Three dystopias and A disappearance

Joyce Carol Oates - Hazards of Time Travel

Varlam Shalamov - Kolyma Stories

Curzio Malaparte  - The Kremlin Ball

Peter Stamm - To The Back of Beyond

The New Criterion, November 1, 2018

One of the symptoms of the hysteria surrounding Donald Trump’s election (a candidate, incidentally, for whom I did not vote) was the conviction that democracy was in danger—“dying in darkness,” the #Resistance, and all that. This led to a revival of interest in the imaginary totalitarian futures of the past, mobilized now against the imaginary Trump terror to come.

Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) was adapted for the stage in Berkeley, edgy as ever, even before that dread November 2016 night; its title has been looted by countless headline writers and the book itself has appeared on Amazon’s bestseller lists. Nineteen Eighty-Four did its bit for Jeff Bezos, too, and a theatrical version (from 2013) of Orwell’s bleak warning opened not in Berkeley but on Broadway. Elections have consequences. There was also a mass screening of Michael Radford’s 1984, “a thirty-year-old film that suddenly feels new again,” marveled Time magazine. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) has been made into a hit TV series, inspiring pink ladies in red to show up at various protests. It hasn’t hurt that, unlike Lewis and Orwell, Atwood is still around, and able to talk up supposed Trump parallels. Gilead is on the way!

All this must have been galling to Joyce Carol Oates, a noisy member of the #Resistance, but a dystopia short. She has now remedied that with Hazards of Time Travel. She previewed the book in this tweet from January:

If this novel—“Hazards of Time Travel”—had been published before 2016 would seem like dystopian future/ sci-fi; now, a just slightly distorted mirroring of actual T***p US sliding, we hope not inexorably, into totalitarianism & white apartheid.

“Just slightly distorted”? As claims go, that tips over from hype into psychosis, but, as a “mirroring” of the prejudices and paranoia of a segment of today’s Left, this book is of some value. Well, there’s also an intriguing, skillfully implied—no more than that—twist in the plot, which it would be bad manners to reveal.

After a brief prelude, the story moves to the 2030s. Seventeen-year-old Adriane Strohl (much of the book is written in her voice—and convincingly so) is about to graduate from a high school in the “Reconstituted North American States,” a far-from-perfect union. It’s repressive (check), stratified by race (check) and class (check). Health benefits are bad (check), and the postal service has been privatized (reviewer perks up). Most of the national parks have been sold, closed off to the plebs, but opened up to fracking (check) and other outrages. History has been rewritten, scientific inquiry is suspect (check), and it’s unwise to stand out as too smart. Unfortunately, Adriane is smart and has a way of asking the wrong sort of questions. She is arrested by “Homeland Security” (check), just after making a valedictorian speech composed of the wrong sort of questions, and found guilty of “Treason-Speech [no dystopia would be complete without ugly neologisms] and Questioning of Authority.”

What happened to the poor old USA is not set out in detail, but the rot set in with the abuse of executive powers after “The Great Terrorist Attacks of 9/11” (check) and was helped along by environmental devastation (check) partly attributable to climate change (check). The Patriot Party (check) “funded by NA’s wealthiest individuals, which appointed all political leaders as well as the judiciary” (check) is now running the country. Presidents are thought to be “multi-billionaires” (check) or their associates—their names often invented—that citizens are conditioned by the media to “like.” All citizens are “Christian” (check), ethically a meaningless term (fist thrown at hypocritical Trump-voting evangelicals—check) and “no one ever spoke of . . . doing good, helping the less fortunate, being selfless.” Dystopic fiction often contains a satirical strain, but the dagger is generally more effective than the club.

Adriane is handed a lighter sentence than some. Rather than being “deleted” (nasty), she is exiled back in time; and rather than being sent, like the dissidents in Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station (1968), to the Precambrian era, she is allocated a new identity and transported back to a mediocre Wisconsin university in 1959. Her studies at this “excellent” campus will, she is told, be an opportunity to re-educate herself in preparation for a return to nas, an extension, by implication, of the 1950s (check).

Oates uses Wainscotia State University to trash the nostalgic appeal of the “again,” in “Make America Great Again,” taking aim at oafish frat boys, Cold Warriors, the subordination of women, and a certain mid-century American intellectual parochialism (her portrayal of the local poet in residence, a Robert Frost wannabe, is a delight). Then there is the absence of “diversity.”

However gloomy her overall premise, Oates has fun with the idea of someone from the twenty-first century finding herself in Ike’s America. Adriane is shocked by such primitive horrors as smoking—some of our nanny state has evidently hung on into nas—cyclists without safety helmets, and questionable food (a roommate notices how Adriane won’t touch “glazed doughnuts [or] Cheez-bits”). Then there’s the ancient technology, televisions with their pictures “in tremulous shades of grey,” typewriters, books.

A distinctly less predictable topic covered (at considerable length) in the description of Adriane’s studies at Wainscotia is behaviorism (she is attending psychology classes), and, more specifically, her distaste for its “mechanical, soulless view of consciousness.” Presumably Wainscotia’s fondness for B. F. Skinner is intended by Oates as a proxy for mid-century regimentation, but Adriane’s reaction seems excessive. For all its many flaws, behaviorism suggests some useful, if uncomfortable, truths about human nature, truths that Adriane may or may not recognize, but would, in any case, be unwilling—and this may be what Oates is driving at—to accept (despite or even because of the ability of the nas regime to condition those who live under it). Adriane is also, tellingly, somewhat skeptical about the influence of genetics on behavior. Oates’s heroine (again, perhaps tellingly) prefers the defiance encapsulated in her truth: “My parents taught me there is free will. There is a soul within.”

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

Varlam Shalamov (1907–82), a clearer-eyed observer of our species and a survivor (more or less) of almost the worst an all-too-real dystopia could do to him, would, I reckon, have permitted himself a wintry smile. In 1961 he compiled a list of what he “saw and understood” in the Gulag. It included the observation that people there could not survive by means of free will: “They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.”

Then again, Shalamov was proud he had “never betrayed anyone in the camps, never ratted anyone out.”

Then again, in his introduction to Kolyma Stories, a new and extended English-language edition of Shalamov’s great Gulag story cycle, the stories’ translator Donald Rayfield relates how in “Permafrost” (a story I have yet to read; it will be included in a companion volume), Shalamov is shown to be “responsible for the suicide of a young man whom he refused to allow to go on washing floors in the hospital and dispatched to hard labor back in the mines.”

“The camp,” wrote Shalamov elsewhere, “was a great test of our moral strength . . . and 99 percent of us failed it.”

Rayfield also notes Shalamov’s seeming approval of revolutionary violence—if the motives were idealistic and the perpetrators prepared to die for their cause. In that connection, he refers to Shalamov’s “almost deif[ying]” of Nadia [Natalya] Klimova, a pre-revolutionary terrorist, in “The Gold Medal,” another story to be included in the second volume.

Then again, Klimova’s daughter, Natalia Stolyarova (whom Shalamov knew well), helped smuggle The Gulag Archipelago out of the Soviet Union. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn praised mother and daughter as representatives of “all the forces of a healthy Russia united.”

Shalamov’s work has been trickling west for years, with the first reliable collection (only a small selection) appearing in English in 1980 as Kolyma Tales. A larger compilation was released in the 1990s under the same title. Now, Kolyma Stories will, with its companion volume, double the amount of Shalamov’s work available in English, going a good way to remedying a gap that should have been filled decades ago.

Shalamov, a priest’s son who had soured on religion (although he maintained that “the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity” in the camps were religious believers), was initially sympathetic to the young Soviet state despite facing discrimination for his “incorrect” social origins. Trouble and his first stint (three years) in a labor camp came with his involvement in the publication of Lenin’s testament, a document containing some unflattering comments about the now-ascendant Stalin. His descent into hell’s lowest circles came with re-arrest in 1937 (for “counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activities”), and years in the Gulag, including long stretches in the mines in the Kolyma region—a territory in Siberia’s far east so remote and inhospitable that it was in itself one of the most formidable of all the Gulag’s many jailers.

Shalamov’s life was saved by a doctor, who arranged for him to be trained as a paramedic. He spent his last few years in the camps as a medical assistant, a relatively soft job. Released in 1951, Shalamov eventually arrived back on “the mainland” in 1953.

Partly autobiographical, partly built on observation and extrapolation, these stories are the product of a specific time, place, and experience, but they also transcend them. They stand at the pinnacle of the literature of the long Soviet night, but to describe them solely in those terms would be akin to labeling the short stories of Chekhov—a writer to whom Shalamov is often compared—as nothing more than superbly taken snapshots of late-Czarist Russia.

The stories are concise, spare, dark, matter-of-fact, and unadorned. “There is no polishing them,” Shalamov explained, “but there is completeness.”

Shalamov was also a poet, and he had a poet’s eye for the right word in the right place, but those looking for lyricism, let alone consciously “fine writing,” will almost invariably be disappointed. The power of these stories comes from something else. It is, maybe, a mark of their exceptional quality that it is hard to identify just what. I do know, however, that even some of their shortest of passages can stay with you for a long, long time:

A whole brigade of one-armed men, who’d mutilated themselves, washed gold in winter and in summer. Then they handed over the specks of metal, the gold grains, to the mine’s till. That’s what the one-armed men were fed for.

The life that Shalamov describes is nastier, more brutish, and far shorter than anything that even Hobbes could have dreamt up. These are not tales of redemption or inspiration, nor do they make any claims about the nobility of suffering. Decency (such as the life-saving act of kindness in the haunting “Handwriting”), or, at least, an unexpected absence of cruelty, occasionally lightens the darkness, but these are exceptions, as are flickers of bone-dry humor: “A Dr. Krasinsky, an old military doctor, a lover of Jules Verne (why?), took over his case.”

Unadorned prose offers up humanity unadorned, refined most frequently in its savagery, whether from guards or “ordinary” criminals, “friends of the people” allowed and encouraged to prey on the lowest of the low, the “politicals” who had incurred the rage of the state.

Survival was a matter not of heroism, but of keeping one’s head down:

We had learned to be meek . . . . We had no pride; no self-esteem or self-respect . . . . It was far more important to learn the skills needed to button up your trousers in sub-zero winter temperatures. Grown men would weep when they found they could not do that.

Survival was a matter of grabbing every chance that came a prisoner’s way. In “Cherry Brandy,” the inmates of a transit camp take two days to disclose that a famous poet (unnamed, but clearly Osip Mandelstam, one of the best known of Stalin’s literary victims) has died in his bunk:

His enterprising neighbors managed to get a dead man’s bread for two days; when it was distributed the dead man’s hand rose up like a puppet’s. Therefore he died earlier than the date of his death, quite an important detail for his future biographers.

In another story, Andreyev (sometimes one of Shalamov’s fictional alter egos) muses that he was “kept alive by indifference and resentment.” Each of his tales, Shalamov wrote, was “a slap in the face to Stalinism.”

Kolyma Stories lacks the grand sweep of The Gulag Archipelago (Shalamov declined Solzhenitsyn’s invitation to co-write the latter). Shalamov did not appreciate the epic style (he was no fan of Tolstoy), or even what he dubbed the “narrative genre.” His stories do not attempt to decipher the Gulag’s origins. Nor, except in echoes, do they track its development: new waves of prisoners, new types of prisoners—Balts, a Hungarian doctor, Russian émigrés caught in Manchuria, Red Army soldiers repatriated after the war—tumble into its maw. Henry Wallace—yes, Vice President Wallace—pays a visit.

In “On Lend-Lease,” a parricide, a respectable, “ordinary” criminal, uses a bulldozer supplied by America to its Soviet ally against Hitler to create a new mass grave—up to then almost an impossibility in the permafrost—for the undecomposed bodies of (to quote from one of Shalamov’s poems) some of his “unrotting brothers.” Previously they had been packed in a stone pit that had, most indecorously, spilled over:

Corpses were crawling across the hillside, exposing a Kolyma secret . . . . Every one of those close to us who perished in Kolyma . . . can still be identified, even after decades. There were no gas ovens in Kolyma. The corpses wait in the stones, in the permafrost.

But not, as Shalamov recounts in another story, before their gold teeth had been knocked out. In Kolyma, it wasn’t only the rock that was mined.

Taken together, these tales, each a small shard in which a glimpse of a greater nightmare is caught, form a pointillist portrait of the worst of the Gulag at the worst of times: “Shalamov’s experience in the camps was,” said Solzhenitsyn, “longer and more bitter than my own . . . to him and not me was it given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all.”

Some of the stories overlap and collide in ways that do not quite make sense, a reminder that in Kolyma what we fondly imagine to be universal rules counted for nothing:

Any human concept, while still keeping its spelling, its pronunciation, and its usual set of letters and sounds, now meant something different, for which the mainland had no name.

The first volume of Kolyma Stories ends with the freed narrator in Moscow: he “had come back from hell.” He had, but its demons hadn’t finished with him. Shalamov’s poetry was published, but only one of his least-controversial Gulag stories appeared in print in the USSR during his lifetime, and even that led to the dismissal of the editorial board that had approved it. When copies of the Kolyma Tales were published in the West, Shalamov publicly objected, “evidently,” writes Rayfield, “under compulsion.” As a reward, possibly the greatest of all the giants of Russia’s twentieth-century literature was finally admitted to the USSR’s Union of Writers, a necessity if he was to make a living selling the few permissible scraps of his craft.

Shalamov—like his narrator—had emerged from hell, but brought some of it back with him. His health never fully recovered. His memories drove his writing but left him forever an ex-prisoner, cautious, distrustful, and “difficult.” “All my skin has been renewed,” he told a friend, “my soul has not.” By the end of the 1970s, Rayfield writes that Shalamov was “homeless.” That might be an overstatement, but Shalamov was certainly in a very poor way. He was placed into an old people’s home. Conditions were appalling, and he reportedly lost much of his vision and most of what was left of his hearing. In 1982, Shalamov was diagnosed with dementia, and transferred, Rayfield writes, “almost naked [and] in the freezing cold” into a psychiatric hospital where he died a few days later.

Shalamov’s tales about Kolyma began appearing in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, but, Rayfield relates, it was only in 2013 that a “reasonably complete” collection became available in Russia. Part of Shalamov’s childhood home now houses a museum dedicated to him, and some memorials are scattered across his homeland, including one in the central Russian town of Krasnovishersk on Dzerzhinsky Street, a street still named after the founder of the Bolsheviks’ Secret Police (why?).

Shalamov was trapped in hell for nearly two decades. The Italian writer Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957), best known for Kaputt (1944) and its sequel, The Skin (1949), dropped by there from time to time, sometimes as an observer, sometimes in his imagination. The (in Malaparte’s words) “horribly gay and gruesome” Kaputt is a frolic through the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe and the war on the Eastern Front. Brilliantly written and strikingly original, it combines a superb evocation of evil with interludes of disturbing frivolity. In The Skin, the narrative resumes in liberated Naples. Like its predecessor, it slips without warning from autobiography to embellishment to outright fiction—a process that Malaparte, a former fascist with much to explain away, also applied to his endlessly rewritten résumé—but this time the confection, even allowing for some remarkable sequences, came across as a little stale.

The sense that the well was running dry is even stronger in The Kremlin Ball. This unfinished work, regardless of chronology (the book is set in Moscow in 1929, a city Malaparte had visited at that time), was intended to conclude the exploration of European catastrophe begun with Kaputt. Malaparte apparently put it to one side to work on cinema and theater projects in 1950, and that is where it stayed. Malaparte being Malaparte, it’s tempting to wonder whether his complicated relationship with the Italian Communist Party influenced his decision not to proceed any further—the book contains largely matter-of-fact references to Stalin’s great purges to come, but plenty of opprobrium for those beyond-the-red-pale Trotskyists. Or maybe Malaparte realized that The Kremlin Ball’s central conceit—a reimagining of the Soviet elite as the beau monde of Belle Époque Paris—was better as political punchline than book.

The Kremlin Ball was published in Italy in 1971 as part of a complete edition of Malaparte’s works. It was released in English for the first time earlier this year, with a foreword by Jenny McPhee, its (excellent) translator who, however, sporadically bends the knee to contemporary pieties with an assiduity that Malaparte would have applauded and a sincerity that he would have mocked. While Malaparte was repelled by Nazi anti-Semitism, his writings are not those of an author preoccupied by Europe’s “toxic misogyny, racism and homophobia,” nor, despite some admiration for Soviet steeliness, was he ever seriously tempted by communism, except as a device to save his skin after Italy had surrendered to, and signed up with, the Allies in 1943.

McPhee is on safer ground when she highlights the way Malaparte used what he called his “novels of biographical reportage” to play games with reality. As she says, he took “the unreliable narrator to a new level.” And by this time in his career he was doing so with teasing, exuberant brio, beginning The Kremlin Ball with the manifestly ludicrous assertion that “everything” in this novel “is true: the people, the events, the things, the places.” Just how ludicrous will rapidly become obvious to Russian history buffs (to take just one example, Prince Lvov, the first head of the provisional government assembled after the fall of the Czar, had died in France four years before Malaparte supposedly encounters him, uh, selling an “enormous” armchair on a Moscow sidewalk). But even those who are not so familiar with the byways of the Soviet past will have their doubts about the accuracy of Malaparte’s account of a meeting with Olga Kameneva (Trotsky’s sister and the ex-wife of a Bolshevik leader who had fallen foul of Stalin—two strikes): “She was a woman who was already dead. A subtle odor of dead flesh spread through the room.”

Yet Malaparte’s greater truth holds. Kameneva was doomed, and she knew it, although she outlived her former husband and their two sons. They were shot before her.

It may be unfair to be too harsh a critic of an unfinished work, but The Kremlin Ball has its longueurs, and they are not confined to Malaparte’s attempt to fashion a Potemkin Belle Époque on the unpromising territory of early Soviet Russia. In particular, the philosophizing (disappointing in such a detached writer), whether it is on Christianity, suffering, Europe, death, whatever, is all too often jejune, wrong-headed, and, most unforgivably, dull.

Nevertheless, sifting through the dross is rewarded by flashes of something that, despite Malaparte’s love of illusion, is more than just gilt:

It was, at the time, Easter week in Russia. But the bells were silent. At the tops of the bell towers of Moscow’s thousands of churches, the church bells hung silently, their thick clappers dangling like tongues from the heads of cows hung out to dry in the sun.

Thousands of churches? No, there were not, not even in Moscow, the “Third Rome” of wishful Russian thinking, but the way that Malaparte (an atheist, as it happens) brackets that exaggeration—a depiction of a stifled Easter reinforced by an image of death rather than of resurrection—points to a more important truth.

Malaparte travels around Moscow, fraternizing with writers, Soviet prominenti, diplomats, and remnants of the past: Prince Lvov and other “well-bred, miserable ghosts,” “former people” in the terminology of the time, a description that became a proscription. As he moves from strange meeting to strange meeting or even indulges in a little macabre tourism—he visits the room where the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky has just committed suicide—Malaparte is often accompanied by his secretary. Marika is a dark-eyed, sixteen-year-old Georgian, an (unrequited?) love interest, echo or preview, perhaps, of the dark-eyed, sixteen-year-old Romanian waitress Marioara from Kaputt, another not-quite dalliance (a pogrom intervenes) in the disintegrating world that Malaparte made his own.

After three dystopias, Switzerland comes as a relief, but in To the Back of Beyond, Thomas decides to cast himself out of Schwiizertüütsch Eden. Modestly prosperous with a wife and two kids in a pleasant, orderly town, he marks his family’s homecoming from a Spanish vacation by sneaking out on them that night without warning, explanation, or any obvious reason. He hesitates momentarily, then, “with a bewildered smile he was only half aware of,” heads for the garden gate. Then he is gone—for good, it seems.

The only hint—maybe not even that—of trouble ahead had been Thomas’s suggestion that the family stay on in Spain for a year, an idea his wife, Astrid, “the voice of reason in the relationship,” rejects. Later, after Thomas has vanished, Astrid uploads their vacation pictures. The best shot of Thomas is “of the bottom half of [his] face with a rather strange half smile,” an absence repeated in photographs taken on other, recent trips.

First published in German in 2016 and then released in this country (in a fine translation by Michael Hoffman) late last year, this book, by the Swiss writer Peter Stamm, is short, spare, and haunting; it lingers, unsettlingly, in the memory. To return to Shalamov’s adjective, Stamm’s prose is “unadorned,” and yet, even in the book’s first lines, he manages, without any drama, to convey a sense of unease, a sense of waiting, a sense of a coming storm:

By day, you hardly noticed the hedge that separated the yard from that of the neighbors, it just seemed to merge into the general greenness, but once the sun went down and the shadows started to lengthen, it loomed there like an insuperable wall, until all light was gone from the garden and the lawn lay in shadow, an area of darkness from which there was no escape.

Escape.

Sometimes Astrid “asks herself if Thomas would have chosen a different sort of life if they hadn’t been a couple.”

Stamm alternates descriptions of Thomas’s hike towards the mountains and depictions of the reactions and actions of the family that he has left behind. To begin with (later, it’s not so straightforward), it is Thomas’s journey that draws the attention. There at least, there is movement. Back at home, Astrid begins by doing her best to preserve a status quo that has vanished beyond recall. Meanwhile, the farther Thomas trudges from home, the further he breaks, in a mild Swiss way—Apocalypse Now this is not—from the constraints of his old life, accidentally stumbling into a brothel (a first, even if nothing much happens there, although he does steal a coat as he leaves, another first), sleeping rough, scavenging some food. And the further Thomas goes, the greater his sense of distance from where he has been and, even, where he is:

Thomas had the disquieting feeling that all this had been laid on for him, that the people in the village were actors who were merely waiting for him to come by, to assume their roles and speak their lines. It was an artificial world, a model construction under an expansive blue sky.

There is something of the waking dream about both Stamm’s prose and a storyline dominated in its early stages by a pilgrimage with no discernible end in sight. Thomas is a man driven—and his determination to avoid detection indicates that he is driven—but it is unclear by what. Perhaps the answer is buried within Thomas’s observation that none of his clients ever ask, “What was it all for?” The obvious and perfectly satisfactory answer—nothing—will clearly not do.

But To The Back of Beyond goes far beyond being a beautifully written account of yet another middle-aged man’s existential crisis. I won’t say what takes place in the mountains, partly because it would be a spoiler, and partly because I’m not so sure I’ve fully understood it myself, but it is the hinge on which the story—or stories—turns. The pace picks up, but Stamm finds the time to deepen his touching, if still economically drawn, portrait of Thomas and Astrid’s marriage before bringing Thomas’s odyssey to a conclusion that can be taken in different ways but is, I have found, impossible to forget.

A Huckster at the Mic

Mark Jacobson - Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the fall of Trust in America

The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2018

‘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.”

A March of Folly

Ashoka Mody - EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts

National Review, July 26, 2018 (August 13, 2018 issue)

Near the beginning of his convincing, readable, and satisfactorily acid account of the rise and who-knows-what-now of the euro, Ashoka Mody cites basic monetary theory and grumbles that the European Union’s leaders “should have been aware that a single currency could not [by itself] deliver . . . prosperity.”

The EU owes its existence to the notion that Europe should avoid repeating the catastrophes of its 20th-century past. Yet by imposing a single currency on a large number of very different countries, it was blending elements of two lesser disasters — fixed exchange rates and central planning — into a combination that history (and some distinguished Cassandras) suggested would end very badly indeed.

No matter. Political ambition trumped economic risk on grounds that fail to persuade Mody. After all, the economic tensions built into a shared currency of such scope were more likely to divide than unite. But Mody overlooks the centrality of the three words “ever closer union” in the preamble to the 1957 treaty that paved the way to the EU. They set the course of the European project in only one direction — forward. To Brussels and its allies, the key attribute of monetary union was that it threw away the key: There was no easy way to check out. Under the circumstances, the governments signing up for the new currency should have paid more attention to flaws in its design that added to its already considerable risks. Perhaps most dangerously, in the absence of political support for a fiscal union to act as a safety net, the euro was launched without one. Once again, no matter: If a crisis developed, it would, enough of the right people evidently believed, overwhelm opposition to that fiscal union. The ratchet of integration would turn again.

This was not a novel idea. When the single currency was first formally proposed back in 1970, “falling forward” was to be “its guiding philosophy,” Mody writes. “Crises would make Europeans more determined to move forward. . . . Europe would emerge stronger and more vibrant.” This cynical strategy has worked well for Brussels in other areas, but, with the single currency, it was pushed too far. The EU emerged neither stronger nor more vibrant, but hobbled, embittered, and lopsided.

Mody, an economist and a visiting professor at Princeton, has worked at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. At the latter, his role included acting as a deputy director of its European Department, and he was responsible for the Fund’s relationship with Ireland during its euro-zone nadir. He is thus well equipped to describe the euro’s curious political and intellectually indefensible origins, as well as the new currency’s grubby gestation, the bubble the euro facilitated, and the bust that came close enough to breaking the euro zone apart. Mody recounts how the currency union was held together, before turning his attention to a recovery that may be no more than the calm between storms. Overall, he tells a tale of warnings ignored, of groupthink, of deception and denial, of both recklessness and an excess of caution, of myth, magical thinking, and technocratic illusion — and of reality’s relentless revenge.

For all Mody’s meticulous chronicling of events, he has room for broader themes too. These include a sustained attack — not without cause — on the German-led fixation on budgetary targets and, in particular, an overly emphatic insistence on “austerity” as the cure for the euro zone’s troubles. It is not an endorsement of fiscal profligacy to argue that, in certain cases, the screw was turned too tightly too soon. Compelling Greece, in essence, to try to deflate its way back to better days was already to ask a great deal. To be sure, the Baltic states (by then de facto members of the currency union) managed to do just that. But there were specific reasons that they could, just as there were specific reasons that Greece could not. And these were distinctions that could not be given the recognition they deserved, thanks to a one-size-fits-all financial regime that was taken far further in the euro zone — and, after the crisis erupted, applied more harshly — than sharing a currency would already necessarily imply. 

To understand why Berlin wanted the purse strings kept drawn so tight it is necessary to examine what lay behind what at first seems like purely habitual stinginess. Of course, it is unsurprising that German politicians thought that their successful homegrown model — a degree of frugality — was the right one to follow, but there was more to it than that. Berlin simply had no confidence that its partners (notably those in the south of the euro zone) had the willingness or ability to run their finances appropriately, a concern that Mody might have stressed more. This lack of trust may or may not have been merited, but it was a symptom of a monetary union flung together without enough regard for the psychological or political readiness of its member states for such a step. Even the requirement (reflected in the Maastricht Treaty) that they should converge economically turned out to be a joke, at best largely meaningless, at worst a sham.

Germany’s leadership was also nervous about the consequences of their voters’ having to pick up the tab for a currency union they had never wanted, a bill their politicians had assured them they would never have to pay. Mody is clearly conscious of these issues and, pointing to America’s experience during the Great Depression, highlights the fact that the U.S. government had both the “legitimate political authority and the concurrence of sufficient numbers of the country’s citizens” it needed to help struggling states. It still has. Its counterparts in Germany (and the euro zone’s other “creditor” nations) had scant justification for claiming that they had either. There was one other vital distinction: Americans were being asked to help their compatriots. Notwithstanding grand proclamations of a shared EU “citizenship,” the tie between Michigan and Missouri is infinitely more binding than that between Germany and Greece.

Meanwhile, the stakes for countries beyond Germany — especially in the euro zone’s hardest-hit nations — were raised by the legacy of Berlin’s stipulation that the European Central Bank (ECB), like the Bundesbank before it, should (at least nominally) be free of political interference and, unlike the Federal Reserve (which also has to foster employment), focus solely on price stability. That can work, as it did in Germany (where memories of Weimar’s inflation linger), with sufficient popular consent, but, in countries where that consent does not exist, it can be an invitation to radicalization when tough times come calling — and they did come calling. That invitation was made even easier to accept by the way that the unaccountability of the ECB is reinforced — as Mody demonstrates in some of the most disturbing passages in a frequently disturbing book — by the EU’s high-handedly technocratic ethos. It is an essentially post-democratic approach, and as Mody (without resorting to that adjective) shows, it bears no small part of the blame for the euro-zone fiasco.

The effects of this ruinous monetary experiment have not been confined to political radicalization (a phenomenon not reserved to the euro zone’s weaklings) or the stirring up of antagonism between the nations it was designed to bring closer together. The currency union’s laggards have suffered immense economic harm, and the damage, warns Mody, to their potential for growth may endure long after the current trauma has receded. This implies that the chance of genuine economic convergence within the euro zone — never much of a likelihood despite all the promises — will slip even further out of reach. The natural tendency of a currency union to draw economic activity away from its periphery (a topic discussed by Joseph Stiglitz in his 2016 book on the euro) could make matters worse still — not a pretty prospect when that periphery includes entire nations.

The euro-zone drama still has a long way to run. Some months after Mody’s manuscript went to press, a coalition government of populist Right and (sort of; it’s hard to explain) populist Left, with a suspicion of the euro and a distaste for Teutonic austerity in common, took office in Italy. Much larger than Greece, Italy is, Mody contends, the “eurozone’s fault line.” He may well be correct, but don’t expect a cataclysm quite yet. The most impressive thing about this misbegotten currency union is the political will to keep it in one piece.

Mody himself peers into the future towards the end of the book. One supposedly brighter vision features debt forgiveness, a loosening of the euro zone’s fiscal fetters, improved sovereign-bond issuance, and standard panaceas from education to technology. Much more intriguing is a suggestion tucked away in Mody’s description of a (more plausible) downbeat scenario in which, broadly, those steering the currency union do little to change course.

Amid dark talk of sluggish growth and vulnerability to new shocks — not to mention the cascading defaults that could follow an Italian exit from the euro zone — Mody floats the happier alternative that Germany might either readopt the deutschmark or form a new currency bloc with other like-minded “northern” countries. Meanwhile, those states remaining in the old euro zone would still be able to repay their debts in euros, thereby dodging default while benefiting from the increased competitiveness created by a currency that would undoubtedly devalue sharply once the virtuous had left the picture.

Put another way, the best way out of the euro-zone mess remains, as it has been for years, partition. Such a move, however, would represent more than a few steps backwards in what is meant to be a perpetually forward march.

And that would never do. 

Better Dead Than Read

Gregory Claeys - Marx and Marxism

Sven-Eric Liedman - A World To Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx

The Wall Street  Journal, July 5, 2018

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.

Not just remembrance

On Nightmare in Berlin by Hans Fallada, Theory of Shadows by Paolo Maurensig, A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré & The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea by Bandi.

The New Criterion, May 1, 2018.

The past, wrote William Faulkner, lending a hand to generations of scribblers struggling for a first line, “is never dead. It’s not even past.” That was seldom more true than in Germany immediately after the Second World War, the setting for Nightmare in Berlin, the penultimate— and posthumously published—novel by Rudolf Ditzen (1893–1947), the German writer better known as Hans Fallada, a pen name cobbled together from two of Grimm’s tales. This uneven but compelling book initially appeared in 1947 as Der Alpdruck (The Nightmare), but it was first translated into English (by Allan Blunden) in 2016 and released in the United States last year. Presumably adding Berlin—a city with a dark grip on the Western imagination—to the title was to boost the book’s sales, and to connect it to its successor, the better-known Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone). This became an English-language bestseller after its first translation (in 2009) and the award of a new title—Alone in Berlin—featuring that bookstore-bait burg along the Spree.

Even by the questionable standards of the creative class, Fallada had a rocky start. Highlights included two failed suicide attempts, the first of many sanatorium stints, murdering his opposite number in what may or may not have been a suicide pact, speedy discharge from the army in 1914 (in retrospect, a spot of luck), alcoholism, and drug addiction (both were problems for much of his life), and two terms of imprisonment for embezzlement. His first novel came out in 1920, after another go at suicide, but before he took up theft. By the beginning of the 1930s, however, Fallada was enjoying some success, notably with Little Man, What Now? (1932), in which he used the plight of one couple to illustrate the effects of the economic crisis that plunged the Weimar Republic into a night it could not survive.

Fallada’s decision to keep on in Germany after the Nazi takeover—and the sporadically squalid compromises that choice involved—contributed to the postwar eclipse of his reputation abroad. He expressed some support for the Nazis early in their rule (“this is the party which will save Germany from chaos”) but never joined them and soon lost whatever sympathy he’d had for their regime. Despite that, he largely avoided trouble by mainly confining himself to non-political fare, although Wolf Among Wolves (1937), focused yet again on Weimar woes, had the dubious distinction of being both praised by Goebbels (“a super book . . . . That fellow has real talent”) and being filmed for East German television.

Nightmare in Berlin draws heavily on Fallada’s existence amid the ruins of the Third Reich. Like Fallada, its hero (if that is the word), Dr. Doll, is a writer haunted by the sporadically squalid compromises he has made. Like Fallada, he shared a weakness for morphine with a much younger second wife. Like Fallada, he spends time in rehab, including —yes, like Fallada—a stay in a clinic where he is the only man: many of the other patients were prostitutes under treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. Like Fallada, Doll is appointed the interim mayor of a small town by the Soviet military authorities. Like Fallada, Doll is overwhelmed by the task and retreats to Berlin, “a city reduced to rubble, burnt out and bled to death,” a city of scant rations, hardscrabble squabbles, “trickling debris,” and “rats, looking for something unspeakable in the basement.” And, like Fallada, Doll finds a literary patron, the head of a new arts association. Nightmare in Berlin’s Granzow owes a lot to Johannes Becher, a future East German culture minister, back in Berlin after years in the USSR as a guest of Stalin’s more congenial tyranny.

When Doll greets the incoming Red Army as liberators and hails them as “comrades,” the response is a “withering gaze,” a reminder that as a German he “belonged to the most hated and despised nation on earth.” This realization may account for the most striking omission in a book Fallada described as “a faithful and true account . . . of what ordinary Germans felt, suffered and did between April 1945 and the summer of that year.” Maybe, but when it came to mass rape by the Soviet occupation forces, the dominant issue—beyond simple survival—for many “ordinary Germans” at that time (the victims included Fallada’s first wife, to whom he had remained close), Fallada opted for silence. Perhaps he had found he could live with a fresh set of jackboots. Nightmare in Berlin was first published by Aufbau, a company set up with Soviet approval. Becher was one of its founders.

Nightmare’s prose, typically for Fallada, is unvarnished. The book is intrinsically episodic: “the great collapse,” Doll’s mayoralty, the return to Berlin, a battle over an apartment, the time in clinics, and ultimately a resumption of his career. The plot was never the point. Fallada explained that Nightmare was “essentially a medical report, telling the story of the apathy that descended upon a large part, and more especially the better part, of the German population in April 1945.” Writing it, he confessed, had not “been an enjoyable experience,” partly, I suspect, because of the guilt he himself felt, guilt that he expresses through Doll, a man complicit simply by his passivity in the face of a tyranny that had tyrannized him: Doll had been interrogated, arrested, and spied upon. The Nazis had “banned his books some of the time, allowed them at other times,” but although he was “appalled” by them, he “never did anything about it.” Fallada once wrote that he did not like “grand gestures, . . . being slaughtered before the tyrant’s throne, senselessly . . . is not my way.”

Fallada had few illusions about himself or his compatriots. Asked by the Soviets to address the locals on the day of the Reich’s capitulation, Doll notes the rote cheers and raised arms—“the right arm still, in many cases, raised in the salute that had been drilled into them over many years.” His “nation . . . bore its defeat without dignity of any kind, without a trace of greatness.”

For all that, this sour, subdued, exhausted novel staggers to an unconvincingly uplifting conclusion:

And maybe people will learn something, after all . . . . Doll, at any rate, was determined to be part of this learning process. He saw his path laid out before him, the next steps he had to take, and they meant work, work and more work.

It reads better if “The Internationale” is playing in the background.

By this point Fallada was, in the words of one biographer, “a physical and psychological wreck.” He died in the Soviet sector of Berlin almost exactly six months later, in February 1947.

At around the time that Doll and Fallada were trying to come to terms with their pasts, Alexander Alekhine was avoiding a reckoning with his. In the early stages of Paolo Maurensig’s Theory of Shadows, Alekhine, with only one brief interruption the real-life world chess champion since 1927, is the solitary guest in a hotel in Estoril, Portugal. It is March 1946. A heavy drinker for decades, Alekhine is hard-up, in poor health, deep into his own endgame. He is also waiting to hear which Soviet master will challenge him for the world championship in a contest that also will be a proxy for a broader ideological struggle. A traitor to the radiant future, Alekhine had quit revolutionary Russia in 1921, never to return, never forgiven.

Framed as a book within a book (playing games with narration is something of a Maurensig trademark) and as fiction inserted into fact, the complex and atmospheric Theory of Shadows falls somewhere between historical reconstruction and a seductive reimagining of Alekhine’s last days. Its Italian author is probably best known for The Lüneburg Variation, an extraordinary debut published, encouragingly, after his fiftieth birthday. As they do in Theory of Shadows, chess and the Holocaust intertwine in the earlier (somewhat superior, more tightly constructed) book, which also contains references to Alekhine, most significantly this:

[A]nti-Semitic articles appeared with increasing frequency under the byline of the world champion, who . . . noted that after having been so long polluted by Jewish blood, the world of chess would finally recover its purity.

That alludes to a number of articles in the Pariser Zeitung, a newspaper published by the Germans during their occupation of France. Unabashed by inconsistency, Alekhine maintained—take your pick—that these pieces were not his work, or that they had been written under duress, or that his text had been doctored: a clash of excuses undermined both by their contradictions, and, some years after his death, by the discovery of interviews he had given to two Madrid newspapers in 1941. Among the self-incrimination: huzzahs for Capablanca, that rival of rivals, for “depriving the Jew Lasker of the world chess scepter.”

In Theory of Shadows (which was translated by Anne Milano Appel), Maurensig revisits the Paris articles, but adds more to the charge sheet, including Alekhine’s participation in tournaments in Nazi-dominated Europe and his relationship with Hans Frank, Hitler’s proconsul in Poland, a lover of chess and of genocide. Alekhine recalls playing chess in Frank’s residence. Was it “possible to dance the polka in the middle of hell”? Yes, Alekhine had concluded, it was.

And so:

At the end of the war, he was left with few friends: to the French [Alekhine had become a French citizen] he was a collaborator, to the Soviets a traitor; even the White Russians who had settled in Europe would not forgive him for having worked, during the Revolution, for the ministry tasked with expropriating the assets of emigrants.

The past parades through his afternoon dreams, but benignly: his mother, the czar, long-dead acquaintances, an agreeable contrast to “bizarre” or “terrifying” nightmares after dark.

A violinist, David Neumann, comes to stay at the hotel. “Alekhine found himself thinking that the man was quite likable. Despite his surname, which clearly disclosed his race.”

Ah.

Someone slides newspaper articles beneath Alekhine’s door. All “without exception” concern the Nuremberg trials then underway. A man and his wife—two more new guests—dine with Alekhine for the first time; the husband’s remarks grow progressively more probing. The wife, ominously silent, stares at Alekhine and then “abruptly [runs] her index finger across her throat.” It is an unusually melodramatic moment. Maurensig writes in a sotto style that reinforces the impression of a trap slowly but relentlessly closing around the grandmaster: appropriate enough in a book where chess, that most implacable of games, is, as in The Lüneburg Variation, a deity—or demon—demanding attention and much, much more.

The hotel gradually fills, the Portuguese secret police show up, a Russian is overheard discussing Alekhine on the phone. Another clipping, a photo, another dinner conversation: French hit squads are hunting Germany’s collaborators all over Europe. One night Alekhine hears someone fumbling with the lock to his door. The ratchet continues to turn, sometimes, maybe, only in his imagination, sometimes not. Alekhine dies alone in his room. Choked on a piece of meat. That was the official story, difficult to reconcile with the widely circulated photograph of the dead man, seemingly asleep in his chair, wearing an overcoat that would have been unnecessary inside. But that was the official story.

Theory of Shadows opens in 2012 with a novelist (with just a touch of Maurensig about him) explaining that he is in Portugal to research what he is convinced was Alekhine’s murder. Despite an Orient Express–load of potential culprits—including the Soviets and those French hitmen—he has been unable to decide who was responsible: “And I know that you cannot write a story centered on a crime without unmasking the killer at the end.” The pages that follow, written by Maurensig, a trickster-writer layering a narrative where reality has a way of slipping out of sight, disprove that. And Maurensig’s crumbling Alekhine—cold and narcissistic under the camouflage of a brilliant naif consumed only by chess—and the circumstances in which he finds himself, would be book enough without a death, let alone a solution.

In an epilogue, the novelist (whom Maurensig never names) meets the individual who discovered (“or so they wanted people to believe”) Alekhine’s body. But what he really saw, or so he says, was the aftermath of a murder. He then reveals who he thinks arranged the killing and their motive for doing so. It is right, this witness-of-something suggests, that the novelist is telling this story as fiction: “Perhaps only the imagination allows us to arrive at certain hidden truths.” That is what Maurensig has done. Perhaps.

Berlin, August 1978 © Andrew Stuttaford

In A Legacy of Spies, David Cornwell, the author better known as John le Carré, returns entertainingly, and with some relish, to his past—to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the novel that made his name. And the past catches up, unpleasantly, with Peter Guillam, a former agent first encountered in Call for the Dead (1961): the elastic lifespans and variable biographies of some of the Le Carré regulars who crop up in this book will niggle the pedantic.

Guillam is now retired in Brittany, “resolutely” fighting off the “accusing voices” that occasionally—the night is kinder to him than to Alekhine—“attempted to disrupt my sleep.” Then his former employers write, asking him back to London: “A matter in which you appear to have played a significant role some years back has unexpectedly raised its head.”

Appear to. Le Carré has not lost his ear for cautious bureaucratic prose.

When Guillam arrives at the Service’s “shockingly ostentatious new headquarters” (and so it is from the outside: disappointingly, I have never been in a position to assess the interior) across the Thames, it’s evident that time has moved on, and so has Leviathan. Different accents—Le Carré’s prickly sensitivity to the nuances of English class is as acute as ever—different, careful jargon (“assets” now, not “joes”), impersonal electronic security, more women, tracksuits, quietness, cleanliness, no windows, sealed windows, locked doors: “Somewhere . . . between Cambridge Circus and The Embankment, something has died.”

But the performance lives on—“Bunny . . . managed a half-squeeze of the eyes for friendly”—and so, for all that regrettable ostentation, does the parsimony. A flat is found for Guillam—in, of course, Pimlico’s Dolphin Square, a massive 1930s apartment complex famous for politicians, spies, and scandal, some of it true—at “a concessionary rental of £50 per night . . . set against [his] pension.” Ashe, the low-level operative who was the first to contact Alec Leamas on East Germany’s behalf in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, had lived there, too. Le Carré likes an old tune.

Le Carré’s writing before the Wall fell was marked by a world-weariness that periodically edged close—but not as close as is sometimes claimed—to calling down a plague on the houses of all the Cold War’s antagonists. Nevertheless, it is difficult to read A Legacy of Spies without detecting some sympathy for the hard edges of those who operated London’s vanished Circus. The stakes, after all, were higher back then. Regret, or, more rarely, guilt, was—generally—for later. Their successors are tough enough, but they have a sickening primness about them. They mouth, and some may even believe, the platitudes of a legalistic, self-righteous society with little awareness of, let alone understanding for, the cruel dilemmas of the past. Rather than risk too much embarrassment over that past, they are—times have changed, you see—willing to throw one (or two) of yesterday’s men under the bus. The embarrassment? The lives knowingly and unknowingly put in danger—and then tragically lost—in the interest of a cause rather more worthwhile than the avoidance of a scandal that in saner times would not be a scandal. A cause, writes Le Carré, acidly, if oddly oblivious of still strong sentiments east of the old curtain, that “the world barely remembers.”

And so, arriving in front of the block of flats that has concealed a safe house for decades, one of those investigating Guillam asks which bell she can press “without catching gangrene,” a phrase mixing contempt with an undeserved presumption of moral superiority. Guillam suggests that she press the one marked “ethics,” “Ethics being Smiley’s own choice for the least alluring doorbell he could think of.”

Smiley. He may have been transformed into a brand like Fallada’s bolted-on Berlin (“George Smiley novels” are now a thing), but it’s good to see him back, if only in flashback up until almost the end, conjuring up memories —to me, anyway—of Alec Guinness on the telly nearly forty years ago.

In one chair sits George Smiley, looking the way only George looks when he’s conducting an interrogation: a bit put out, a bit pained, as if life is one long discomfort for him and no one can make it tolerable except just possibly you.

If you have watched the BBC’s adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, try to read that passage and not think of Sir Alec. Gary Oldman can have Churchill: that ought to be enough for anyone.

This time Smiley is in the shadows. A Legacy of Spies chronicles a long-delayed aftershock of the events described in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Smiley, who planned that grand deception, is frequently discussed, but appears principally in those flashbacks, his presence only emphasized by absence, an absence that will be a challenge to preserve if the children of three of those killed as a result of that (in Leamas’s phrase) “filthy, lousy operation” —and what preceded it—get their way. They want revenge. It is perhaps indicative of where, perhaps despite himself, Le Carré’s underlying feelings lie, that, of these vengeful offspring, one is an unrepentant believer in the old East Germany, another is a thug, and we never meet the third at all.

“We were not pitiless,” argues Smiley. “We were never pitiless. We had the larger pity.”

Prospero has forgotten neither the magic of espionage noir (“there is a flicker to his smile like a faulty light bulb that doesn’t know whether it’s on or off”) nor the appeal of knowledge, real or imagined, passed on to us bumpkins by someone who was a real spy for a while: “The tortured are a class apart. You can imagine—just—where they’ve been, but never what they’ve brought back.”

A Legacy of Spies delivers, if only near its finale, an unmistakable political message, particularly for Brits. Le Carré’s stories typically come with a subtext. There were those nods to moral equivalence between the Cold War’s two sides and, often, a revealing combination of class resentment (a souvenir of an upbringing on something of a tightrope) and center-left mandarin condescension. In the introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, he brags that he was “writing for a public hooked on Bond and desperate for the antidote.” It was?

Le Carré’s politics have taken a harder, angrier turn in recent years, both inside and outside his books. Much of the grumbling is standard fare: wicked America, wicked corporations, wicked neocons, wicked climate change, wicked Thatcher, although an attack on Salman Rushdie added surprising variety. Rushdie should have, Le Carré advised, withdrawn The Satanic Verses until things calmed down: “I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.”

Impertinent. So judges the mandarin, so rules the former Eton beak.

Naturally, Le Carré disapproves of—the impertinence of it—“that jingoistic England that is trying to march us out of the EU,” and his lofty disapproval permeates Smiley’s grand farewell in A Legacy of Spies, degrading it to a mandarin whine. No, Smiley says, his work has not been for capitalism (the appalled italics are Le Carré’s), or Christendom, or even, after a while, for England. It was for Europe (the appalled italics are mine). If he had an “unattainable ideal,” it was an ideal he still holds, that “of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason,” now managed, we must assume, by Brussels.

Can a fictional character be embarrassed by his creator?

When the Soviet empire collapsed, some worried that Le Carré would have nothing more to say. When North Korea failed to follow suit, the pseudonymous writer known only as “Bandi” (the name comes from the Korean for “firefly”), supposedly a member of North Korea’s state-controlled writer’s association, must have wondered whether he would ever see what he really wanted to say in print in his own land. Between 1989 and 1995, he had secretly turned to writing fiction that told the truth about a country where fact is drowned out by mandatory fantasy.

Nearly two decades later, or so the story goes, Bandi told a relative who was planning to defect about what he had done. Taking the manuscript—handwritten, bulky, and lethally incriminating—with her was too risky, but she agreed to try to send for it if she got out. And that is what she managed to do. The manuscript was smuggled out, and the stories it contained were published in South Korea in 2014 and translated into English (by Deborah Smith) last year. A collection of poems included in the same bundle of papers was published in South Korea a few months ago.

The Accusation’s American publishers, Grove Atlantic, concede that they cannot be sure that its author is not an emigré already beyond Pyongyang’s grasp. We do not even know for certain that it is the work of just one person. That said, there is enough circumstantial evidence, including the involvement of a respected human rights activist, and analysis of both the paper on which the manuscript was written and of Bandi’s language—like East and West German before reunification, North and South Korean have drifted marginally apart—to accept, for now, these stories for what they are said to be.

Bandi has been compared to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but the collection of seven short stories that make up The Accusation has neither the sweep of The Gulag Archipelago nor the heft of Solzhenitsyn’s best-known novels. A more fitting comparison might be Varlam Shalamov, the author of Kolyma Tales, terse, precisely crafted glimpses of horror, some just a few pages long, that, taken as a whole, provide a vivid depiction of life—and death—in Stalin’s concentration camps, a guidebook to one kind of hell.

Bandi’s more discursive stories are accounts of what, in North Korea, passes for ordinary life. The camps, the prisons, and the mass graves cast a deep shadow but are largely offstage—until they are not. Schoolchildren suspected of “counter-revolutionary tendencies” are forced to watch the execution of a victim, bound, gagged, and allegedly guilty of an absurd charge: smearing “feces on supplies that were to be exported to the Soviet Union.” It works: “Myeong-chol . . . began to feel ever more cowed and docile, rushing to obey whatever task his teachers . . . might set him.”

Bandi’s characters are cogs in a machine that straitjackets, exploits, and never ceases to watch them. They fear it, worship it, or both. North Korea has been run by leaders saluted by portents (the birth of Kim Jong-il was reputedly heralded by a double rainbow), and associated with superhuman feats and the miraculous. It is a country where the uncertain boundary between communist rule and theocracy has been blurred more brazenly than usual. In one story, “Pandemonium,” the elderly Mrs. Oh, struggling through the countryside to see her daughter, is suddenly summoned to meet one of the passengers who emerges from one of a convoy of passing cars.

[His] pale golden clothes seemed to shed a soft veil of mist . . . a man who was unmistakably “the Great Leader, Father of Us All, Kim Il-sung . . .”

. . . Mrs. Oh dropped to her knees about five paces in front of Kim Il-sung. As she did, words slid as smoothly from her mouth as a coiled spring being released.

“I respectfully pray for the long life of our Great Leader, Father of Us All.”

No matter who you were, if you lived in this land, beneath these skies, you would have memorized these words time and time again ever since you learned to speak; hence they flowed without a hitch from Mrs. Oh’s mouth.

“Oh, thank you.” This cheerful voice came from somewhere above Mrs. Oh’s head.

North Koreans know that the apparatus that contains them can turn on them for infractions that the paranoid logic—in one story curtains drawn in the daytime not only disrupt the obligatory unity of a streetscape, but could be a signal to spies—of totalitarianism can make into the gravest of sins. And as Bandi reminds us, such sins can endure across the generations, reducing the children and grandchildren of the guilty to pariahs, to “hostile elements,” to “crows.” The past is never dead. There is a timelessness about this collection and the state it describes. Most of these stories could have been written twenty years before or, for that matter, twenty years after Bandi put pencil to paper. Even the calendar has been torn out of history and rebased to the glorious year—1912—in which the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, was born on the very day that the imperialists’ Titanic disappeared beneath the waves. Just a coincidence, comrade?

Kim follows Kim follows Kim, and, even after his death, the first of them, Kim Il-sung, selflessly carried on as its head of state, “the Eternal President of the Republic,” a position slightly renamed now that he shares it with his son, the equally deceased Kim Jong-il. “If you want a picture of the future,” wrote George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” It is a forever that North Korea has made its own:

One by one, columns began to form in the square, neatly divided like blocks of tofu. Each column accumulated new blocks in rapid succession, as though the phrase “without exception” were a long steel spit, skewering people in bunches and delivering them promptly to the square. Eventually, with only five minutes to go, the entire square was a sea of color, with columns stretching out on both sides of Department Store 1 . . . .

Senior state functionaries began to make their way out onto the VIP platform. A hushed silence descended on the square, which quivered with palpitations like the sea after a storm has just subsided.

Many of Bandi’s tales end with the protagonists turned against the regime, and, as far as we know anything about North Korea, the level of dissent has increased in the decades since Bandi wrote them, not least due to the famines of the 1990s. Nevertheless, that hushed silence still, for the most part, prevails.

Nothing has been heard of Bandi for over a year. Neither good news, nor bad news, nothing.

Do Not Speak, Memory

Masha Gessen - Never Remember: Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia

The Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2018

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.

The Red Broom

Anne Applebaum - Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine

National Review, November 27, 2017

Nearly 40 years ago, I met the parents of a graduate-school friend. They were exiles, Ukrainians, a people said not to exist, not really. Their son had told them that I took an unfriendly interest in Soviet history, and that I knew a little about their lost homeland.

The father asked if I’d heard about a famine there in the early 1930s. I had: something to do with collectivization.

“There was more to it than that.”

In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum, a prominent journalist and the author of fine histories of the Gulag and the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe, recounts just how much more there was. Red Famine is powerfully written, extensively researched, and, frequently, painful reading. It tells of a meticulous annihilation that tore a nation away from its traditions, its language, its morality, its past, its future, its everything: “A woman whose six children died over three days in May 1933 lost her mind, stopped wearing clothes, unbraided her hair, and told everyone that the ‘red broom’ had taken her family away.”

Her life had unraveled, her culture had unraveled — there’s accidental symbolism in that unbraiding — and she unraveled. The land around her unraveled too: once a breadbasket, now a wasteland, a domain of the dead and those waiting to die, Muselmänner, as they were known in Auschwitz.

Neighbor was set against neighbor, cannibalism was far from rare (yes, you read that right).

By the time — it took less than a year — the red broom had completed its 1932–33 sweep (there were smaller sweeps before and after), roughly 3.9 million Ukrainians were dead: a decimation, and more. Countless others were deported, many to a Gulag that had plenty of demand for slave labor. Large numbers never returned.

Some of this came with collectivization, Stalin’s decision to impose larger collective or state-owned farming across the USSR. Even Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent and a reliable shill for the Soviet dictator, admitted that collectivization had been a “mess”; still, he said, while there had been casualties, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” And quite often those casualties were not unwelcome to the regime. Communism, like the millenarian movements it succeeded, rested on the notion of a great sorting between sinners and saved. Collectivization could be used to weed out enterprising, more successful private farmers, the relentlessly demonized “kulaks” (a category regularly expanded to include peasants who owned, say, a cow or a pig more than their fellow villagers), who were too smart to be won over by deceptive promises of the bounty that Communism would bring to agriculture: They were another of the Soviet Union’s disposable classes, “former people” in the sinister and, all too often, prophetic terminology of that era.

In Ukraine, the noose was drawn far tighter than anywhere else — a fact still denied by today’s Kremlin and its apologists. The millions who starved to death there, like those who died in famines elsewhere in the USSR at that time, were, it is maintained, the victims of a reckless agricultural experiment, nothing more. Applebaum agrees that the “chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine,” but rightly goes on to argue that neither chaos, nor the weather, nor crop failure can account for the death toll in Ukraine, and especially that terrible spike in the spring of 1933. For that, the better explanation is a series of measures enacted by the regime that can only have been intended to kill. There’s a reason this famine is known to Ukrainians as the “Holodomor,” a term, Applebaum explains, derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger and extermination.

Stalin, writes Applebaum, “launched a famine within the famine, . . . specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.” It was not enough to hit the region’s faltering farms with grain-production targets they had no chance of meeting and then to requisition what they had managed to grow. Seed corn was often seized too, as were livestock, potatoes, and, eventually, just about anything else that someone might have hoped to eat. Houses were repeatedly ransacked in hunts for any hidden scraps. Cooking utensils (and other goods) might well be taken, too. Tight controls were imposed to restrict movement out of the countryside into hungry cities (which were often unable or unwilling to help in any case), let alone out of Ukraine. Exports of grain, however, continued. Millions in hard currency were worth more than millions of lives.

Traveling to find work elsewhere was out of the question. Farms and villages judged to have fallen particularly short of production quotas — no small number — were “blacklisted”: burdened with yet more restrictions, confiscations, and prohibitions, and denied credit, essential services, and the right to barter or trade. The peasants were trapped, cut off. Not to be starving was a sign of guilt, inviting another search.

Applebaum records how a Polish diplomat crossing the border from rural Ukraine into an adjacent Russian province in May 1933 was left with the impression that he had crossed into “Western Europe,” so great was the contrast. Ukraine had, quite clearly, been singled out.

And the reason for that was Stalin’s recognition that Ukrainians’ belief that they were a people distinct from their Russian neighbors was authentic and thus potentially dangerous. The confused period that followed the Bolshevik Revolution had seen two attempts to establish a separate Ukrainian state as well as a massive peasant uprising that had evolved into a war of all against all — and a serious threat to the nascent Soviet regime. When the Bolsheviks finally secured their hold over the country, they first played, by their dismal standards, nice. Ukrainians were led to believe that their Soviet Republic would, in a real sense, be Ukrainian and, often, run by Ukrainians.

That was never likely to be a solution acceptable to Stalin, that paradoxical Georgian enforcer of Russian imperial control, a man who knew a thing or two about nations — and how to break them. When, in 1925, Stalin declared that “the peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question,” it was Ukraine that was on his mind. If Ukraine was to become “a true fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic,” which Stalin had said that he wanted, the uncomfortably large, uncomfortably independent peasantry, the repository of so much of Ukrainian tradition and, in some sense, Ukraine’s soul, would have to be ground down.

But Ukraine would have to be decapitated, too. Applebaum details the silencing and, often, destruction of much of Ukraine’s intelligentsia, and the purge of a Ukrainian Communist Party with a membership too prone, the Kremlin suspected, to go its own way.

The Holodomor is properly understood only when it is understood as part of a broader, deeper assault on the Ukrainian national idea. Applebaum records how, even as “the famine was raging, . . . Stalin’s de facto spokesman in Ukraine forced through a decree eliminating Ukrainian textbooks as well as school lessons tailored to Ukrainian children” — another warning that Moscow had not finished with Ukraine. Taken as a whole, Stalin’s multifaceted onslaught on Ukrainians as a peoplewould (as Applebaum points out) “certainly” pass the test established for genocide by Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who coined the term. Indeed, Lemkin acknowledged as much. Whether it would meet the narrower definition of genocide set out in the U.N. Convention on Genocide is, Applebaum contends (perhaps too cautiously), a different matter, but, as she notes, that convention was heavily influenced by a Soviet Union that had no interest in being asked to answer for its crimes.

The final stage of genocide or ethnic cleansing — call it what you will — is usually the replacement of the old population with a new one. Russian peasants started to move into the emptied villages, the beginning of what Applebaum describes as a “slow-motion movement of Russians into a depopulated Ukraine” that was to last for decades, further blurring the idea of a Ukrainian Ukraine in a way that helped the Soviets then, and helps Vladimir Putin now.

The Holodomor was unmentionable in the Soviet Union until just before the USSR’s collapse. And shamefully, indifference in the West played a part in greasing its transformation from a topic that was forbidden into one that came close to being forgotten. Applebaum rightly highlights the role played in the original Soviet cover-up by Times man Duranty, not least the way he so effectively smothered the reporting of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who stepped off a train at a place he wasn’t meant to, walked for three days through the hell the Holodomor was creating, and told the world what he had seen.

Memory can sometimes outlast efforts to repress it. When, in the late 1980s, it finally became possible to talk about the Holodomor in the USSR, the long-buried memories of those years played their part in paving the way to Ukrainian independence in 1991. This was perversely acknowledged by the “Russian-backed separatists” who (Applebaum relates) destroyed a Holodomor memorial in the occupied eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne in 2015. It was a desecration that also echoed the Kremlin’s attempts to escape the consequences of the past by evasion and denial, a would-be rewriting of history that makes this compelling book all the more timely — and all the more necessary.

Gods and Monsters

Erich Kurlander: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich

National Review, October 2, 2017

Adolf Hitler once argued that National Socialism represented “a cool and highly reasoned approach to reality based on the greatest of scientific knowledge and its spiritual expression.” If there are any people foolish enough still to fall for that, they will not enjoy this book. While the enthusiasm of some Nazi leaders, most notoriously Himmler, for the occult has been a staple of pop culture and the more disreputable corners of historical “investigation” for years, this volume shows that many others felt much the same way.

Kurlander depicts a Third Reich in which, despite uneven and often ambiguous efforts to rein them in, seers, magicians, and psychics flourished. Buddha was drafted into the master race, parapsychology “so long as it comported with ‘Nordic-Germanic feeling’” was recognized as legitimate, and the grounds were laid for an “Ario-Germanic” national religion as a syncretic (it wouldn’t all be Wotan) “substitute for Christianity.” Meanwhile, charlatan-historians and charlatan-folklorists hunted for proof that large swathes of Europe were part of an ancestral German homeland, charlatan-archeologists searched for evidence of “the Nordic origins of Asian civilization,” charlatan-doctors worked on monstrous human experiments, and charlatan-scientists struggled to develop weapons designed to draw on mysterious untapped electromagnetic forces. This arsenal was intended to include death rays, sound weapons, and anti-gravity devices — an absurdity and a waste made all the more grotesque by the contrast with the remarkably sophisticated technology successfully deployed by Germany during the war.

If the magical weapons proved harmless, the same cannot be said of the mix of superstition and pseudoscience that ran through the Nazis’ thinking about race, a mix that goes some way to accounting for both the intensity of their anti-Semitism and the meticulousness of the slaughter that followed. “Traditional” anti-Semitism rested on a distrust of difference reinforced by religious and then economic resentment. It generated exclusion, violence, and, as time went by, increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories. But the notion of Jews as perpetual enemies of an advanced “Aryan” race was a fairly new confection, dating back only to the mid 19th century.

Kurlander is an excellent guide to the complex and often conflicting “histories” of the Aryans’ origins, versions of which featured sex with angels, God-men from Tibet, a descent from heaven, moons made of ice crashing into the earth (the weirdly popular “World Ice Theory,” in which Hitler was one of numerous believers), and much more besides. These narratives also incorporated tales of a fall: The original Aryans had been scattered. Their racial integrity had been diluted by intermingling with “lesser breeds.” They had been preyed upon by — whom else? — the Jews, routinely smeared as parasitic and as a disease but also in terms that sometimes appeared to be more than metaphor: Hitler dubbed Jews the children of the devil and believed that forestalling the “Jewish apocalypse was our duty, our God-given mission.”

Kurlander contends that this supernatural dread was genuinely felt by “the Third Reich’s brain trust,” a claim that should be treated with some caution. When it comes to the supernatural, what people believe and what they say they believe are frequently very different — more so, indeed, than they might themselves understand.

When studying the translation of concepts of such malevolence into the deeds that became the Holocaust, it is easy to make the all too common mistake of treating the Nazis as a case apart, as an unparalleled eruption of evil. And, yes, there were aspects of the Third Reich — from the particular horrors it devised to an ideology that was as bizarre as it was sinister — that distinguished it from the other mass-murdering regimes of the last century. But take a step back and the similarities between National Socialism and its totalitarian counterparts on the left quickly become visible.

This is true of their shared “supernatural” dimension. All were essentially millenarian. Communist revolutionaries (nominally philosophical materialists despite a fundamentally mystical view of historical forces) would not have appreciated the connection, but it was there all right — the religious impulse is hard to discard — complete with the promise of a merciless sorting, after which the saved would march to a better world. Untethered to atheism, the Nazis could be more explicitly millenarian, referring to a “thousand-year” Reich. This number has, notes Kurlander (citing another author), “deep biblical overtones,” overtones to which he pays too little attention — a curious misstep in a history of this type, as is his relatively cursory handling of the Nazis’ knotty relationship with Christianity.

As Kurlander makes clear, the Nazis’ racial and occult obsessions did not come out of nowhere. The party that evolved into the National Socialists had roots in the Thule Society, a group formed in early 1918, focused on the occult, anti-Semitism, and, as Germany descended into defeat, politics. Its members sported a swastika in homage to the Aryans’ supposed Indo-European heritage — an important, if counterintuitive, theme that ran through much of esoteric German racism and was associated with the admiration for “Eastern” spirituality of the sort later felt by quite a few leading Nazis. The Thule Society (the name is a reference to a “Nordic” interpretation of the Atlantis myth) had in turn emerged out of a broader Germanic intellectual community that had wallowed in a swamp of Grenzwissenschaft (or “border science,” to give this nonsense — astrology, anthroposophy, “natural” medicine, parapsychology, radiesthesia, theosophy, and all the rest — a kinder name than it deserves), Aryan fantasy, and racial hysteria for decades.

There is no “right” side of history, no law that makes what we call progress inevitable. Other parts of Europe were also doing their bit to let the Enlightenment down. As Kurlander points out, it was a Frenchman, Arthur de Gobineau, who, writing some 40 years before the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair, did much to popularize the idea of a superior Aryan race. Anti-Semitism was far from being solely a Teutonic vice. Kurlander accepts that border science had scant respect for borders but maintains (without satisfactorily explaining why) that Germans were more despairing of the growing ascendancy of scientific materialism than most Europeans, and therefore more prone to succumb to the “re-enchantment” offered by border science. If that was true before 1914, it was even more so after a war that shattered any illusions about modernity — and a defeat that brought humiliation, chaos, and revolution in its wake. As Kurlander tells it, “hundreds of thousands of Germans and Austrians” bought “occult and New Age literature,” read “border scientific journals,” and participated in “astrological and theosophical societies, séances and spiritualist experiments.”

A key element in this collective derangement was the suspicion — still flourishing in the West today — that modern science had torn apart the harmony that had allegedly once existed between man, nature, and the divine, a breach that could be restored by a more spiritual, holistic approach. More often than not, the results — such as “biodynamic” agriculture (a more straightforwardly superstitious variant of organic farming) — were largely innocuous, but the fact that there was a biodynamic “plantation” on the grounds of Auschwitz is a reminder of where the retreat from reason can lead, a lesson that, judging by our own overly relaxed response to resurgent pseudoscience (the anti-vaxxers come to mind) or political attacks on the scientific method, has not been learned.

The dream of restoring a lost whole — even one that had never seen the light of day — was particularly toxic when applied to ethnicity. Imagining a heroic national past (even one with mythic or supernatural undertones) was not confined to Germans, nor was a sense of being a cut above other races, but in Germany, such prejudices were unusually intense. Kurlander never specifies quite why, but the comparatively late (1871) creation of a unified German state — a state then partly unraveled by the Treaty of Versailles — must have increased the pressure on Germans, including, in different ways, their kin in the multiethnic Austria-Hungary of Hitler’s youth or the truncated Austria that was left after World War I, to define who they were. Among the ways they responded was by emphasizing who was not German, most notably the Jews, reviled for the threat they were meant to represent to the unity of the Volk: They were an Other that could have no place in a nation that wished to survive as a nation.

Even if he might occasionally exaggerate the contribution of the specific outlandish beliefs he describes to the catastrophe that unfolded, Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits. In remedying that, Kurlander offers a strikingly different and deeply disturbing perspective on the rise and subsequent trajectory of the Third Reich, and, most unsettling of all, on the numinous appeal of its Führer. Hitler both shared and channeled (some contemporaries referred to him as a medium) the discontents of a people so drastically detached from reality that they were seduced by a conjuring trick, albeit one in which the conjurer himself may well have believed. It was a dark magic so potent that it took an apocalypse to break the spell.

Proletarians, Painters and Propagandists

The Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2017

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.

The Road to Red October

The Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2017

‘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.