Ding, dong, Hugo is Dead, Horrible Hugo is Dead!

Bye, bye

“Chavez Vive!”, the red-shirted chavs are shouting on the streets of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela.  No, he is not – Chavez Muerto!   Thank goodness that the world is rid of another petty demagogue, a corrupt and degraded icon of the left. It's a measure of just how degenerate left wing thinking has become when a creature like this is celebrated.  Rather have no more heroes anymore than a hero like Horrible Hugo. 

By his friends shall ye know him, and lamentations are coming from the likes of Syria’s Basher Bashar al-Assad and our very own Ken Livingstone, King Newt himself. Diane Abbott, that fat thick black racist, said that his death was a ‘tragedy’ for South America. Imam George Galloway described him as ‘Spartacus.’  I wish that the Romans had got to him sooner.  “He’s Spartacus”, I would gleefully have shouted. 

Obsequies are also coming from Iran’s President Mahmoud Amadinejad.  Apparently Saint Hugo will rise from the dead, reappearing among us in the wake of Shia Islam’s long awaited Twelfth Imam, which means, of course, it will be the twelfth of never, which will be a long, long time.  Then there is the mass outpouring of woe from the readership of the Guardian, a paper, ironically, that would never have survived in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.  Hmm...maybe there is something to be said for Chavez after all. 

We go now to another delusional tyranny; we go to Cuba.  There two days of national mourning has been announced, a period of “deep and excruciating sorrow”.  It will indeed be deep and excruciating for the Castro mafia if a post-Chavez government cuts off the oil transfusions which have kept their shabby regime afloat for the past few years. 

Meanwhile, back in Caracas, the red shirts wail. Oh, woe is them.  Vice President Nicolas Maduro led the lamentations.  There he is, flailing around the place, blaming shadowy right wing and foreign forces for Chavez’ premature demise.  Apparently his cancer might have been plotted from ‘outside.’   Yes, indeed, a successful attack, code named Operation Crab! 

Not everyone is as deluded as Maduro and the hysterical canaille in Caracas.  There are those in the country who are courageously prepared to speak the truth.  “Hate and division was the only thing that he spread”, one man said.  “He did a lot of harm because there are no institutions, there is no justice.  He mistreated everyone who disagreed with his government.” 

Even so the mourning extends, yea, even so far as the United States, that is to say, even so far as the actor Sean Penn.  Apparently Chavez’ death is the hardest thing he has had to endure since trying to watch all of ex-wife Robin Wright’s series House of Cards on Netflix.  He plans to honour his late buddy by making life a ‘living hell’ for his fellow Americans.  I guess he won’t have to do very much then; his mere presence among them should be more than enough.  Penn’s counter-attack on the Great Satan will include chain-smoking, which may mean that Operation Crab will soon claim another victim.  In that sad event I expect the scenes of hysteria on the streets of Los Angeles greatly to exceed those in Caracas.

Elsewhere there is a lot of pious hand-wring, the usual guff that follows the departure of leaders like this, hated while they were alive, loved now that they are dead.  William Hague, our own Foreign Secretary, claims to have been ‘saddened’ by the event.  Personally I prefer my hypocrisy in extremely small doses.  Evo Morales, Bolivia’s indigenous and semi-literate president, said that Chavez is “more alive than ever.”  Actually he’s more dead than ever.  Amado Boudou, Argentina’s vice-President, tweeted that “one of the best has left us; you will always be with us.”  Never mind the contradiction here.  Perhaps he might like to go and find him?  I would advise him to hold his nose in the process. 

Amidst the guff there is a nugget or two of sanity. The best, I think, comes from Ed Royce, Chairman of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs.  “Hugo Chavez was a tyrant," he said “who forced the Venezuelan people to live in fear.  His death dents the alliance of anti-US leftist leaders in South America.  Good riddance to this dictator.”  Venceremos, Comrade Royce! 

The simple fact is that for all of his left-wing credentials, or rather because of his leftist credentials,  Hugo Chavez was nothing but a bully and a thug, a fascist by any other name, who did much to destroy the economy of Venezuela for the greater good of...of what, exactly?  Why, of himself and his venal, money-grubbing family.  Is there anything at all to be said in his favour?  There is this much: he over-fulfilled, Stalin-style, aspects of his own five year plan – Venezuela’s murder and inflation rates are now among the highest in the world. 

My, how it delights me to speak ill of the dead; how it delights me that Chavez has been swept off to the deepest circle of hell, where he can dance forever with the likes of the late Kim Jon-il.

The world will not record their having been there;
Heaven's mercy and its justice turn from them.
Let's not discuss them; look and pass them by...

Spaghetti Dialectics

Have you heard of a movie called 1900?  If not, it’s a 1976 Italian extravaganza, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.  I say it’s Italian but the leading parts are mostly taken by an international cast, chiefly American.  Apart from France's Gerald Depardieu – amazingly young and thin looking – there is Robert de Niro – also amazingly young looking -, Donald Sutherland and Burt Lancaster. 

Was this, I wonder, a time when their careers were in the doldrums?  Perhaps they still had to make a name for themselves?  No, no, that can’t be true.  Lancaster was a cinematic veteran at the time.  Well, maybe he just wasn’t getting the parts anymore.  Better to star in spaghetti dialectics rather than nothing at all!

Yes, that’s what we are dealing with, a lengthy Marxist soap opera, tedious if it wasn’t so risibly ridiculous.  I knew Marxists were dim but I had no idea just how dim.  Watch it if you have the time or the inclination.  I did by invitation and I had such a fun time.  

It’s a side-splitting pastiche of Italian history from 1900 – hence the title – to 1945 and beyond.  As I say, the lead parts are mostly taken by foreigners, but the director has managed to dig up some wonderful grotesques to masquerade as the poor suffering peasants.  Looking at them it’s almost as if, Pygmalion-style, he has managed to bring a lot of gargoyles to life!

This, dear readers, is a tale with a moral, an everyday story of proletarian folk.  It begins with the birth of two boys into entirely different strata of society.  Oh, but not at the same time, you understand; for when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?  First comes the peasant, one Olmo, born into a rather revolting clan known as the Dalcos.  Olmo – eventually to be filled out in adulthood by Depardieu – is destined to be a horny handed son of toil.  Actually, no, he’s destined to be a self-righteous and sanctimonious prig. 

After him into this world is thrown Alfredo Berlinghieri, the grandson of the padrone, the landowner, destined to be padrone himself one day and destined to be Robert de Niro.  1900 is their story, the story of Olmo and Alfredo, a story of an impossible friendship of social unequals, or an impossibly funny friendship.  These two will negotiate in their separate ways through the currents and eddies of twentieth century Italian politics. 

The real excitement comes after the First World War.  Olmo goes to the front, of course, and Alfredo stays behind, of course.  Well, he also serves who only stands and stares.  Into the mix comes a certain Attilia (note the name) Mellanchini, whom Alfredo’s father has employed as a foreman.  Now we have Donald Sutherland measuring up to what must surely be the most bizarre and grotesque part in his whole acting career. 

This Mellanichi, you see, is set to become the community Blackshirt.  Oh, but not just that; he also turns out to be a sadist and a sexual pervert.  Into Marx comes Freud, which I assume is the director’s own particular dialectic, the Bertolucci factor.  The important thing is that he is a bit of an epiphenomena, no more than the creature of the padrone, without a thought or a political instinct of his own.  He is hired, if you like, in 1922 and fired in 1943, hired by the father and discarded by the son, those wicked capitalists who take up fascism when it suits them and discard it when it does not.  Simple!  Oh, I should say that the friendship between Alfredo and Olmo does nothing to stop the former allowing Attila the fascist and his gang giving the latter a good kicking at one point.  You see, it’s the class struggle in action! 

Wait!  I completely forgot to mention Regina (Laura Betti), the poor relation to whom the Berlinghieris extend their condescending charity.  She turns out to be as weird sexually and in every other sense as Attila, with whom she takes up (naturally), proving to one and all that fascism was brought into the world as a vehicle for poor relations and perverts!  Ah, Regina, how I felt for her when Alfredo introduces his glamorous French wife Ada, a touch of exotic chic by Dominique Sanda.  How will she manage, the embittered Regina muses, among the pigs, the shit and the Dalcos?  Yes, well, give me the pigs over the Dalcos any day! 

On we go thesis, antithesis and synthesis, a merry Marxist march.  At this point I’m desperately trying not to identify with the fascists (I’m no sex pervert), especially when Attila and his merry band start shooting peasants for whistling the Italian communist anthem badly out of tune.  Obviously these people are no more than rather sensitive music critics. What a pity Olmo wasn’t around, having previously made good his escape after pelting the unfortunate Attila with horse manure.  Sex pervert, yes; coprophile, no.

He turns up again, unfortunately, in 1945, a partisan and a communist; sorry, he was that all along, a socialist with holes in his pocket.  Now he is back, ready to do justice.  Attila has already been pronged and butchered – serves him right – but not before he shouts to Regina, his wife of some years, that their children will reap what has been sown on this day.  And now I call to mind the recent remark by the Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s comeback kid, that maybe Mussolini wasn’t such a bad chap after all.  A positive saint, I would say, compared with the Dalcos of this life.

Olmo does justice to his old friend the padrone, who is executed...no, not really, only symbolically, by a kangaroo court of peasant grotesques.  Where did the director dig up that munch munch woman – from the local cemetery, perhaps?  The padrone is dead; Alfredo Berlinghieri lives, proving that he is dead.  Confused?  Don’t be, for the padrone is not dead at all.  The struggle goes on, and there is Italy in the last century, after which history came to a full stop, or a Berlusconi, whichever your preference is.  Anything, anything, but a Dalco.   

Incidentally this is not movie review.  I’m just having a spot of fun, Ana’s delicious dialectical dance. :-)

Nuclear Facejobs

So, North Korea has announced plans for further rocket launches and a nuclear test as ‘New phase of the anti-US struggle.’ The official communiqué could not make it any clearer;

We do not hide the fact that a variety of satellites and long-range rockets will be launched by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea one after another, and a nuclear test of a higher level which will be carried out by it in the upcoming all-out action will target against the US, the sworn enemy of the Korean people. Settling accounts with the US needs to be done with force, not with words. The world will clearly see how the army and people of the DPKK punishes all kinds of hostile forces and emerge as the final victor while following the just road of defending its sovereignty.

I know, I know; the prose is not very elegant, but surely it creates a mood of dread? The hermit state really does seem intent on settling accounts with America but, contrary to assertion, not with missiles but with a lethal barrage of...words. Yes, let’s bore the hostile forces to death with intercontinental verbal incontinence. Quick; take to the shelters; here comes a dirty bomb of nouns and verbs!

Do not be too concerned by the latest petulance from Pyongyang. As far as real intercontinental capability is concerned, it’s almost certain that the country lacks the capacity. Of course it can still do a lot of damage with short range weapons aimed at South Korea and Japan. Still, look at the facts. Regimes that plan aggressive actions do not generally announce their intentions in advance. Look out, America; here we come: the Imperial Japanese fleet is on its way to Pearl Harbor.

It’s getting just a bit boring, this pseudo-nation behaving like a petulant child. We’ve been here before, in 2006 and again in 2009, nuclear tests that provoked international outrage. But there was no advance publicity with these past travesties, no bluster, no suggestion that the regime was set to punish ‘all kinds of hostile forces.’

The truth is Kim Jong Un, the Fat Leader, and his military chiefs are a bit like a collection of mafia dons, making an offer you can’t refuse. No test, no missile, and no words, just as long as the price is right. After all, this is a country that can build weapons but can’t feed its own people.

The biggest threat North Korea presents is not its weapons arsenal but itself, and the greatest threat is not to the US but to China, its ostensible ally. The Chinese, infinitely patient, are beginning to lose patience. They have had enough of their blustering and adolescent neighbour. But there is only so far they can go in expressing disapproval, least the baby starts howling and throwing his toys out of his pram.

Beijing said naughty, naughty after the last nuclear test, punishing baby with a series of sanctions that were not sanctions. The latest hot air is a cause of renewed embarrassment. But China can’t go too far in reigning in the Fat Leader. His ultimate threat is not the explosion of his nuclear arsenal but the implosion of his own benighted nation, causing millions to flee over the border, the stuff of Chinese nightmares.

Meanwhile the reports that the Fat Leader has been having plastic surgery to look more like the Great Leader, his dead grandfather, are entirely wrong. This falsehood is a hideous criminal act that the party, state, army and people can never tolerate;

Those hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership of the nation should not expect any mercy or leniency. Time will clearly show what dear price the human scum and media in the service of traitors of South Korea, slaves of capital, will have to pay.

Would it, I wonder be as high as the price for a nose job? Oh, well; I can’t say I haven’t been warned. Even as I write a severe incontinent reprimand is winging its way in my general direction.

China’s Ancien Régime

Last August, in China’s Hunan province, a woman by the name of Tang Hui was sent to a labour camp, sentenced to eighteen months‘ re-education’ for “seriously disturbing the social order and exerting a negative impact on society.”  Why, you may wonder, what was her crime?  Simply that she had repeatedly petitioned officials, saying that the sentences passed against the men who had kidnapped, raped and forced her eleven-year-old daughter into prostitution should have been more severe. 

Times have changed, even in China.  In times past Tang Hui would simply have vanished into night and fog.  In times present thousands went online to protest on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, which really is turning into the true voice of the people, protesting against the corruption and complacency of the country’s communist oligarchy.  She was released but the protests against the obvious injustice of the legal system have not gone away.

It was Mao Zedong, one of history’s most revolting tyrants, who set up China’s ‘reform through labour’ system, known as laojiao, in 1957.  It was a way of dealing with people who had offended the communist authorities, all the better since it did not involve the inconvenience of any form of due process. 

People can be locked up for four years simply on the whim of some petty official or other; in the past because they were supposedly ‘counter-revolutionaries’, in the present because they are perceived to be a nuisance.  At a conservative estimate some 160,000 are said to be languishing in laojiao labour camps. 

The paradox of Chinese communism is that it reproduces, in its own unique way, the abuses of the Ancien Régime.  Yes, indeed.  Those of you have read Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities may recall the fate of Dr. Manette, imprisoned in the Bastille by means of a lettre de cachet.  These documents, often issued blank, with a name to be added later, were used by the powerful to imprison people without trial or an opportunity for defence.  Laojiao is possible the closest thing the modern world has to lettre de cachet.  But the various Bastilles it supports are far fuller than they ever were in the good old bad old days in France. 

Things move slowly in China when they move at all; politically they move with all the urgency of a glacier.  Earlier this month a senior legal journalist claimed in a microblog that the government was getting ready to abandon the whole system.  Soon after laojiao consigned his tweets to silence.  Instead Xinhau, the official news agency, said that the government would “advance reforms” this year.  Yes, well, I think we all know exactly what that means. 

Soon after the release of Tang Hui a poll of some 20,000 internet users recorded a 98% verdict in favour of abolition.  I can’t be certain, of course, but I imagine the 2% who voted in favour are placemen and stooges of one kind or another.  No matter; for the poll was deleted, causing some to remark that it too had been sent to a labour camp. 

Tang Hui was lucky; her case attracted public attention, too many people to be sent comfortably off for ‘re-education through labour.’  But there are many thousands still languishing in camps, fellow petitioners, House-church Christians and others who have attracted the eye of disapproval.  It’s simply a way of silencing any form of dissent by those who don’t really qualify for the big Dissident label.  No, these are the petty people, the little people who can be incarcerated often just to settle a local vendetta. 

Just imagine a legal system where you can be picked up by the police because the local sheriff does not like your face.  Just imagine being used as slave labour by camp officials for their own personal profit.  Just imagine injustice.  Just imagine China.   

Get Back to the Chickens and Pigs

On Thursday Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is scheduled to be sworn in for yet another presidential term, unless Jesus Christ, “the greatest socialist in history”, decides that it is time for him to join the people’s commune in the sky. 

Hugh the Horrible is not even in Caracas as I write.  He is in Havana, dying of cancer.  There he is surrounded, a bit like a medieval monarch, by his court and his kin, all worried about the future, the future of the ‘revolution.’  That is to say, they are worried about the future of the wealth that they have managed to siphon off during the fifteen years Chavez has run his benighted ‘Bolivarian democracy.’

The ostentatious riches of the Chavez family in Barinas, the state where he was born, and where his brother Adán is governor, stands in non-socialist contrast to the poverty of most of the local people.  The old family home, once a small chicken and pig farm, is now a sprawling state-of-the-art ranch, a sort of Venezuelan version of South Fork. 

In the state capital, also called Barinas, the family has a luxury mansion in a high-walled compound in one of the city’s most exclusive districts.  They are to be seen travelling around the place in heavily-armed SUVs.  According to opposition figures, the clan owes a further twenty estates throughout the province.  Elena Frias, the president’s mother, has an ostentatious taste for the better things of life, including designer clothes.  Viva la Revolution!

If Elena and the rest of this grubby and nepotistic shower are worried by the expected death of the golden goose they can’t be nearly as worried as his thuggish allies across the region.  There is the Castro regime in Cuba, desperately trying to keep the demagogue alive on life support, just as he kept their regime on life support for years now with cheap oil.  There is the semi-literate Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, whose crack-brained political schemes, all supported by rent-a-mob, have been underwritten by Comrade Chavez. 

In all Chavez has spent an eye-watering trillion, yes trillion dollars in state funds to support foreign allies, his family and all his other domestic political hangers-on, including the ‘Boligarchs’ – oligarchs who have flourished under the so-called ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ - , the sort of greedy and self-serving gangsters that are such a feature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. 

Meanwhile Venezuela, with some of the richest oil reserves in the world, has gone step by step down the primrose path to economic ruin.  The cupboard is bare.  Chavez’ critics say that the very fact that he has repeatedly sought medical treatment in Cuba over the last eighteen months for his recurring cancer is a damming indictment of his stewardship of Venezuela. 

Damning indeed.  A country that should be floating on oil revenues is sinking under a surging fiscal deficit.  Inflation is out of control.  The overvalued Bolivar, the national currency, is sliding on the black market.  The country’s debt, now standing at an estimated $160billion, has increased five-fold under Chavez.  The economy has been crippled by the price and currency controls that are such a favoured feature of state socialism.

Chavez is dying of cancer.  Venezuela is dying of cancer too, the cancer of socialism.  This disease has such a predictable pathology, always resulting in the inevitable outcome of ruin, necrosis and decay.  Intelligent people recoil from it in horror.  But then intelligence was never one of El Jefe’s virtues.  There may – thank goodness - be no hope for him.  There is, perhaps, hope for Venezuela, once this appalling demagogue is off the scene and his corrupt and venal family have been dumped in the dustbin; once Elena and her dreadful progeny get back to the chickens and pigs.  

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.

Light in the Dark

Last week saw a sad anniversary in the Ukraine.  It’s eighty years since the beginning of the Holodomor, literally meaning ‘extermination by hunger’, a Stalin-made catastrophe that is thought to have been responsible for the death of up to seven million people in the years 1932 and 1933. 

It marks the first great moral nadir of communism.  It was a period of forced requisitions, a period when corn, even seed corn, was taken by the thugs of the NKVD, the state security apparatus, and other politically-inspired gangsters.  It was a period when food was marked ‘for export’ while men, women and children dropped dead in the streets.  For some it is comparable to the Holocaust.  While that is probably a step too far, in that there was no discernible racial motive involved, it shows a comparable callousness.

This tragedy is still not widely known outside the Ukraine.  The reason for this is simple enough: it was hushed up at the time by Western journalists who were little better than the stooges and dupes of Stalin.  The greatest stooge of all was Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who received a Pulitzer Prize for the ‘honesty’ of his reporting from the USSR, which might be a good indication of the true value of this benighted award. 

To the cowards and wretches like Duranty there is one honourable exception – Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist and former aid to David Lloyd George, whose reporting of the famine had him banned from the USSR.  He was later murdered in Mongolia, aged only twenty-nine, in circumstances that have never been fully explained.

It was only after the Ukraine achieved its independence that the Holodomor was accorded official recognition after years of enforced silence. Viktor Yuschenko, the former president, initiated a Holodomor Remembrance Day in 2006, marked every 25 November.  There is now a candle shaped memorial in Kiev, the capital, and a Holodomor Museum. 

Things change.  Yuschenko and the Orange Revolution are, like the Holodomor itself, in the past.  Viktor Yanukovich, the current president, started to backtrack almost as soon as he got into office.  The whole thing has been diluted, with the terror hunger now officially viewed as “a common tragedy of the Soviet people.”  There is politics here, of course; there is always politics, even in death.  The former president pursued a distinctly nationalist and anti-Russian line.  Yanukovich, in contrast, is closer to Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and Putin is close to the ghost of Stalin. 

The commemorations went ahead anyway, even with the absence of state support.  People were able to taste dishes made out of tree bark or leaves, something the desperate took to in the days of famine, a forlorn attempt to assuage hunger and cheat death.  The occasion was also marked by various symbolic events like the “uncelebrated weddings” and the “unrealised talents”, a commemoration of loss. 

Up to 2000 people gathered at the Holodomor Museum, observing a moment’s silence at 4pm precisely in memory of the dead.  Across the Ukraine lit candles were placed in windows, little stars of light flickering into history’s great darkness.  

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.  

Eric Hobsbawm: Smelly and Orthodox

The day after I left for Tunisia Eric Hobsbawm died.  A former professor at Birkbeck College, he was ‘Britain’s best known Marxist historian’.  I suppose he must have been; it said so in the Guardian, though just how many outside the common rooms and beyond the chattering classes knew of this ghastly old fraud is open to question.  Now you have a flavour of what is to follow.  Read no further if you think it a sin to speak ill of the dead, for I am about to speak ill; Ana’s silver hammer is about to fall upon Hobsbawm’s head! 

For me his passing really does mark the end of a political Cretaceous period.  He was the last Stalinist, the last of the ideological dinosaurs who corrupted intellectual life in this country for so many decades.  I’m rather glad I was away, missing some of the more nauseating tributes, including one from Ed Miliband at the Labour Party conference, where he was described as “an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family.”  Hmm, yes, I take this as a measure of the Milibands.  If you do not already know that measure you will before I have finished. 

He was also lauded by the BBC, no surprise there, in that Hobsbawm might be said to have defined a large part of the Corporation’s political and intellectual outlook in much the same way that the creepy Jimmy Savile defined its subterranean sexual morals. 

I was disappointed, though, to note that praise also came from Niall Ferguson, a right-wing historian for whom I hitherto had considerable respect.  He was rash enough to describe Hobsbawm’s cycle of books beginning with The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 as “the best introduction to modern world history in the English language.”  What utter rot!  Has he actually read these awful, badly written ideological apologetics, I have to ask?  Either he has completely failed to understand the falsity here or, like so many others, has descended into abject hypocrisy. 

Let me give you this scenario.  Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party - no friend of the Milibands - has taken part in an in-depth television interview.  In the course of this he was asked one key question – if Hitler had achieved the radiant future he promised would this have justified the murder of six million Jews?  He answers in one word: yes.

Now just imagine the perfect storm that would follow, just imagine the ostracism and the denunciations.  Of course it never happened; it’s a fiction.  It is no fiction that Hobsbawm was asked a similar question by Michael Ignatieff in an 1994 interview, namely, if the “radiant tomorrow” had actually been created in the Soviet Union would the death of 15 or 20 million people have been justified?  Yes, came the reply.  Was there a storm, was he ostracised and denounced?  No; instead Tony Blair made him a Companion of Honour in 1998.

Hobsbawm remained loyal to his murderous political passions all of his life.  He became a Communist at an early age while living in Germany at the beginning of the 1930s.  In another interview, perhaps more revealing than he ever intended, he said he joined the Communist Party partly because he was Jewish - “if I hadn’t been, I might well have become a Nazi in those circumstances.”  In a deeper sense he did: that sense in which both Nazism and Communism have a similar view of the value of human life.

Unfortunately for us he came to Britain before Hitler took power, though he always held this country, its people, its politics and its institutions in contempt.  Fortunately for him he did not go to the Soviet Union, his ideological motherland.  If he had, as a foreigner, an intellectual and a Jew he is unlikely to have survived Stalin’s purges.

Hobsbawm was a traitor in spirit.  A member of the Cambridge Apostles in the 1930s, it may very well be proved at some future point that he was also a traitor in deed.  His treason in word began early.  A supporter of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, he co-authored a pamphlet defending the Soviet attack on Finland, saying that Stalin was merely trying to protect Russia “from an invasion by British imperialists.” 

There is another irony here.  Let’s assume that this defender of the Nazi-Soviet pact had gone to the Soviet Union instead of taking advantage of British liberty, including the liberty to write laughable twaddle.  Let’s say that, by some miracle, he had survived the Great Purge, no doubt by lauding Stalin and denouncing others.  Well, then, that same Pact would almost certainly have finished him.  For Stalin, as a gesture of friendship and goodwill, was delighted to hand German Communist exiles over to the Nazis.

Instead Hobsbawm became the prime example of the idiocy and bad faith of the British left.  He became a prime example of the alienated intellectual who, as George Orwell noted, took their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow.  He became a prime example of the polysyllable-spewing Stalinist that Orwell identified in The Road to Wigan Pier and elsewhere.  The crushing of Hungarian freedom came in 1956; others left the Communist Party; Hobsbawm remained.  The crushing of the Prague Spring came in 1968; others left the Communist Party; Hobsbawm remained.  As Soviet Communism grew senile and sclerotic he grew senile and sclerotic with it.  

Hobsbawm, incidentally, was in the habit of referring to Orwell as the “upper-class Englishman Eric Blair.”  Englishman he certainly was; upper-class he certainly was not.  What marks Orwell out was his decency and his honesty, his contempt for the forms of abject power worship embraced by the likes of Hobsbawm, full of contempt for people while full of love for the Masses.

In the end the Hobsbawm disease is reducible to one thing: the cancer of abstraction.  He remained loyal to the ‘ideals’ of the Russian Revolution, even after those same ‘ideals’ descended to a murderous practice time and time and time again.  But the grand illusion actually goes deeper; it goes as deep as Rousseau and the French Revolution. 

The Soviet Experiment, you see, was for Hobsbawm just the latest expression of 'Enlightenment Values', a belief that it was possible to create the world anew following an abstract blueprint.  Those who are not deluded understand the implications of this – the death of millions.  More human beings have been destroyed by Communism and ‘Enlightenment Values’ than by any other force in history.  And there never was, never could be, a happy outcome, only a mountain of skulls that would have made even Tamerlane blanch.  Not Hobsbawm. 

I have the deepest contempt for this man’s legacy, for the malign impact he has had on the intellectual life of this country, for the way in which his minions and fellow travellers have been allowed to corrupt so much of the media establishment, particularly the BBC, an organisation that has become a national disgrace.  It is indeed a matter of concern, as Michael Burleigh noted in the Telegraph, that such dubious figures have been given licence to dominate the soft culture of the BBC and so many universities. 

I return to George Orwell, specifically to his essay on Charles Dickens, which concludes with the following observation;

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.

Smelly little orthodoxy never let go of Hobsbawm’s soul.  I, too, see his face in his writing.  There he is, smirking. His eyes show it all.  They show him to be mean-spirited, unimaginative and small-minded. His is the face of a hypocrite and a liar. His is the face of a twentieth century Communist, smelly and orthodox to the end.  He will be forgotten, his dishonest and derivative books unread.  He was bad rubbish.  Good riddance. 

Russia’s Historical Amnesia

  

There is a scene in David Lean’s movie version of Doctor Zhivago where Lara, the great love of Zhivago’s life, disturbed by the howling of wolves close to the dacha where they are staying, says to Yuri that this is a terrible time to be alive.  It’s Russia towards the end of the Civil War that followed the Bolshevik takeover in 1917. 

It was a terrible time to be alive but neither Lara nor Zhivago knew just how terrible it was to become.  She herself was eventually to disappear at the height of the Great Terror, a nightmare yet to descend.  This, particularly the year 1937, the so-called Yezhovshchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the security police, was the very acme of suffering.  It was the Golgotha of the ordinary people of Russia, captured so memorably in Requiem, the poetic cycle by Anna Akhmatova.

Yezhov, Beria and the other apparatchiks of death and despair were only a front.  The beast at the heart of the labyrinth was Josef Stalin, conceivably the worst and bloodiest tyrant in human inhuman history, paranoid, vengeful and dangerous; a monster in monster’s clothing. 

Stalin was just a communist Hitler, though in some ways even more vile.  But Soviet Russia, despite the dictator’s best efforts, was never defeated in war.  Unlike Hitler’s Germany, it was never pulled up by the roots.  Russia, even post-communist Russia, has never had a proper reckoning with Stalin and Stalinism.  There has never been, and possibly never will be, a truth and reconciliation committee.  So much truth remains hidden; so many Russians are still in denial.  Even Khrushchev’s famed 1956 Secret Speech was but a partial break with the past.

Stalin, in a way, is the temperature of Russia, rising and falling with the circumstances of the day.  Khrushchev’s denunciation saw a partial reappraisal of his legacy, little better than a renaming without a re-evaluation.  Khrushchev’s fall in 1964 was followed by the stagnation and sclerosis of the Brezhnev years, in which Stalin’s memory underwent a partial thaw.

For a period in the 1990s, albeit all too brief, it looked as if Russia might finally come to terms with the full horror of its Stalinist past.  It was not to be.  For an instant Russia saw freedom only to retreat into age-old slavery.  It was a depressingly familiar pattern, so brilliantly captured by Vasiliy Grossman in Everything Flows, a novel unfinished at the time of his dearth in 1964.  “The implacable suppression of the individual personality”, he wrote, “ - its total, servile, subjection to the sovereign and the State – has been a constant feature of Russian history.”

Stalin is back; the temperature is rising.  He is back in Putin’s Russia, in a worse form than ever; he is back in a gangster state that does not even pretend to embrace an ennobling ideology.  He is back simply as an avatar of power, of the most demeaning and slavish forms of state worship.  The recent vindictive treatment of Pussy Riot, the female punk rockers accused of ‘hooliganism’, is but one small example of the new mood.

There is so much irony in ignorance.  In 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, Stalin’s ‘achievement’ in leading the country to victory was lauded.  His earlier alliance with Hitler, a man in whom he placed implicit trust, and his gross errors in 1941, which cost so many Russian lives, was completely forgotten.  What a wretched fate to live with a partial memory.

Partial memory is the key to Russian history, the key to Putin’s approach to the past.  In 2007 his government decided on a restructuring of the national curriculum for schools, teaching children that the tyrant’s actions were ‘entirely rational’.  In the same year the archives of Memorial, an organisation set up to establish an accurate view of the past, were raided.  The police confiscated images of Stalinist atrocities along with twenty years worth of oral testament chronicling everyday life under the regime, as Emily Whitaker points out in the recent issue of History Today. 

The following year a television company organised a national poll on the ‘Greatest Russian Ever’.  Stalin came third, despite pleas by the station for people to choose someone else, another remarkable piece of ignorance, inasmuch as he wasn’t even Russian.  The television executives would have solved their problem by disqualifying him on those simple ethnic grounds! 

It’s a sure sign of things when tyrant kitsch is all the rage.  Just imagine Hitler watches and other tat on sale in Berlin.  Now go to Moscow.  No need to imagine: there is Stalin tat aplenty. 

If Stalin is the mood in Putingrad, so are Stalinist policies.  New legislation been proposed, including increased penalties for violation of protest laws.  Non government agencies that receive international funding now risk being labelled as ‘foreign agents.’ The government is also being granted permission to censor certain internet pages. 

To resurrect a putrid past shows just how morally abject the present regime is, how deeply sunk in dissimulation and lies.  With some noble exceptions Russia itself is sunk deep in moral turpitude, especially tragic in that there can be few families without the victims of past wrongs.  This is a country, in short, suffering from a particularly degrading form of historical amnesia. 

You were taken away at dawn’s mildness.

I convoyed you, as my dead-born child,

Children cried in the room’s half-grey darkness,

And the lamp by the icon lost light. 

On your lips dwells the icon kiss’s cold

On your brow – the cold sweet … Don’t forget!

Like a wife of the rebel of old

On the Red Square, I’ll wail without end.

Mean City

Conquered City by Victor Serge is the second novel that I’ve read set in the Civil War that followed the 1917 Bolshevik coup in Russia.  The first was The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov which I admired for its clarity, its biting satire and its sheer brilliance.  It’s set in and around Kiev in the Ukraine at a particularly troubled and uncertain time in history, just as Serge's book is set in and around Saint Petersburg - then called Petrograd – during the same troubled months. 

Conquered City is a slightly different order of literary experience.  It has flashes of brilliance, though the overall effect is uneven.  At some points it’s clear, at others opaque; at some points satirical, at others laudatory. I do admire Serge, but in a different way; I admire him above all for his honesty and for his integrity which carries this work – the first book of his I’ve ever read – from the mundane realms of propaganda into a far higher aesthetic level. 

The thing is Serge was a true believer, a professional revolutionary who identified with the Revolution.  To that extent he believed that the suffering he describes which such lucidity in Conquered City could be overcome; that a floor was being constructed on which the future would dance. 

But he was also an idealist, not a quality particularly prized among hard-nosed Bolshevik cadres, the sort of man uncomfortable with self-serving cynicism and the betrayals of expediency.  He was the sort of man, in other words, who was incapable of settling down to the rigours of Stalinism. 

But there is more here.  Serge, it seems to me, was not the type of individual who could ever have made a home in any kind of Russia, least of all the one forged by the Bolshevik Revolution, no matter if the flavour was Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin.  Indeed I begin to wonder if the author really understood the true character of the history he lived through and the ideology he embraced, a dangerous step, I know, on the basis of a single reading of a single novel. 

Perhaps I’m not being quite fair; there is startling prescience along with the idealism.  I recall having an argument over the precise point in Animal Farm where the degeneracy started.  Most see Orwell’s novel as a parable against Stalinism. My interpretation is different.  The moral rot clearly sets in before the rise of Napoleon/Stalin; the moral rot sets in when the pigs take the windfall apples for themselves.  In Serge’s beleaguered city the goods that are available are not evenly distributed, something he is acutely aware of.  The workers starve; or rather they are fed on the fine words of Bolshevik apparatchiks, who claim the sausage and bread for themselves.

And then there is this passage on page 47, a parable of bureaucracy, the rope that was to strangle all hopes that the events of 1917 may have raised;

These were not the same outrages, but they had just cost the lives of forty soldiers who had frozen to death near Dno while the overcoats being sent to them were held up in a railroad station because the shipping order hadn’t been filled out according to regulations. 

Overall Serge has an admiral precision with words.  He manages to convey so much with great economy of expression.  I thought this passage close to the beginning particularly impressive:

…Comrade Ryzhik, was sleeping in his boots on the same divan where, eighteen months earlier, an old epicurean of the race of the Ruriks amused himself by staring full of enchantment and despair at naked girls in this elegant Louis XV room.  Now this epicurean was lying somewhere else, who knew where, naked, with a bristly beard, and a hole clean through his head, on an artillery range under two feet of trampled earth, four feet of snow, and the nameless weight of eternity. 

It’s history in an instant; it’s about time, near and distant; it’s about personal loss and decay; it’s about change and it’s about irrelevance, not just the irrelevance of the past but the irrelevance of a possible future.  What does fate have waiting for Comrade Ryzhik? 

As a novel Conquered City is a bit like a painting, impressionist and expressionist at one and the same time.  There is no central focus.  Rather we move from episode to episode, looking at developments from within and without, caught in the currents and cross-currents of events, dipping in and out of the lives of others, lives within lives, marionettes on the stage of history.  “The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it”, some lines I remember from Doctor Zhivago.  There is no personal life in Serge’s Petrograd; history, and the CHEKA, the first manifestation of the Soviet secret police, are killing it in starvation and terror.  Perfection cannot be shaped by ugliness and squalor. 

This is an honest novel.  Serge’s virtue would almost certainly have led to his death in Stalin’s Great Terror, the sum of all of the little terrors that had gone before, but for his international reputation.  Already a persona non grata, he was allowed to leave Russia before the real horror began.  As it was he was pursued to the end of his days by the agents of a Revolution that had corrupted beyond recall.  There are other novels of Serge’s I’ve still to read, better perhaps, so Conquered City may not stand as his final testament.  It’s a commendable one, notwithstanding. 

We conquered everything and everything slipped out of our grasp.  We have conquered bread and there is famine.  We have declared peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house.  We have proclaimed the liberation of men, and we need prisons, an iron discipline – yes, to pour our human weakness into brazen moulds in order to accomplish what is perhaps beyond our strength – and we are the bringers of dictatorship.  We have proclaimed fraternity, but it is “fraternity and death” in reality.  We have founded the Republic of Labour, and the factories are dying, grass is growing in their yards.  We wanted each to give according to his needs; and here we are, privileged in the middle of generalised misery, since we are less hungry than others!