Paper Tiger

It’s by pure chance that I came to David Cannadine’s recently published The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences in succession to Catalin Avaramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, though they harmonise quite well.  Both are concerned with categories and perceptions, both with the divisions created between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’, both with notions of ‘Us’ and notions of ‘Them.’

Cannadine, a professional historian who professes history at Princeton, comes to us rather in the manner of a prosecutor, bearing a heavy indictment against the profession of history!  Actually his beginning is the profession of politics, or the sort of simple-minded politics embraced by the likes of George W. Bush and Tony Blair in the aftermath of 9/11, a new form of Manichaeism, with clear and uncomplicated division between the forces of light and the forces of dark.   

Historians are to blame here, Cannadine feels, in creating to a general mood of division and derision.  They have spent too much time, he argues, on conflict and very little on collaboration, on disharmony rather than harmony.  Above all, they have failed to celebrate a ‘common humanity.’

The Undivided Past, if you like, is a critique of artificial identity politics.  Professor Cannadine unveils his six paper tigers.  These are religion, nation, class, gender, race and civilization.  In cementing differences and creating antagonisms, historians made their particular choices.  The overall result is a kind of interpretive straightjacket. 

The simple truth is that we have multiple and shifting identities, a truth so simple it scarcely deserves repeating.  But the author’s blood is up and his challenge offered. He bears down on “the conventional wisdom of single-identity politics, the alleged uniformity of antagonistic groups, the widespread liking for polarized modes of thought, and the scholarly preoccupations with difference.”  My, how those paper tigers fall, driven down by this mighty verbal onslaught! 

Broadly speaking it’s possible to accept elements of Cannadine’s argument.  All history, to take one example, is not the history of class struggle!  But Marx and Marxism is such an easy target, for the simple reason that ‘class’ is the weakest of all the tigers.  Old dinosaurs like Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, are now themselves consigned to the past with a good part of their tendentious scholarship, though they and their kind still have an abiding influence on sections of the liberal media.

Yes, what a chimera class politics proved to be.  The whole sandcastle was swept into the sea in 1914, when the German Social Democrats, the largest Marxist party in the world, voted for war credits, thus in a single move destroying the Second International.  Here nation trumped class, but even so Cannadine’s method would not allow us comprehend why class-based politics became so important in the Second Reich in the first place.  Why on earth did Bismarck and Bebel not simply celebrate ‘togetherness’?  Altogether there is a conceit and polemical blindness here that I find difficult to accept, for all of the author’s weighty scholarship. 

Actually I’m not quite sure who the author is arguing against, beyond the ghosts of the past, those who rest in the shade of Karl Marx or Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee.  I know of no reputable scholar today who is in thrall to any single one of the six categories.  We all know – surely we do? – just how complex the past is, just how hopeless the search for any imperial model of explanation.  The supposed big division between Christianity and Islam sublimates a great many internal divisions within these faiths.  Historians have long been alert to the truth that wars of religion, for example, are never exclusively about religion.  The Thirty Years War is very fertile ground here. 

Cannadine is certainly no Marxist but paradoxically he seems to have lifted notions of false consciousness from the ideological wreckage.  His fellow historians, you see, have helped to create artificial and misleading perceptions of reality.  Alas, he would do well to remember that the task of historians is to interpret the past, not change it. It there are conflicts the conflicts are real; if there are debates the debates are real, if there is oppression the oppression is real.  We cannot conjure away the things we do not like or approve of by fatuous appeals to a ‘common humanity.’  This book, for all its weightiness, is replete with too many unsupported generalisations and too much, well, pious intellectual conceit.    

There is the professor at the end of the lists, his tigers all knocked down.  The contest was just too easy, the false solidarities all dead.  The only solidarity acceptable from this point forward is human solidarity; it’s really as simple as that.  Come, now, ye academic historians, see the truth and abandon the artificial divisions and celebrate those things “that still bind us together today.”  Yes, I imagine Haitian slum dwellers and Russian billionaires will be delighted to see a celebration of a ‘common humanity’ as the profession of history sinks into a sleep of quietism! 

All history may not be the history of class struggle, but it is the history of struggle, as Arthur Schopenhauer rightly contended.  Yes, we are all human but any attempt to create a ‘common identity’ or a common history is a task that has failed, destroyed by its own absurd contradictions.  There is nothing new in this observation.  As long ago as the 1960s J. H. Plumb described UNESCO’s History of Humanity as “an encyclopaedia gone berserk, or resorted by a deficient computer.”  Speaking of berserkers, there is the European Union’s House of European History, which begins the story in 1946, because the various national governments can’t agree on what went before!  I’ll go with Cannadine’s six categories, liberally mixed, any day over absurdities like this, or over his hippy-like, Kumbaya approach to the past.

At the end I found that The Undivided Past was the biggest paper tiger of all.  It’s entertaining, certainly, at least now and again, though far too prolix and dense in style.  It's also wide-ranging, but that does not compensate for its deficiencies.  My most serious criticism is over the stunning banality of the central message.  Simply put, it’s almost impossible to provide an acceptable definition of a ‘common humanity’ when one proceeds beyond the basics – we are born, we breath, we eat, we grow, we decline, we die.  That’s it, a ‘common humanity’ we share with every other species on earth. 

Historians have to grapple with the past and interpret it for the present and perhaps even the future, with as much honesty and integrity as they can, not be seduced by cosy common room cant. We are in the presence here of a new Francis Fukuyama.  

Monsters of Imagination

Those who have read Robinson Crusoe will recall the point when the hero discovers that he is not alone on his island when he rather ludicrously finds a single footprint! A duffelpud, perhaps? Defoe is really setting the mood, one of horror and one of fascination. And it’s with horror and fascination that the cannibals made their way into the western imagination, from Robinson’s Island to the feasts of Hannibal Lector. 

I had so much fun – if that’s the word! - in picking my way through An Intellectual History of Cannibalism by Catalin Avaramescu, translated by Alastair Blyth and published by the Princeton Press. It really helped me to put the practice in a the wider context of history, civilization and imagination

I love Hannibal Lector as much as the next girl but - oh my - when it comes to the real thing some of the details of the cannibal life are truly hard to take in. I remember when I was in my teens reading about the case of one Armin Meiwes, who lived in the German town of Rotenburg an der Fulda. This man went into a website called Cannibal Café and there advertised for a “well-built eighteen to thirty-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.”

Who on earth is going to volunteer for that? Well, someone did, someone by the name of Bernd Brandes. The actual details of what followed are truly repellent. Let me just say that dinner began while Brandes was still alive, the hors d'oeuvre being a certain part of the anatomy that most men find dear. Found to be too rubbery, it was sautéed and fed to the dog! 

To a certain extent, as Avaramescu explores, cannibalism began really as an invented concept, a dividing line between civilization and savagery. It was another form of ‘here be dragons,’ filling out the space on empty maps, those barbarous places “...of the Cannibals that each other eat.” Cannibals, in other words, entered the western imagination alongside such fabulous creatures as the dog-headed men and monopods. 

For Thomas Hobbes the cannibal was a useful concept, a warning of the depths that the war of all against all could descend to in the absence the social contract and the state. But it became something more in the real world; for the discovery of supposed cannibal ‘savages’ became an excuse for far greater savagery, as the Spanish fully demonstrated in the Americas. The hypocrisy, not just in this, but in much of the practice of ‘civilization,’ was touched on by Montaigne;

I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but lately seen, not among the inveterate and mortal enemies, but among neighbours and fellow citizens, and which is worse, under the colours of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is dead. 

I suppose the modern cannibal, cannibals in the form of the fictional Lector or the factual Meiwes, are really the creation of civilization rather than savagery, a notion supported by arguments advanced by the Marquis de Sade, who saw the absorption of ‘the other’ as a perfect expression of one’s freedom. Alas, there are some forms of freedom one would rather not have. 

Avaramescu has performed commendably in exploring the darker side of human imagination; for this is a journey less into the practice than the perception. It touches on assumptions about barbarism that allowed supposedly civilized societies to behave towards others in a wholly barbarous way. As much as anything An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is an exploration of evil, of ideas and practices that go well beyond the consumption of human flesh.

At the Top of the Greasy Pole

I started my odyssey through Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series of political novels in early 2011, beginning with Can You Forgive Her? I said at the outset of my review of this book that the year was to be my Trollope period, an author I had hitherto overlooked. Well, I only made it as far as Phineas Redux, the fourth in the series, which I reviewed in October, 2011, just before a trip to Egypt. I was sidetracked, as I am invariably am, setting off in the pursuit of various literary foxes, shifting from one horse to another in mid-gallop. I took time out but I was out for almost a year and a half! 

Now I’m back on course, having finished The Prime Minister, the sequel to Phineas Redux, at the weekend. Once again I immersed myself in the high Victorian political and social milieu; once again I was captivated by the intrigues and the machinations of Trollope’s most engaging character – Lady Glencora Palliser, now the Duchess of Omnium. Her husband, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium, formerly the Chancellor of the Exchequer and now the Prime Minister, has at last made it to the top of the greasy pole, but, oh my, what a struggle she has trying to stop him from sliding back down! 

Her problem is simply stated: Plantagenet is the noblest Roman of them all, something of a drawback when it comes to the realities of modern political life. He heads a coalition, a compromise on men and measures, cobbled together to break a political deadlock. He becomes Prime Minister, moreover, simply because there is no one else suitable at the time, not as the fruit of his own ambition. But, alas, he is not comfortable in the role; he is far too honest, far too thin-skinned and far, far too scrupulous. The Duchess, if only it were possible, could have done it so much better;

They should have made me Prime Minister...I could have done all the dirty work. I could have given away garters and ribbons and made my bargains while giving them. I would give pensions or withheld them and make stupid men peers..... a man at a regular office has to work and that is what Plantagenet is fit for. He wants always to be doing something...............but a Prime Minister should never go beyond generalities about commerce, agriculture, peace and general philanthropy. Of course he should have the gift of the gab and that Plantagenet hasn't got....I could do a Mansion House dinner to a marvel.

Oh, Glencora, you were a hundred years too early! 

The truth is that the Duke, for all his moral rectitude, or because of his moral rectitude, is a dull dog, high-minded but uninspiring, wholly unsuited for a position which demands the kind of personal and managerial skills that he simply does not have. Does Trollope conceive of him as an admirable figure? Yes, he obviously does, though he is clearly one best suited the second rank of political life, far better as a Chancellor, where he can ponder the ins and outs of decimalisation – one of his obsessions – without having to concern himself with the kind of things that the Duchess understands are an essential part of effective leadership. A good Prime Minister has to be a consummate actor. Glencora realises this; Plantagenet does not. No, that’s not quite true: he does not want to play a part. Playing a part, to be more exact, involves compromising his Olympian ideals of probity and honour. 

Those who are interested in present day English political realities will find The Prime Minister dryly amusing at points, not least when the author touches on the nature of coalition government. England does not love coalitions, Disraeli said. That may be true, but England has to suffer coalition;

...coalitions of this kind have been generally feeble, sometimes disastrous, and on occasions, even disgraceful. When a man, perhaps through a long political life, has bound himself to a certain code of opinions, how can he change the code in a moment? And when at the same moment, together with the change, he secures power, patronage, and pay, how shall the public voice absolve him? 

The Prime Minister is certainly a political novel, but the game – unlike the novels of Disraeli himself - is played in the minor key; the politics are the personal. There are really no high ideological issues at stake, no great clash of principles. The focus, rather, is on social, sexual and domestic politics, the politics of marriage above all, particularly as this bears on property relations. 

The author is particularly good on the position of women in the Victorian world. Marriage to a virtuous gentleman, as he sees it, is that highest thing they can aim for, but he does not shy away from the penalties: the frustration of limited prospects and circumscribed lives. It’s also a novel of contrasting types. There is the practical Glencora, a foil to the high-minded Plantagenet. But the greatest contrast of all is between the Duke, a very perfect, gentle knight, and one Ferdinand Lopez, a parvenu, an interloper and - in his personal impact on the lifes of those with whom he comes into contact - something of an incubus. 

Where Lopez comes from, who and what his antecedents were, and how this outsider managed to graft himself on to the highest reaches of English society is never fully explained. Why Glencora takes him up – with unfortunate consequences for her husband – is also something of a mystery, given that he is wholly without connections or influence. Lopez, as an interloper, becomes the butt of all sorts of mid-Victorian prejudices. He is “a man without a father, a foreigner, a black Portuguese nameless Jew...[with] a bright eye, a hook nose and a glib tongue.” Whether or not Lopez is Jewish he certainly takes on the role of the unscrupulous financier, comparing himself at one point to Shakespeare’s Shylock.

Lopez is the kind of figure that might very well find a resonance with a modern readership, particularly as we all now live in ABC – the Aftermath of the Banking Crisis. He’s not a banker himself but he is a speculator, a man who uses the money of others wholly without any kind of scruple. Amongst other things he deals in guano, which may or may not be intended to convey the author’s own estimation of a particular kind of entrepreneurial capitalism! Lopez has nothing, no background, no wealth, no prospects; nothing beyond his wit. 

In his smooth glibness, he manages to contract a socially advantageous marriage to one Emily Wharton, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer, who also happens to be a scion of England’s old rural Tory squirearchy. 

I’ve admired a great many of Trollope’s female characters hitherto, particularly Glencora (who could not admire and love her?), Madame Max Goesler and even the colourful and slightly disreputable Lizzie Eustace. 

Emily Wharton is a contrast in every way; she is a crashing bore. Her one defining characteristic is a perverse obstinacy, coupled with dog-like notions of duty. She is obstinate in her desire to marry Lopez, though she knows nothing about him, and she is obstinate in widowhood – sorry for the spoiler – when he has conveniently been dispatched, Anna Karenina-style, though he had previously used her shamefully in an attempt to milk her father's wealth. After his death she descends into morbid mourning, even though the marriage was a disaster. In fact her widowhood becomes a badge of personal self-immolation. The man was unworthy of her; she should never have married; she rejected honest and true love; it's all her fault - mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Why poor Andrew Fletcher, part of the family’s county set, continued in his unrelenting devotions I have no idea! 

I was tempted to write that The Prime Minister is a kind of comedy of manners, except there is not really much in the way of comedy (The Duchess has a few good self-deprecating lines, though). It’s certainly a superb panorama, ranging over aspects of Victorian life, attitudes and manners at the higher reaches of society, the kind of parts that Dickens never reached or wanted to reach. Trollope, moreover, has a crisp and engaging style. 

There is also, at least it seems to me, an intriguing ambiguity in his message. He obviously disapproves of the morally reprehensible Lopez, but Lopez, or people like him, were the motors of Victorian transformation, the risk takers and the deal makers. Is he really suggesting that the only alternative is the unimpeachable Whartons and Fletchers, the epitome of rural stasis and torpor? Ah, but as Abel Wharton, Emily's father, reflects "...the world was changing around him every day. Royalty was marrying out of its degree. Peers' sons were looking only for money. And, more than that, peers' daughters were bestowing themselves on Jews and shopkeepers." The world is changing, yes, but all change is accompanied by fear, uncertainty and prejudice. 

Anyway, read it and make up your own mind. I assure you it’s well worth the effort. You may even, like me, be engaged enough to cry out in frustration when the plot takes a particular turn, or certain characters prove to be more than usually annoying. I defy anyone, moreover, not to hate Quintus Slide the newspaper proprietor, as slimy as any modern press baron.

So, yes, I’ve bagged my fifth literary Munro in the Trollope range. I spy the last, The Duke’s Children, in the distance. I promise my next review shall not be as distant. 

Remembering George Orwell

George Orwell was born in June, 1903. No, he wasn’t. George Orwell was born in January, 1933. Actually, both are true. What; is there something Orwellian here; are we to entertain contradictory statements without being aware of the contradiction? Are we in the foothills of double-think? 

OK, then, let me clarify: Eric Arthur Blair, who was to become George Orwell, was indeed born in June, 1903. Although he had previously published some minor articles with the by-line E. A. Blair, the pen name by which he is best known comes with the publication in January, 1933 of Down and Out in Paris and London, his George Gissing-like odyssey into the nether world.

So this year is an anniversary in two senses – the one hundred and tenth of his birth and the eightieth of his first reasonably successful literary endeavour, the kind of perceptive, unadorned and matter-of-fact sociological analysis that he was to make a unique feature of his writing.

Orwell - like Charles Dickens a social analyst as well as a novelist - is one of my favourite writers. Like him, my own ambition is to make political writing into an art, an aim he set out in Why I Write, one of his most brilliant essays. Like him, I discovered the sheer joy of words when I was in my mid-teens. I first readAnimal Farm, his exposé of the fraudulent character of Soviet Communism, when I was fourteen. I have been reading his work on and off ever since, his novels, his reportage, his criticism, his occasional pieces and his journalism. 

This anniversary year I’ve been re-tracing my steps, overwhelmed by the sheer brilliance and insight in the likes ofCharles Dickens, a critical essay of outstanding ability. As with so much of his work there is a slight element of biography. I give you, from the conclusion, how Orwell saw Dickens and how I see Orwell:

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

I’ve been looking for this face also in biography. I looked for it in George Orwell by Gordon Bowker. This is not the first account of Orwell’s life that I’ve tackled. I read Bernard Crick’s study while I was still at school, though I remember little of it now. What can I say about Bowker? He has given us an honest and decent account of honesty and decency, the major themes, if you like, of Orwell’s literary career. What I do remember about Crick is that his book was primarily political in purpose. Bowker, I suppose, is more classic biography, a warts and all portrait. It’s a good workman-like effort, though I have to say I could have done without the occasional ‘he would have thought’, the kind of tiresome and speculative formula used to fill gaps in the narrative. This sort of thing simply will not do! 

I think I probably know as much about Orwell about as anyone, which is to say I’m not sure how much I really know. He certainly left traces, including Such, Such Were the Joys, his posthumous exposé of life at Saint Cyprian’s, his prep school, where he says that he does not want to make it sound like Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall and then makes it sound remarkably like, well, Dotheboys Hall! At other times he can be quite guarded, saying very little about his five years as an imperial policeman in Burma, his version, I think of Gorky’s ‘university.’ It left him with an abiding hatred of imperialism and left us with two superlative essays – A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant, but not much more besides. It also gave us Burmese Days, his first novel and, in my estimation, his best. 

That’s the other thing about Orwell – he was an artist first and foremost, not beyond a certain amount of embellishment and poetic licence. Did he really shoot an elephant? Yes, it seems he did, but perhaps not in the way he suggested. I imagine the political symbolism was just a brilliant afterthought. 

As I say, Bowker gives us a decent warts and all portrait, not avoiding some of the less savoury aspects of the writer’s character, including his apparent homophobia, his anti-Semitism and his misogyny. Sex for Orwell seems to have been something of an imperial experience, picked up clearly during his formative years in Burma, quick possession and rapid fulfillment being the only aims! Ah, but he was man of his times, for all of his progressive attitudes, replete with the residual prejudices of his time and his class, things which have become rather amusing with the passage of time. His fulminations against fruit juice (fruit juice!) and nudism in The Road to Wigan Pier are a joy to behold. Eileen O’Shaughnessy, his first wife, was in the habit of pulling his leg over some of his more outrageous statements, which he took in good humour. 

When I think of Orwell I also think of Jonathan Swift, who just so happens to have been one of his favourite authors. Orwell was the Swift of the Age of Ideology, exposing in the most biting satire the lies and deceptions that had become part of contemporary political discourse. If Swift was a frustrated Tory, Orwell was a frustrated Socialist, more critical of his own side than the enemy. It was in Stalinism that he saw the greatest evil, particularly after his experiences in Spain, recorded so memorably in Homage to Catalonia Here, with language abused for political ends, with the truth turned inside out, with today’s orthodoxy becoming tomorrow’s heterodoxy, the foundations were laid for the Nineteen Eighty Four, the ultimate nightmare of the age.

I believe that Orwell is best approached through his work. But if you are coming to him for the first time, or if you are looking for a thread through the labyrinth, then George Orwell is a useful companion. It’s well-situated, well-structured and well-written without a superabundance of detail. It’s a little lacking, perhaps, in critical analysis, but I do not believe that to be a great fault. 

For so many years success and recognition had eluded Orwell, often reduced to the same tenuous straights as Edwin Reardon in George Gissing’s New Grub Street. It came eventually, particularly after the publication of Animal Farm, but by now the author was approaching a premature death, carried away eventually by the lung aliment that had troubled him for most of his life. 

Just before Orwell’s death at the tragically early age of forty-six in January, 1950 Desmond MacCarthy, a distinguished editor and literary critic, wrote saying that he considered him “among the few memorable writers of your generation”, one who had left “an indelible mark on English literature.” It serves, I think, as an abiding epitaph. Bowker has done good service in reminding us just how memorable he was. 

Daft Dominion

Here are the facts. The year is 1952. In the east the German war with Russia, now eleven years old, shows no sign of ending. On a line roughly extending from Lake Ladoga in the north-west to the Caspian Sea in the south-east, the struggle is in stalemate, a contest punctuated by blows and counter blows which settle nothing.


In the west Britain, having made peace with Germany after the brief war of 1939-40, is governed by a crypto-fascist regime headed by Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate. Oswald Mosley, whose fascist party made substantial gains in the rigged parliamentary election of 1950, is Home Secretary, in charge of the normal police and black-shirt recruited auxiliaries. Enoch Powell is Secretary of State for India, where Britain is still fighting a rearguard action to retain the Jewel in the tawdry Crown. Under the Treaty of Berlin, which ended the western war, the Isle of Wight has been turned over to Germany as a base.

In Berlin, Hitler, suffering from increasingly acute Parkinson’s disease, is nearing the end. The future is uncertain, with no clear succession. There are those who want to end the hopeless war in the east; there are those, chiefly in the SS, who want to carry on the struggle against the Slav ‘sub-humans’ until that elusive final victory.

We are, of course, in past futures, a foreign country which did things differently; we are in the country of C. J. Sansom’s Dominion, a ‘what if’ novel along the lines of Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, Len Deighton’s SS GB and Robert Harris’ Fatherland.

The premise is a plausible one. The novel opens with a real historical scene, the meeting in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street on 9 May, 1940. Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, has announced his intention to resign, discredited by Britain’s disastrous campaign against the Germans in Norway. The contenders are Halifax and Churchill. Halifax, the Foreign Minister and a noted appeaser, is favoured by Chamberlain, the King and most of the Tory Party. In real history he demurs. In this history he does not. After the German invasion of the West, and the disaster of Dunkirk, Halifax makes peace, entering into a treaty of friendship with Britain’s former enemy. Churchill withdraws, eventually to lead a Resistance movement against the new Vichy-style regime, headed in succession by Halifax, David Lloyd George and finally Beaverbrook.

Dominion is the first book that I’ve read by C. J. Sansom, though I’m told that he is well-respected for his Shardlake series, historical novels set in Tudor England. He has a doctorate in history; so, if that’s any measure, he is qualified enough to treat the subject with imaginative insight and a high degree of verisimilitude and empathy. Does he? Well, now, that’s the key question. At the risk of trying your patience I’m going to begin this review by looking at the justification for the premises contained in the novel, set out in a Historical Note at the very end.

Actually, if you are at all interested in the context, I would suggest that you begin at the end. It’s the key to all that goes before. It shows the author as a man with a mission. He has, in other words, a political intent; his novel is not merely for shallow entertainment. Rather it has a didactic purpose, namely to warn you against the dangers of nationalism and fascism in the real historical present by showing you nationalism and fascism in a fictitious historical past.

I suppose that this book might be compared, at least superficially, with It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel warning of the dangers of fascism in America. It could have happened here, that’s Sansom’s point. But could it have happened in the way he describes in Dominion?

You see, what he gives us is an Anglo-Saxon version of Petain and Laval’s Vichy state. It’s really all based on a shallow idiocy of perspective, if I can put it like that. George Orwell, who also feared a form of fascism in England, was altogether more subtle than the inept Mister Sansom, at pains to advance his left-wing credentials. “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially left wing intellectuals”, Orwell wrote, “is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.”

My own doubts were raised early. Beaverbrook, in real history, was a close friend of Churchill and an effective minister in his wartime cabinet. In Dominion this same Beaverbrook is a man prepared to hand over Britain’s Jewish community to the Nazis. In justifying his portrayal, Samson quotes Clement Atlee, the post-war Labour prime minister, who said that the press baron was the most evil person he had ever met. Really? Is this the same Beaverbrook that Michael Foot, a former Labour leader and respected leftwing journalist, describes with such warmth and affection in his essay collection Debts of Honour?

Then there is Enoch Powell, the bête noir of Samson and his kind. His real credentials were impeccably anti-fascist, an opponent of appeasement and a man who returned to England from a comfortable academic position in Australia specifically to fight against the Nazis. The idea of him collaborating with Oswald Mosley is laughably absurd. Samson has simply advanced beyond his fictitious present to a real future, to Powell’s 1960s warning over the possible effects of mass immigration. He has then projected back again; for, as we all know, concerns about immigration equals fascism.

Powell, who only entered Parliament in 1950, was an admirer of British rule in India, that much is true, but by the early 1950s his imperial convictions were weakening. The depiction of him in Dominion is, quite frankly, childishly inexact. By Sansom’s measure Churchill might just as readily have been Secretary of State for India in a Beaverbrook cabinet, given his own past political commitments, his past refusal to countenance any form of independence for India.

So, what is there to say about Samson’s imagined Britain? It’s a drab place, economically depressed, a country in debt, a country that is no more than a satellite of a Continental superpower, a country where independence is all but a fiction, a country with an uncertain future. This is Vichy Britain, the only model the author seems to understand, a country whose cowardly leaders are prepared to hand over some of its citizens to an uncertain fate.

But Vichy was not the only model to hand. In real history there was Finland, an ally of Germany in the war against Russia, but one that preserved its democratic polity and refused to play any part in the Holocaust. Then there is Denmark, the ‘model’ protectorate, a country occupied by the Germans but one that still managed to undermine Nazi policy towards the Jews.

It’s perfectly true, in a world of limitless possibilities, that Samson’s alternate is just as valid as any other alternate, but does it stand up to scrutiny? My alternate is that if Britain had exited the war in 1940, instead of 1945, it would not have accumulated the massive debts, particularly to America, that so crippled its post-war economic performance.

Even in Sansom’s world the country would surely have done much better. There is no objective reason why it should have been so poor. Although allied to Germany, it was not involved in the war with Russia. Why on earth would the Germans have erected tariff barriers against British produce when such produce, particularly in armaments, would have been vital for the continuing campaign in the east? Sansom’s model makes no logical sense.

The truth is that Sansom’s depiction of a sad, indebted, economically and politically dependant nation is far closer to our contemporary political realities; a grubby Britain, a country increasingly uncertain of itself, a country falling to bits, a country tied to the European Union, an organisation the author clearly approves of.

The Historical Note, incidentally, which starts off objectively enough, ends up as a carpet-chewing rant against nationalism in general and – would you believe it? – Scottish nationalism in particular! Nationalism and patriotism, in Sansom’s view, are close kin to fascism. We are back in the mental world of those 1930s intellectuals who, when it came to understanding fascism, understood exactly nothing

I’ve tried your patience too far. The historical stuff may be of no interest at all to you. You have one question only: what of the novel, what of the story; is it any good? Yes, well, it is in part, now and again a bit of a page turner. Ignore the political manipulation – unfortunately I can’t - and you might actually enjoy it. The problem is that it is overlong and repetitive. More than that, the whole superstructure rests on an astonishingly weak base. The core plot device, the heart of the story, is as weak as marshmallow.

It centres on one Frank Muncaster, a geologist, who has learned a ‘dreadful secret’ that turns out to be no secret at all. I’m not going to tell you what the ‘dreadful secret’ is, simply that the Germans are anxious to find out, though what earthly good it could have done them is anybody’s guess. Muncaster learns his ‘dreadful secret’ from his physicist brother, who happens to be working with the Americans. In the contretemps that follows, the said brother is pushed out of the window of Muncaster’s flat, while he proceeds to wreck the place (why?), all the time shouting about the end of the world.

It turns out that Muncaster is the sort of fellow that a goose would say boo to, so his actions, to say the least, are just a tad out of character. But on his hissy fit all else follows; the Gestapo follow, the British fascist police follow, the British resistance follow; Churchill himself follows. Quick, let’s find Frank; our war in Russia depends on his ‘dreadful secret.’ Quick, let’s find Frank; let’s discover the ‘dreadful secret’ or get him away safely to America.

I’m really trying not to laugh as I write this, but there is so much in Dominion that is laughable; the lost and found chase through a thick London fog, Keystone Cops-style, is particularly funny. Poor Muncaster, freed from a loony bin, is aided by an assortment of individuals – David Fitzgerald, a civil servant and member of the resistance who befriended the forlorn chap (oh, just how many times do we heed to be reminded of his rictus smile?!) while they were at Oxford together. He is aided by Ben, a nurse at a lunatic asylum and a homosexual Scottish communist, also a member of the resistance, ye ken. He is aided by, of all organisations, the Fire Brigade, an organisation with impeccable left-wing credentials, which rides to the rescue through the fog!

And so it goes on, from high tension to low comedy, a series of increasingly implausible encounters. The scene on the beach below Rottingdean on the Suffolk coast takes verisimilitude to the Senate House, the SS headquarters in London, and tortures it out of existence. In the end Frank takes himself and the ‘dreadful secret’ into oblivion, an action, if taken earlier, that would have saved several hundred wearisome pages.

As a novel Dominion is real boys’ own stuff, difficult even for boys to swallow. In almost 570 pages of text the only believable character, the only character with any real human depth, is the world-weary Gunther Hoth, the Gestapo agent on Muncaster’s tail. There would seem to me to be a spot of plagiarism here, for he is simply a more ideologically committed dimension of Xavier March, the detective from Robert Harris’ Fatherland.

Dominion is based on a bogus historical premise; it’s based on the character assassination of real people. As a novel it’s too long, it’s repetitive, the characterisations are weak, the encounters unbelievable, the narrative plodding, as thick at point as the London fog and the fog in the author’s mind.

Samson does not write badly; he just doesn’t write very well. If he were not already Mister Shardlake I am convinced that this book would have gathered rejection slips rather than accolades from the likes of the Guardian and the Independent. Quite frankly, it’s a shallow and immature book, no more than a vehicle for the writer’s political prejudices. If you like alternate history and political thrillers go to Fatherland instead. It’s infinitely superior.

Castles made of Sand

There is a Japanese proverb which goes “Vision without action is a daydream; but action without vision is a nightmare.”  It serves, so far as I am concerned, as the prefect epitaph for the Second Iraq War.  I cannot conceive of any action in either American or British history more abysmal than the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  It was a monumental error of judgement, the consequences of which are likely to remain with us for generations to come.

Simon Heffer and Charles Moore, two of my favourite press columnists, have expressed some admiration in the past for Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister who took this country into one gung ho war after another, the prime minister who took us into Iraq. 

It perplexes me that anyone can have a good word for Blair; it perplexes me why people are not angrier over the damage he and Gordon Brown, his Chancellor and successor, did to the strategic and political interests of this country.  Quite apart from their other sins, Blair and Brown, the two Bs, bear joint responsibility for possibly the worst military humiliation in British history.  I’ll elaborate on this point a bit later.

Iraq, of course was essentially the third B’s war, the B in question being George W. Bush.  I’ve not long finished The Endgame: the Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor.  This important book is essentially a history of American involvement in Iraq, which probably means that it will have a more limited readership in England.  If so this will be a pity, for the authors have important and uncomfortable things to say about British involvement also.  

Although The Endgame, as the title suggest, purports to be an account of the final stages of the war in Iraq, it’s actually a very good narrative of the course of the entire conflict, exhaustive in its attention to detail.  The authors, who work for the New York Times, are military specialists rather than professional historians.  In some ways this accounts for both the strengths and weaknesses of their book. 

As a blow by blow inside view of the military and strategic challenges faced it’s a superlative chronology.  Unfortunately Gordon and Trainor have left themselves little time to stand and stare, resulting in a weakness in analysis.  Still, given the range of resources used, including classified cables and personal interviews, The Endgame is bound to serve as an invaluable mine for future generations of historians. 

War, as Carl von Clausewitz observed, is the continuation of politics by other means.  If so, the political comprehension of Bush and Blair was utterly abysmal. It was the soldiers on the ground, as well as the Iraqi people, who suffered as a consequence of their ignorance.  To slightly adapt the Roman historian Tacitus, in invading Iraq the American president and the British prime minister made a desolation and called it democracy. 

There were a whole series of political, cultural, religious and historical factors that should have urged caution.  Saddam Hussein was a wicked despot; of that there is no doubt.  But to believe his removal would lead to a brave new world of freedom and democracy is stunningly naïve.  The truth is that Iraq is not so much a nation as a hornet’s nest.  The invasion of 2003, with little in the way of forward political planning, simply set the hornet’s buzzing.  The West won the war only to lose the peace.

The only virtue in Bush is that he kept his nerve and listened to his military specialists.  With the situation almost out of control, the President committed extra fighting forces, ably commanded by generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno.  The so-called ‘surge’ of 2007-8, the account of which is at the heart of The Endgame, effectively broke the back of the al-Qaeda led insurgency. 

The surge was important in recovering the honour of the US military; it was even more important in winning over Sunni tribes, disgusted by the extremism of al-Qaeda, their former shield against Shia extremists, and the foreign fanatics it had introduced into the country. As Gordon and Trainor say of the surge, it was a military event that succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation in tamping down sectarian violence and breaking the back of both Sunni and Shia terrorism. 

The relative success of the American surge stands in sharp contrast to British performance in the south around the city of Basra.  In time to come I am convinced, as I suggested above, that what happened here will stand alongside the most serious defeats in British military history.  It was more than that: the British Army was humiliated.  The fault is not that of the soldiers, who did their duty in the most extreme circumstances, but sections of the senior command.  The fault, above all, is that of Blair and Brown, who gave the army a task and then starved it of the resources that would have ensured its successful completion. 

As the Americans reinforced Baghdad, the British withdrew from Basra, leaving it to murderous anarchy.  As the Americans successfully negotiated with Sunni leaders, the British surrendered abjectly to the Shia fanatics of the Mahdi Army.  The appeasement did little good.  Even in the base around Basra airport, British troops came under sustained mortar and rocket attack.  The insurgency in the south was only broken after Petraeus sent American forces to back up the regular Iraqi army.  Meanwhile the British division commander was off in Switzerland for a spot of skiing.

The authors rightly blame the timidity of the British government for the Basra fiasco.  But the chief political culprit of The Endgame is George W. Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama.  This was not his war, as he was quick to demonstrate in coming to office in 2009.  The chief focus on the 'war on terror' (what a disaster that has been) was shifted away from Iraq and back to Afghanistan.  American troops were gradually withdrawn from the former with the result that all the gains of the surge have effectively been squandered.  Now al-Qaeda is back; now Iran uses Iraqi airspace to send military support to the beleaguered President Assad in Syria.  All this effort, all those lives for what exactly? – for precisely nothing.  Castles made of sand slip into the sea eventually.

The Tides of Time

Here’s a literary recipe.  Take a big book, an epic.  Cover a slice of national history, several decades for preference.  Introduce a family over three generations.  Combine real historical figures with fictitious characters.  Season the whole mixture with fleeting moments of happiness and liberal amounts of tragedy.  What do you have?  You know, surely you know?  Yes, of course – you have War and Peace! 

Actually on this particular occasion you don’t.  What you have Vassily Aksynov’s Generations of Winter, a book which the Washington Post described as “the great Russian novel, the 20^th century equivalent of War and Peace.”  All I can say is that the Washington Post needs to get out more; it needs to wander down the highways and byways of Russian literature.  There are novels far greater than Generations of Winter.  One immediately comes to mind – Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, the only modern novel, so far as I am concerned, that really does stand up to War and Peace. 

Of course I can’t blame Aksynov for the hyperbole of the Washington Post.  Ah, but just a minute.  That’s not quite true.  I can blame him inasmuch as he offers a challenge to Tolstoy on his own ground.  The knight enters the lists in a wholly self-conscious way, too big for his horse and too big for his armour.  Tolstoy thunders down, upsetting the mount and unseating the rider!  Oh, if only he had been more modest; if only he had challenged Pasternak first.  For Generations of Winter might weigh in better on a first charge with Doctor Zhivago. 

It’s certainly a book conceived on a monumental scale, one which tackles Russian history head on, a slice of the twentieth century, from the tranquil mid-1920s, a period of relative liberalisation, through the dark 1930s, the time of Stalin’s Great Purge, on to the Second World War.  It follows the fortunes of the Gradov family, in happiness and in sorrow; and when it comes to sorrow no other nation quite matches Russia.  It follows the fate of Boris Gradov, a leading Soviet doctor, and his children – Nikita, a soldier, Nina, a poet, and Kirill, an idealist.  It follows, in turn, the fate of their children. 

The author should know whereof he speaks.  Both his parents were arrested at the height of Stalin’s terror when he was not quite five years old.  His mother was Eugenia Ginzburg, herself a writer, who spent years in the concentration camps of Kolyma and in Siberian exile, recording her experiences in Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind.  Aksynov, who did not see her again until he was sixteen, was sent to a state orphanage, another kind of gulag, a death sentence for so many children, from which he was rescued by his uncle. 

Alas, if only he had been a little less contrived in his approach to the subject matter we might be dealing with a superb novel, perhaps even a great one, rather than one which is simply good.  Obviously I can only talk about the English translation but the style, the narrative technique, seems to me to be course and clumsy at points.  The various ‘intermissions’, moreover, are horribly contrived, self-conscious and embarrassing literary artefacts. 

Generations of Winter is also a game of two halves.  Actually – as I subsequently discovered – it really is a game of three parts except the third part is missing!  In large measure this explains why the novel is so uneven.  The first part leading up to the Second World War is assured and focused.  The second part lacks coherence.  In the end, without the sequel, we are simply left hanging, unsure of the fate of the various characters. 

I do not think that Generations of Winter is a great book, but it is an honest one.  It’s an uncompromising picture of what life was like in Stalin’s nightmarish utopia.  It’s a picture of betrayal, of lives all but destroyed by arbitrary whims and political paranoia; it’s a picture of unwholesome people like Stalin and the reptilian Beria, chief of the NKVD, the thuggish and criminal state security apparatus.  It’s a picture, above all, of corruption.  Here the author is direct rather than subtle.  At one point Boris Gradov treats Stalin for extreme constipation.  The dictator, you see, is nothing but a sack of shit. 

I read this book, a surprise gift, over the Christmas holiday and found myself beguiled, my various criticisms notwithstanding.  This is living history, history mediated through the eyes of real people, who when they are not real are fictions!  I followed the Gradovs and their various fates, never wholly losing interest, though from time to time losing sight of some members of the family.

I was irritated, though, by the artificiality which breaks through from time to time.  There are too many contrived encounters, particularly those involving Townsend Reston, an American journalist, and leading members of the Gradov family.  His meeting with Nina Gradov in the Moscow metro during a German bombing raid stretches credulity to the point of absurdity.  Then there is the relationship between Veronika, Nikita Gradov’s wife, and Colonel Kevin Taliaferro, an American military attaché, which takes credulity beyond absurdity.  Here the book descends almost into the comic nonsense of soap opera. 

But, as I say, it’s an honest narrative of dishonest times.  I remember an observation from Doctor Zhivago, where a character says that the personal life was dead in Russia, that it had been killed by history.  There must have been many families like the Gradovs, real people, people who maintained decent standards in the midst of indecency, who did their best to retain something of the personal life; who ensured, even in the most trying of circumstances, that they would not be drowned by the tides of time.  For these generations Generations of Winter stands as a worthy testimony. 

A Christmas Memory

  

I was a precocious child.  I have before me The Christmas Reader edited by Godfrey Smith, the paperback version published by Penguin Books in 1986.  On the flyleaf I see the following inscription, written in a bold, clear hand – “To mama from Anastasia, Christmas 1986.”  How could I not be precocious?  I was all of six months old!

This collection, at over three hundred pages, is an absolute delight, a treasure chest full of golden literary nuggets - poems, short stories, anecdotes, diary entries, extracts from novels, songs, recipes and menus, all on the common theme of Christmas. 

Smith, formerly a columnist with the Sunday Times, was asked for help by one John Simmons.  Mister Simmons, who belonged to a supper club, had read an extract from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol the previous December.  What could he read them this year, he asked the journalist, that was any near as good?  Smith duly put the question to his readers.  The answers came cascading as from a horn of plenty.  In the end, as he puts it in the anthology’s introduction, there was enough to keep the supper club entertained until the middle of the present century!

I first read my gift to mother when I was about twelve.  I’ve been reading it on and off ever since, always at this time of year, of course, as the days get shorter and Christmas draws near.  There are so many gems that I simply can’t possibly mention them all in a manageable blog article.  There were discoveries that took me, like an explorer, on different journeys.  It was in these pages that I came across American writers like Willa Cather, Truman Capote, O Henry and Damon Runyon for the very first time. 

Runyon is represented, guys and dolls, by Dancing Dan’s Christmas, an amusing tale set in Prohibition days and written in his own incomparable style.  Truman is also represented by a short story, the wonderfully poignant A Christmas Memory, a tale of an unusual friendship between a child and an elderly woman who thought like a child.  It moved me when I first read it; it moves me still, the pair of lost kites, rather like hearts, moving towards heaven.

In the same section – Now One Time it Comes on Christmas…- there is a piece by Alistair Cooke, a journalist based in the States who used to broadcast on life there to people in England.  It’s called Christmas in Vermont, not a short story but an account of the holiday he spent in 1976 with his daughter and her family, who live in a remote farm in the north of the State.  The prose is wonderful, limpid and shining.  Even more wonderful is his description of a Christmas feast where nothing, not even the wine, was ‘store boughten’, as they say in New England.  He concludes by writing of his grandson;

And here, at four, he’s skiing over the deep and crisp and even like a Disney doll.  And this is all the life that Adam knows.  One day he will grow up and, I’m afraid, taste of the forbidden fruit.  One day he will read the New York Times.  And Adam will be out of the Garden of Eden, out of Vermont, for ever. 

Do you heard of John Betjeman?  If not he was once the English Poet Laureate.  His poetry is neither clever nor sophisticated.  Rather it’s full of dry humour and simple sincerity, which made him all the more popular with people who normally take very little interest in poetry.  He is represented in this collection by a poem simply called Christmas.  The last three verses will give you something of the flavour;

And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall ?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

It really does not matter if you believe or not.  The words are uplifiting enough.

There are other verses including the much-parodied Christmas Day in the Workhouse, parodied in such immortal lines as “Then up spoke one old pauper/With a face as bold as brass/We don’t want your Christmas pudding/You can stick it up….”  I don’t think I need continue, do I?  The original, though now laughable in its dripping melodrama, is evidence of just how dreaded this much-despised Victorian institution once was. 

In his introduction Smith touches on the criticisms of modern Christmases.  I’m sure you know the sort of thing - they are too commercial, too corrupted, too trivialised.  It was all so much better in the past.  But that’s just the point – Christmas is all about the past, all about nostalgia.  It brings a longing for things that have been, things that have passed, and things that never were.  Hilaire Belloc’s A Remaining Christmas, written in the 1920s, calls for Christmas Past.  Then we have Washington Irving’s The Christmas Dinner, written a century before, where the old English squire regrets the passing of traditions two centuries before that! 

There are some seriously funny pieces.  Here I give special mention to John Julius Norwich’s spin on The Twelve Days of Christmas, the traditional carol detailing a succession of increasingly unusual gifts sent by a true love to a true love.  By the end the true love remains true no longer.  In the form of a series of letters from the recipient, it’s better to hear it read aloud with the right pacing, but it’s still very funny on paper.  Here, for example, is letter five, received after the five gold rings:

Dearest Edward,

The postman has just delivered five most beautiful gold rings, one for each finger, and all fitting perfectly.  A really lovely present – lovelier in a way than birds, which do take rather a lot of looking after.  The four that arrived yesterday are still making a terrible row, and I’m afraid that none of us got much sleep last night.  Mummy says she wants to ‘wring’ their necks – she’s only joking, I think; though I know what she means.  But I love the rings.  Bless you.

Love, Emily.

She does not love what comes in the days after.  In the end the whole lot, the birds, the lords a-leaping, the ladies dancing, the pipers piping, the drummers drumming, the maids a-milking are sent back by a firm of solicitors, Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Run, who inform the true love that his true love has taken out an injunction against him! 

I could go on and on.  There is A Child in the Forest, an extract from Winifred Foley’s beautiful and poignant memoir, or the unbelievably sumptous Christmas Dinner at Mount Vernon, the menu George and Martha Washington placed before guests at their Virginia home.   But not wishing to try your patience any longer I must stop.  Let me just say that there is so much more, delights of all kinds.  This, as Mister Pickwick said, is indeed comfort. 

The Hand of History

There are not many jokes in communism. Actually that’s not quite true. A case could be made that communism itself was a massive joke, except those living under it dared not laugh, or laugh only at their personal peril. All humour in what used to be called the Eastern Bloc was inevitably of a subversive nature. For as George Orwell wrote, a thing is funny when it upsets the established order; that every joke is a tiny revolution. The revolutionaries did not want revolution; they wanted total conformity.

Have you ever been in a situation, or a place, say a church or a library, where something struck you as funny? It may not be all that funny on later reflection but just try to contain a laugh when it wants to explode!

I’ve been reading Anne Applebaum’s masterly Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56, a follow up to her equally masterly Gulag: a History of the Soviet Camps. There are not many laughs in that, you may think. But you are wrong. I’m not at all sure I could have survived the dull curtain of monotony that descended on Eastern Europe after 1945 for one simple reason – I have an acute sense of humour.

You see, I would have been overcome with explosive fits of laughter over the shear earnest pettiness of it all. Imagine going in to a bookshop and seeing children’s titles like Six-Year-Old Bronek and the Six Year Plan. You leave quickly, only to have your senses assaulted by a propaganda hoarding. There it is, just across the street, boldly announcing “Every artificially inseminated pig is a blow to capitalist imperialism!” Your lips are tightly closed; the laughter is escaping like steam under pressure. You don’t want to be seen so you turn away to look at the latest civic art, only to be confronted by a painting entitled “The technology and organisation of cattle slaughter.” Was the Berlin Wall really brought down, I wonder, by a great outburst of laughter? Sorry, I should write the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall, to give its official title.

Yes, there is humour in the story but the bigger picture is altogether bleak. In picturing the history of communism in Eastern Europe I see a façade, eaten hollow from within by termites. In the end the whole thing simply collapsed under its inherent contradictions, to borrow a piece of cherished Marxist terminology.

Let’s be absolutely clear about one thing: for people in places like Poland, particularly Poland, the Second World War did not end in 1945. The immediate joy of ‘liberation’ simply gave way to an understanding that a new occupation had taken hold, one that was to last for decades.

The expression ‘Iron Curtain’ did not originate with Winston Churchill but it was he who was to give it greatest resonance in speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri in March, 1946;

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. 

Applebaum sets out her stall quickly. She refuses to entertain the revisionist view that the imposition of communism throughout Central and Eastern Europe after 1945 was a countermove to American policy at the start of what was to become the Cold War. No, the importation of a Soviet-style system was a deliberate ideological move, all part of the greater revolutionary good. As she quite rightly says, there was a template already in place for this in the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940, states that had been consigned to Stalin under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

So far as Stalin was concerned there were also foreign policy advantages. The new communist satrapies acted as a buffer zone in a period of growing East West tension. More specifically, an independent Poland would clearly have been a major political embarrassment to the Soviets, doubtless demanding the return of those territories in the east of the country seized by Stalin in 1939 as part of his satanic bargain with Hitler. For Poland it was a bleak choice between extinction and communism.

As always the road to hell begins with noble intentions. Alongside the cynical little Stalins, who had spent years licking the boots of their Master in Moscow, there were genuine idealists, people who believed in the lie. They came as self-perceived liberators, ready to free the working classes from capitalist exploitation. They expected to be welcomed in their establishment of a brave new world. Unfortunately for them it had real people in it.

The truth came quickly; the truth came in Poland. In 1946 the people decisively rejected a communist-backed referendum. Perplexed, the government rejected the people, concluding that they had acted in “some kind of incomprehensible spirit of resistance and complete ignorance.”

Here I immediately fast forwarded to the events of June, 1953 in East Berlin, the first serious uprising against imposed communist rule. Bertolt Brecht, the playwright, had hitherto served as the German Democratic Republic’s tame intellectual and court poet. But even he had enough, offering comment on the worker state’s suppression of the workers in his poem The Solution;

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

That would seem to serve as the very definition of the so-called People’s Democracies. In the place of real people came a hollow cardboard illusion.

Applebaum is splendid in her treatment of the high politics, in her description of the appalling stooges who reproduced the bleak apparatus of Stalinism in their respective spheres of influence: personality cults, purges, camps, bogus trials, the whole depressing paraphernalia. She also offers a description of the corrosive effects of communism on everyday life. Any kind of personal or free expression, even in the most minor forms of liberty, was excised. Popular consciousness was filled with the state and nothing but the state. One small example serves here. The scout movement was banned as were all other private societies. In 1950 in Poland a seventeen-year-old girl met with friends from a former troop. All were arrested and given jail sentences of two to five years.

Iron Curtain is a splendid piece of work, witty, perceptive, thoroughly researched and superbly written. I was impressed enough to consider it the most important book I’ve read this year, one that will make a lasting contribution to our understanding of this period in history, a tragedy on which the final curtain has thankfully fallen. My main criticism concerns the title. It’s not a comprehensive history of Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1956, as the title misleadingly suggests, but principally a history of three countries behind the Curtain – Poland, East Germany and Hungary. There is next to nothing on places like Romania, where the whole communist experiment eventually descended to the most degenerate form.

Don’t let that bother you. The history we are given is first class, a journey into a heart of darkness. Iron Curtain is a book that is scholarly and accessible, free of all condescension while losing nothing in the telling. It’s a commendable achievement. I felt both exhilarated at deflated at the end, especially after reading about the brutal suppression of the 1956 anti-communist rising in Hungary, which proved to all who were not blind that the liberation of 1945 was nothing but a lie. I was exhilarated by the narrative and deflated by the fate of some of our fellow Europeans, to whom history had dealt such a poor hand.

A Million Tragedies

If you’ve seen the David Lean film version of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago you may recall the scene where Lara, hearing wolves howl in the snowy distance, turns to Yuri in fright, saying that this is a terrible time to be alive. This is in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War that followed; history in action, a process that overwhelmed so many individual lives, consumed by fear, uncertainty and terror.

But Lara did not know then how bad things were to become, that the wolves would not stay in the distance or outside the door. In the end she herself was to be the victim of the greatest fear of all – Stalin’s all-consuming Purge of the late 1930s which reached its murderous height in 1937, the Yezhovchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD security apparatus.

In his novel Pasternak writes of his character;

One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that was later mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.

She was a nameless number, that’s all, drawn into the maelstrom like so many others. As Stalin is reputed to have said, a million deaths is not a tragedy, merely a statistic. The victims of his regime are gone beyond recall, just a meaningless list of meaningless names, voices that can no longer be heard. The rest is silence.

But it’s not. The silence has been broken with whispers. It has been broken by The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia by Orlando Figes, a British specialist in Russian history. It isn’t a new work; it was published as long ago as 2007. The subject certainly interests me, having read and reviewed other books on this phase in Russian history, here and elsewhere. I would have tackled it eventually though I finally came to it as the dust settled after one of the little sandstorms that overtake publishing and the academic world now and then, inevitably obscuring the horizon

I’ll come to this in a bit. Let me begin by saying that I consider Figes to be one of the best historians in his particular field. I hugely enjoyed his account of the Crimean War and I think A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 is the single best account of the whole period.

I do not think The Whisperers has surpassed this achievement, but it is still an important forward step in historical research. Its achievement lies in what I would call ‘a panorama from below.’ This is the voice of the voiceless, of people who experienced the Great Terror at first hand, not the politicians, the ideologues and the apparatchiks but the ordinary people of Russia.

Working with a team of researchers, Figes has recovered so much personal testimony on the threshold of an even greater silence. For that alone he is to be commended. He also draws on family archives, letters, diaries, personal memoirs and so on, testimony that would have otherwise have been forgotten, unread and turning yellow with age.

In Stalin’s Russia Big Brother, in the shape of the secret police, was constantly keeping the private citizen under observation, ready to pounce, like a wolf, on the least sign of deviation. I write ‘private citizen’ but there really was no privacy and no retreat. Stalinism fed on moral corruption, and moral corruption begins at the level of the individual.

Yes, the state was ever watchful but it depended most particularly on those who were prepared to denounce others, either for base motives of personal gain – apartment space was at a premium - , or because they wanted to wash out some ‘stain’ in their personal biography by proving themselves more orthodox than the orthodox. One published notice serves here: “I, Nikolai Ivanov, renounce my father, an ex-priest, because for many years he deceived the people by telling them God exists, and for that reason I am severing my relations with him.”

Deception and self-deception, lies and half truths, all were absorbed into a jungle-like struggle for survival. Commenting on one journal from 1937 Figes notes that “…people were becoming so adept at concealing meaning in their speech that they were in danger of losing the capacity to speak the truth altogether.”

In a way personal life turned into a bizarre Greek tragedy, all emotion hidden behind masks. Those desperate to speak the truth turned in on themselves, like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, confining their thoughts to diaries, a release carrying its own particular danger.

The title has a double meaning that becomes increasingly obvious the further one reads. Whisperer in Russian has two senses: those who speak quietly for fear of being overheard, and those who inform on others, even friends and family, for fear of being suspected. Denounce, in other words, before you are denounced. Figes writes that “The distinction has its origins in the idiom of the Stalin years, when the whole of society was made up of whisperers of one sort or another.”

Personal and moral corruption came through fear and intimidation. There is, however, another form of corruption, one which begins not with baseness but with idealism. The key example here is one Konstantin Siminov, whom Figes singles out as the ‘central figure’ of The Whisperers. He was a journalist, novelist and poet who enjoyed a particularly successful career under Stalin, demonstrating his loyalty time and again.

There was no opportunism here; he was a genuine believer. Even the arrest and disappearance of family, friends and colleagues did nothing to dent his enthusiasm. It was this enthusiasm that allowed him to embrace every ideological perversion, including Stalin’s late anti-Semitism. He was loyal even after the end. As the truth began to come out after the dictator’s death, Siminov held to his early course. The alternative was just too awful: the alternative was to admit that his whole life had been based on a fraud. In the end he did. This was to be his particular tragedy.

The Whisperers is an important book, I would go so far as to say a crucial one, a necessary testimony coming at just the right point in time, coming as a new fog of lies and misinformation about the past and about Stalin descends on Putin’s Russia. Even so it’s not a perfect book; there are flaws. As I hinted above, I read it in the aftermath of a controversy earlier this year. Russian publishers scrapped a projected translation because of alleged ‘inaccuracies.’ The story was picked up by Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen, two American academics, who published their findings in The Nation.

Errors of fact are always a concern, particularly when those errors concern people who are still alive. But it seems to me that given the scale and scope of The Whisperers, given the mountain of primary material, such a thing while not excusable is at least understandable. Many of the errors, though, seem to have been introduced by the Russian translators or were present in the source documents. Once this had been taken into account the author wrote that it left “…a few genuine errors in a book based on thousands of interviews and archival documents. These I regret.”

I do not regret this book, perhaps one of the most ambitions and worthwhile exercises in oral history ever undertaken. The flaws notwithstanding, it is a commendable achievement. It is, if you like, the story of a million tragedies.