Never Let Me Go Ishuguro, Katsuo (2005)
Memoires of Montparnasse. Glassco, John (Buffy)(1969)
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Dalrymple, William (2019)
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14thCentury. Tuchman, Barbara (1978)
Shakespeare and Company. Beach, Sylvia (1959)
The Nickel Boys. Whitehead, Colson (2019)
Earnest Hemingway: A Biography. Dearborn, Mary (2017)
Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights. Lewis,Helen. (2020)
Too Much and Never Enough. Trump, Mary (PH.D.) (2020)
Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. Sheffer, Edith (2018)
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Shirer, William L. 2011 (1961) 50thanniversary edition
TheNature of Nature, Sala, Eric 2020
Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of theSoviet Regime. Vitaly Shetalinsky. 1993
The New Shostakovich. Ian McDonald. 1990
Waiting for Hitler. Stalin Vol. 2 Stephen Kotkin. 2018
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life. D. M, Thomas.1998
Never Let Me Go Ishuguro, Katsuo (2005)
Although I came to this novel late, I am glad I did not miss it since I consider it one the great novels of our time. I won’t say anything about the plot since it is the slow reveal that is a large part of the novel’s power but I can think of very few works that challenge the nature of being human so strongly and from such an extraordinary direction. When you are finished, you believe the book’s premise and begin to question what a human being really consists of, to make that premise believable. This a is a deservingNobel Prize winner – and many are not. Do not miss this book.
Memoires of Montparnasse. Glassco, John (Buffy)(1969)
I mention this book because I read it, largely, inconjunction with Part #5 of my Stories of the Dome series and because I am working on a larger article to put it in context with many of the other stories of the “Lost Generation” who lived and wrote in Paris in the 20’s – Hemingway, Cowley, Beach, Stein, Fitzgerald etc. Most reviewers (even Ondaatje, Edel, Cowley and Atwood) have taken it as what it proclaims itself to be: the memoirs of a young man in Paris in the 20’s, felled by TB and writing his memoirs under the shadow of the scalpel in the Royal Victoria Hospital. Precisely what its author wanted everyone to believe when he wrote most of it to make some money, 40years later after he saw that Hemingway and Callaghan were cashing in on the era.
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Dalrymple, William (2019)
If you ever wondered what the spoils of colonialism are, this is the book to set you straight on that score. It is the history of the British East India Company from 1599 until after 1757, by a master historical tale teller. It is about the plundering of the Mughal Empire in India by a bunch of English entrepreneurs/robbers – so much plunder that India still has not recovered from it. Up for a ton of awards, it is the most complete telling of the truth behind the “white man’s burden” in the early days of colonial India.
Dalrymple begins his extraordinarily good history of the East India Company by describing the nature of the one of the first Indian slang words to enter the English language: loot. To illustrate it he describes the contents of Powis Castle in Wales, “room after room, of imperial plunder, extracted [from India] by the East Indian Company (EIC) in the eighteenth century. There are more Mughal artefacts stacked in this private house in the Welsh countryside than are on display in any one place in India –even the National Museum in Delhi. The riches include hookahs of burnished gold inlaid with empurpled ebony; superbly inscribed Badakhshan spinels and jeweled daggers; gleaming rubies the colour of pigeon’s blood, and scatterings of lizard-green emeralds. There are tiger’s head set with sapphires and yellow topaz; ornaments of jade and ivory; silken hangings embroidered with poppies and lotuses; statues of Hindu gods and coats of elephant armour. In pride of place stand two great war trophies taken after their owners had been defeated and killed: the palanquin Siraj ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal, left behind when he fled the battlefield of Plassey, and the campaign tent of Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore.”
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Tuchman, Barbara (1978)
This is my third time through this book and each time the rewards are enormous. Pay attention to the title as it is (and continues to be, more than 40 years after publication) spectacularly appropriate. Just compare the status of labour today and the era post-bubonic plague and you’ll see what I mean. The extraordinary range of human experience is amazing and the unbelievable ignorance and detachment of the wealthy from everyday reality is spectacular. There have been a few great historians in the last 100 years and most of them (Tuchman, MacMillan, Fraser and Beard) have been women.
Shakespeare and Company. Beach, Sylvia (1959)
If the name does not ring a bell, Sylvia Beach was the woman who established the lending library and bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris in the 1920’s. It’s still there by the way and still independent. She’s the woman who famously fed Hemingway (food and books) and published, in the face of heavy-handed censorship, James Joyce’s Ulysses. In actual fact, Hemingway didn’t need any feeding – he had lots of money – and she more than published Joyce, she was his personal secretary for a number of years and lived through considerable mis-treatment at his hands. Of all those who wrote memory books about this era in Paris, she is the most honest and the kindest as well. She’s not a great writer but she knew everybody very well. And she told the truth which is not true of a lot of them.
The Nickel Boys. Whitehead, Colson (2019)
Colson Whitehead has taken a commanding lead among American novelists with this book – as well as The Underground Railroad. This time he takes on a Florida reform school of the Jim Crow era and by the use of a clear-eyed but innocent narrator he is able to reveal all the horror of this establishment without a touch of melodrama. Anyone who has done any reading about the residential schools that haunt this country will see the parallels. This is a masterwork.
Earnest Hemingway: A Biography. Dearborn, Mary (2017)
Hemingway’s macho pose had largely been debunked before Mary Dearborn came along. Still, there’s a lot here that is relatively new, particularly Hem’s serious problem with multiple concussions, less than adequate medical treatment and prescription drugs. All of which added up to a rather sorry and bizarre ending to his life. On the whole a solid and well told biography full of sympathy for a man who, for all his faults, was a master of prose.
Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights. Lewis, Helen. (2020)
An excellent introduction to early battles in the history of women’s rights, divided up into 11 areas. Each area is well researched and brought into a contemporary focus with equal measures of wit and wisdom. Particularly interesting are the chapters on divorce, abortion, work and the suffragette movement. People seem to have forgotten that the early British feminists conducted a devastating and effective bombing campaign that might have achieved the vote if the First world War had not intervened.
As of June2022
Too Much and Never Enough. Trump, Mary (PH.D.) (2020)
I avoided this book, and all the others, during his “presidency.” The less I had of his unlimited ignorance and malice, the happier I was. I needed no-one’s aid -- relative, pundit or memoirist -- to understand what a colossal waste of skin he was. But as he faded into his malignant lair of Mar-a-Lago having almost toppled American democracy (and plotting another attempt with his republican minions) my interest was a little peaked to hear about him from “inside” the family. What a waste of time that was. Nothing new was revealed about how he co-opted his father’s millions in order to present the façade of the intrepid “business man” and to conceal the truth of the con man, grifter and perennial failure. The only thing that was made apparent was Mary’s own deep anger at being done out of a portion of her grandfather’s estate because of the sad tale of her own father. She does manage to portray all three generations of the Trump’s (every single one, including herself) as damaged people with a genetic blindness towards anything good and clean and a fixation on the American dream – lots of money with very little effort.
Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. Sheffer, Edith (2018)
This is the story of Dr. Hans Asperger and his work in the1930’s and 40’s with a-social (criminal behaviour in the Nazi universe)children, who would later become known as autistic children. His work was, ostensibly, with kids on the more socially acceptable end of the spectrum, in order to integrate them into the Aryan world around them (also saving their lives). He also worked with those who were more “difficult” and had a modest success rate there as well. But the others, including those that he knew that he could not help, were consigned to the Spiegelgrund hospital where he knew that they would most probably be executed. Spiegelgrund was a “children’s clinic” in Vienna during the Second World War which was well known as the death hospital. Between 1940 and 1945 at least 789 child patients were euthanized, because of behavioural issues, and Dr. Asperger was complicit in the patient selection process. These children died by lethal injection, gas, disease, starvation, exposure and ‘accidents.’
All this was a small part of “Aktion T4”, which was a series of radical eugenic measures which were intended to restore the racial "integrity" of the German nation. It purported “to eliminate what eugenicists and their supporters considered "life unworthy of life"; “those individuals who — they believed — because of severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities represented both a genetic and a financial burden on German society and the state.” Karl Brandt was the head of the Program, anuntersturmfuhrer in the SS; later Commissioner of Health and Sanitation. He wasarrested in 1945 by the Gestapo for making arrangements for his family to surrender to the Americans. He was then re-arrested by the British and hung in 1948 for his work as an executioner of the powerless. The executions began in January,1940 and an estimated 250,000 people were executed. The deaths were listed as having been caused by invented causes. Most of the victims were gassed but there were also many subjected to experiments. Dr. Heribert Goll, at Spiegelgrund, conducted various experiments on children, depriving them of Vitamin A to track the ensuing blindness. These experiments were done, he said, “only on infants unfit to live.” He even published the results of his experiments which deprived infants of fats and vitamin A for periods of up to 300 days. Many died.
The Aktion T4 program was not a secret at first and by 1941 it was stopped because of widespread public opposition. Then, one year later, it was started again in secret. In this second phase, as a more covert means of killing, the "euthanasia" campaign resumed at a broad range of institutions throughout the Reich. Many of these institutions also systematically starved adult and child victims. The “Euthanasia Program” continued until the last days of the war, expanding to include an ever-wider range of victims, including geriatric patients, bombing victims and foreign forced laborers. Historians estimate that the program, in all its phases, claimed the lives of 250,000individuals.
Perhaps because Sheffer refuses to charge past the facts in order to engage in more damning but possibly incorrect speculations, she succeeds in achieving two things in this important book: she manages to illustrate an extraordinary aspect of the human condition – our ability as humans to adapt to anything, any villainy – while at the same time painting a brilliant image of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality” of evil. And all this is done in a society where the execution of the less than perfect was a common and accepted process for everyone except the relatives of those about to die –and sometimes even for them.
As one of the survivors put it:
“I am not angry with anybody for how can you be mad with somebody when the evil has no name, when the evil is just a part of life, like it was the case there. But the evil belonged there, it was everyday life, and nobody questioned it.”
Leopoldine Maier
Just in case anybody asks you what is so wrong with fascism.
See the Holocaust Encyclopedia on line.
As of August2022
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Shirer, WilliamL. 2011 (1961) 50thanniversary edition
Let us get the negatives out of the way first because this is an important book to read and it’s important to read it now. The book is enormous (1280 pages) which makes for a long read and a bulky carry. It is painfully guilty of short sections of homophobic rant – mostly directed at Ernst Roehm and the SA (precursors to SS and the Proud Boys of the Nazi Party) – but still unacceptable. Because it is a personal account (Shirer was a journalist stationed in Germany from 1934 to 1940 and had covered Europe from 1925) there is voluminous detail on what Shirer witnessed and less focus on the course of the military campaigns.
Having said that, some of the weaknesses are also strengths. Because Shirer was there, he has a very clear insight into the manipulative ways of fascist politicians – as in, for example, how they lie as a deliberate tactic.
Besides the sheer fascination of the story – how Hitler and his minions got away with the insanity that was the third Reich – there is the cautionary tale of how Hitler gained power without violating the constitution of German democracy and then erased democracy from the German horizon. It is a textbook case that literally begs to be read today more urgently than at any time since the book was first published in 1961.
Briefly, here’s how it worked. Moderately right-wing “conservative” parties have difficulty in growing their support among the electorate – since their appeal is mainly to people of wealth – but they see that fringe (lunatic) parties to their right have a modest percentage of support that clearly will never go to the centre or left-wing parties. So, they begin, either secretly or publicly(or both) to legitimize and fund these fringe elements and then to incorporate them into their own party. The National Socialists, which had very little growth potential because of the extremity (and, frankly, lunacy) of their views, suddenly grew in size and power when they were legitimized (normalized) and heavily funded by the conservative right. But the process back-fired on the “conservatives” because the Nazis began to cannibalize their hosts and, in the end, replace them. By the time the Nazi party was in power in Germany they were “normal” to the majority of Germans and a bizarre mystery to the rest of the west. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this government are of a mentality that You and I cannot understand,” the American consul general wrote in a message to the state department. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.” (from Stalin by Kotkin, S., Vol 2,p.121)
The same process is playing out in most of the democratic west(and elsewhere) today. The republican party legitimizes the Tea Party, libertarians, white supremacists and self-interested Koch-ers) and the party ends up being run by these people, and Trump and QAnon crazies, making it legitimate and ‘normal’ to give ‘alternate’ facts and to talk about pederast plots and Jewish conspiracies as if they were political realities. The Alberta Conservative party swallows Wild Rose and ends up with Danielle Smith and her “poor persecuted” anti-vaxxers, England gets Liz Truss, Italy gets Mussolini’s ‘daughter’ and we get trucker Polievre. All thrive on disinformation like the Nazis. All are science deniers as were the Nazis, all use the tactic of disunity and baseless charges as did the Nazis. Ethnography, science, logic, empathy and justice all mitigate against fascism. So, these things must be denigrated, disposed of or, at best, laughed at.
Shirer’s book is a monumental and fascinating documentary of how it was done and where it led. The western democracies have often flirted, and more, with some very frightening stuff: slavery, eugenics, fascism, internment camps, apartheid and genocide. But as we begin to follow the Nazi model we move from a flirtation to an engagement. Read this book
The Nature of Nature, Sala, Eric 2020
It’s enough to make you weep. A book about the ecosystems of the world, what they do for us and what we do to them. About why we are the only truly dangerous predator and how we do the damage we do without even thinking about it. About re-wilding as one of the essential ways to extend our own existence. About what a fraud GDP is and how it is used to conceal reality from us. A small example:
The free oxygen in our (“our”) atmosphere is worth (what it would cost to replace it – that’s how monetary value is established) about$186,000 trillion dollars. But we are destroying it at an astronomical speed, through (primarily) agriculture and industry. Nowhere does that value or cost enter GDP or any other economic formula of foodstuffs or products.
At the same time, we give, world-wide, the fossil fuel industry about $300 billion and then we (not they) pay for the impact of burning that fuel: traffic congestion, accidents, roads, damage, lung disease, global warming– to the tune of $5 trillion dollars a year. We are economically insane because we have allowed ourselves to be fooled into the belief that these expenses are our responsibility, not the responsibility of those who rake in the obscene profits by causing the damage. In fact, that’s why they rake in the obscene profits.
At the same time this is a wonderful book about what can be achieved (so far only on a small scale) by protecting and re-wilding places like coral atolls and Yellowstone National Park.
So, grit your teeth and enjoy it.
As of January 1 2023
Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime. Vitaly Shetalinsky. 1993
The New Shostakovich. Ian McDonald. 1990
Waiting for Hitler. Stalin Vol. II Stephen Kotkin. 2018
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life. D. M, Thomas.1998
The continuing stories about the war in Ukraine, first the atrocities committed on civilians, mass graves in previously occupied areas and now (Winter 2022/2023), the continuous missile attacks on the infrastructure that are clearly intended to leave the people of the Ukraine freezing in the dark this winter, have led quite a number of people, myself included, to wonder exactly how merciless the Russians truly can be. Granted, there is an enormous propaganda machine in the Motherland that churns out the Kremlin’s warped version of reality and the fact that the government of Russia -- since the fall of Yeltsin (and quite possibly since the fall of Stalin) – has been largely in the hands of the KGB (or whatever acronym it is using now) means that once again the Russian population has limited access to truth. But this, except for a few brief periods, is not a new thing and there has still been a powerful underground (or samizdat) in operation through it all from the Tsars to Lenin to Stalin to Putin. Are the people of Mother Russia really ready to let their former compatriots (from whom they parted amicably) freeze to death in the dark? Are they that heartless?
On reading Volume 2 of Stephen Kotkin’s monumental opus on Joseph Jugashvilli Stalin (and I do mean monumental – volume 2 is 909 pages, not including footnotes, so big that the cliché “I couldn’t put it down” could never be used, you have to, it’s fascinating but just too big not to -- and we haven’t even got into World War II yet) the question comes up again and again. Stalin and his party cronies, in the process of “collectivization” and “de-kulakization” of the country managed to starve (literally) to death millions of Ukrainians (in the ‘bread basket’ of Europe) as well as the people of Kazakhstan and parts of Georgia. Millions starved and cannibalism was widespread from 1931 to 1933 but Stalin and his minions were somehow convinced that this was the path to socialism. Having completed that task, Stalin turned upon his aiders and abetters and took out a couple of million of them in a campaign of political terror rivalling Torquemada. He eliminated well over 60%of the communists who had joined the Party before or just after the revolution and also took out leaders like Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin – anyone (even former friends) who had shown any opposition to Stalin’s policies, however ludicrous or murderous that policy was. Using successive KGB chiefs (Yagoda then Yezhov then Beria) vast numbers were tortured until they confessed – which they almost all did – and then most were shot, burned or buried in mass graves, many of which were not dug up until the fall of communism. The rest were sent off to the camps. The focus was on the intelligentsia (which Lenin referred toas “shit”), the military leadership (who might have posed an actual threat to the party) and the upper and middle level apparatchiks. The lists, the tortures, the meaningless confessions, the shooting – went on and on until Stalin’s appetite was temporarily sated. The case of the theatrical genius and successor to Stanislavski (Stan’s words, not mine) will serve to illustrate:
Vsevolod Meyerhold, the USSR’s most renowned theater director, who had traveled to Leningrad to finalize the choreography of a mass spectacle of physical culture involving 30,000 young athletes moving in unison to glorify the regime, was rewarded by being arrested. At Moscow’s infamous Butyrka prison, he was tortured into confessing to espionage for Britain as well as Japan. “The investigators began to use force on me, a sick, 65-year-oldman,” he wrote in a letter to Molotov. “I was made to lie face down and then beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap… When those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal hemorrhaging, they again began to beat the red-blue-yellow bruises with the strap, and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling hot water was being poured on those sensitive areas… . I began to incriminate myself in the hope that this, at least, would lead quickly to the scaffold.” Meyerhold’s interrogators had urinated into his mouth and smashed his right (writing) hand to bits. Right around the same time, his second wife and lead actress, the Russified ethnic German Zinaida Reich, was brutally stabbed to death, including through the eyes, in their home. None of her valuables were taken. Meyerhold knew nothing of his wife’s murder; his colleagues knew nothing of his fate, only that his photographs had been taken down or cut out.
Stalin vol II p.649-50
Meyerhold’s actual crimes? Unknown, really, except that he wanted to direct Hamlet, which Stalin hated, and he could be annoying and talked far too much. At a political gathering he had the audacity to attack the official literary policy of Soviet Realism:
What [he demanded of the stunned Party officials on the platform with him] is your definition of Formalism? I also would like to ask the question in reverse: what is anti-Formalism? What is Socialist Realism? Apparently Socialist Realism is orthodox anti-Formalism. I would like to consider this question in practical rather than theoretical terms. How would you describe the present trend in the Soviet theatre? Here I have to be frank :if what has happened in the Soviet theatre recently is anti-Formalism, if what is happening today on the stages of the best Moscow theatres is an achievement of the Soviet drama, I prefer to be considered a Formalist. I, for one, find the work in our theatres at present pitiful and terrifying. Where men of art once searched, made mistakes, experimented and found new ways to create productions some of which were bad and others magnificent, now there is nothing but a depressing, well-meaning, shockingly mediocre and devastating lack of talent. Was this your aim? If so, you have committed a horrible deed. In your effort to eradicate Formalism, you have destroyed art!
The New Shostakovich 140
This was the end of potentially the most important theatrical thinker in the 20th century -- left to the devices of some thug: “one of the twentieth century’s greatest theatrical producers lay on the floor with a fractured hip and blood streaming down his battered face while an interrogator urinated on him. The rest is silence. “
Alexander, 85
Besides, then NKVD head Beria wanted Meyerhold’s apartment for his (Beria’s) mistress. So it went.
In Arrested Voices, Vitaly Shentalinsky documents how he was given access in the late 1980’s (from the advent of Gorbachev until the failed military putsch) to the KGB files that documented the interrogation, torture and liquidation of the lost writers of the Soviet Union including Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pilnyak, Andree Platonov and many more. While the writers of the Soviet Union (Stalin’s “engineers of the human soul”) suffered all the political evils of the rest of the administrative class, they had in addition, to deal with the Stalinist conception of a set form of writing (Soviet Realism) as being the only acceptable form of writing. Everything else was “formalism” (or something worse) and was not only banned but persecuted through the usual channels of silencing, isolation, impoverishment, arrest, torture, interrogation, more torture and execution. Talk about literary criticism. There were exceptions, of course. If Stalin liked your work then all the rules dissolved like ice in the summer. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov, was clearly a religious enthusiast, a formalist, and an apologist for the White’s during the Civil War – he didn’t even pretend to be a Bolshevik. His play, The Days of the Turbins, still holds the record for the longest running Russian play, because Stalin adored it and saw it multiple times. It may have even saved the existence of the Moscow Art Theatre (like Chekhov’s The Seagull had -- that place seems to have been so badly managed that it needed saving by individual plays a lot). Although Bulgakov could rarely get plays produced, had to hide the manuscript of his novel The Master and Margarita and nearly starved a few times, he was only arrested once and never tortured. In fact his early diaries only survived because of that arrest, since the KGB confiscated them and made copies. When they returned the originals, Bulgakov burned them in terror. And Boris Pasternak, a religious mystic and multiple adulterer, lived a charmed existence -- terror-filled, but charmed. He was given a lovely summer home (dacha) in a writer’s community, where he was locked up and constantly watched. In 1958 he was bullied into refusing the Nobel Prize for Literature. Both of these men wrote towering novels in secret that were eventually smuggled out and published in the west.
Poet Anna (“of all the Russia’s”) Akhmatova “survived” but her work was unpublished from 1923 until 1956 and her husband and son both ended up in the Gulag. She was publicly humiliated on a number of occasions but, because of her popularity, she was left untouched. Marina Tsvetaeva had to put her daughter in an orphanage because she couldn’t afford to feed her. The daughter starved there. Marina committed suicide. But aside from these few exceptions, large numbers of writers were tortured and then executed under Stalin’s leadership up until 1952. After that they were just sent to the Gulags, like Solzhenitsyn. Stalin died in 1953.
Many of these writers are not particularly well known in the west, largely due to the fact that their work did not get published (except in samizdat) until after Stalin’s much-appreciated demise and even then, most not until after Gorbachev arrived on the scene. Shentalinsky deals with the known (Pasternak, Babel, Gorky etc.) as well as the unknown. With Mandelstam, he documents in detail the case of a poet brought down because of one poem that he wrote – but it was on the subject of the despot himself. I include it:
We live without sensing the country beneath us,
At ten paces, our speech has no sound
And when there’s the will to half-open our mouths
The Kremlin crag-dweller bars the way.
Fat fingers as oily as maggots,
Words sure as forty-pound weights,
With his leather-clad gleaming, calves
And his large laughing cockroach eyes
And around him a rabble of thin-neckedbosses,
He toys with the service of suchsemi-humans.
They whistle, they meow, and they whine:
He alone merely jabs with his finger andbarks,
Tossing out decree after decree likehorseshoes –
Right in the eye, in the face, the browor the groin.
Not one shooting but swells his gang’spleasure,
And the broad breast of the Ossetian.
Arrested, 173
Mandelstam was arrested and taken to the Lubyanka prison. Tortured, he confessed to whatever they told him to confess to, was sentenced, released, had a breakdown, was re-arrested, re-tortured, re-confessed and died in a slave labour camp of typhoid. His reputation was “rehabilitated” in 1987.
The unfolding of the story by Shentalinsky is very much like a chapter from 1984, and clearly illustrates something that is repeated throughout the book: how political repression was often simply a cover and a justification for personal revenge, sadism, greed and pettiness on a mammoth scale. Without detailing each case –although they are all fascinating, as is the over-all story of how the truth was revealed – the case of Gorky is worth focusing on.
Maxim Gorky (real name Alexei Maximovich Peshkov) was the darling of Stalin’s Soviet Empire. An early Bolshevik and a protegee of Tolstoy and Chekhov, Gorky was a successful novelist and playwright, wooed by Stanislavski and disliked by Nemirovich-Danchenko. After the 1905 uprising he was pursued by the police and fled to Finland and then the United States where he was a fund-raiser for Lenin, with whom he had a troubled relationship. In1914 he returned to Russia and worked for the party during the war and then the revolution. After 1917 he either developed serious political differences with Lenin or (it depends on whose story you listen to) got frightened by the arrests of multiple writers around him. In any case he fled the country for treatment for TB and lived in exile in Italy until 1930 when he was persuaded to return to Russia and appointed head of the Writers Union. From that time on Gorky became the figurehead author of Stalin’s regime. Whether wittingly or unwittingly he was used to justify any and all actions taken that in any way reflected on him or the Union that he led. In the end he baulked, partly at the absurdity of the official attack on Formalism and the composer Shostakovich and partly that he could see the toll that the terror was taking on the artistic community. Seeing that he was no longer useful the KGB moved in, deepened their surveillance on him, engineered his beloved son’s death, suborned his staff and in the end probably used his own doctors to dispose of him in 1936. Stalin helped carry his coffin, which was most apt.
Artists were central to Stalin’s despotic activities. They held a position of status and honour in Russia far above their stature in the west. And, I think, they held that position in the mind of Stalin as well. Therefore, they had to be subservient to his leadership and policies. The situation was also complicated by the fact that the victory of Communism in Russia was an unexpected event – even in communist theory. Marx’s writings had called for Class War between the working class and the Middle Class and Lenin was nothing if not a Marxist. But Middle Class meant different things in different countries. In Germany, France and England (the countries Marx was most familiar with) there was a large working class and a well-developed Middle Class of considerable size and capital endowment. In Russia things were different. The working class was smaller, peasants (by vast numbers) dominated and the middle class was mostly a rather less wealthy but well educated group – what we would refer to today as the intelligentsia. So, when Lenin, followed by Stalin, waged war, they waged war on the educated classes and the artists.
Stephen Kotkin’s on-going (to say the least) biography of Stalin and his despotic rule of Soviet Russia is rather beyond review, it is so breath-takingly all-encompassing and absorbing. If you are prepared to commit to it in all its detail you will not be disappointed. After Kotkin, there will not be another bio. Of Stalin needed for a generation. Perhaps the most difficult, but absolutely central, question with Stalin refers to the Great Terror of 1934-38 and the question of “Why?” Why did he destroy the vast majority of loyal cadres, devastatingly purge the military with Hitler growing in power and clearly a threat of enormous proportions and why did he come close to destroying the Communist government he had largely created himself? Kotrkin has two slightly different answers to these questions. The first answer comes on page 435 of Vol. II:
“Sometimes his terror ruminations were extensive, such as at the June 2, 1937, closed session of the Main Military Council; other times they were brief. They emerged from his long-standing self-conception that those who opposed him were broadcasting disunity and weakness, thereby inviting foreign powers to attack – in other words, objectively supporting the USSR’s enemies - while he, a selfless servant of the cause, under siege from uncomprehending critics, had been placed on this earth to defend the socialist revolution and the Soviet state. Therefore, he was not merely justified, but dutybound, to eradicate oppositionists and anyone taken in by them. The incarceration or physical liquidation of more than a million and a half human beings apparently posed no moral dilemmas for him. On the contrary, to pity class enemies would be to indulge sentiment over the laws of objective historical development. Ignorance of history could be fatal, Stalin argued, and he spent a great deal of time during the terror midwifing an accessible history of the Russian state, from its origins to the present, as a tool of mass civic training. Stalin was a massacring pedagogue.“
But that is the answer from Stalin’s own, self-justified point of view. The other, more Kotkin’s opinion, is on page 902
“The superhuman resolve that he had demonstrated in launching and carrying through collectivization was, it turned out, accompanied by a surprising brittleness, which was exposed in his reaction to the criticism that the violent upheaval and famine sparked. Stalin became haunted not by the peasants’ horrors under collectivization but by the party criticism of him regarding those horrors, which would become the dark spur of his mass murders in the wanton terror, made possible by Bolshevism but driven by him. The pandemonium of widespread accusations of treason that he fomented reflected not reality or even potential threats, but his own demons. The flip side - his fantasies of a cleansing cadre renewal via promotion of new people - did littlet o quell his anxieties, partly because of their glaring difficulty assimilating the Short Course he produced expressly for them. By inclination, Stalin was a Russian nationalist in the imperial sense, and anti-Western, the core impulse of long-standing Russian-Eurasian political culture.”
In other words, and in a very complicated sense, fear of punishment for what he had, of necessity (in his own opinion), done.
D. M. Thomas’ biography of Solzhenitsyn deals, of course with the later oppressive era of WW II and after, since Solzhenitsyn was a committed Leninist until his arrest in 1945 by SMERSH (yes, it really existed)and sent to the Gulag. The biography is long and detailed and Thomas is an accomplished writer whose novels were particularly popular in the 1990’s.Unfortunately, the subject of the book is not an entirely likeable individual. A saint, possibly, a devout believer certainly, a committed devotee to the cause that he holds dear, absolutely. A dedicated laborer, yes. An attractive personality – I don’t think so. So it makes Thomas’s job an uphill one, which he labors at manfully. Certainly, it is the equivalent of The Gulag Archipelago about one man, at the very least. It is just not a lot of fun to read.
The New Shostakovich is another kettle of fish. Although Shostakovich remains enigmatic and the book, especially in the sections devoted to the music, can be repetitive, it remains a fascinating study that accomplishes two things. It gives a very clear picture of what it must have been like, as a creative artist, to live in the terrifying world of the Terror that Kotkin has portrayed in a more general way. The day by day, night by night, wait, suitcase packed, for the knock at the door by the KGB. What it must have been like too be, as Shostakovich was, as Akhmatova was, publicly humiliated by talentless party nobodies, in front of your peers, knowing that the slightest incorrect expression of emotion on your face would mean torture and death as it had to many of your peers and friends. It also paints an inside view of that society that Kotkin describes from the outside so well, but never gets inside. But McDonald does and he does it well. So, if the era or the music interests you, this is a book for you (as they say).
One of the MANY ironies of the Soviet Union is the fact that the building which housed the Union of Soviet Writers (the site of enormous ego destruction and deep humiliation for many writers from 1918 until 1990) was a nineteenth-century mansion on Vorovsky (formerly Cooks) Street, in what had been Moscow’s most aristocratic neighborhood, part of the ancient Dolgorukov estate. This mansion figured largely in Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace as the home of the Rostov family. Which leads us to a kind of answer to the question raised at the start of this little essay. Are the people of Russia always prepared to sit soundlessly by –even though under autocratic rule – as they have in the past, while others suffer? And the answer is – a qualified “no.”
In 1905, when the first Russian revolution took place and the people marched through the street for justice and democracy and were rewarded by their Tsar by being cut down in large numbers by the government’s Cossack sabres, Tolstoy proclaimed to all:
“I cannot remain silent!” and this was repeated when, in 1908, a number of revolutionaries were sentenced to death -- even though Russia had no death penalty – in something very much resembling a KGB execution. In the 1880s, Tolstoy recalled, there had only been one executioner for the whole of the Russian empire. Now the number of hangmen was rising, day by day. Counter-revolution was using terror in response to the terror of the revolution – peasant raids on landowners, and assassination attempts against official figures. “We cannot go on like this,” Tolstoy declared. “Or, at least, I cannot and will not do so.” The authorities should either stop the killings or, he demanded, execute him just as they were hanging “those embittered and frivolous people who began this violent struggle.”. He drew the following conclusion for the authorities:
By participating in these frightful crimes you are not only failing to heal the disease but intensifying it and driving it deeper within.
Tolstoy’s article had a wide resonance throughout the world, and was translated and reprinted everywhere. The tsarist authorities made no reply to his thunderous denunciation. The revolutionaries whose lives the writer was defending, however, did not remain silent. The same year, Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) published “Lev Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution” where he described him as “a landowner playing the Holy Fool”, a “laughable” prophet who had “discovered new recipes for the salvation of mankind”, a utopian and reactionary. Tolstoy’s teachings, in Lenin’s view, “were deprived of the slightest practical meaning, and of any theoretical justification.”
Tolstoy’s humanism and appeals for clemency, and his defense of every individual’s inalienable right to life did not suit the future leader of the proletarian revolution. Within 10 years Lenin’s views had the upper hand and had Tolstoy still been alive then he would not have escaped the avenging sword of the Cheka. Tolstoy, nevertheless, still managed posthumously to visit the Lubyanka. His daughter Alexandra was arrested, as were almost all his pupils and the Tolstoyans who lived by his teachings. And, I was to discover, even his own words were arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet secret police.”
Arrested, 223
The voice of Tolstoy (even though a bit cracked) is there, still part of the Russian psyche, but it has been buried deep by almost a century of oppression and enforced silence or silent screaming. How and when it will awake is a mystery. I leave the last word to Marina Tsvetaeva.
Of love one whispers or sings.
One cries or grits one’s teeth in pain.
In honour of the slain one stays silent
Or talks at the top of one’s voice.
Russian Proverb: “To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.”
