‘Pravda Ha Ha’ Review: Requiem for a Dream
Rory Maclean - Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe
The Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2020
Pantheon of the Working Class Movement, Kerepesi Cemetery, Budapest, Hungary, October 2014 © Andrew Stuttaford
There are, remarkably, people who still believe that history has a “right side”—and Britain-based travel writer Rory MacLean, with his “firm and unwavering belief in the promise of the future,” is one of them. Intriguing, informative and infuriating, Mr. MacLean’s latest work, “Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe,” is something of a return, literally and figuratively, to the ground covered in his beautifully written first book, “Stalin’s Nose” (1992), an account of a trip around Eastern Europe during that exhilarating interlude between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Readable and often grimly entertaining, “Pravda Ha Ha” demonstrates that Mr. MacLean has not lost his eye for absurdity (a zoo in the yard of a prison ministry in Transnistria, a “republic” that the world prefers to pretend does not exist), a good story (wild times with a Russian chicken czar!) or a revealing detail (in “Russia’s military Disneyland” there is a replica of the Reichstag, built so that Vladimir Putin’s cadets have a place to practice their assault techniques). Yet “Pravda Ha Ha” has less of the subtlety that marked Mr. MacLean’s long-ago debut, a shortfall that extends into occasionally clumsy prose (“The Kremlin’s teeth-like crenellations took a bite out of the firmament”).
Perhaps the spirit in which the book was written should bear some blame. Beneath its sporadically surreal veneer, “Stalin’s Nose” was a profound meditation on how the Soviet retreat had opened up, if unevenly, not only the futures of the nations of the old bloc but also their long suppressed pasts—pasts that, once unleashed, would shape the years to come in darker ways than Mr. MacLean had anticipated. But it’s difficult to blame him. “Stalin’s Nose” was, fundamentally, an optimistic book. Given the change from what had gone before, how could it not have been?
“Pravda Ha Ha,” by contrast, sets out to explain what is now going wrong. The “end of Europe” in this book’s subtitle does not refer only to the continent’s eastern periphery. After the Berlin Wall fell, Mr. MacLean had “danced with so many others on the grave of dictatorships,” but the recent turn of events across Europe, from Russia to that Brexiting island just off the mainland, has led him to dread what lies ahead. As Mr. MacLean retraces his earlier journey (but backwards, from east to west, from Moscow to London), he hears “the echo of marching boots”—a symptom, mainly, of his bleak mood. Still, it’s hard to miss that echo while reading the author’s tales of Putin’s “troll state” or his report of a visit to Dnipro, Ukraine, “a hundred miles from the Donbas battlefield.
”Disillusion is generally a better guide than hope, but when disillusion is, if only partly, the product of a continuing illusion—in this case, a vision of “Europe” to which Mr. MacLean is still in thrall—that is not necessarily so. Mr. MacLean concludes “Pravda Ha Ha” with the claim that defining where “Europe” ends is not a question of geography but “far more a question of culture and morality, a matter of principles. It’s the point where antique forms of identity clash with modernity, where tolerance, decency and a certain way of thinking end, where openness meets a wall.” But Mr. MacLean’s notion of “modernity” is no more than a declaration of faith. He may have once “dared to imagine the end of the nation state,” but many more wished to rebuild or preserve it.
Regardless, the EU’s leaders—convinced, like Mr. MacLean, that both righteousness and history are on their side—have pushed “ever closer union” too far and too fast. In so doing, they have helped provoke the reaction that is making a mockery of Mr. MacLean’s European dream.
Failing to acknowledge how the EU has been its own worst enemy leads Mr. MacLean astray as he searches for enemies elsewhere. He exaggerates the effect of Russian efforts to “undermine European unity” (though these are real enough). At the same time, the author downplays the extent to which the EU’s insistence on “unity”—on issues ranging from immigration to the launch of the euro (the latter an initiative based on politics rather than economics, with predictably catastrophic consequences)—has become a force for destabilization within its member states. The Kremlin has tried to exploit this destabilization by lending a helping hand to European populists of both left and right, although to what extent and with what success remains as controversial as it is murky.
Mr. MacLean’s distaste for “antique forms of identity” emerges as he chats to a lieutenant colonel from a nation—Estonia—that has hung on to just such an identity against overwhelming odds. Possibly relying on Estonians’ reputation for calm, he asserts that the idea of “the individual identifying with the nation [is] . . . a dated, dreamy concept.” To the lieutenant colonel, “national identity is the myth that built the modern world.” Mr. MacLean agrees, with the tactfully qualified proviso that “in larger nations it’s mostly made up.”
Mr. MacLean does accept that “the myth of a nation” can bond people together, but he contends that this myth deludes as it does so, priming “for patriotism yet also for racism, xenophobia and even genocide.” This is a distinctly partial view, in both senses of that word, of nationhood—and what it can achieve. After all, what preceded the nation-state was nasty, brutish and prolonged. The most sustained attempt to replace it, in the name of communism’s heaven on earth, led to the destruction of tens of millions of lives, a horror Mr. MacLean portrays powerfully, yet somehow without connecting the dots.
Despite such sins of omission, Mr. MacLean has an acute grasp how a people’s history can be rewritten to reshape its future—even if, interestingly, he has nothing to say about the ways in which EU’s cheerleaders distort Europe’s past. His examples range from a (brutally and brilliantly described) Russia, an imperium of lies that sanitizes Stalin, to a Poland where a battle is fought over a war museum deemed insufficiently patriotic by an incoming government of the nationalist-populist right. That this government has got away with some disconcertingly authoritarian moves surprises him. Then again, he refers the Poles’ decision to vote PiS, “the so-called Law and Justice Party,” into office as a choice for “the nation—a more primitive form of collective identity.” When he contrasts this with what, swigging the Kool-Aid, he dubs “Europe’s postmodern vision of community,” his choice of words suggests we should be less surprised than Mr. MacLean appears to be.