After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutineers had taken control of Rostov-on-Don, Vladimir Putin appeared on television to appeal, above all, for unity. At a time when “Russia is waging a hard fight for its future,” the mutiny was “a stab in the back of our country and our people.” So far, so predictable, but what came next was less so…
Read MoreIn 2019, writer and historian Timothy Phillips embarked on a 3,000-mile trek along the route of Europe’s postwar dividing line—almost a third was on foot. The trip began in Norway’s far north and ended where Turkey and Azerbaijan meet, and in his engrossing “Retracing the Iron Curtain,” Mr. Phillips uses that journey to tell the story of this brutal “border of borders,” which in the early days after World War II reached much further than is typically recalled.
And so Mr. Phillips shows up in Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic, which was still being “liberated” by the Soviets when Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain….
Read MoreThe notion that closer trade connections with the West will necessarily set less enlightened nations on a course toward prosperity and liberty is nonsense, but convenient nonsense. Germans have a phrase for it — Wandel durch Handel, change through trade — often given as a justification for their business dealings with Russia and China. Unfortunately, the change they triggered was in Germany. In one case it has been for the worse; in the other it appears to be headed that way…
Read MoreThe term “special military operation” was not just a euphemism. It also reflected the Kremlin’s hope that it could take Ukraine by means of a swift “decapitation.” Kyiv would be overrun, Ukraine’s leadership would be killed, arrested, or driven into exile, and the country would fall under Russian control. We will never know what was meant to have come next. Two days before the invasion, Russia had recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” that, with Moscow’s backing, had broken away from Ukraine in 2014. Those have since been annexed by Russia, along with Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts (regions), although parts of all these territories are still in Ukrainian hands. Moscow probably always intended that this portion of Ukraine would be transferred to Russia, not least because it constituted a broad land bridge to occupied Crimea…
Read MoreWalking home after dinner in Kyiv on Feb. 23, British journalist Luke Harding answers his phone: The Russian attack, he is told, is expected within hours. “Invasion” is his account of the war that ensued. Gripping and often moving, the book is primarily journalistic but goes beyond mere reportage as Mr. Harding draws on his knowledge of the region and a background that includes serving as head of the Guardian’s Moscow bureau.
Read MoreThe historian Barbara Tuchman famously compared European civilization before the First World War to a “proud tower” but showed how that tower was more rickety than those at its summit imagined. The pride was overdone, the hubris all too real.
If Europe today can be symbolized by a similarly proud tower, one candidate might be a giant North Sea wind turbine in September 2021, its blades barely turning thanks to winds that had dropped, unexpectedly, for weeks. This unproductive calm had led to a scramble for other sources of power to remedy the shortfall. But the price of one obvious alternative, natural gas, was already soaring (the European benchmark, Dutch front-month gas, was around five times as high as it had been two years before)…
Read MoreWhen, during the Second World War, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who had made it to the U.S., coined the word “genocide,” he intended that it should cover more than the Holocaust, which had consumed 49 members of his own family. Nazi-style annihilation was the ne plus ultra, but Lemkin argued that genocide could also be somewhat subtler. Genocidaires might want to destroy a national group as a distinct entity while being content to see many of those who had been a part of it survive, so long as they accepted the identity imposed upon them by their oppressors. Time would take care of the rest as the next generation grew up in a new order it did not know was new.
This, not extermination, is what Vladimir Putin has in mind for Ukrainians.
Read MoreWhen the Argonauts—so the story goes—sailed toward the Black Sea, they had to deal with giants, harpies and murderous women. When, in April 2018, Jens Mühling, a German journalist and a writer, arrives on the Black Sea coast during the early stages of the journey he so vividly describes in “Troubled Water,” he ends up drinking—a river of alcohol flows through this book—with a Russian (Oleg, naturally) and a Crimean Tatar (Elvis, naturally) in the courtyard of a rundown fishing cooperative on the western tip of Russia’s Taman Peninsula. A mile away, a newly built bridge awaits its formal opening. It connects the peninsula with Russian-occupied Crimea: “We screwed up our eyes, shelled Black Sea shrimps, and observed the world’s largest country in the act of growing.”
Read MoreThere 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.
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Vagankovskoye Cemetery, Moscow, Russia, March 1993 © Andrew Stuttaford
Imagine a Germany where the Third Reich’s monuments abound but memorials to the Holocaust are scarce. Hitler is venerated by millions and his dictatorship given a positive spin by an authoritarian state that never definitively broke with the Nazi past. Replace Germany with Russia, Hitler with Stalin, and the Third Reich with the Soviet Union and that is pretty much the situation that prevails in Russia today.
The unbroken connection to the Soviet era is key to understanding “Never Remember,” a short, haunting and beautifully written book by Masha Gessen, the Russian-American journalist who is one of Vladimir Putin’s most trenchant critics. About halfway through, Ms. Gessen tells how Irina Flige, an activist who spent decades trying to restore to public view memories of what occurred under communism, has concluded it is wrong to see the problem as forgetfulness because, as Ms. Gessen summarizes it, “forgetting presupposes remembering—and remembering had not happened . . .” In Ms. Flige’s words, “historical memory can exist only when there is a clear line separating the present from the past. . . . But we don’t have that break—there is no past, only a continuous present.” In contrast to Germany, there was no reckoning. There was no Soviet Nuremberg.
Ms. Gessen offers up various explanations for this, including the long duration of Communist rule and the ways in which the categories of victim and perpetrator overlapped. The trauma was something that Russians inflicted on one another. In a sense they still do. Ms. Gessen is evidently saddened and frustrated by the spectacle of a people—her people—wandering through a manufactured reality unbothered by, or oblivious to, the obscenities or incongruities that surround them. Some of the old regime’s statues were, in the false democratic dawn of the 1990s, defaced and toppled or—in the case of one statue of Stalin—dug up and exiled to a sculpture park of shame in central Moscow. Now, however, the statues stand in the same place proudly, cleaned up but unexplained, sharing space with a rare commemoration of the Soviet regime’s victims as well as statues of poets, writers, and—why not?—Adam and Eve.
The melancholy that saturates Ms. Gessen’s prose is reinforced by pages filled with Misha Friedman’s bleakly evocative photographs, images that convey unease, absence and loss. The huts and barracks of the Gulag, ramshackle to start with, and often designed to be temporary, have often just rotted away—“only the barbed wire remained,” Ms. Gessen writes. Other, sturdier structures survive, either ignored—one of Mr. Friedman’s photographs is of a ruined prison on the edge of a housing complex—or inaccessible, swallowed up in the vastness of Siberia. One camp—just one—not far from the Urals has been restored, a project begun, tellingly, on the private initiative of two local historians but now taken over by the state. While, as Ms. Gessen notes, it has not been turned into some defense of the Gulag, its message has been muffled, shrouded in a deceptive neutrality. Ms. Gessen herself is no neutral (she describes the “distinguishing characteristic of the Putin-era historiography of Soviet terror as . . . [saying] in effect, that it just happened, whatever”).
This is an angry book. Ms. Gessen makes her case with a series of vignettes ranging from the discovery of a mass grave in northwestern Russia to a trip to the region of Kolyma in the country’s far east. (“If the Gulag was anywhere, it was in Kolyma.”) The years of glasnost and Boris Yeltsin finally provided pitifully small scraps of comfort to the descendants of the disappeared—a photograph, a death certificate, something—yet the Gulag’s poison continues to seep through the generations. When Ms. Gessen visits Kolyma’s “capital” in 2017, all the people with whom she has contact are later visited by the FSB, the successor to the KGB.