Notes of a drink-man

Kingsley Amis: Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis

The New Criterion, January 1, 2009

There are, I suppose, various possible things I might do after failing to reconcile with an estranged wife because of my refusal to give up alcohol. Becoming a drink columnist for a national newspaper is not one of them. Then I’m not Kingsley Amis. Then again, Elizabeth Jane Howard soon ceased to be Mrs. Kingsley Amis. Oh well. Some or all of those columns later re-appeared, clean-shaven, refreshed, and tidied-up as Every Day Drinking (“Being paid twice for the same basic work is always agreeable”), the second of three books (the other two are On Drink and How’s Your Glass?) that differ from much of Amis’s oeuvre in that they are specifically about drink rather than being merely drink-sodden.

Don’t misunderstand that “merely.” An immense torrent of alcohol surged through much of Amis’s work, sweeping his novels and their protagonists on their bleary, boozy, too British to be Bacchanalian, way, and, as it did so, it shaped our view of their creator. As Amis complained/boasted in his Memoirs, he had “the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.” Part of the blame lay with the characters with whom he peopled his fiction: “A link is set going and is reinforced every time one of my chaps raises a glass to his mouth, and I have to admit that some of them do so rather often.” Somewhat defensively, and after allowing for the necessary journalistic exemption, Amis goes on to warn that writing and drinking don’t mix: “Whatever part drink may play in the writer’s life, it must play none in his or her work.”

By many accounts, Amis stuck fairly strictly to this rule. Alcohol was his theme, not his muse. Even in his extraordinarily bibulous, and, under the circumstances, remarkably productive, later years, he would write for a few disciplined, Mojave-dry hours in the morning before calling it quits and plunging into a liquid lunch, wet afternoon, and thoroughly saturated evening. Influenced, doubtless, by Dixon’s most memorably dreadful morning in Lucky Jim, Martin Amis has described his father as “the laureate of the hangover,” and so the Old Devil was—but, surely, in both senses of the phrase.

Every Day Drinking, On Drink, and How’s Your Glass? are now available in one volume, with, perhaps unsurprisingly, Christopher Hitchens (a friend of Amis, that’s all I mean by that “unsurprisingly”—really) providing a new introduction. He does so deftly, with charm and insight. It’s even less of a surprise that a highlight of this collection is frequently said to be Amis’s discussion of the hangover. Grand stuff it is too: amusing, certainly, but also awash with patent cures, long-marinated advice, and the details of “three notable breakfasts.” Unfortunately, it is also chock-full of bunkum, and pretentious bunkum (“the metaphysical hangover”: come on) at that.

Hangovers are a bad business, but they are (fairly) easily seen off with Veganin (a take-no-prisoners painkiller, long available over-the-counter in the U.K.), Coca-Cola, and, once things have calmed down intestinally, an Egg McMuffin. There’s no need to make a big deal about them, but that is exactly what Amis is doing, disappointing behavior from a man so skilled at deflating mystification, humbug, and fuss, from the writer who so relished repeating (in the Memoirs) Brendan Behan’s approval of the way that Parisians (allegedly) ordered wine:

You don’t catch ’em saying “Have you a nice full Burgundy with a good big body?” … Christ, it’s “D’ya want the ten, the twelve or the fourteen percent and d’ya want the label with the sluts dancing or the bastard with the big hat?—What d’ya want?”

That’s, so to speak, the spirit, and that, I suspect, is also the spirit in which Every Day Drinking and On Drink were designed to be read (How’s Your Glass?, a dull series of quizzes of interest only to drink nerds, is something else altogether).  Amongst Amis’s targets are wine snobs, reverse snobs, “authenticity,” the “no-reds-with-fish superstition,” Paris, “curiously shaped” bottles, and dancing (“ridiculous and shameful”). Food (“irrelevant rubbish” with no place in a “drink-man’s” refrigerator) is, as often with Amis, an object of disdain. Amis’s later career as a restaurant critic was one of his better jokes.

And if it’s good jokes and convivial writing that you’re looking for, there’s plenty to be found in Every Day Drinking and On Drink, as well as, amongst other treats, generous portions of splendidly forthright advice (good and bad) and an endearingly eclectic selection of cocktail recipes (good and bad): tomato ketchup has no place in a Bloody Mary, Sir Kingsley.

But it’s not just the thought of Stolichnaya colliding with Heinz that may leave some readers a touch queasy. Complicated undercurrents swirl beneath the breezy, blokey surface. At one level, with his references to wine merchants, drinks parties, waiter wars, and the pub, Amis is presenting himself as one of the “chaps” (even then, a mildly arch, somewhat dated term to use so repeatedly in print), a modestly prosperous, immodestly reactionary everyman (and I mean man: “females” are generally relegated to annoyances, totty, or comic relief), but on closer inspection this proves to be a confidence trick.  With their name dropping, vacation dropping (“Should you find yourself in Athens, you seriously should make the trip to Naxos”), and condescendingly matey intellectual ostentation (Goethe’s Harzreise im Winter is, “between you and me, rather crappy”), the conceit that these writings reflect the lives of their intended readers is, between you and me, nonsense—flattering nonsense, but nonsense all the same.

In truth, Every Day Drinking and On Drink are aspirational, and what its readers are meant to aspire to be is Amis. Back in 1965, Amis (lightly disguised as Lieutenant-Colonel William “Bill” Tanner) had written The Book of Bond or Every Man His Own 007, a “how to” guide for would-be Bonds, extremely funny (find it if you can), but firmly tongue-in-cheek.  As Books of Amis, Every Day Drinking and On Drink were intended a little more seriously, and that, ultimately, is the tragedy they represent. Drink was Kingsley’s (other) Thing, a prop, a pleasure, a crutch, a social lubricant, and, I’d guess, a means of “getting away … from this body … from this person … from attending to my own thoughts.” These last words are borrowed from The Green Man’s Maurice Allington, an alcoholic, and, of all Amis’s numerous fictional alter egos, the one who may have come closest to reality.  Allington is contemplating the relief that only death will bring, but, in the meantime, we know that he will make do with the bottle.

In his invaluable Life of Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader observes that the question of alcoholism is given “short shrift” in On Drink (Amis wrote there that he had “little to offer” on the topic). Plausibly enough, Leader suggests that for Amis the distinction between drinker and alcoholic rested on whether the drinking was a social activity. Quite possibly: it’s questionable science, but as a rationalization it could work. Amis’s writings can thus be interpreted as an attempt to redefine his own drinking in a way that made it seem, if only to himself, as a normal expression of sociability—and therefore nothing to fear. Snarling Garrick get-togethers are transformed into something jovially Pickwickian; binges and pratfalls are just what any chap might to do; a compulsion becomes a respectable intellectual interest, and, what’s more, a nice little earner: all under control, then.

Except that, as Amis must have been too sharp not to realize, it wasn’t. As Hitchens recalls, “the booze got to him in the end, and robbed him of his wit and charm.” There’s nothing particularly social, or sociable, about that. In the end, of course, it helped kill him. He’d got away at last.

Sacred monsters

Michael Burleigh: Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism

The New Criterion, October 1, 2008

New York City, September 2001  © Andrew Stuttaford

If you are searching for a few scraps of comfort about the nature of our species, you would do very well to avoid Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, the latest in a series of profoundly depressing books by the British historian Michael Burleigh. If, on the other hand, your objective is to examine the current global eruption of Islamic extremism through a wider perspective than the usual minaret, mullah, and middle-eastern rancor, Blood & Rage is an essential, imperative read, and well worth crossing the cyber pond to buy (it’s as yet unavailable in the United States).

A decade ago this was probably not a volume Professor Burleigh would have anticipated writing.  In the final sentences of his grim, grand, and uncomfortably perceptive The Third Reich: A New History (2000), even the generally gloomy Burleigh was cheered by the way that the disasters of the twentieth century appeared to have dealt a devastating blow to the millenarian dreaming that had done so much to devastate that era:

The lower register, the more pragmatic ambitions, the talk of taxes, markets, education, health and welfare, evident in the political culture of Europe and North America, constitute progress… . Our lives may be more boring than those who lived in apocalyptic times, but being bored is greatly preferable to being prematurely dead because of some ideological fantasy.

The following year, the twin towers fell.

History, once again, had made a fool of the historian. By 2008 Burleigh could write, apocalyptically enough, of “an existential threat to the whole of civilization.” If the Clinton years had seemed a little “boring” when compared with what had gone before, it was only because we were too distracted, too complacent, and too incurious to notice what beasts were slouching our way.

Burleigh doesn’t want us to repeat that mistake. Blood & Rage is urgent, insistent, and angry, so much so that it occasionally topples over into the clichés of what Brits dub “saloon bar” wisdom (imagine Fox’s Bill O’Reilly pontificating in a Surrey pub). Like much of Burleigh’s work, Blood & Rage is panoramic in its scope (it begins with Fenians and ends with jihadis), and it’s packed with intriguing and awkward historical detail, quite a bit of which is guaranteed to irritate the usual suspects on campus and in the media. The book has been criticized for lacking a clear unifying theme, but there’s not a lot that nationalist killers such as, say, the IRA, ETA, or Black September have in common with the millenarian butchers of al Qaeda or the Russian anarchist fringe—except, most notably, the corpses they leave behind (it says a great deal about Burleigh that he often takes the trouble to record the names of the victims). If there is one broader lesson to be drawn from Blood & Rage, however, it’s this: terrorism may ebb and flow, but it will, like Cain, always be with us.

For a deeper understanding of the specific plague that we pigeonhole as “al Qaeda,” read Blood & Rage in conjunction with Earthly Powers (2005) and Sacred Causes (2006), Burleigh’s remarkable two-volume depiction of the danse macabre of religion, politics, and revolutionary violence that has whirled its way through four centuries of an emerging “modern” era that still has, evidently, plenty of room for the old Adam. Taken together, these three extraordinarily wide-ranging books can be seen, among the many other attributes they share, as a shrewd and unsettling investigation of the persistence, allure, and danger of religious (in a very broad sense of the word) absolutism, a phenomenon that has, in one way or another, been an important element in all too many of mankind’s attempts to establish an organizing principle for its societies.

In earlier epochs, enforcing its imperatives was made (for those who needed it to be made easier) by the belief that to do so was God’s will. Thus killing the heretic was worship, not murder, a tough, noble deed that brought heaven just a touch closer. But in Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes Burleigh reminds us that you don’t need God for an Inquisition or, for that matter, a religion. Oddly, Sacred Causes is subtitled “The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror.” Clash? It’s true that the years after 1918 were marked by an onslaught on the established churches by Europe’s new totalitarian states, but the nature of that attack was itself, in many respects, “religious.” This wasn’t a clash between religion and politics so much as an attempt to merge the two forcibly. Belief in God was sometimes a casualty, rationality always. “The people dream,” wrote Konrad Heiden (Hitler’s first biographer), “and a soothsayer tells them what they are dreaming.” As Burleigh explains, these totalitarian regimes “metabolized the religious instinct.” Both state and state-sponsored cult became, he argues, “objects of religious devotion,” their ideologies “political religions” of a type already visible in the revolutionary France that is in some ways the principal villain of Earthly Powers.

This is, I suppose, a perverse tribute to the persistence of man’s innate religious instinct, something to which Burleigh attaches an importance at odds with the usual orthodoxies. Of course, it’s not particularly novel to regard Nazism as a cult (although in The Third Reich, Burleigh extends this analysis further than most), but it’s somewhat rarer to see a similar diagnosis applied so comprehensively to Bolshevism (the Asian variants of Communism are, unfortunately, outside the scope of these books, although I can guess what Burleigh, a writer who is as humane as he is caustic, would have made of Maoism) and, more provocatively still, to the very roots of supposedly “scientific” socialism itself.

But if God died, He took His time doing so. We have grown accustomed to the idea that religion in Europe spent the post- Enlightenment centuries rapidly retreating to the private sphere, and thence to quietist oblivion. This process may have been uneven, but it was, so runs the argument, as continuous and as inevitable as the defeat of those throne-and-altar types who tried to impede it. Burleigh reveals this narrative to be as inaccurate as it is incomplete. He resurrects philosophers, politicians, and movements largely written out of more conventional accounts of the past. To be sure, some of those exhumed are so marginal and so mad that they might have been better left to molder on undisturbed, but the cumulative effect is fascinating, a rich rococo mess, rather than the dully one-directional tramline that defines the progressive view of history.

If the religious instinct survived (as it was always bound to—we are what we are), the weakening of long-established vehicles for its expression left it vulnerable to the new political religions and with them the delusion that it was possible for man to build heaven here on earth, a fantasy that paved the way for attempts to create a state of limitless reach and unbridled cruelty. That’s not to claim (and Burleigh wouldn’t) that the totalitarian impulse is now solely the preserve of the unbeliever. In an age defaced by the Taliban and al Qaeda, who could? Besides, attempting to pin the blame on either godliness or godlessness is less useful than looking at the very nature of belief itself—and how it can, and frequently does, mutate so horrifically, and how, for that matter, it can be manipulated.  After reading Burleigh’s books and contemplating their rogue’s gallery of madmen, prophets, and monsters, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion (even if it’s never directly spelled out) that the origins of jihadi violence lie as much in the darker recesses of the human psyche as in the peculiarities of any one religion or, indeed, region. As Burleigh demonstrates, a Bernard Lewis may be an invaluable guide to the appeal of bin Ladenism, but so is Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In his ideas, in the breadth of his writings, and in the distinct, acerbic, and sometimes bleakly humorous spirit that permeates them, there’s a hint of Edward Gibbon about Burleigh. If we listen to what he has to say (including some useful practical suggestions at the end of Blood & Rage), we may have a better chance of avoiding our very own decline and fall. The last one was bad enough

A Cabinet of Soviet Curiosities

Paul R. Gregory: Lenin's Brain 

The New York Sun, May 21, 2008

Moscow, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

Sometimes the smallest of things can illuminate the largest. A fossil tells the story of massive planetary change, a line or two of poetry does more to explain trench warfare than a dozen history books, and the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard bring Gloriana's long vanished England back to iridescent, dangerous life. In writing "Lenin's Brain" (Hoover Institution Press, 163 pages, $15), Houston University professor Paul R. Gregory has mined the Hoover Institution's extraordinary collection of Soviet archival material to come up with 14 brief, deftly chosen tales that brilliantly illuminate the cruelties, the absurdities, and the failures of the USSR's malignant, broken-backed utopia, with a precision and a concision that have rarely been equaled.

Professor Gregory's book is as grim as it is fascinating; the nearest it comes to offering any sort of relief is with its account of the fate of its eponymous red-gray matter. The Soviet leader's brain was not the source of much laughter in the course of Lenin's lifetime, but the absurd, darkly funny story of its subsequent fate is a farce that would have delighted Mikhail Bulgakov and must surely, one day, tempt Tom Stoppard.

The saga begins with the removal of the brain in the immediate aftermath of its owner's death, to be poked and prodded, examined and venerated. From there it went on a long, strange trip from skull to jar to slide, ending up divided into 30,953 carefully selected slices. (I am unclear whether this total includes the portion that was dispatched to Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.) A German brain specialist was put in charge of the project for a while, but he proved unacceptably foreign and irritatingly independent. In the end, however, Stalin's Politburo got the result it wanted from a team of more biddable experts, "proof" that Lenin was smarter than just about anybody else — a mixture of pseudoscience and elitism that was all too typical of the Bolshevik project. As the episode reminds us, the Soviet leadership believed that the masses were inherently unreliable: Without an "enlightened elite to manage [them], there would never be a peasant-worker paradise. By this logic, the creators of this dictatorship must themselves be head and shoulders above the rest."

The rest of "Lenin's Brain" shows the society these geniuses created. It was a civilization where mass murder was commonplace ("the Leningrad troika sentenced 658 defendants to death in a single day"), where history (such as the truth behind the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn) was almost infinitely malleable, and where, in 1944, 180,014 Crimean Tatars were exiled from their ancestral homeland "without incident," a comment from the secret police chief that, in just two words, shows how brutal and brutalized this paradise had become.

And so it goes on. Mr. Gregory introduces his readers to the notion of "former people" (byvshie liudi), individuals whose background, behavior, or associations (such as who they were related to) meant that "they were no longer [to] be regarded as human beings." We read how debate was suppressed (even at the Party's highest levels), and are given details of a paranoia that ran so deep that the notion of "anti-Soviet agronomists" could be taken seriously. In the end, ironically, the result was that the Kremlin's bosses no longer had access to the information they needed to run their empire efficiently: The chapter describing how the decision was taken to invade Afghanistan is a devastating portrait of a secretive and fumbling gerontocracy seduced by conspiracy theory and ancient ideological assumptions into a disastrous international adventure.

But of all Professor Gregory's stories, the most haunting is that of Vladimir Moroz. After the arrest of his parents and older brother in 1937, Vladimir and his younger sibling were transferred to (separate) secret police-run orphanages. There he made the mistake, records show, of expressing "dissatisfaction with the arrests" of his family. He was then arrested himself, tortured, and sent to a corrective-labor camp. He died there six months later.

He was 17 years old.

Round Two?

Edward Lucas: The New Cold War

National Review, May 5, 2008

Putin

It’s not just the fact that Edward Lucas is a quietly proud, quietly amused holder of Lithuania’s Order of Gediminas (Fifth Class) that distinguishes him from many other non-native (he’s English) commentators on Eastern Europe; it’s also the depth of his interest in, and sympathy for, this long-contested stretch of territory’s cultures and peoples, an interest and a sympathy that resonate throughout this fine, timely, and thought-provoking new book.

It’s an interest he has pursued at first hand. Lucas (whom — full disclosure — I’ve known for more than 20 years) spent time in Poland as a student, and has been covering the region as a journalist since the late 1980s in a career that has included stints in Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Tallinn, Vilnius, and Moscow. He is now the Central and East European correspondent for The Economist. It’s his sympathy for the nations once trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and his grasp of their struggles — past, present, and, quite possibly, future — that now lead him to warn of the danger that a revived Russia might represent not only to their independence but also, for that matter, to the West.

To be sure, The New Cold War is, as its title reveals, a polemic. Obviously sensitive to accusations of hyperbole, Lucas takes care to stress that today’s threat is subtler than in the days of a divided continent and Mutually Assured Destruction. Nevertheless he’s out to alarm. He describes a Russia now run by, and for, its security services, a power once again on the prowl beyond its borders. Domestically it has, he shows, reverted to a form of authoritarianism, albeit one that, Lucas readily concedes, allows far more leeway than in the grim, gray, grinding Soviet past: “Never in Russian history have so many Russians lived so well and so freely.”

This is not an unfamiliar tale (news coverage of Putin’s rule has been more critical than Lucas sometimes appears to think), but here it’s recounted with fluency, authority, and an eye for detail that, even in this book’s lighter moments (of which there are a respectable number; he is a dryly amusing writer), betray its author’s long experience of the ramshackle, turbulent, and bewildering space that is all that remains of the utopia that never was:

I went to visit a new [Georgian] finance minister . . . who was being energetically promoted by the ever-optimistic American embassy. His office was bright, modern, and computerized. We had an enjoyable chat about e-government and zero-based budgeting. . . . As I left, I used an old journalist’s trick and asked to use the restroom, saying that I would find my way out. Not only was the toilet worse than a midden, but my detour to some of the other offices produced a much more convincing picture: a warren of ill-lit and dingy offices, each filled with rickety wooden furniture. Dumpy little men in ill-fitting brown suits were engaged in chain-smoking conversation with thickset men in leather jackets. Not a computer was in sight.

Clearly Lucas retains an unromantic, often skeptical view of the states that stumbled, lurched, and strode into the murky post-Soviet dawn. He’s often their cheerleader, but he’ll heckle too. Equally, his view of Russia is more balanced than his book’s title might suggest. After witnessing the chaos, violent criminality, and, for many, penury of the Yeltsin era, he can appreciate the attraction of the (partially) restored order and increasing prosperity associated with Putin, if not their political consequences. It’s telling that mounting suspicions (in Lucas’s view, “the weight of evidence so far supports the grimmest interpretation”) that the security services were behind the “terrorist” apartment bombings that helped pave the way for Putin’s election in 2000 have done little to dent his popularity: Russians have been prepared to pay dearly for the hope that the trains might someday run on time.

This is yet another reminder that the benign “universal” values (liberty, democracy, and so on) so cherished by Lucas are far from being universal priorities. Freedom may be important to Russians but it has demonstrably mattered less than the restoration of stability, and, probably, the desire that their country be, once again, a force to be reckoned with. But if nationalism can function as a valuable social glue, it can also gum things up. Adopting an increasingly rancid notion of the national interest may play well at home, but it has proved to be better theater than policy, and it’s leading Russia in a direction that is not just destructive, but self-destructive.

Bullying small neighbors is one thing (it’s an example of derzhavnichestvo, something that great powers just tend to do — and get away with), but Putin’s diplomacy has often appeared to put petulance before realpolitik. Aiding the Iranian theocracy may be an enjoyable way to taunt the West, but it makes little strategic sense for a country with mounting Islamist problems of its own. As for Putin’s embrace of China, Lucas approvingly quotes a Russian observer who despairingly, and reasonably, depicts such a partnership (presumably designed to act as a counterweight to those wicked Americans) as “an alliance between [Russian] rabbit and [Chinese] boa constrictor.”

Similarly, there is clear evidence, repeated by Lucas, that increasing meddling (to use a mild term) by the Kremlin has held back economic development. Times have been good but they could have been better. Investment has been deterred, delayed, or distorted. The high price Russia now receives for its oil and gas has been a godsend, but the resulting bonanza has both encouraged and financed the damage that an ever more assertive state is inflicting upon a still fledgling free market. Despite this, the prospects of rich pickings from Russia’s petro-economy not only have, as Lucas demonstrates in some of the most unsettling sections of his book, dampened Western criticism of Putin’s rule, but also look likely to set in motion a process that will leave Europe unhealthily dependent on Russian energy resources. To Lucas, “the growing [Western] business lobby tied to Russia represents a powerful fifth column of a kind unseen during the last Cold War. Once it was Communist trade unions that undermined the West at the Kremlin’s behest. Now it is pro-Kremlin bankers and politicians who betray their countries for 30 silver rubles.”

That’s a tirade too far, but it inevitably brings to mind Lenin’s best, if apocryphal, jibe: the one about rope, revolutionaries, capitalists, and selling. It’s a comparison that would gain added resonance were Lucas able to prove his contention that there is, once again, an ideological element to Moscow’s rivalry with the West. I’m not convinced that he is. To be sure, some of Putin’s more intellectually enterprising acolytes have managed to cobble together a doctrine of sorts, a haphazard jumble of grandiloquent, nostalgic nonsense that goes by the name of “sovereign democracy,” but nobody appears to take it terribly seriously. Nor should they. Russia has some traditions of government that are, mercifully, all its own, but these days they are, mercifully, no longer for export. There is no ideology behind Russia’s current maneuverings abroad, merely an old-fashioned pursuit of power, influence, and wealth — legitimate aims for any nation, great or small, flawed in this case by a profound misunderstanding of where its people’s best interests really lie.

But if the Kremlin is to play these games, so must we. Lucas concludes his book with some recommendations as to how to shove back. Some are sensible (focus on energy security), some naive (would Russia really care, or even notice, if it were suspended from the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly?), and some unnecessarily antagonistic (Georgia in NATO?). The first stage in any effective response, however, is a realistic understanding of what Russia is up to. This bracing, dismaying book doesn’t tell the full story (in particular, there’s not enough discussion of the extent to which Russia’s ambitions are both hobbled and inspired by its weakness), but it’s an excellent place to start.

Children of the Revolution

Catriona Kelly: Children's World

National Review, March 5, 2008

It is fair to assume that any volume with space for a discussion of the "crisis" in mid-20th-century Soviet children's theater is aimed at a specialist audience. That said, if the subject of "Children's World" (Yale University Press, 736 pages, $45), Oxford professor Catriona Kelly's immense, imaginative, and thoroughly researched new book — a history of child-rearing in Russia between the twilight of the tsars and the fall of Gorbachev — is somewhat academic, her prose style is not.

She writes clearly, keeps her use of pedagogic jargon to a minimum, and even leaves room for occasional flashes of dry, donnish humor. Describing the shabbily manufactured playthings of the inter-war years, she recounts how "smudgy and ungainly wooden figures passed for dolls, shaggy and savage-looking hairy lumps for toy animals." Meanwhile, locating a kindergarten on the top floor of an elevator-less Moscow building was evidence of the way that "the eccentricities of centralized planning made themselves felt."

High Table witticisms aside, this book's real value for the lay reader comes from the unusual perspective it offers on the wider Soviet experience, a perspective sharpened by its author's eye for the telling detail. Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, educationalist, scold, and harridan, was, Ms. Kelly records, opposed to birthday parties (they served no educational purpose and, horrors, emphasized a child's individuality). Opposed to birthday parties! That tells you almost everything you need to know about the elaborate fanaticism of the dreary Mrs. Lenin. It also says quite a bit about the cause she served: The Bolshevik revolution was designed not only to remake Russia, but to transform human nature itself.

Not all aspects of the approach taken by the fledgling Soviet bureaucracy to the treatment, education, and upbringing of children were, as Ms. Kelly shows, negative. That's not to claim (and she wouldn't) that the early period of communist rule was a time of educational liberalism — at least in any meaningful sense. Youngsters may have been given more opportunity to express themselves than in either the typical tsarist or Stalinist school, but only within strict ideological limits. What's more, many of the reforms of that era, and even some of the freedoms, must primarily be understood as devices to promote the state's assault on the family, an institution the Bolsheviks regarded with deep suspicion. Under the circumstances, it's easy to imagine that the return to social conservatism (and, with it, more regimented schools and a more conventionally organized curriculum) that accompanied Stalin's rise to supreme power in the 1930s was welcomed by many parents: One of this book's rare weaknesses is that we are never really told if that was indeed the case.

The inspiration for the change in direction under Stalin was, of course, neither philanthropic nor democratic. It merely reflected his willingness to use the appeal of both restored order and, for that matter, revived Russian nationalism (something that would have been taboo in Lenin's Kremlin) to shore up support for his dictatorship. In schools, as elsewhere, the revolution's egalitarianism — or, more accurately, collectivism — was overlaid with the cult of state and leader. The collective had been transformed into a congregation. Egalitarianism evolved into patriotic obligation as much as moral duty. The primary function of the educational system became the production of docile, loyal and subservient citizens. In some of the most interesting passages in her book, Ms. Kelly explains how this effort was orchestrated — and, often, how subtly. Its traces could be detected even in the way that children were portrayed in fiction, reportage, and textbooks. They were demoted from being the spunky, assertive heroes of revolutionary lore into altogether more passive creatures, forerunners of the dutiful and deferential Homo Sovieticus they were being molded to become.

Now, it could be argued, quite reasonably, that most schools in most countries try to churn out good citizens, however they define the term. Furthermore (as Ms. Kelly also acknowledges) what may seem like extreme regimentation to us would have appeared far less startling to the Western observer of, say, half a century ago — an epoch when schools on either side of the former Iron Curtain would have generally been much more disciplined than they are today.

Nevertheless, this book leaves no doubt that Soviet regimentation was indeed extreme. While Professor Kelly doesn't dwell on the cruelties of communist despotism, she never succumbs to the usual bien-pensant temptation of trying to find a supposed moral equivalence between East and West. This is demonstrated most strikingly, perhaps, by her decision to include (among a consistently well-chosen range of illustrations) a page of mug shots taken from the archives of a secret police home for "Family Members of Traitors to the Motherland." These particular family members cannot have been more than 9 or 10 years old. Their faces stare out, bewildered, haunted, trying to please, victims of a tyranny that could not, would not, forgive their genes.

In the end, ironically, the successes of Soviet education — standards rose, facilities were upgraded, some degree of independent thinking came to be acceptable — helped foment the widespread disillusion that contributed so much to the regime's eventual implosion. "In a pattern that comes up again and again in Soviet history," Ms. Kelly writes, "rising standards brought rising expectations." She might have noted the additional irony that those rising standards also taught the Soviet population that its expectations would never be met by the system in which they had been trained for so long, so hard, and so cynically to believe.

The rest is history.

Fixin' Nixon

Conrad Black: Richard M. Nixon - A Life in Full

The New Criterion, March 1, 2008

Judging by the tone and the content, if not the length, of his epic, sprawling, and (on several levels) fascinating new biography of Richard Nixon, Conrad Black is not inclined to attempt much analysis of what, ultimately, made Tricky Dick tick.. There have, he snorts, “been many amateur psychoanalyses of Nixon, [but] none of any apparent validity or value.” None? When Black refers to the “psycho-media speculation” contained within press coverage of the various medical disasters that befell the former president in the immediate aftermath of his resignation, he doesn’t mean it as a term of approbation.

Now it is true that Nixon did have to put up with more than his fair share of long-distance psychoanalysis (so much so, in fact, that when David Greenberg wrote Nixon’s Shadow [2003], a valuable study of shifting perceptions of the thirty-seventh president, he devoted an entire chapter to “the psychobiographers”), and more than a fair share of that was nonsense, make-a-buck flimflam, or propaganda masquerading as science. At the same time, there can have been few presidents whose behavior did more to attract this sort of attention. Nobody should expect the occupants of the Oval Office to be regular folks, and few of them have been. Nevertheless, even when compared with other members of this often eccentric fraternity, there’s something about Nixon’s psyche that makes it stand out in its strangeness, its melancholy, its noir, and its mystery.

In part, of course, this reflects Nixon’s misfortune (for a man who achieved so much, Nixon was, as Black demonstrates, remarkably unlucky) to be living at a time when increasing (and frequently hostile) media scrutiny combined with the mid-century infatuation with psychiatry to ensure that almost no aspect of his career or character was not picked apart. If his predecessors had received similar treatment, Nixon would not have seemed quite so peculiar.

Nixon himself understood that he was something of a puzzle, and rather relished it. In President Nixon—Alone in the White House (2001), his intriguing account of the Nixon presidency, Richard Reeves recounts how Bob Dole once told Nixon “that he was destined to be misunderstood because he was too complicated a man to be totally understood.” Nixon had responded to that with enthusiasm, saying, “Aha! Now you’re getting somewhere.” Reeves then goes on to argue that Nixon “did not want to be understood. If other men thought he was unreadable, then they must think there was a great deal more inside him than just a powerful mind voyaging alone in anger and self-doubt.”

You can debate the second part of that diagnosis, but not the first: Nixon clearly did not want to be understood. That doesn’t mean, however, that a biographer should avoid trying to do so. Black doesn’t, but his efforts too often come across as more a matter of (deftly chosen) adjectives than anything more substantial. Even if one makes allowance for Black’s distaste for such analysis, his failure to deliver more of it diminishes the roundedness of his book, and is, in such a perceptive author, a disappointment. What his readers are offered instead is a biography where, with the notable exception of the canny, and feline, depiction of Kissinger, politics tend to be handled more convincingly than personality, a chronicle where the emphasis is on the event rather than the individual. Black, the author of a notable biography of FDR, is evidently a writer who prefers to focus his attention on the external, on great men, on momentous events and the grandest of themes. The rest, I’d guess, he sees as trivia, little more than gossip. Nixon would approve.

To read Black’s book is to be treated like the guest at a lavish dinner party presided over by an opinionated, brilliant, mordantly amusing, powerful, and loquacious host. As the port is passed round and the cigars light up, the host holds forth—for hours and hours (this work is easily over a thousand pages long) and hours. Glasses are drained and doubts drowned. Stories tumble out, anecdotes cascade. Portentous verdicts are cast: the opening to Communist China“was an imaginative diplomatic initiative of great geopolitical consequences … but to the extent it was sold, then and subsequently, as a combination of Columbian exploration, Bismarckian diplomacy, and Jesuitical missionary work, it was a confidence trick to reelect the president, pad the CVs of the two ex- plorer/diplomat/pilgrims, and garnish the post-governmental wallet of Kissinger.” Lapidary pronouncements are made: “Nixon’s trousers were slightly too short (often the case with Americans).” Widespread rumors are discounted: Nixon tells the author that “Edgar [Hoover] had a lot of files, but I had a lot of files too, and there was nothing in them about Edgar in a red dress.” Erudite digressions are explored: “Disraeli was rivaled only by Churchill as the greatest wit of all British prime ministers.” And insidery recollections are shared:

His office was another Nixonian classic. It was reached by walking through a large travel agency on the ground floor of a building on a suburban boulevard, then taking an elevator up two floors, opening a box with a bronze eagle on it, and announcing oneself on the telephone receiver within.

All this is filtered through, and often illuminated by, our host’s distinctive, distinctly orotund, use of language. He deploys a startling, imposing, and baroque phraseology. Black’s language is never dull, but it does teeter between the enlightening (the Democratic-led “assault on Nixon” had become “the rape of the executive”), the arch (“the influx of newcomers to California … tended to be conventional southerners well to the right politically of the egalitarian EPIC group, which had believed in collective economics and the absence of complexional distinctions”), the absurd (“malignant Nibelungen within the IRS”), the Agnew (“It was another herniating levitation of pandemic hypocrisy”), the sly (“Kissinger tried a fully gymnastic range of explanations”), and occasionally the bizarre (Jesse Jackson as “rutting panther”).

And, no, as enjoyable as the occasion may be, the magnate’s guests at this splendid feast will never entirely be able to shake off the sense that they are receiving a message de haut en bas. Black, Conrad Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour, was a newspaper mogul in the old style, a mover, a shaker, a macher, and it shows. Nixon gives “the annual Atlantic Richfield Dinner address in London in the autumn of 1992, and dazzle[s] the most eminent dinner audience that city could produce,” a dinner audience that included Lord Black, but not me, or in all probability, dear reader, you.

None of this is to detract from Black’s ability to spin a “rocking, socking” (to borrow a term Nixon used to describe his more vigorous campaigns) yarn. A thousand pages, maybe, but they don’t pall, and they are dauntingly thoroughly researched. The narrative is comprehensive, detailed, generally judicious and, in its careful assessment of Watergate, is closer to a plea in mitigation than an outright case for the defense. Overall, it’s almost impossible and largely pointless to highlight any particular topic covered in those thousand pages, but if I have to choose one, it would be the subtle and sympathetic way in which Black handles Nixon’s tortured and complex dealings with a truly masterful trickster, the enigmatic, cunning, and ruthless Eisenhower.

Where the book fails is in “The Transfiguration,” the book’s ambitiously titled final chapter. The picture Black paints is of the painstaking, carefully crafted step-by-step creation of the last “new Nixon”—a largely rehabilitated figure, a much consulted, highly respected foreign policy sage, the grandfatherly “most successful ex-president in the country’s history,” a figure whose fate was apparently beginning to prick what Black refers to with characteristic melodrama as the “Great American Puritanical Conscience.” This overstates matters. With the passing of the years, we have indeed witnessed the emergence of a fairer, more balanced assessment of Nixon (and this biography will help in that process). Some of the wilder accusations of the Watergate era have now been shown up for the ludicrous overreaction they always were, and as they have faded, so some of the luster has, at last, been restored to Nixon’s reputation.

At the same time, it remains unclear just how seriously people really took Nixon’s advice in those final years. Not so much, I reckon. As for the circles in which he was allegedly regarded as either martyred or, well, transfigured, they are, in their very different way, unlikely to have been much more representative than those of Pauline Kael; the New Yorker critic was supposedly unable to work out how Nixon could have won his 1972 landslide when “no one she knew” had voted for him (as it happens, she didn’t actually say that, but the story’s too good not to repeat). What works for Atlantic Richfield will not work so well in Atlantic City or, for that matter, anywhere else in America outside, perhaps, the Beltway and, certainly, Yorba Linda. The restoration of Nixon’s image is far less complete than Black would have us believe.

It may not be the most scientific of tests, but the fact that, as David Greenberg records, masks of Nixon were the top-selling Halloween costumes in October 2000, over a quarter of a century after his resignation, must mean something. In the American popular imagination Nixon will always be seen primarily as a villain, albeit one who can sometimes be played for laughs, or pathos, or both. There were traces of that in Frank Langella’s enthralling performance as the fallen president in the play Frost/Nixon, but Nixon fans may not find it entirely reassuring that Langella was previously best known as a notably effective Dracula.

It’s difficult not to think that, in writing the final chapter in the way he did, Black may have allowed himself to be swayed by his hopes for his own future. In a still-disputed verdict, Black was found guilty last year of defrauding Hollinger International, the company he used to lead, as well as of obstruction of justice. He is currently appealing. Under the circumstances, the idea that Nixon (who was a friend of Black’s) was able to pull off a comeback may well be a source of comfort, inspiration, and, Black might hope, precedent. The author himself has preferred to downplay the extent to which he identifies, or should be identified, with his subject, but choosing, while under indictment, to write a supportive (if still critical) life of a public figure whose most well-known line was that he was “not a crook” may be revealing and is indisputably provocative.

What Black cannot surely deny is that his understanding of what happened to Nixon has been colored by his own problems, whether it’s on the reluctance of Henry Kissinger (once an appointee of Black’s to the Hollinger International board, but now, it seems, somewhat estranged) to stand by the beleaguered Nixon or on the way that the use by prosecutors of plea bargains and whistleblowers has“encouraged a system of suborned or intimidated perjury, or at least spontaneous clarity of recollection, to move upwards in the inculpation of officials in any organization where wrongdoing is alleged.” As so often, Black makes a good, if over-elaborately expressed, point.

It’s worth adding that whatever else this volume reveals about Black’s state of mind, its completion under what in the introduction are referred to as “very distracting circumstances” is also a phenomenal demonstration of discipline, willpower, and self-control. Yet again, Nixon would approve.

The Lives of Others

Orlando Figes: The Whisperers

Moscow, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

It has been the worse part of a century since the bloody birth and savage adolescence of the Soviet state, but the events of those years are still obscure — lost in time, muddled by propaganda, and treated, even now, as the stuff of spin. Those terrible decades remain camouflaged, murky and mysterious, glimpsed mainly in shadow or in tantalizing, elusive outline. They have been best illuminated not in nonfiction accounts, but in novels, short stories, and verse — by Solzhenitsyn’s zek grateful for his day “without a dark cloud,” by the deadpan of Shalamov’s spare, unsparing Kolyma Tales, by Ahkmatova’s torn, desperate, eloquent laments:

This was when the ones who smiled

Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

And like a useless appendage,

Leningrad Swung from its prisons.

And when, senseless from torment,

Regiments of convicts marched,

And the short songs of farewell

Were sung by locomotive whistles.

The stars of death stood above us

And innocent Russia writhed Under bloody boots

And under the tires of the Black Marias.

That’s not, of course, to deny that there have been some excellent histories of that era. One of the most notable in recent times was Orlando Figes’sPeople’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. Professor Figes, a British historian, is now extending that saga deeper into the nightmare that enveloped the Soviet Union with The Whisperers, a massive, sprawling, and unsettling book billed as a description of “private life in Stalin’s Russia.” In researching it, Figes has made extensive, and extraordinary, use of freshly opened family archives and a large number of personal interviews. As well he might. To understand the founding period of the USSR is tricky enough. To uncover the private lives, and thoughts, of those who lived through it, inhabitants of a society where reticence, conformity, and role-playing could be, even at home, matters of life and death is doubly difficult. Then there is, as Figes writes, this:

People with traumatic memories tend to block out parts of their own past. Their memory becomes fragmentary, organized by a series of disjointed episodes (such as the arrest of a parent or the moment of eviction from their home) rather than by a linear chronology. When they try to reconstruct the story of their life, particularly when their powers of recall are weakened by old age, such people tend to make up for the gaps in their own memory by drawing on what they have read, or what they have heard from others with experiences similar to theirs.

To accept this logic is to accept that seminal accounts of this period, such as The Gulag Archipelago or Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, have evolved from, respectively, works of collective history and individual recollection into the imagined, or partly imagined, autobiographies of countless victims of the terror. Figes himself claims that “many Gulag survivors insist that they witnessed scenes described in . . . Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn, or Shalamov, that they recognize the guards or NKVD interrogators mentioned in these works . . . when documentation clearly shows that this could not be so.” Figes never specifies what he means by “many” (the numbers involved are probably, I suspect, less than that adjective implies), but there can be little doubt that the phenomenon is real. Complicating matters further, memories have been distorted not only by trauma and time, but also by wishful thinking:

People who returned from the labor camps . . . found consolation in the . . . idea that, as Gulag laborers, they too had made a contribution to the Soviet economy. Many of these people later looked back with enormous pride at the factories, dams, and cities they had built. This pride stemmed in part from their continued belief in the Soviet system and its ideology, despite the injustices they had been dealt, and in part, perhaps, from their need to find a larger meaning for their suffering.

Additionally, as Figes reminds us, it’s a viewpoint that finds an echo and reinforcement in the widely held opinion that victory in the “Great Patriotic War” can be seen as some sort of justification for the horrors of Stalinist rule.

These ideas are bizarre, but for large numbers of Russians they beat the alternative: facing up to just how much was lost, thrown away, or destroyed in pursuit of a delusion and in the name of a tyrant. This recourse to the comfort of denial and the ease of evasion is of more than academic interest. It helps explain the Putin government’s approach to the Communist past. A definitive reckoning with history, that long-overdue Soviet Nuremberg, is too daunting to contemplate, too potentially demoralizing for the nation as a whole, too incriminating for a still-compromised Kremlin establishment. Speaking last year in support of a new manual designed to help the teaching of Russian history in the country’s schools, Vladimir Putin conceded that aspects of the former dictatorship were “problematic.” Nevertheless, he went on to say that Russia could not allow “other states” to “impose a sense of guilt” upon it. The words he used reveal both unease about the past and, implicitly, a desire to reshape it.

If Figes’s analysis casts doubt on the reliability of some accounts of the Stalin years, those he has unearthed for the purposes of this book add fascinating detail to what we know, or think we know, of that epoch. Nevertheless, to view The Whisperers as a comprehensive survey of “private life in Stalin’s Russia” would be a mistake. For example, there is not a great deal about how it was to experience, and, where possible, endure, the camps and prisons that have come to symbolize the Stalinist order, an aspect of “private life” that Figes appears to believe lies mainly outside the scope of his chosen topic; I’m not so sure.

Meanwhile, at the other end of official approval there is, with one critical exception (the writer Konstantin Simonov, a man who was both too tough and too weak to avoid aligning himself with the system), less than might be expected about those who actively supported the regime or who, in one way or another, flourished under it. As for those “ordinary” Russians who managed, so far as they could, to keep out of the way of history, they feature relatively rarely. Readers looking for more on their lives would do better to turn to the evidence collected in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism, and Stalinism as a Way of Life, edited by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov.

What Figes offers is something less all-embracing. It is, primarily, a look at lives spent on the edge, neither at the heart of darkness nor untouched by it. The stories he recounts could not, by definition, fail to be interesting, but however skillfully he tries to weave them together (and Figes is a highly accomplished storyteller), the final picture is not as coherent as it might be. It’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that on this occasion this talented author’s reach was greater than his grasp.

As a result, the principal value to be derived from The Whisperers is almost incidental to what is supposed to be its main theme. In particular, the book’s earlier sections are a remarkable evocation of the sheer scale of the Bolshevik project. This was, in reality, nothing less than an attempt to remake man according to the dictates of what was, for all practical purposes, a millennial cult run by a lethal combination of fanatics, sadists, and opportunists. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of this task, and, with the resources of the state behind it, nothing was. In such a climate, the family, the most redoubtable bastion against totalitarianism, was bound to be a key target of the regime. And, as the narratives selected by Figes underline, that is what it became. The conflict, persecution, and occasional moments of stubborn resistance that ensued make up the grim, gripping, and horrific drama around which this book revolves.

But if the Bolsheviks proved effective at sweeping away much of what had preceded them, the ramshackle utopia with which they replaced it was a broken-backed wreck. Another striking aspect of the oral histories contained in this book is how often they share a subtext of astonishing material deprivation and hardship. If the Soviet Union was, as its supporters abroad liked to claim, a “new civilization,” it was one with large elements of the pre-modern about it.

And the physical squalor was, as Figes repeatedly demonstrates, matched by the moral; this, indeed, inspired the book’s title. The Stalin years, he writes, left the Russian language with “two words for a whisperer — one for somebody who whispers out of fear for being overheard . . . another for the person who informs or whispers behind people’s backs to the authorities.”

Mr. Putin, I think, would approve.

Spies Like Us

Joseph Weisberg:  An Ordinary Spy

The New York Sun, January 16, 2008

Mark Ruttenberg, the hero of "An Ordinary Spy" (Bloomsbury, 288 pages, $23.95), Joseph Weisberg's deft, sour, and clever new novel of espionage, bureaucracy, and disenchantment, is — it is true — a spy. But he's no James Bond.

Just read what happens, or doesn't, when he shows up for a celebration at the Russian embassy in the country to which, as a novice CIA agent, he has recently been posted. The poor fellow fails to make any real progress with the general who is the most important target in the room, he gets "tipsy" on two shots of vodka, and when, finally, he runs into a girl he has been trying to recruit, he is not only snubbed, but also floundering:

I had an impulse to rush after her, grab her arm, and spin her back around. But I didn't know what I'd do after that. Did I want to kiss her? I'd always found Daisy attractive … [b]ut I'd wanted to recruit her, not sleep with her.

Good God, man, get a grip! In cloak-and-dagger Valhalla, 007 is, undoubtedly, shaking his head (as well as that third martini). The contrast between his stumblebum spy and Ian Fleming's swashbuckling psychopath is, however, one that evidently amuses Mr. Weisberg. As fans of his debut novel, the lovely and beguiling "10th Grade" (2002), will recall, Mr. Weisberg is a sly, dryly funny writer, and even in the far more downbeat surroundings of his new book, he sporadically allows himself to unleash the occasional fleeting and stealthy joke at the expense of the luckless Ruttenberg and the frustrating, dull, drab routines that make his a life far removed from the spy game's glittering, legendary, and deceptive glamour.

But the disillusion, and not only Ruttenberg's, that permeates this book is generally closer to the "quiet desperation" of old Thoreau's loopy ravings than any profound ideological crisis; there is no hint of the majestic decay and mythic exhaustion that run through le Carré's best, possibly because Mr. Weisberg is describing an agent at the beginning of his career — an agent working, what's more, for a nation that, unlike George Smiley's Great Britain, is unwilling to accept eclipse, humiliation, and relegation to the second tier.

Nevertheless, there are moments when readers of "An Ordinary Spy" may worry that its portrait of the CIA as a cesspit of careerism, groupthink, and deadening conventionality may be a warning that the United States is poised to follow its transatlantic cousin into decline. The fact that the book's author formerly worked for the agency (he was employed there for three years and, by the time he quit, was in training to become a "case officer" much like Ruttenberg) only adds to the concern: Even if he never advanced very far in the intelligence service, Mr. Weisberg must have learned enough to offer up an accurate description of its workings. Whether that is, in fact, what he has done is a different question (I've no idea one way or another), but his writing feels authentic, an impression he tries to reinforce by displaying his text in a "redacted" format that is simultaneously bogus and real. As a former CIA man, he was indeed required to submit his manuscript to Langley's Publications Review Board, but ahead of doing so, he anticipated what the board might ban. Both the board's deletions and his own pre-emptive strikings-out are evidenced by the thick black lines that are the censor's impenetrable spoor, with no way to distinguish between them.

It's a device that sometimes irritates, but it helps transport outsiders into the secret world, at least as they might imagine it, a world made all the more mysterious, all the more opaque, and all the more disturbing by the fact that Mr. Weisberg's readers aren't actually informed where within it they have ended up: The country where the greater part of the drama unfolds is never disclosed. If I had to guess, it's located somewhere in Central Asia, the Middle East, or North Africa, but we're never told for sure.

And maybe that's the most effective device of all. The United States now finds itself enmeshed in a probably endless, possibly apocalyptic struggle against an adversary that knows no limits, no rules, and no borders, a conflict where every diplomatic outpost, but particularly those in countries of the type that Mr. Weisberg doesn't name, is a listening station, a sentry box, and perhaps more. In one form or another, such outposts have existed whenever there have been nations with interests to protect. They have been manned by guards, by observers, and by spies; patriots often, ideologues occasionally, but for the most part, ordinary men doing a job that is rarely extraordinary, and changes history even less.

And it is the story of two of these ordinary men, these ordinary spies, that Mr. Weisberg sets out so skillfully. There's no great message that underpins this novel, no intimations of coming American collapse: just a tale well told of lives that were meant to be spent watching, probing, plotting, guessing, and double-guessing, lives that, it turns out, go somewhat awry, lives that are illuminating only in their insignificance, and yet they are lives on which yours, and mine, may depend.

We Happy Two

Nicholas Wapshott: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage

The New York Sun, November 5, 2007

One of the more poignant features of the current competition among Republican presidential hopefuls, fiercely fighting for a chance to lose to Senator Clinton in 2008, has been a series of missions to Maggie. Mitt Romney saw Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, late last year in Washington, D.C., while Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani were at pains to include meetings with the Iron Lady in the course of their recent trips to London. The political consequences of such encounters will, I'd guess, be minimal, but the briskly written, perceptive, and, ultimately, moving "Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage" (Sentinel, 336 pages, $25.95), by The New York Sun's Nicholas Wapshott, helps explain why, nearly two decades after she was driven from office, a frail, elderly Englishwoman still merits visits from American politicians looking to win the most powerful job in the world.

As its title would suggest, the focus of this volume is the personal alliance of Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher, a combination that represented the most productive and historically significant incarnation of the Special Relationship between England and America since that astonishingly effective blend of Anglo-American genes better known as Sir Winston Churchill (whose mother was, of course, from Brooklyn). Well-buttressed by skillfully chosen quotations from letters and telephone records (some previously unpublished), the central story of "Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher" is of a relationship between two politicians of conviction whose friendship, shared goals, and remarkable ability to reinforce and support each other through some very difficult times were key features of international politics in the 1980s — and, so it was to turn out, critical factors in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Given his subject matter, it's to be expected that Mr. Wapshott has somewhat less to say about the domestic scene on either side of the Atlantic. Yet, American readers may also find that this book makes an excellent, if brief, introduction to Mrs. Thatcher's career as a whole.

There is, however, one aspect of this account that may come as a surprise. These two leaders are often seen as a matching pair, but the tones of their respective biographies differ in some profound ways. To be sure, both came from hardscrabble backgrounds —Mrs. Thatcher's far less so than Reagan's — which they later romanticized, but there was always something sunnier about Reagan and the arc of his rise, something that owed a great deal to the difference in the two leaders' personalities, but also something to the myth and the reality of opportunity in the country in which the Gipper was, as he always knew, lucky enough to be born.

The latter is something Mrs. Thatcher, a lifelong admirer of America, would be presumably quick to admit. Yet, despite her fondness for America — and despite the usual claims from the usual suspects that she was "America's poodle" — this most patriotic of women always put Britain, and its national interests, first. At times, this led to disagreement with Reagan, and, as Mr. Wapshott shows, the conflict could become quite sharp. In the course of one spat, we read how Secretary of State Haig was quick to send Washington an ominous, and urgent, weather advisory: Mrs. Thatcher, he warned, had spoken to him with "unusual" vehemence, a terrifying image, given the intensity of even her usual vehemence. She would, Mr. Haig warned the president, be writing with "her concerns." Yikes.

On that particular occasion, the prime minister had been frustrated by the Reagan administration's attempt to extend the extraterritorial reach of American law. There was more serious trouble between this generally harmonious duo over equivocation within the White House in the run-up to the Falklands War, and, tellingly, horror and bewilderment in Downing Street at Reagan's repeatedly stated belief that it was possible to rid the planet of nuclear weapons. Mrs. Thatcher, correctly and characteristically, thought that this was hopelessly, dreamily, and dangerously "unrealistic." She could not, she explained, foresee a nuke-free future "because there have always been evil people in the world."

Fortunately, shrewd, easygoing "Ron" was usually prepared to listen to his shrewd, hectoring "Margaret." So much so, in fact, that in Mr. Wapshott's not unreasonable view, "Reagan's readiness to take Thatcher's advice ensured that her interventions in American policy [meant that] … she acted as an unofficial, unappointed, but wholly effective additional cabinet member." Under the circumstances, to argue, as Mr. Wapshott does, that Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher had entered into a "political marriage" is no exaggeration. What's more, this was not just any marriage: It was a good one. In a good marriage, the partners are able to disagree, and they continue to pay attention to each other, even when they are at odds. They never forget that, in the end, they are on the same side; the prime minister and the president never did. As Denis Thatcher — an often underrated figure, who is, refreshingly, given his due in this book — was early to recognize, his wife and Nancy's husband shared a vision, a close ideological bond made all the stronger by the fact that both had spent long years as representatives of a minority viewpoint not only within their own countries, but within their own parties.

But the vision thing was not, by itself, enough. The relationship between Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher was political, yes, but it was reinforced and strengthened by ever deepening personal affection. This is visible in much of the material chosen by Mr. Wapshott, and in particular in the charming anecdote with which he concludes his introduction:

One day an insistent call from Thatcher interrupted a meeting in the White House. Reagan mouthed to the assembled company that it was Thatcher, and they waited patiently as the president listened in silence to the force of nature on the other end of the line. Eventually, he placed his hand over the mouthpiece and gushed to everyone in the room, with a broad smile, "Isn't she wonderful."

She is. He was. They were.

The Godfather, Part I: Stalin as a Boy

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Young Stalin

The New York Sun, October 24, 2007

Young Stalin

When Josef Stalin finally succumbed to the stroke he so richly deserved, a distraught Pablo Neruda mourned the death of this "giant. ... the noon, the maturity of man and the peoples." Such attitudes are, mercifully, now rare. Once known genially as "Uncle Joe," Stalin is now regularly reviled as a monster and a despot to be ranked with history's worst.

Despite this, it continues to be the case that, in the popular imagination, the name Stalin fails to deliver anything like the sense of horror conjured up by Hitler. The reasons include the persistence of leftist ideology, the fact of cultural distance, and the recollection of wartime alliance. There's something else, however, that should not be overlooked: Stalin the man is barely known, and what is thought to be known is that he was something of a plodder, a bureaucrat, the embodiment of Soviet drab: in other words, a bore. That's not a quality humanity expects from its enduring villains: Just ask Shakespeare, just ask Milton.

In our memory, Hitler is not only the incarnation of evil but also its most vivid caricature. By contrast, in public Stalin was managerial rather than charismatic, cleverly distanced from the cult of personality that enveloped him. He went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that little of substance was disclosed about his private life. His biography was transformed into pious myth, systematically drained of real interest. Those few people who knew the truth, or part of the truth, managed to survive only if they kept it to themselves.

While this culture of secrecy began to change during the Khrushchev era, the twists, turns and imperatives of Kremlin politics conspired to keep the real Stalin hidden from the historical record. After 1991 this was no longer so, but while the details of Stalin's crimes are now widely available, the individual who inspired them has remained a strangely elusive figure, still scarcely more than the "gray blur" of ancient Menshevik libel. If any historian can bring an end to this relative indifference it is Simon Sebag Montefiore. His bestselling "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" (2003) was a masterful, magnificently readable, and immaculately researched account of the Soviet leader's long rule. As a portrait of ascendant malignance, it has rarely been equaled.

Mr. Sebag Montefiore's new book adds more depth to this picture. "Young Stalin" (Knopf, 460 pages, $30) is a kind of prequel to the earlier volume. It tells the story of the dictator's earlier years, from Georgian boyhood to his (often underrated) role as one of the key organizers of the Bolsheviks' Petrograd coup. Even told badly, this would be fascinating, but the ever-fluent Mr. Sebag Montefiore recounts it with brio, insight, and quite remarkable amounts of additional, never-before published information: I read it in one sitting. In some ways "Young Stalin" comes across as a picaresque, if grim, adventure, a bawdy chronicle of seminary school rebellion, banditry, bank robbery, revolutionary intrigue, jail, piracy, extortion, love, murder, romance, exile, scandal, and, even, hunting trips with the tribesmen of the remote arctic taiga. It doesn't hurt either that Mr. Sebag Montefiore's considerable literary gifts allow him to bring life back to the lost, exotic realm within which his saga unfolds, the brutal mass of contradictions that made up the Romanovs' ramshackle, doomed empire.

The fact that, for most of his youth, Stalin was a fairly marginal figure enables Mr. Sebag Montefiore to focus even more closely on the character of his subject. Young Stalin comes across, like so many psychopaths, as charming, manipulative, and highly intelligent. Musically gifted, an accomplished poet, and a relentless autodidact, he was no less of an intellectual than the revolutionaries he so liked to disdain. But, crucially, he was also what he was proud to call a praktik, a tough guy capable of doing the "black work" of revolution. Stalin was only in his early 20s when he moved to the oil port of Batumi. 'Within three months, the Rothschilds' refinery had mysteriously caught fire ... the town was flooded with Marxist pamphlets; informers were being murdered ... factory managers shot.'

There was, of course, far, far worse to come. For reasons we can only guess at, Stalin not only excelled at black work; he relished it. Part of the blame for this must lie with a dirt-poor childhood spent in a town notorious for its hard-edged and thuggish ethos, a childhood scarred also by violence that extended into the home itself: His father was an abusive drunk. Nobody could be trusted, not even family. Throw in Stalin's psychopathy, his egomania, his seminary-sharpened ability to detect heretics, and his experience of the way the tsarist secret police managed to suborn so many supposedly loyal comrades and we can detect the outlines of the nightmare to come. Vladimir Lenin certainly could, and he was thrilled. "That chef," he commented, "will cook up some spicy dishes." So he did. And with them he poisoned a culture, a nation, and a world.