to be fair,” which does. Mr. Miéville’s narrative is at times—how to put this—selective. On occasion, he’s careless with facts, not least when it concerns the Bolsheviks’ January 1918 suppression of the Constituent Assembly (Russia’s last democratically elected “parliament” until the Yeltsin years): It is misleading to maintain that its membership was “chosen” before the Bolshevik coup.

That “October” is written from a sympathetic perspective is an unsettling reminder of the persistence of ideas—with roots long predating Marx—which can never safely be consigned (to appropriate Trotsky’s words) to the dustbin of history. Nevertheless this book is worth reading for its emphasis on the bitter debates within Russia’s revolutionary left over how to take advantage of the opportunity it had been given by the fall of the czar—and by the fragility of the regime that replaced him in early 1917.

When the year began, Nicholas II was clinging to his throne, Lenin was an exile in Zurich and the Bolsheviks were just one faction in a fissiparous revolutionary underground. Less than 12 months later, they were running the country—or enough of it to count. The czar was overthrown in a revolution in February (dates given are according to the Julian calendar then used in Russia). Food shortages, wider economic difficulties and general war weariness (World War I had entered its fourth year) had all reinforced the feeling shared by many Russians—even some among the ruling elite—that Romanov absolutism had had its day.

There was a wide agreement that the monarchy should go, but no consensus about what should come next. The new liberal “provisional government” had emerged out of a Duma committee during the crisis. Lacking much democratic legitimacy, it was well-intentioned, weak and well-named. A caretaker more naive than negligent, it threw open the door, but (to borrow a phrase from Engels), the hangman stood waiting outside. Dark forces poured through, including Lenin, who returned from Zurich in April, with assistance from Germany.

Russians, Lenin conceded, now enjoyed “a maximum of legally recognized rights,” but he claimed this was a capitalist con. Bolshevism was required, whether the masses realized it or not. That, eventually, was what the second, October, revolution gave them.

The excellent “Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War 1914- 1921” (Oxford, 823 pages, $39.95), by Yale’s Laura Engelstein, is a considerably more objective account than Mr. Miéville’s. It covers not just the two revolutions and their prelude, but also the civil war that ensued—a civil war that the Bolsheviks, Ms. Englestein argues, did what they could to foment. Lenin calculated that a great sorting, a “process of clarification,” as she terms it, would leave the Bolsheviks alone on top. The war turned out to be more terrible than even Lenin envisaged, but he was proved right in the end.

Lenin often was, but one interesting aspect of Ms. Engelstein’s discussion of 1917 itself is the degree to which she depicts the Bolsheviks as storm-chasers, struggling to keep pace with events they could not yet control. The successive iterations of the provisional government, the best known of which was led by the charismatic if not particularly effective Alexander Kerensky, were actually caught up in the storm.

They failed to feed the cities. They could not satisfy the demand by workers and peasants (and the soldiers recruited from those classes) for a system—collectivist and profoundly antihierarchical—very different from the liberal order they had in mind. They could—and should—have ended Russia’s unpopular, perilous participation in World War I, but didn’t. Meanwhile, democratic principles and a justified fear of both ends of the political spectrum kept Kerensky from gambling on a more authoritarian turn until it was too late.

It was a while before the Bolsheviks could take the helm. April, June and July all saw eruptions of popular discontent, which Ms. Engelstein maintains were beyond “the capacity of any political leadership to contain or direct.” The philosopher Fedor Stepun observed that Lenin’s post-exile speeches were merely “sails to catch the crazed winds of the revolution.” The Bolsheviks, writes Ms. Engelstein, were “on the margins of political life [but] . . . the margins were a good place to be.” Amid mounting disorder, “those at the center of authority, tenuous as it was, were in the process of exhausting their political credit.”

According to the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov (the somewhat more moderate Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks had split in 1903), “Lenin’s group was not directly aiming at the seizure of power [in June 1917] but . . . was ready to seize it in favorable circumstances, which it was taking steps to create.” Ms. Engelstein explains how the Bolsheviks built their base, patiently gathering support among the military and in factories. They then mobilized this “relatively disciplined mass” in a manner designed to increase disorder and topple the flailing provisional government while acting as a “force for order” poised to step in when the moment came. In October, it did.

Contrary to those who assert that the workers and peasants lacked an agenda of their own, Ms. Engelstein believes they genuinely wanted social revolution—though not a Bolshevik dictatorship. But only the Bolsheviks were able “to create the architecture needed to run the successor to the autocratic state and transform the excitement of liberty into a new kind of discipline and power.” The result was totalitarian rule, in which the only “excitement” was the manipulated fervor of a cult on the march.

“Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd” (Harvard, 351 pages, $29.95) is an innovative study that’s about more than its title would suggest. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, formerly a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, shows how the social breakdown that followed the February Revolution triggered a surge in crime that the provisional government could not reverse. It may be too much to argue, as Mr. Hasegawa does, that “the Bolsheviks rode a crime wave to power,” but the chaos did make it easier for them to exploit the growing vacuum in authority. The provisional government faded from shadow to ghost, essentially finished off in late October by the capture of a few buildings, a coup at first barely noticed by many in an exhausted Petrograd. Russia’s new Bolshevik rulers initially did not bother too much about crime, until devastating alcohol-fueled mayhem forced their hand, “inadvertently provoking,” claims Mr. Hasegawa, “the establishment of a new kind of police state”—one, I suspect, that was already on the way.

Helen Rappaport’s “Caught in the Revolution” (St. Martin’s, 430 pages, $27.99) is an account of 1917 as witnessed by Petrograd’s expatriate community, which was itself threatened by the lawlessness Mr. Hasegawa chronicles. A lively if sporadically florid book (“Petrograd was a brooding, beleaguered city that last desperate winter before the revolution broke”), Ms. Rappaport’s account works well as an introduction to a complicated year, but is most valuable for its record of the impressions of those who lived through it. Many of these were relatively privileged (“the servants are beginning to get stuck up with this new-born freedom”), but their observations (“I see Russia going to hell, as a country never went before”) have aged rather better than those of the enthusiasts who welcomed October’s false dawn. Rhapsodizing over workers rallying at the Bolshevik headquarters, American journalist and fellow traveler Albert Rhys Williams wrote that they were “dynamos of energy; sleepless, tireless, nerveless miracles of men.” Visiting the same place a few weeks later, a less easily impressed Frenchwoman saw “dead, doctrinaire eyes.”

Despite its title, the worthwhile “Revolution! Writings From Russia, 1917” (Pegasus, 364 pages, $27.95) features surprisingly little from the revolutionary year itself—editor Pete Ayrton includes nothing, say, from Nikolai Sukhanov or from the diaries of the novelist Ivan Bunin, a harsh critic of Bolshevism. This is only partly compensated for by Leon Trotsky’s vivid report of October 24, the “deciding night” of the Bolshevik coup—complete with the complaint, as revealing as it was dishonest, that “the Revolution is still too trusting, too generous, optimistic and light-hearted.” The next morning Lenin announced that the provisional government was no more.

The inevitable extract from John Reed’s “Ten Days That Shook the World” is a gung-ho depiction of the taking of the Winter Palace on the evening of the 25th. Somerset Maugham makes a rather less-expected appearance with a short story from “Ashenden,” a volume of tales based on his experiences as a British spy. It’s good enough, if not up to the standard set by three sentences from the book’s preface: “In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success.”

Finally, “1917: Stories and Poems From the Russian Revolution” (Pushkin Press, 236 pages, $14.95) is an anthology of literary responses to Bunin’s “damn year.” Neatly chosen by Boris Dralyuk, with room for the familiar (such as Boris Pasternak) and those known less well (the sardonic Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, who wrote as Teffi), the volume is reasonably well balanced between the October revolution’s supporters and those appalled by it. Vladimir Mayakovsky catches the millenarian mood (“We’ll cleanse all the cities . . . with a flood even greater than Noah’s”) while in “The Twelve” Alexander Blok opts for a warmer purge: “We’ll . . . set the world on fire . . . give us Your blessing, Lord!”

History made fools of the cheerleaders of revolution, but the words of those who opposed it still haunt. Anna Akhmatova resolves to stay with her “nation, suicidal” and does so, her great chronicling of Stalinist terror still to come. Marina Tsvetaeva writes of the wine flowing down “every gutter” and a “Tsar’s statue—razed, black night in its place.” Zinaida Gippius mourns the death of long longed-for liberty: “The Bride appeared. And then the soldiers / drove bayonets through both her eyes . . . The royal axe and noose were cleaner / than these apes’ bloodied hands . . . Can’t live like this! Can’t live like this!” Both Gippius and Tsvetaeva went into exile. Tsvetaeva later returned to her homeland. She hanged herself in 1941.

Baltic Dawn

Sigrid Rausing: Everything is Wonderful - Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia

The Weekly Standard, November 10, 2014

Tallinn-Narva road, February 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford

I first visited Estonia—or more specifically, its capital, Tallinn—in August 1993, two years after the small Baltic state regained its independence after nearly half-a-century of Soviet occupation. Tallinn was in the process of uneasy, edgy transformation. The Soviet past was not yet cleanly past. It was still lurking in the dwindling Russian military bases. It was still visible in the general shabbiness, in the rhythms of everyday life, and, above all, in the presence of the large Russian settler population, a minority that Vladimir Putin now eyes hopefully, if not necessarily realistically, for its troublemaking potential.

Totalitarian colonial rule had been replaced by a national democracy, the ruble had been succeeded by the kroon, and free-market reformers were at the helm; but the new government was operating in the rubble of the command economy. There was no spare cash to smooth the transition to capitalism. Inflation had exceeded 1,000 percent during the course of the previous year, savings had been wiped out, the old Soviet enterprises were dying, and the welfare net was fraying.

Yet in Tallinn there was a discernible sense of purpose, buttressed by memories of the prosperous nation prewar Estonia had been. What people wanted, I was told, was a “normal life.” That was a phrase that could be heard all over the former Eastern Bloc in those days, a phrase that damned the Soviet experience as an unwanted, unnatural interruption and resonated with dreams of that elusive Western future. Life was tough in Tallinn, but there were hints of better times to come. If the country was to be rebuilt, this was where the turnaround was taking shape.

But Sigrid Rausing went somewhere else in 1993, to a place far from the hub of national reconstruction, a place where the inhabitants had little idea of what could or should come next, a bleak place—poor, even by the demanding standards of post-Soviet Estonia—where nationhood was misty and visions of the future were still obscured by the wreckage of an alien utopia. Rausing, a scion of one of Sweden’s richest families, was a doctoral student in social anthropology. To gather material for her thesis, she spent a year on the former V. I. Lenin collective farm on Noarootsi, a remote peninsula on the western Estonian coast.

Noarootsi had once been inhabited by members of the country’s tiny Swedish minority, most of whom had been evacuated to the safety of their ancestral homeland by Estonia’s German occupiers shortly before the Red Army returned in 1944. The final minutes before their departure were caught on film: the exiles-to-be assembled on a beach, Red Cross representatives mingling with smiling SS officers. Baltic history is rarely straightforward.

Rausing’s thesis formed the basis of her History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm, an academic work published by Oxford University Press 10 years ago. This was never a book destined to top the bestseller lists, but for anyone able to weather the clouds of jargon that drift by—“the effect was to emphasize the experience of oppositions in the form of a homology”—it offers a sharp, intriguing, and unexpectedly wry portrait of what Rausing refers to as the “particular post-Soviet culture of 1993-94, the culture of transition and reconstruction,” a culture that no longer exists.

Rausing has now reworked the topic of her time in Noarootsi into Everything Is Wonderful, a personal, intimate account of that year in which she largely dispenses with academic analysis—indeed, there are moments when she pokes gentle fun at its absurdities—and gives her considerable lyrical gifts free rein. Graduate-school prose now finds itself transformed into passages of austere beauty. They describe a landscape that reminds her of Sweden, only “deeper, vaster, and sadder”; more than that, they portray a people adrift. There is something of dreaming in her writing, images that haunt. Spring returns, and

the children were outside again, playing and shouting in the long twilight, until there was an almost deafening din echoing between the blocks of flats. One day someone burnt the old brown grass strewn with rubbish between the blocks, and the children kept up their own private fires deep into the night.

There is a subplot too, tense and awkward, sometimes expressed in not much more than a hint, that surrounds the position of Rausing herself, an attractive thirty-something Swedish heiress inserted into this exhausted husk of a community and, for a while, lodging with the heavy-drinking, possibly/probably lecherous Toivo and his long-suffering wife, Inna. Ingmar Bergman, your agent is on the line.

That’s not to say that Rausing neglects the broad themes of her academic research. As she notes, the two books “overlap to some degree,” and they have to. Without repeating some of the background covered in the first volume, isolated, depopulated Noarootsi—with its Soviet dereliction, abandoned watch-towers (the peninsula had been in a restricted border zone), emptied homesteads, and taciturn, enigmatic inhabitants scarred by alcoholism and worse and speaking a language of a complexity Rausing struggled to grasp—would have seemed like nothing so much as the setting for a piece of post-apocalyptic gothic. So Rausing provides a brief, neatly crafted, and necessary guide to Estonia’s difficult and troubled history, neglecting neither the obvious horrors nor the subtler atrocities, such as the attempted cultural annihilation represented by the wholesale destruction of Estonian literature. Tallinn Central Library lost its entire collection of books—some 150,000 of them—between 1946 and 1950.

Sometimes, traces of that history—forbidden for so long—come crashing through the silence. Ruth, 76, a Seventh-Day Adventist, tipped by tyranny into something more unhinged than eccentricity, hands Rausing a handwritten retelling of her life: “Devilish age, sad age. Schoolchildren also spies .  .  . life as leprosy.” But Everything Is Wonderful is a book in which the story lies mainly beneath the surface. Old ways linger on amid new realities. There is a new cooperative store, but the old Soviet shop hangs on, “selling household stuff as well as some food, pots and pans, exercise books, shoes if they got a consignment, and ancient Russian jars of jams and pickles with rusty lids and falling-off labels.”

Throughout the brutal winter, heating is intermittent. Heating bills are no longer subsidized, but the majority of villagers “patiently” pay them nonetheless. New habits creep in. Empty Western bottles and other packaging are displayed in apartments, demonstrations of “a connection with the West, a way of expressing the new normal”—that word again, that “normal” in which most had yet to find their feet. Meanwhile, Swedes bring hand-me-down help and the suspicion that they might be looking to reclaim a long-lost family home.

Rausing is a participant in this drama. We learn of her fears, her loneliness, of her wondering what she is doing in this distant Baltic corner, and of her small pleasures, too (“the tipsy sweet happiness of strawberry liqueur”). But she is a spectator as well, and a perceptive one, not least when it comes to the profoundly uncomfortable relationship between Estonians and the Russian minority. The latter are resented as colonists, yet caricatured in terms that remind Rausing of the “natives” of the “colonial imagination: happy-go-lucky, hospitable people lacking industry, application, and predictability.” She dines in a restaurant in a nearby town, where “the atmosphere was a little strained between a Russian group of guests and the few Estonians in the room.” Later, Rausing learns that the “only” Russians living in the “comfortable Estonian part of town” are deaf and dumb; they are “outside language,” as she puts it, and thus able (she theorizes) to “assimilate .  .  . through muteness.”

That sounds extreme, but the scars of the past were still very raw back then. Sometime in the mid-1990s, I watched a senior member of the Estonian government bluntly explain the facts of Estonia’s (to borrow a Canadian phrase) twin solitudes to a delegation of Swedish investors. There was, he said, little overt trouble between ethnic Estonians and the country’s Russians, but there was little contact either: “We don’t get on.”

Rausing’s tone is quiet, often wistful, marred only by interludes of limousine liberalism—apparently there was something “liberating” in the way the locals didn’t care too much about their possessions, which is easy enough, I imagine, when those possessions were, for the most part, Soviet junk—including an element of disdain for the market reforms that were to work so well for Estonia. The prim pieties of Western feminism also make an unwelcome appearance. Watching a pole dancer in a rundown resort town summons up concerns over “objectification,” but Rausing’s response to reports of a topless car wash in Tallinn is endearingly puzzled and—so Swedish—practical: “Really strange, particularly given the Estonian climate.”

But this should not detract from Rausing’s wider achievement. Her book is the last harvest yielded up by that old collective farm, and the finest.

The Kremlin Mountaineer

Paul Johnson: Stalin - The Kremlin Mountaineer

The Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2014

In the months leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution, Joseph Stalin was, recalled one fellow revolutionary, no more than a “gray blur.” The quiet inscrutability of this controlled, taciturn figure eventually helped ease his path to some murky place in the West’s understanding of the past, a place where memory of the horror he unleashed was quick to fade. Pete Seeger sang for Stalin? Was that so bad?

This bothers Paul Johnson, the British writer, historian and journalist. Hitler, he notes with dry understatement, is “frequently in the mass media.” Mao’s memory “is kept alive by the continuing rise . . . of the communist state he created.” But “Stalin has receded into the shadows.” Mr. Johnson worries that “among the young [Stalin] is insufficiently known”; he might have added that a good number of the middle-aged and even the old don’t have much of a clue of who, and what, Stalin was either.

Mr. Johnson’s “Stalin: The Kremlin Mountaineer” is intended to put that right. In this short book he neatly sets out the arc of a career that took Soso Dzhugashvili from poverty in the Caucasus to mastery of an empire. We see the young Stalin as an emerging revolutionary, appreciated by Lenin for his smarts, organizational skills and willingness to resort to violence. Stalin, gushed Lenin, was a “man of action” rather than a “tea-drinker.” Hard-working and effective, he was made party general secretary a few years after the revolution, a job that contained within it (as Mr. Johnson points out) the path to a personal dictatorship. After Lenin’s 1924 death, Stalin maneuvered his way over the careers and corpses of rivals to a dominance that he was never to lose, buttressed by a cult of personality detached from anything approaching reason.

Mr. Johnson does not stint on the personal details, Stalin’s charm (when he wanted), for example, and dark humor, but the usual historical episodes make their appearance: collectivization, famine, Gulag, purges, the Great Terror, the pact with Hitler, war with Hitler, the enslavement of Eastern Europe, Cold War, the paranoid twilight planning of fresh nightmares and a death toll that “cannot be less than twenty million.” That estimate may, appallingly, be on the conservative side.

Amid this hideous chronicle are unexpected insights. Lenin’s late breach with Stalin, Mr. Johnson observes, was as much over manners as anything else: “a rebuke from a member of the gentry to a proletarian lout.” And sometimes there is the extra piece of information that throws light into the terrible darkness. Recounting the 1940 massacre of Polish officers at Katyn, Mr. Johnson names the man responsible for organizing the shootings—V.M. Blokhin. He probably committed “more individual killings than any other man in history,” reckons Mr. Johnson. Ask yourself if you have even heard his name before.

To be sure, Mr. Johnson’s “Stalin” will not add much new to anyone already familiar with its subject’s grim record. It is a very slender volume—a monograph really. Inevitably in a book this small on a subject this large, the author paints with broad strokes, sweeping aside some accuracy along the way. Despite that, this book makes a fine “Stalin for Beginners.”

As Mr. Johnson’s vivid prose rolls on, the gray blur is replaced by a hard-edged reality. Stalin’s published writings were turgid, and he was no orator, but there was nothing dull about his intellect or cold, meticulous determination. As for his own creed, Mr. Johnson regards him as “a man born to believe,” one of the Marxist faithful, and maybe Stalin, the ex-seminarian, was indeed that: Clever people can find truth in very peculiar places.

But what he was not, contrary to the ludicrous, but persistent, myth of good Bolshevik intentions gone astray, was the betrayer of Lenin’s revolution. As Mr. Johnson explains, Stalinist terror “was merely an extension of Lenin’s.” Shortly before the end of his immensely long life, Stalin’s former foreign minister (and a great deal else besides), Vyacheslav Molotov, reminisced that “compared to Lenin” his old boss “was a mere lamb.” Perhaps even more so than those of Stalin, Lenin’s atrocities remain too little known.

Over to you, Mr. Johnson.

Landscape After

Marci Shore: The Taste of Ashes - The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe

National Review, April 3, 2013 (April 22, 2013 Issue)

Warsaw, Poland, May 1998 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

The new dawn that broke over Eastern Europe in 1989 was bright, but the landscape it illuminated was exhausted, a territory of shadows and regret, where hope was jostled by apprehension and old demons stirred. To read some of the accounts of that time and that place is to confront sadness unexpected after the jubilation on the Wall, the Hungarian border, or Wenceslas Square — a melancholy echoed in Marci Shore’s beautifully written, discursive, and by her own admission “deeply subjective” new memoir, a work of well-told history and perceptive reporting that is both less than its title promises and rather more. Either way, it could have done with an index.

Don’t read The Taste of Ashes expecting a survey that covers all of the old Eastern Europe. With the exception of Romania (does that count?), the Balkans do not really feature, nor do Hungary and the former East Germany. There’s a brief excursion to Lithuania, but the other Baltics and the rest of the Soviet far west are notable only by their omission. This is a volume centered on Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, but quite a bit of what Shore discovered there could easily have been found elsewhere in the region. Thus, in early 1995, she returns to Prague and visits the house of an apolitical elderly couple, all too typical of a generation throughout Eastern Europe whose lives had been impoverished by Communism, but ruined by its fall:

The Velvet Revolution had brought freedoms they had no use for, and in any case had not the money to enjoy. Their whole adult lives they had worked under the Communist regime, and that regime had promised they would be cared for in their old age. Now the social contract had been broken. For their generation the revolution had come too late. For Pan Prokop and Paní Prokopová, it would have been better had it not come at all.

That, of course, assumes that — had it survived — the crumbling economy of Communist Czechoslovakia would have been in a position to deliver on those undertakings, something that is by no means certain.

Shore is an associate professor of history at Yale, a Generation X intellectual of somewhat progressive hue. Thus it may not be surprising that her description of her time in the Eastern Europe of the “post-Communist moment” — doubtless further skewed, in a form of confirmation bias, by the views and experiences of those with whom she chose to associate — comes with a sigh of disappointment. History failed again. The rise of the philosopher king, Vaclav Havel, was not accompanied by the rise of a philosopher people.

There’s prim tut-tutting about the profusion of pornography, and, more justifiably, about the increase in crime and the persistence of the inertia, passivity, and conformity of the “realm of the not possible” that was so much of the Communist state. There is little about the revival in free enterprise, but plenty on the resurgence in national tensions. Shore spent time “working as an intern for an ethnic-conflict project at an American-funded research institute.” Ex-Yugoslavia was in flames, and other long-suppressed conflicts had reemerged into the space that Moscow had once policed. In Romania, Shore investigated tensions between ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Romanians. Fair enough, interesting enough, but all this risks giving an unbalanced impression of a region where most just wanted their lives to be “normal,” an adjective that Shore happens to hear used by a Romanian politician, but that was voiced often in Eastern Europe in those days. When the old regimes fell, achieving a “normality” defined in largely Western terms was a widespread objective.

This idea is reflected in a clever phrase deployed by Shore to describe 1989’s upheavals: “Time, seemingly halted for so long, suddenly leaped forward.” And if the results of the leap have been uneven, they have still been impressive: “To tens of millions of East Europeans the end of Communism brought countless good things — above all a freedom the vast majority of people never imagined that they would live long enough to see.”

But in one sense, time did count, and it counted very much. Shore trains her historian’s eye on the impact of the Communist years, with a keen focus on the telling detail and defining atrocity. And she takes a longer view than most. The rise of the red flag over what her husband, Yale professor Timothy Snyder, dubbed the “bloodlands” in his magisterial book of the same name cannot, she correctly stresses, be seen in isolation. The subtitle of Shore’s book refers not just to Communism but to totalitarianism. In her view, the different stages in the evolution of Eastern European Communism must be read as links in a chain that stretches back to World War II, Nazi occupation, and the Holocaust and, before that, to the Depression, the rise of Fascism, and even to “the dizzying possibilities of the 1920s.”

It is widely recognized that war and Nazi misrule were critical in clearing a political, military, and (perversely) moral space for Eastern European Stalinism, and the link between the war and the troubled decade that preceded it is hardly a secret. The connection to the “unhinging” 1920s is more novel. Shore uses the microcosm of a group of 20th-century Polish poets as a window into the revolutionary fervor that enveloped large sections of the European intelligentsia in a decade happier, luckier Americans remember for jazz and Al Jolson.

Those poets — many of them of Jewish descent — dominated her book Caviar and Ashes and crop up again in The Taste of Ashes. From the later 1920s onward, they exchanged the (to them) ultimately unbearable uncertainties of nihilism for the messianic determinism of the far left, a faith that they — and a number of their associates — were eventually, and crucially, to put at the disposal of Stalin’s Poland. That’s a timetable that suggests to me that the original sin from which the nightmares Shore describes were to flow was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. After all, it was Lenin’s blood-soaked millennial upheaval that frightened many into Fascism as a supposed last bulwark of civilization. And it was Lenin’s revolution that drove its followers worldwide into a Communist cult that became dangerously intertwined with Stalinism years before the alibi that was Auschwitz.

To attribute so much of the blame to Lenin fits awkwardly with the emphasis that Shore’s narrative places on Hitler. The Holocaust is justifiably central to our reading of Eastern Europe’s dark 20th century, but its role as Stalin’s enabler needs more nuance than Shore gives it. Equally, notwithstanding the pantomime anti-Semitism (a gargoyle hounding of phantoms) that still, shamefully, persists in these lands, the horrors of the Shoah are less critical — other than for the hideous absence that it left behind — to our understanding of the region today than Shore appears to suggest. In a book billed as wide-roaming, she devotes perhaps too much space to what is now, tragically, only a tiny, introspective, often conflicted minority of Polish Jews. A minority of a once slightly larger minority (the Communists arranged a final anti-Semitic purge in 1968), they stay put in a country that groups of visiting Jewish teenagers — there to mourn at the death camps — regard (Shore recalls) “as a cemetery.”

Theirs is a disturbing, compelling story, but it crowds out a broader discussion of the encounter with a Communist past in which so many Eastern Europeans were profoundly compromised and then, “in a world where all the rules had changed,” left exposed by the opening of files that were either devastatingly ambiguous or, worse, all too clear.

There could have been more too in this book on the appeal of totalizing ideology to so many intellectuals. It is a topic that obviously interests Shore (it surfaced in Caviar and Ashes), but she gives too little attention to a phenomenon that still endures, if more benignly, even in the attitude of those such as the former dissident and Velvet Revolutionary who opts out of the, yes, normal politics of the new era: “To be engaged” is, in his view, “to forgo clean hands,” an abdication that is itself a declaration of absolutist thinking. Shore notes that “dissidence . . . had often been born of communism”: Once a believer, always a believer — all that changes is in what. That dangerous thrill remains.

Shore concludes the book with a tale of meeting a “bright young” member of the Polish new Left, who thanks her for Caviar and Ashes — a work he regards as rehabilitating those Marxist intellectuals of seven decades ago. Shore contradicts him, explaining that their fate is a “tragedy.” “But I didn’t read it as a tragedy!” says the bright young man. “I read it as a romance.”

We have been warned.