Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” was one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, and the 20th century would have been a better century had it been more influential still. Yet until now, the book could only be read at one remove, in editions based on a hasty English translation of a German text presumed lost in the confusion of wartime.
Read MoreBritain’s “public,” which is to say private, schools have been around since at least the 14th century. The controversy over their place in the country’s life sometimes seems to have been raging for almost as long, although it really only took off a couple hundred years ago, the day before yesterday in a land of ancient grievances.
“Gilded Youth,” James Brooke-Smith ’s addition to the sizeable canon of unflattering accounts of these curious establishments, has plenty of room for familiar complaints: bullying, sadism, sexual abuse, emotional repression, entrenching “the privilege of the wealthy few,” and so on. But even those exhausted with this well-worn topic may be intrigued by Mr. Brooke-Smith’s examination of the surprisingly complex history of public school dissent—there were some inmates who struck back against what they saw as asylums.
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With “Bankers and Bolsheviks: International Finance and the Russian Revolution,” Hassan Malik has written a fascinating study of an overlooked topic—but not a book for emerging markets investors who like to sleep soundly at night. Mr. Malik chronicles the involvement of foreign capital in Russia before and up to the October Revolution. It ends expensively. Shortly after taking power in 1917, the Bolsheviks repudiated Russia’s debts. Adjusted for inflation, this remains the biggest sovereign default in history, made costlier by its completeness. No debts or obligations were “restructured”: With token exceptions, the money was gone for good.
Mr. Malik’s meticulous, forensic account reveals why late Romanov Russia—for a few years the world’s largest oil producer—had been so successful in attracting funding from abroad. Mr. Malik, an investment strategist and financial historian, is more skeptical than many about the contribution made by Sergei Witte, who was Russian finance minister between 1892 and 1903 (before rising higher still). But the surge in Russia’s economic development during those years is beyond dispute. Net national product grew at an estimated compound annual rate of nearly 5%, “very high” for the time, according to Mr. Malik. Other numbers tell a similar tale.
That Russia turned to foreign bond markets during a wave of financial globalization was not “particularly remarkable,” the author notes. That it would become “the largest net international borrower in the world” was, he believes, a different matter. Given the pace of Russian growth, however, and bankers’ perennially Pavlovian response to the whiff of profit, I am not so sure.
There was also the perception at the time that, for all its faults, Russia was “a responsible member of the European family of civilized nations.” As such, the czar’s government was rewarded with more trust than it probably deserved. In 1906 Russia secured a massive loan despite troubling finances, an economic slowdown, a shaky currency, recent military defeat by the Japanese, and something close to outright revolution. More foreign money followed, drawn in by a return to growth. Nevertheless, Mr. Malik argues that late imperial Russia was more fragile than understood then (and now). Debt was piling up and the political system was unstable. It took a huge build-up in defense spending—the silver lining of a cloud about to burst—to revive an economy that was again faltering.
If the attitude of foreign financiers toward Russia up to 1914 can be defended, their behavior afterward is rather harder to explain. By early 1917 Russia was losing World War I, its finances were crumbling, the economy was buckling and the political climate was deteriorating. Despite this, Mr. Malik notes, “the risk premiums on Russian debt relative to Western benchmarks approached multiyear lows.” Wartime politics played their part, and so did moral hazard, thanks to Russian government guarantees (and vague support from its allies). The liberal revolution that overthrew the czar in early 1917 was broadly welcomed as another step in a transformation in which, as Mr. Malik observes, international financiers considered they had long been participating. Maintaining or increasing their presence in a newly liberal Russia would be a “logical continuation” of that role, so that’s what they did.
What ensued, unfortunately, was not the next stage in a benign evolutionary process, but an abrupt break with the past. Foreign investors anticipated radical change, maintains Mr. Malik, but not the direction it took. This was a mistake more forgivable than he implies: There was nothing inevitable about the Bolshevik triumph that fall. The author is right to highlight the probability that, even if the liberals had held on to power, “a fairly significant default” was on the cards. But a default by a liberal regime would have borne no comparison to the Bolshevik default.
Even had the Bolsheviks been able to honor the debt, they would not have done so. This was a matter of principle (why, asked Lenin, repay lenders who financed “the Cossack whip and sword”?) as well as strategy. Debt repudiation was a weapon in the class war, intended to dismantle the economic strength of the bourgeoisie at home and to foment trouble abroad—specifically in France, where investment in Russian securities had spread a long way down the social scale.
Mr. Malik records the insouciance or even optimism of foreign financiers in the face of late 1917’s political turmoil. This may have peaked with “in hindsight . . . one of the most bizarre business decisions in American banking history”—no mean feat: The forerunner of Citibank opened its Moscow branch “nearly three weeks after the Bolshevik takeover.” This was an extreme example of the consequences of some financiers’ misreading of Lenin’s new order, a phenomenon Mr. Malik handles well. Precedent (Russia had never defaulted) suggested the new regime would see reason, as did a conventional understanding of morality and self-interest. Yet bankers and Bolsheviks defined reason, morality and self-interest in very different ways. Lenin’s oddball sect wanted to remake Russia (and the world). If that meant cutting itself off from international capital, too bad.
Mr. Malik criticizes foreign investors for not grasping “the political dimension” of financial support for the czar’s sometimes savagely repressive rule. But their unpopularity with the opposition was somewhat ironic: It overlooked the way in which “apolitical” foreign financing contributed to a modernization that, however unintentionally, subverted the ancien régime. And investors may have paid too much attention to politics later on. One element in the seemingly complacent reaction of international financiers to the February Revolution was a desire to help the liberal reformers. This may have been too much of a gamble but, given what was to come, it was worth taking. Russia’s tragedy was not that it ran out of money, but that it ran out of time.
‘Nonsense,” said the Talmudic scholar Saul Lieberman, referring to the Kabbalah long before its celebrity moment, “is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship.” In the intriguing if uneven “Pale Horse Rider,” writer and journalist Mark Jacobson takes a primarily biographical approach to the strange, sad tale of the turn-of-the-millennium conspiracy theorist Milton William “Bill” Cooper (1943-2001). In doing so, he has missed an opportunity to take a deeper look at how, what and why we believe.
Cooper’s best-known work, “Behold a Pale Horse” (1991), is a dense, meandering and bewildering compendium of conspiracy theories. These include the allegation that JFK was murdered by his driver, the discovery of a plan to blow up Jupiter and the revelation of a treaty between Ike and space aliens. Yet there is also the suggestion that “the whole alien scenario is the greatest hoax in history,” a trick to frighten the “sheeple” (a favorite Cooper term) into submission to a “one-world government” controlled by . . . the Illuminati. Choose your own truth. After all, Cooper himself concedes that “one or more conclusions may be wrong.” This Bedlam medley has sold almost 300,000 copies. Why?
Readers wanting to find out are mainly left to navigate their own way through the fever swamps: Mr. Jacobson describes more than he explains, a flaw mitigated by his sharp eye and keen ear. Scattered through his account are stepping-stones to a partial understanding of Cooper’s appeal. A rapper from the Wu-Tang Clan tells Mr. Jacobson that “everybody gets f— [but] William Cooper tells you who’s f— you,” a near-perfect, if NSFW, summary of conspiracism’s attraction to the powerless or paranoid. It offers a structure for rage, an excuse for failure, a flattering fantasy of being in the know.
Mr. Jacobson dubs Cooper a “P.T. Barnum of dread.” (“The Hour of the Time,” his long-running shortwave-radio show, opened with wailing sirens, a sinister distorted voice, barking dogs, shrieking people and the sound of “tramping . . . feet, growing louder, closing in.”) But Cooper was a huckster who took more than a swig of his own Kool-Aid. The origins of his dreamscape—born at the intersection of creativity and psychiatric disorder, and reinforced by post-Vietnam, post-Watergate disillusionment and the need to make a buck—are easier to understand than its evolution. A saga in perpetual flux (Knights Templar! Freemasons! The aliens really were a hoax!), its backstory stretched across millennia.
Cooper was obsessed with the New World Order and the actions of jackbooted government enforcers against the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and white separatist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. He became a part of the “patriot” fringe (Timothy McVeigh was an admirer). But, while his views often inspired theirs (the Clinton administration labeled him America’s “most dangerous” radio host), they did not always coincide. Cooper’s following among some African-Americans, a community targeted in conspiracies he claimed to have uncovered, does not fit the militia mold. On the other hand, Cooper reproduced the notorious anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” within “Behold a Pale Horse.” The deception, he maintained, was not that the “Protocols” were a fake, but something else: The plotters were not Jews, but Illuminati. Oh.
Conspiracism seeps through many cultures, nations and eras. It isn’t uniquely American, but it can take distinctively American forms. For example, Americans’ traditional distrust of government can mutate from a sign of rude civic health into a pathology. Cooper, as Mr. Jacobson relates it, tapped into a feeling of alienation fueled (often) by mourning for a vanished, if frequently imagined, past—white picket fences and all that—which he turned into a very American narrative about the betrayal of the promise of liberty contained in the Constitution, a sacred text now disdained.
Mr. Jacobson is not entirely unsympathetic to his subject’s point of view, commenting that there’s “no arguing [Cooper’s] basic insight: that something wasn’t right, that there was something you couldn’t quite put your finger on except . . . that you were a little less free than . . . yesterday.” That’s an extremely generous interpretation of Cooper’s “insight.” In any case, it’s no secret that we live in an ever more controlled, ever more controlling society.
Mr. Jacobson accepts that Cooper said “some of the nuttiest things” yet asserts that what counted was “the journey, the relentless search for truths.” But that was not what Cooper sought. He replaced truths he didn’t like with stories that he did. In June 2001 Cooper discussed threats made against the U.S. by Osama bin Laden. There would indeed, predicted Cooper, be a “major attack.” Bin Laden would be blamed, but “don’t you even believe it.” Within hours of the 9/11 attacks, Cooper was telling listeners that the two jets could not have felled the Twin Towers any more than a truck filled with fertilizer could have brought down Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah building. He was the first Truther.
Mr. Jacobson attributes the spread of the Truther virus to the need for “explanation . . . [and] something that made sense”—as if, according to its brutal logic, the 9/11 massacre did not. Yet those words work well as a general description of conspiracism’s allure: Unwilling to face life’s arbitrariness, we make connections where none exist.
Cooper ended his days “a madman,” writes Mr. Jacobson, “holed up in his [Arizona] hilltop home.” There was a federal warrant out for his arrest (for tax evasion and bank fraud) but after an altercation with a neighbor, local police took action. An attempted arrest in November 2001 ended with a scramble in the dark. Cooper shot first, leaving a cop paralyzed. A deputy returned fire, handing Cooper a death he had forecast on air—gunned down on his doorstep in the middle of the night, a Truther martyr, some argued.
The most in-depth coverage of Cooper’s death, notes Mr. Jacobson, may have come from “a then relatively unknown twenty-seven-year-old shortwave broadcaster from Austin, Texas: Alex Jones.”
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 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.
‘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 Sea, Stockholm-Helsinki, August 1980 © Andrew Stuttaford
Robert Ferguson’s “Scandinavians” is not a book for the beach, but it might well fit the bill on a distant northern shore, with the fog rolling in and memories of long ships stirring. Discursive, meandering, sometimes beautifully written, it presents a historical narrative punctuated by reminiscences, conversations retold, snatches of autobiography, fragments of biography and stories added, one suspects, solely for their strangeness.
Oslo, Norway, May 17, 2009 © Andrew Stuttaford
We learn, for instance, about Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702), scientist, engineer, architect, musician and botanist. “Of all [the] claims for Rudbeck’s polymathic genius,” Mr. Ferguson writes, “none can compare in its scope, its vision, its ingenuity and its sheer weirdness” with his discovery that Atlantis had been located in Sweden and that Swedish was “the proto-language from which Greek, Latin and Hebrew all derived.” Rudbeck devised, Mr. Ferguson suggests, “a golden past worthy of Sweden’s golden present”—in the 17th century, the country was a European superpower. The stormaktstiden (the great power era) didn’t last long, nor did Rudbeck’s reputation. Even so, nowadays he is remembered sympathetically in Sweden for his account of the country’s origins, a saga “in which facts, dreams, myth and waking life, historical personages, biblical and mythological figures merge and flow and part in a mesmerizing drift.”
Stockholm, Sweden, December 2010 © Andrew Stuttaford
Mr. Ferguson, whose earlier books include a history of the Vikings, as well as biographies of Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, is a rather more reliable source. A Briton, he first traveled to Scandinavia at the tail end of the 1960s with a friend (“He looked like Withnail and I looked like I”). Despite an unglamorous stint in Copenhagen (Withnail was eventually deported for trying to shoplift some cheese), Mr. Ferguson fell for the place. He obtained a degree in Scandinavian studies and, not long after, took up a Norwegian government scholarship to study in that country for a year. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that he’s still in Norway today.
Arlanda Airport, Stockholm, Sweden, June 2011
The book’s subtitle (“In Search of the Soul of the North”) makes “Scandinavians” sound more daunting than it is. If there is a search going on, the author is in no hurry to find what he is looking for. Instead we are left with an idea—no more than that—of these lands and the three taciturn tribes that make up the bulk of their population. To an outsider, Norwegians, Swedes and Danes seem to be cast from the same mold, but—as I know well from three decades of working alongside them—that is far from the case. Mr. Ferguson touches on this, but too lightly.
Over southern Norway, March 2015 © Andrew Stuttaford
The history that he retells—Vikings, wars, monarchs, writers, philosophers—is an overview, operating both as necessary background and an invitation to dig more deeply. The grand old gods make their inevitable appearance and so does the tale of their demotion, a transition commemorated in 10th-century Denmark by a massive stone that features the earliest known depiction of Jesus in Scandinavian art, a “fierce-eyed warrior ready to jump down from his cross and do battle with the demons of heathendom.” As Mr. Ferguson observes (and as the first missionaries to these unpromising territories understood), “the suffering Christ had no natural appeal among those who formerly worshipped masters of violence like Odin and Thor.”
Oslo, Norway, May 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford
Even once they had dispensed with those roughnecks from Asgard, it took a while for the Swedes, Danes and Norwegians to succumb to that whole “love thy neighbor” thing. The Kalmar Union of 1397 among the three countries lasted barely more than a century: Sweden broke away, although the Norwegians sank into what they cheerfully refer to as their “400-year night” under the Danes. Meanwhile, the Swedes sliced away at Denmark’s domain over the years, finally annexing Norway in 1814.
Hotorget, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford
Only nine decades later, Norway split off from Sweden. This history, differing patterns of economic development and subsequent events, not least sharply contrasting experiences of World War II, helps explain some of the distinctions among Denmark, Norway and Sweden today. Nevertheless all three adopted strikingly egalitarian forms of social democracy bolstered by an insistence on self-effacement in the interests, as Mr. Ferguson puts it, “of the greater good of social harmony.” In more recent years, this emphasis on conformity has become, paradoxically, a threat to the harmony it was designed to protect.
Husby, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford
These societies are now undergoing possibly their most consequential transformation in centuries, “immigration on a scale unprecedented in the recorded history of the region.” Yet particularly in Sweden—a country marked, in Mr. Ferguson’s dismayingly accurate opinion, by “an almost pathological fear of socially conservative views and a demonization of those who hold them”—the inflow has been, in the main and for too long, waved through with too little of the debate it deserved. The situation is somewhat different in Norway and Denmark, but Sweden’s democracy has been damaged by the treatment of those disinclined to join the elite’s passionate embrace of “globalized culture.” Add in the effects of the immigration itself, and it’s easy to imagine a future in which the past will be sorely missed.
Stockholm, Sweden, February 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford
Decades ago Mr. Ferguson set out to live “in what was essentially a nineteenth-century dream of Norway,” and when he arrived there this was in a certain sense possible. Norway, Sweden and Denmark were—particularly before cheap travel, the internet and all the rest—both physically and mentally somewhat remote from the European “mainland.” But since then, Mr. Ferguson writes, there has been a “slow-motion tsunami of change,” and the author has “felt an increasing desire to look back” before these societies “change out of all recognition.” This book may be an introduction to the Scandinavians, but it is also an elegy.
Note: Appeared in the August 3, 2017, print edition as 'Northern Lights.'
Stockholm, Sweden, December 2009 © Andrew Stuttaford
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