The other Joads

Many people will be familiar with the story of the Joad family from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, the great epic of the Great Depression in America, or from the film of the same name directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad.  Tom and his family are dirt poor ‘Okies’, who escape from Oklahoma’s ever expanding Dust Bowl, moving west to California in search of a better life.  Instead they are met with hostility and exploitation. 

The Joads were lucky.  There were other Joads, other poor Americans who tried to flee the Depression, going off in search of a better life, taking their families with them.  But these people did not go west; they went east; they went all the way to Stalin’s Russia.  There they met something worse than hostility and exploitation; there they met slavery and death. 

This is no fiction; this is a real American tragedy, a tragedy in which the hapless and the helpless were betrayed not just by their hosts but by their own government.  These are the forgotten Americans and this is a forgotten story.  At least it was until the appearance of The Forsaken.  From the Great Depression to the Gulags: Hope and Betrayal in Stalin’s Russia by Tim Tzouliadis.  

I’ve read several accounts of the impact of Stalin and Stalinism but this is possibly the most poignant.  This is the story of people lured east in what the author describes as the least heralded migration in American history.  They were lured away from their homes by lies and stupidity; the lies of Soviet propaganda and the stupidity of intellectuals like George Bernard Shaw, who swallowed the propaganda whole, seduced by the biggest Potemkin façade ever devised. 

They were deceived also by their own countrymen, by the likes of Walter Duranty, Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times, who wrote articles urging Americans to come to Russia.  For a man on the spot, Duranty’s understanding of Russia was abysmal and his ‘journalism’ biased enough to border on deception and fraud.  His reports earned him a Pulitzer Prize, which might give some insight into the true value of this benighted award.

To begin with things for the Joads were not too bad.  They found work in the new Ford factory on the banks of the Volga among other places.  They brought their own pastimes with them, playing baseball in Moscow’s Gorky Park.  It was the early 1930s, a period of relative calm in Soviet history.  People were generally welcoming.  Still, there were worrying signs.  The migrants were obliged to surrender their passports.  Most of them never saw them again.  Most of them were never to see America again.

History fell on Russia with the abruptness of an Arctic night.  The murder of Sergey Kirov, the Leningrad party chief, in December 1934 was the beginning of an epic tragedy.  As Russia moved by stages into the Great Terror, fear gripped the American community.  There was no more baseball.  All at once the American Embassy in Moscow was besieged to people wanting to go home.  They were met not with sympathy but indifference.  Those turned away were arrested in the street by the NKVD, the Soviet security police.  Whole families were rounded up and sent into the night and fog of the gulags. 

Tzouliadis tells his story with insight and vigour, leavened by an undercurrent of incredulity and anger.  It’s difficult not to feel anger at the fate of so many people who were effectively abandoned.  They were merely flotsam and jetsam on the sea of life, as one American diplomat put it, adding that “they are born, live and die, and their existence has probably no individual effect on any governing or supervising authority.”

They certainly had no effect on the despicable Joseph Davis, a multi-millionaire appointed as ambassador to Russia by President Roosevelt, on the basis of what qualification or talent is impossible to determine.  While he ignored the plight of the Americans in Moscow he fawned over Stalin, even taking the infamous Moscow show trails at face value, contrary to the opinion among the rest of the embassy staff.  While Americans were drawn in ever greater numbers into Soviet death camps, Davis descended into lugubrious lyricism over Stalin’s “exceedingly kind and gentle brown eyes”.

The blindness and betrayal goes on.  There is Henry Wallace, vice-president during Roosevelt’s third term in office, a Soviet stooge who but for fortune might have gone on to becomes President in his own right.  During the war he visited Magadan in the remote Kolyma district, the very centre of the Soviet system of mass labour and mass death.  In his blindness he saw nothing. 

Wallace was a fool.  Worse still is the case of the black singer Paul Robeson, who became aware just how bad the oppression was while continuing to laud Stalin.  Acutely aware of racial injustice in his own country, he was wilfully blind to murderous injustice in Soviet Russia.  His speeches and actions, as Tzouliadis says, had justified, and therefore contributed to, the crimes of Stalinism, and for that at least he was morally culpable.  After Davis he is the one character in the story that filled me with particular loathing. 

Thinking of the Joads, some lines from Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago comes to mind.  It’s about Lara, the great love of Zhivago’s life, whose fate sounds as an echo for all the martyred and brutalised children of the earth – “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.”

There are some stories of survival in The Forsaken, none more remarkable than that Thomas Sgovio from Buffalo, New York, but most have left no trace at all, unlike Lara not even a name.  This important book does well to fill some of the silences of time

War By Other Means

Oh, to be in London now the Olympics are there.  Actually, no.  Now the Olympics are in London I’m not!  The city is mad enough at the best of times, so I decided to escape during the build-up, first into the countryside and now north into Scotland.  I’m in Edinburgh at present, on the threshold of a foray into the Highlands.  While here I visited the recently-opened Catherine the Great exhibition being held in National Museum of Scotland in Chambers Street, a fantastic experience which I intend to write about soon.

Thinking of Russia and thinking of the Olympics, I have an angle that ties in both.  It concerns an incident in the 1956 Melbourne Games, when sport turned into war by other means.  I have to thank Zunnur, who, in a comment on my recent blog on Hungary (Hungary’s Future is all in the Past, 18 July) drew my attention to what I now know has passed into history as the Blood in the Water Match, surely one of the most vivid and lurid spectacles ever seen in whole of the modern games.

It concerned a water polo match between the USSR and Hungary, a simple enough affair that came to symbolise so much more.  It’s December, 1956.  Only weeks before the Hungarian Rising against communist rule had been crushed under the treads of Russian tanks.  Budapest, the capital, was in ruins.  Across the world, where Hungarians were free to express any feelings at all against their ‘fraternal liberators’ they expressed nothing but hatred.  They were free to express such feeling in Australia.

Hungary’s champion water polo team knew nothing of these events.  They had been cut off from news from home while training for the games in adjacent Czechoslovakia.  It was only after they arrived in Melbourne that they learned the extent of the violence. 

Twenty-one-year old Ervin Zador, a star player and the only member of the Hungarian party who could read English, bought a local paper when their flight first touched down on Australian soil in the northern city of Darwin.  No sooner had he read the news than he told his team mates that he was not going back home.

The Hungarians went on to dominate their event, winning through to the semi-finals.  It was there that they met the Russians on 6 December.  Tension was already high.  The audience, dominated by Hungarian exiles, turned their backs as the Russians entered.  When the Soviet anthem was played they clapped loudly to drown it out.  With shouts of Hajra Magyarok! (Go Hungarians!), they waved flags and urged on their countrymen.  “We always had an extra incentive when we played the Soviets, but the atmosphere at Melbourne was another dimension," Zador said. "The game meant so much to us. We had to win the gold medal. We were playing for ourselves, for our families back home, for our country."

Throughout the ensuing match, which the Hungarians won 4-0, there had been kicking and punching from both sides.  No fewer than five players were ordered out of the pool by the referee.  With only minutes left before the end Zador was punched in the eye by one Valentin Prokopov, the Russian player immediately opposite. 

With blood pouring from his eye, giving the encounter its infamous name, the Hungarian spectators in the crowd erupted.  People raised their fists, shouted abuse and spat at the Russians.  To prevent a riot the police were forced to intervene. 

The team went on to beat Yugoslavia in the final. Though Zador was unable to take part due to his injury he stood on the podium for the medal ceremony.  True to his word, he refused to return to communist Hungary, seeking political asylum in the West.  He was joined by no fewer than half of the 100-member party that come to Australia.   Zador went on to settle in the United States, where he worked for many years as a swimming coach. 

I’ve never believed that it’s possible to separate politics from sport, not so long as national passions are involved.  The 1956 national passions were at a height.  The Blood in the Water match seems to me to be proof enough for this contention.  

Several Uneasy Pieces

In its beginning was its end. Actually that’s not quite true; the Soviet Union came in with a bang and out with a whimper. Even so the two events were united, a long, slow motion curtain-call for the old Russian imperium. Aleksandr Kugel, a Russian theatre critic and editor, writing a few months after the Bolshevik coup in 1917 put the matter rather well;

The dying process has begun. Everything we see now is just part of the agony. Bolshevism is the death of Russia. And a body the size of Russia cannot die in one hour. It groans.

It certainly did groan, decade after decade, a body in terminal decline, a body destroyed by the most aggressive form of ideological cancer. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the USSR, made one fundamental error: he formed the belief that he was a doctor; in fact he was an undertaker; he tried to raise Caesar only to bury him. His twin medicines, glasnost and perestroika, openness and restructuring, only served to reveal just how bad the patient was, how terminal the condition. The benighted man finally opened to the truth, delivering a funeral oration on Christmas Day, 1991. It all ended with mealy-mouthed good wishes.

There are odd historical ironies here. Imperialism, according to Lenin, is the highest stage of capitalism. His communist state was the highest stage of imperialism. In other words, the revolution of 1917 preserved in aspic what was in effect a Tsarist colonial structure built up over centuries. The Russian Slavs had taken up the white man’s burden, ruling over Kalmyks, Uzbeks, Chechens, Inuits, Tatars and patchwork of other nationalities, races and ethnic groups. As it was, the nationalities suffered the harshest colonial oppression at the hands of Stalin the Georgian, whose first post in the Soviet government was - another irony - Commissar for the Nationalities.

The house that Lenin built collapsed that Christmas Day in what is surely an event unparalleled in the history of anti-climaxes, but the aftershocks were quite devastating, the fall-out from this post-imperial scramble. Lawrence Scott Sheets, an American reporter working for Reuters and National Public Radio, witnessed the whole thing, his experiences now written up in 8 Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse, which serves as a personal record; part memoir, part travelogue, part political analysis.

There are surely few regrets over the death of the Soviet Union; there must be lots over what followed - the crazy ethnic conflicts, the revival of quarrels sublimated for generations; the murders, the kidnapping, the anarchy, the criminality, the chaos and the terrorism. Then there was the flight into fresh forms of dictatorship in some of the new states, based on personality cults that might have embarrassed Stalin.

This terrible scattering left peoples and countries trying to establish a place for themselves, a sense of identity, a sense of belonging. With borders defined in the past by bureaucrats, taking little account of history or ethnic composition, the outcome was sadly inevitable – a series of racial and territorial wars that are thought to have cost the lives of up to 200,000 people.

It’s the pathology of upheaval, to use his own phrase, that Sheets writes about, in an intimate, honest and wholly revealing way. It was at its worse in the Caucuses, particularly in Georgia, whose post-Soviet history might very well serve as a case study in political lunacy. This was a place that went, as the author puts it, from being the crown jewel of empire to a failed state by steady stages. There was Eduard Shevardnadze, once a respected Soviet politician, fleeing from his homeland, the newly-independent country’s first president, in a ravaged, jet-fuel-dripping plane covered in bullet holes, the principle victim of the so-called Rose Revolution

Conflict, fissure and war were to follow, in a country so extreme in forms of behaviour that notices had to be posted in parliament reminding the legislators to leave their guns outside. What astonishes me most is that Georgia was once a serious candidate for NATO membership, with all its smouldering resentment against Russia, coming to a head in 2008. How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we might have been involved in a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing, as someone or other once said. :-)

The book concludes with the greatest horror of all – the Beslan Massacre of 2004, when a school in North Ossetia, the scene of a hostage crisis, saw the deaths of almost four hundred people, many of them children, caught in a vicious cross-fire between Chechen terrorists and heavy-handed government forces. Sheets is at his most poignant here, recalling how he gave a shocked teenager his phone so he could contact his sister. She was already dead.

“Feeling at best an interloper and at worst a tragedy speculator,” he writes, “I put my equipment away. Covering war and tragedy is a bit like exposing oneself to radiation. In carefully measured doses, it often poses few well-established health risks…Unlimited exposure over very long periods, however, is unwise for the mind and the soul.”

He stopped, I feel sure, just at the right time, for the process of fragmentation, as he warns, is by no means at an end. A return to these horrors was unthinkable, save for the fact that in Russia nothing is unthinkable, as Isaiah Berlin once wrote.

There is no analytical depth to Sheet’s book, no meta-narrative, but it cuts in a personal and revealing way, without fuss and burdensome detail, into several tragedies in several acts, staged all the way from Saint Petersburg in the west to Sakhalin Island in the east, all in eight uneasy pieces and more. It’s a story told with moving sincerity, one that goes far in helping to understand how a country evolved from a bureaucratic morass into an ethnic mess. I will never think of journalists reporting from the front line in the same way again.

Odyssey

The Way Back is based on a true story, or creative fiction, or a pack of lies, depending on your point of view. Directed by Peter Weir, the movie tells of the escape in 1940 by a disparate group of prisoners from a Soviet labour camp somewhere to the north of Lake Baikal, recording their subsequent trek through the frozen wastes of Siberia, across the parched Gobi Desert, on to Tibet – China seems to be almost completely missed apart from the brief passage of the Great Wall – through the Himalayas – just as mysteriously incidental – and on to India and freedom.

It’s an impressive movie on a visual level, beautifully shot. It’s far less impressive on a human level, with almost no psychological depth or insight. Most of the characters failed to engage me, apart from Ed Harris as the enigmatic Mister Smith, an American engineer caught up in a Stalinist nightmare, and Colin Farrell, the tough, murderous Valka, a Russian zec or criminal inmate who escapes with the ‘politicos’ because his indebtedness to some of his fellow gangsters puts him in danger of his own life. Jim Sturgess as Janusz, a Polish officer and the leader of the group, sent to the gulag as a spy on the forced evidence of his wife, was far too tepid and unbelievable for my taste. The rest of the group left virtually no impression at all.

I should also mention Saoirse Ronan playing Irena, a Polish escapee from a collective farm, who meets up with the group in the neighbourhood of Lake Baikal, the female interest, added, I suppose, to get the guys to come out a little more about themselves and their individual destinies.

I think I’m beginning to sound a tad too negative. This is a good film, one I enjoyed, one that works as a personal and political odyssey, away from communism and towards freedom, in a literal and metaphorical sense. The early scenes in the gulag are good, showing the sheer horror of these places; the horror of logging in arctic conditions on an inadequate diet and the even greater horror of the mines. Life is not cheap here: it has no value at all. In one review I read the author said of Mister Smith – he never gives his first name- that he did not know why he was in prison. That’s just the thing about the gulag system under Stalin: many of the inmates had no idea why they were there either.

The journey itself is compellingly dramatic, though it requires a major leap of imagination to believe that anyone could survive a trek across a four thousand mile wilderness with almost no food apart from occasional game, fish and other scraps picked up along the way. The only natural survivor in the group is the knife-wielding Valka, responsible for the most effective foraging and ruthless enough to contemplate the possibility of cannibalism. But he, paradoxically the only one of the group who actually believes in the lying nonsense of communism – he has Lenin and Stalin tattooed on his chest rather than his arse, as another of the group suggests – refuses to leave Russia.

Yes, the journey is compelling, though it has a tendency to drop into too many triumph-over-adversity clichés. Besides it’s long, too long, as is the movie, almost becoming trudgingly tiresome. In the end even Weir seems exhausted, taking us in a rush through the wintery Himalayas, potentially the most gruelling part of all, down into happy Indian valleys.

The final reception by the tea-pickers is one of only three encounters with human groups in the whole trip. There are the monks of Tibet and before that some mounted Mongolian herdsmen. Then, just before entering the Gobi, the group, with Mister Smith as their spokesman, pass themselves off as American Buddhist pilgrims on their way to Lhasa. American pilgrims in 1940 in the middle of communist-occupied Mongolia on their way south to a Buddhist Mecca, that doesn’t test disbelief, it murders it!

The movie finishes on a rather obvious note, newsreel footage, shown under a pair of trudging feet, just in case anyone missed the message about the other journey, that of history. The footage shows the rise and fall of communism in Soviet-occupied Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, until the whole corrupt and corrupting edifice collapsed in the late 1980s. Janusz, now in old age, is finally reunited with his wife, forced to betray him all those years before, a moment of pure sentimentality!

Overall nature is the real star of The Way Back, set against an unconvincing script and shallow characterisation. Still, it has an old-fashioned epic feel that has almost completely vanished from contemporary cinema, obsessed, as it mostly is, with rom coms, claustrophobic realism, instant thrills and shallow special effects. It’s a worthwhile, worthy, perhaps, piece of cinema, a generally good movie. With a little more imagination on the part of the script writers, a little more discipline on the part of the director, it might even have been a great one.

A million tragedies

An important new book was published earlier this year. It’s called Drawings from the Gulag, containing an extraordinary and disturbing collection of sketches by one Danzig Baldaev, a former official in the NKVD, Stalin’s security police. I was fully aware of the horror of the Soviet camp system from the work of people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov among others. But these graphic drawings give the sheer savagery of it all a terrible immediacy.

Baldaev himself has an interesting history. The son of a rich Mongolian intellectual, he was born in 1925 in the south-east of the USSR. Like so many others, his father was arrested during the Great Terror of the 1930s, while he and his sister were consigned to an NKVD orphanage, set up specifically for the children of ‘enemies of the people.’ One does not have to imagine too hard to conjure up the treatment children received in places like this.

Later, after leaving the orphanage, Baldaev was ordered to become a guard in one of the NKVD labour camps. To amuse himself he starred to sketch the various tattoos displayed by the criminal fraternities. On learning of this his superiors encouraged him to continue, believing such designs supplied valuable intelligence on the links between inmates and the criminal underworld outside the camp system. Baldaev was therefore given permission to travel from camp to camp, recording tattoos along the way.

Unbeknown to his superiors he was compiling a secret dossier, detailing the various outrages that were such a feature of the whole gulag system. His sketches show scenes of torture, degradation and execution, by the NKVD as well as that practiced by prisoner upon prisoner. There are scenes of sexual torture, of mass rape, of an axe being raised as criminals make ready to decapitate one of their fellows. For once the cliché applies: an image really is worth a thousand words.



Compared with the flood of information about the Nazi camp system, including movies like Schindler’s List, so many people in the west are still comparatively ignorant over the horrors of the gulags. So far as I’m aware the only English-Language film featuring the Soviet camp system is the British adaptation of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, made in the early 1970s. Hollywood has never tackled the subject.

I discovered from a review article by Olrando Figes in The Times that a new movie touching on Stalin’s camps is to be released this month. The Way Back is really about a prison break, a highly improbable one at that, only featuring camp life in a fairly brief slot at the beginning. There is still something lacking here, something revealing about our lack of interest in the mundane horrors of the Soviet camp system compared with the grotesque horrors of the Nazis. Figes makes an excellent point:

We do not feel as close to Russian peasants as we do to Western European Jews. We’re not sure that the Russians are “like us” at all. Maybe that’s why there hasn’t been a film to engage us in the tragedy of the gulag. It is in part a legacy of the Cold War. Perhaps we feel that the Russians brought their suffering on themselves – victims of a revolution that went wrong. Or perhaps, in some former left-wing quarters, we still cling to the old romance about the Soviet Union that puts its victims out of sight – a rose-tinted view of the revolution that can be seen in Reds (1981), Warren Beatty’s love song to Bolshevism, which still colours views in Hollywood. In 2008 it was voted one of the ten best epic US movies by the American Film Institute.

It is, I think, time for a new song, a song to all the victims of Bolshevism, a song that will help us understand the terrible human suffering involved; to understand that a million deaths is a million tragedies.

Upper Volta with Rockets

I know it’s difficult to believe but there was a time when the old Soviet Union looked as if was on the edge of a great economic and technological breakthrough, that it might conceivably have overtaken the west in terms of development. It was, if I can term it so, the Age of the Sputnik, a brief illusory interlude before the Soviet Union fell into that final stage of irrelevance and decrepitude, Upper Volta with Rockets.

This window came with the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957 and ended with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It was a period of reasonably steady growth that caused then Premier Khrushchev to predict that the Soviet economy would soon overtake the west. The problem is that things did not stay still, that there are always two sides to any equation. Capitalism, true to its nature, continued to adapt, advancing still further. The Soviet economy, despite the heavy investment in scientific education and space technology, turned out to be little better than a Potemkin village, impressive on the outside but quite hollow within.

There is something else about those years, the Khrushchev years, something that goes to the heart of the First Secretary’s psychology as well as his personal beliefs. As I mentioned in a previous blog, after Molotov, the former foreign minister, was purged from the Communist Party in the wake of the de-Stalinisation programme, his wife, Polina, made a personal appeal to Khrushchev for his readmission. In response he took her to the archives to show her the many execution lists her husband had signed. But those same archives contained lists signed by Khrushchev himself, if less guilty only by trivial degrees.

We all know about the Terror, the mass executions, the destruction of millions of people. We all know that Stalin was denounced by Khrushchev for his many crimes. But what is perhaps less well-known is that he did more than denounce has former boss; he made an absurd attempt to prove that the sacrifice of so many innocent people had not been in vain, to prove that the promise of communism was something more than a murderous fraud.

In 1961 the Party Congress, under Khrushchev’s guidance, adopted a programme anticipating the end of all scarcity, anticipating the attainment of full communism by 1980, all this as people still had to queue for the most basic goods. The absurdity of the whole thing was caught in a popular joke of the day. The phone rings in the apartment of Yuri Gagarin, a well-known cosmonaut. His daughter answers, saying “I’m sorry, mummy and daddy are out. Daddy’s orbiting the earth and he’ll be back at 19.00 hours. But mummy’s gone shopping for groceries, so who knows when we’ll see her again.”

I came across this in an interesting article I read by Francis Spufford, whose book Red Plenty was published last month. He makes the point that Khrushchev’s laughable hostage to fortune - soon abandoned along with him - was given because his conscience demanded a happy ending for all the horror, all the pointless horror that went before. He was looking, in other words, for some kind of absolution from history.

Dialectical materialism: it was set to do exactly what it says on the tin. Except it didn’t; it couldn’t: it was just an empty husk, another Potemkin village, this time of the intellect. Spufford makes the point that along with our sense of Soviet history as a tragedy we should also embrace the comic dimension, the comedy of ideas and of things, things refusing to obey the roles allotted to them by bossy human intentions.

The problem of the Sputnik Age was that while the Soviets could produce experts by the score, and could even pay them relatively well for their expertise, the economy was such that the ‘contradictions’ (a favoured Marxist terms) made sure that paradise was eternally postponed, the kind of contradiction highlighted in the Gagarin joke. You see, in the west, as Spufford says, if you have the money you can have the thing. In the east having the money was only the start of a campaign to acquire the thing! This is the heart, the comically absurd heart, of planned economies, of tyrannies where ideas and information only ever flow in one direction.

Here lies Upper Volta with Rockets, the historical epitaph of the Soviet Union. At some future point I rather suspect here lies Saudi Arabia with Rockets will be the epitaph of Putin’s Russia.

The Shadow of Stalin

Sometimes news reports offer information without enlightenment. The case I have in mind is the present ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan, the former Soviet republic in Central Asia. So off I went looking for roots in history, for roots in history there surely are.

The main point is that this country, like its neighbours, is essentially an artificial creation, carved out, so to say, by the Soviet authorities in the early twentieth century; carved out by Stalin in his role of Commissar for Nationalities. The Russians had originally expanded into this area as part of a colonial drive in the nineteenth century, there to counter British expansion in India towards the frontier of Afghanistan, an act in what was known as the Great Game. At the time the area was made up of three long-established political units - the Khanates of Kokand and Khorezm and the Emirate of Bukhara, all of which were abolished. It was the Soviets who turned what was effectively an undifferentiated Tsarist colony into a series of 'countries', Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan along with Kyrgyzstan. It was an entirely arbitrary exercise based purely on the language and character of the dominant ethnic group.

The problem here was a simple one, sublimated by the Soviet dictatorships: these countries, created by bureaucratic edict, had virtually nothing in the way of national consciousness. They really only existed, in other words, by the exercise of strong central control, which continued even after the collapse of the Soviet Union when various authoritarian regimes and dictators emerged.

The instability in the region is one of the abiding legacies of Stalin. Not only did he help draw up the borders but he was later responsible for the almost total destruction of the local elites, the very people vital in the creation of any kind of national consciousness or legitimacy. He compounded the problem by destroying local Islamic tradition, a relatively liberal school influenced by developments in Turkey and India, opening the way to the import in the present day of more extreme missionaries in the fundamentalist mould.

So, with no national tradition, a weak elite, no coherent faith-based identity the Kyrgyz and the Uzbeks, the main minority group, are like oil and water, existing side by side but never blending. The overthrow of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in the April riots against corruption and increased living expenses effectively brought to an end the central control that managed to hold the country together. The situation was similar in some respects to that in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, particularly in the state of Bosnia, where ancient rivalries emerged with the end of political unity. In Kyrgyzstan, around the southern city of Osh, the minority Uzbeks have become a target of Kyrgyz gangs with the government losing control. In essence we have a nation that never was a nation disintegrating into its constituent parts.

As I write the prospects are unclear with a full-scale civil war a distinct possibility in what is one of the most politically and ethnically sensitive regions on earth. So far the Russians have refused to intervene in spite of requests from a government that has effectively lost control. I honestly don't see how they can stay out for much longer given the implications for their own security if instability spreads throughout the whole southern region. In a sense Vladimir Putin was right that the disintegration of the old Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster, but perhaps not in the way that he meant. The Soviets both created a problem and offered a solution to a problem. Stalin casts a long shadow.

Death to Spies

People who have read the James Bond novels will be familiar with an organisation known as SMERSH-Death to Spies. What they might not know is that this was a real branch of the Soviet Secret Service, once headed by the notorious Viktor Abakumov. It only had a short three-year existence, from 1943 to 1946, though it clearly left an abiding impression on the mind of Ian Fleming. Anyone who comes away from a reading of From Russia with Love without pleasant and cosy feelings towards General Franco's Fascists clearly has not understood the latent message!

Out of Hell

Last year I read Anne Applebaum's excellent Gulag: A History, a subject that began to interest me after I had read biographies of Stalin. The chapter that has remained in my mind most vividly is that dealing with attempted escapes.

There were escapes right from the beginning, though weather and location was a factor in determining their frequency. The proximity of many of the earlier camps to Finland was an important incentive in escape attempts. In 1932 alone over 7000 inmates were recaptured trying to cross into Finland. According to the official camp statistics some 45,575 people escaped over the whole system in 1933 alone, of which 28,370 were recaptured. In Kolyma in the far east of Siberia escapees organised themselves into gangs, stealing weapons and terrorising the local population.

It's worth stressing that the overwhelming numbers of these escapees were not political dissidents at all but hardened criminals. Some of their escape strategies were particularly gruesome. In view of the distances involved, lack of food was one factor working against a successful escape. To overcome this prisoners took to escaping in groups of three, two of the party deciding in advance who the 'meat' was to be; yes; that's right, the meat!

There are some good literary accounts of the gulag experience, and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch immediately comes to mind. But for me nothing will surpass Varlam Shalamov's brilliant Kolyma Tales collection, told with the same insight and economy of prose shown by Guy de Maupassant in his short stories. Once a prisoner himself, his emotional detachment makes the experience all the more intense.

Was Stalin's Foreign Policy a Failure?

This is a question that can, I think, be tackled on a purely empirical level, proceeding by example and analysis.

Stalin was in many ways a superb tactician; cool, rational, intelligent and utterly ruthless. However, his grasp of international relations was never the strongest of his talents. On occasions his miscalculations had disastrous implications, both for the immediate and long-term security of the Soviet Union. To begin with the problem was one of ideological rigidity. That is to say, once a policy was adopted by the Third International it was followed without deviation, regardless of local circumstances and changing political conditions. In the 1920s the United Front strategy favoured by Stalin, and held to throughout angry debates with Trotsky and the United Opposition, lead to major setback in China, where the local Communist party was all but destroyed by the nationalist Kuomintang, at a time when Chiang Kai-shek was an honorary member of the Comintern!

Having learned nothing by the China debacle Soviet and Comintern policy was then piloted by Stalin into the even more disastrous Third Period, an ultra-left switch based on the contention that all Social Democratic Parties, no matter what their policies, were forms of Social fascism. By this understanding all Communist parties were instructed to concentrate their efforts on defeating their rivals in the labour movement, thus ignoring the threat presented by real Fascism. The implications for Russian security in this strategy were quite profound; for it divided the German left in the face of Hitler, and led to the destruction of the KPD in 1933, and the creation of a new and dangerous threat to the Soviet Union. There is, of course, no guarantee that a united front strategy in Germany would have stopped Hitler; but the divisions among his enemies made things considerably easier for him.

Stalin then sought to check the further development of Fascism, and the threat posed by Germany, by a new emphasis on political unity in Popular Fronts, paralleled by an attempt to advance notions of collective security through the League of Nations. When this was perceived to have failed he then reached an understanding with Hitler, turning the political and diplomatic world upside down in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, an important preamble to the Second World War. Looked at in strictly rational terms the Pact was perfectly understandable from Stalin's point of view; what was not understandable was the continuing trust he placed in Hitler, which led to near disaster in 1941.

So, by the first and most important standard of all, that an adequate foreign policy has to be premised on national security, safeguarding the country from attack, Stalin's must, in my estimation, be judged a serious failure. What of the post-war period? Well here Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe, and his failure to come to terms with the United States, were crucial factors in the onset of the Cold War, the formation of NATO and the acceleration of the arms race. What might be termed the 'Politics of Force' was to place an intolerable burden on the Soviet economy, without measurably increasing national security. It was a burden that, in the end, the system could not stand, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union was perhaps Stalin's final legacy.

Terror, nothing but Terror

Amongst my other reading at present I’ve been working my way through Robert Conquest’s classic The Great Terror, an exploration of the Stalinist purge in Russia in the mid-1930s. I’ve reached the most terrible phase of that terrible part of the nation’s history, the so-called Yezhovchina, named after Nikolai Yezhov, then head of the NKVD, the Soviet security police.

It’s difficult to know how the nation was able to survive the ever growing spiral of denunciations, arrests and executions, embracing the whole of society, high and low, in and out. It’s difficult to know how people, ordinary people, could go to sleep at night, knowing that they might very well be visited by the secret police in the early hours of the morning, their favourite time. It’s difficult to know how Russia avoided a collective breakdown in the midst of this horror.

Here’s one story that caught my attention, a demonstration of the manic stupidity of the whole period, the kind of thing that emerged in the process of lunatic denunciations. It concerns one Sylakov, a deserter from the Red Army. He gave himself up in Kiev claiming that, for whatever reason, that he had been involved in an anti-Soviet plot. He told of a planned raid on a post office in which he had a leading part, intended to provide funds for a terrorist cell. This was not enough for the NKVD, so after a good kicking, he implicated the whole of his old military unit, right up to the commanding officer. The attacks planned were not now on a post office, no, but on government leaders.

Following this almost the whole of his unit was arrested, from the commanding officer right down to the drivers, wives included. Sylakov’s family were also drawn in, his two sisters, his father and his old and crippled mother. So, too, was an uncle, who had only ever met his nephew once. The said uncle was discovered to have served once as a corporal in the old Imperial Army, and was immediately promoted by the NKVD into a Tsarist general!

As with a rock thrown into a silent pool, the rings grew ever wider as this absurd tale progressed, embracing more and more, to the point that every cell in Kiev prison was occupied by someone implicated in the ‘Sylakov Plot.’ But no sooner had the intensity of the Terror slackened with the fall of Yezhov in late 1938 than the NKVD began to re-examine the whole case, now a complete embarrassment. The suspects were all interrogated again, with a view to getting them to withdraw their forced confessions. Some, fearing a trick, refused and had to be given another kicking, to get them to reject statements that carried the death sentence! Is there any greater madness than this?

Russian Art in the 1920s

The 1920s was a time of relative freedom for artists in Russia, though opportunities for self-expression were still determined by one's attitudes towards the legitimacy of 'Soviet power.' Marc Chagall was to leave Russia in 1921, having been accused of being insufficiently committed to 'socialist values' and clinging to 'bourgeois ideals.'

It was the time of Proletkult, a rather misguided attempt to discover a truly 'proletarian' art. It also saw the high tide of Constructivism, embracing both the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and the architecture of Vladimir Tatlin. It was also the high water-mark of the whole of the Russian avant-garde. In writing some of the greatest authors of the twentieth century emerged, including Isaac Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov and Yevgeny Zamyatin. Zamyatin was even able to publish abroad We, his brilliant and prophetic novel, which was to influence both Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, though the book was not allowed to circulate in Russia itself.

Freedom, limited as it was, ended with the 'proletarian cultural revolution' that began in 1928 with the emergence of Socialist Realism. Forced into silence, Isaac Babel was to say in an exercise in 'self-criticism' that the "Party has denied us the right to write badly." But deny this right then all right is denied

Purging God-the Rise and Fall of Stalin's Continuous Calendar

The Bolsheviks had always been great admirers of the 'cult of Ford' and all that it embraced, including the time and motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor. The enthusiasm for the 'high priests of capitalism' became evem nore intense after Stalin introduced the First Five Year Plan in 1928. But, of course, the Soviets had to go yet one step further in the pursuit of maximum efficiency.

Although the working day had been reduced from eight to seven hours, what the state gave with one hand it took away with the other. In 1929, not long after the introduction of the reduced working day, all factories were ordered to adopt a three-shift system, allowing them to work day and night. This meant that many had to work at the most undesirable hours. No sooner had this policy been announced than one Yuri Larin devised a scheme for even greater efficiency. All factories were still closed on Sundays. Why not, Larin reasoned, abolish the wasted day by introducing the continuous working week?

When this proposal was first raised at the Congress of Soviets in May 1929 it attracted little support. It was only when Stalin took an interest that matters changed. By June the press was full of articles praising the idea; and in August the Council of People's Commissars decreed that it should be brought into immediate effect.

Simple enough in theory, it proved very awkward in practice. Complex shift patterns had to be introduced, and the number of holidays allowed reduced. Workers in each establishment were divided into five groups, distinguished by a colour code, which appeared on the new Uninterrupted Work Week calendars. The scheme was also used to further the regime's atheist policy, because the bulk of the working population were no longer free to attend church on Sundays. The most serious impact, of course, was on family life; but the state argued that the collective good had to come first. This was the Ideal, and like most Ideals, it was universally hated by those that it effected most-the working population. Husbands and wives rarely had rest days that coincided.

This grass-roots resentment could be, and was, ignored. Not so the deleterious effect on production rates. With complicated rotas, work teams found themselves performing different tasks on successive weeks. Machines were no longer in the continuous keeping of those who knew them best, with the result that breakages became increasingly common, often put down to 'political sabotage.'

Bit by bit the scheme lost favour. In June 1931 Stalin gave a speech, criticising the 'depersonalised labour' brought about by the hasty introduction of the continuous week. This was the beginning of the end. In November of that same year the government ordered the reintroduction of the six-day week, although Sunday remained a working day. But even this last vestage of the 'continuous week' was not to last; and by 1940 Sunday had been restored as the universal day of rest. God is not so easily defeated!

The Greatest Failure since Lenin

It’s now twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wail, presaging collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe. I marked the occasion recently in a piece I called The Woes of Lemonade Joe, focusing specifically on the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev. I’m now beginning to find out even more about the man, about exactly what motivated him. And the thing that motivated him most was the writings of Lenin! I can’t quite believe that; he must have been the only man in the whole rotten system to pay anything bit lip service to that particular monster of Russian history. I’ll say more on this in a bit.

I’ve glanced over The Accidental Hero of 1989, a piece by Victor Sebestyen in the latest edition of Prospect. Some of the details are really quite amusing. The gradual sclerosis of the Soviet leadership in the days before Gorbachev became General Secretary was a source of much sardonic humour. How could it not when a living cadaver like Konstantin Chernenko was wheeled on to the stage? “Comrades,” one joke went, “we will start the congress in the traditional way-with the carrying in of the general secretary.”

Gorbachev, reaching the top of the barbed-wire pole in his fifties, came almost like a schoolboy compared with the gerontocracy that had ruled hitherto. Amazingly he was the first Soviet leader to have been born after the Revolution of 1917. His rise through the ranks of Party and government followed the usual pattern. “We all licked Brezhnev’s ass”, to use his own words. But Lemonade Joe was different: he was an idealist in a world of cynics and placemen-and that was the cause of his ruin and the ruin of the Evil Empire. It must be one of history’s acutest ironies: for what Lenin set up he also pulled down.

It was Gorbachev’s special mission, as he saw it, to return to the ‘pure’ path of Lenin away from the ‘perversions’ of Stalin. Leninist ideology was always there as a sort of background noise, some noticed but mostly tried to ignore, though not Gorby. His idealism is actually quite touching, naïve, yes, but touching. Unfortunately for him it most often ended in disaster. He somehow thought that by allowing the publication of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, by revealing the horrors of Soviet history, that people would somehow become better Communists! The reality, of course, is that they began to hate the foul doctrine even more.

It really is true: Gorbachev’s path to hell was paved with not just good intentions but with truly noble ones. Consider more closely the actions, worthy in every degree, which earned him the nickname of Lemonade Joe. In 1984 more than nine million drunks were picked off Soviet streets. The statistics for premature death, family violence and crime were truly shocking. In the Politburo when Gorbachev proposed a drastic increase in the price of vodka, Vladimir Dementsev, the finance minister, objected that it would have disastrous effect on state finances. “Do you propose to build communism on vodka?”, Gorbachev responded. He simply did not understand that the system had long since abandoned all attempts to ‘build communism.’

The price hike had just the effect Dementsev predicted. What was worse the growth in illegal distilleries and home brewing resulted often in a form of mass poisoning. The death rate shot up even further. Gorbachev took two steps forward and three steps back. And that is more or less how the Soviet Empire was governed in its final years.

He receives hardly any mention now in Russian school texts, which devote much space to the greatness of Stalin. That’s not fair. Gorbachev was by far the greatest Leninist since Lenin; and that is precisely why he was Communism’s greatest failure.

Child 44, Dictatorship, Death, Deceit....and Disappointment

Earlier this year I wrote a blog headed A Forgotten Serial Killer, a brief account of the career of Paul Ogorzow, executed for the murder of a number of women in wartime Berlin, a piece I introduced as follows:

There are certain periods of history, and certain societies, that are, it might be said, defined by criminality. Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany are good examples of systems of governance where law, as it is commonly understood, only serves to demonstrate how little protection people have from the state that follows no objective moral standard.

The Ogorzow case showed how law-enforcement, the ordinary process of law-enforcement, can be distorted and corrupted by entrenched ideological preconceptions. I find this whole area quite fascinating, the way in which ‘normal’ crime is perceived in abnormal societies, societies where crime is viewed chiefly in political terms. It was this interest in this aspect of the pathology of dictatorship that drew me to Child 44, a debut novel by Tom Rob Smith, longlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize.

I have the novel before me, the paperback edition, covered in lavish praises from a number of sources, the usual over-the-top hyperbole that publishers love. The most restrained, I’m pleased to say, is the quote from The Telegraph, which describes it as a “…superior commercial thriller.” And that’s exactly what it is: a superior commercial thriller, nothing more; it does exactly what it says on the tin!

Yes, yes, the usual clichés apply: it’s well-written, fast-paced, a real page turner and so on, and so on, and so on. But-and I genuinely hate to strike a sour note-it simply does not deserve the praise that has heaped upon it; for it opens with high promise and closes on low disappointment. So much reviewing now reminds me of what George Orwell wrote in his essay, In Praise of the Novel. The novel, he said, “is being shouted out of existence.” Child 44 is, I think, probably typical of most of the works that are shouted on to the Man Booker list, long or short: it’s not a bad book; it’s just not a very good one. In a way it’s a pity; for with a little more work it might very well have been a good book, perhaps even a great one. More, anyway, than a superior commercial thriller.

It’s based very loosely on the career of Andrei Chikatilo, an infamous serial killer of Soviet times known as the Butcher of Rostov or the Rostov Ripper, responsible for the deaths of fifty-two women and children. The main action opens in Moscow in early 1953, just before the death of Stalin, and continues to the summer of that same year. The principle character, the hero of the book, is one Leo Demidov, an officer in the MGB, the post-war metamorphosis of the NKVD, the state security apparatus originally set up by that sociopath Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Bolshevik Torquemada, under the Cheka appellation. Demidov is not a policeman as such, for the real police, the militia, those who deal with day to day law and order, have a very low status in the perfect society, a society where crime officially does not exist.

When it comes to the politics of Soviet security, the brutality, the indifference to life, the moral decay, the fear induced and corruption involved Smith has mastered his brief with commendable skill. There is little to fault the historical setting and the mood he sets. I have to say, though, that I personally found Demidov, as a character, just a little too naïve, not really the sort of man one would expect to advance very far through the ranks of the cynical and the sickening. Quite frankly he’s too much of an empiricist; he doubts where only faith is required

Refusing to denounce Raisa, his own wife, as a dissident, Demidov is demoted, transferred to the lowest grade of the militia and sent with her from Moscow to Voualsk, a bleak industrial town in the Soviet Urals. This process is spurred on by the malevolent Vasili, his second-in-command, who acts partially out of ambition, partially out of hatred.

Anyway, bit it by bit Demidov is forced to question the assumptions on which his life and career has been based when he investigates a series of gruesome murders, where the state refuses to recognise that a consistent and abnormal pattern is emerging. In his new post, and with the eventual help of his chief, he uncovers more and more bodies, all killed in the same fashion. The first case he dealt with in Moscow, the death of a child of a colleague, quickly dismissed as an accident, turns out to be the fourth-forth in a series, hence the title of the book.

So far the story has been reasonably well structured. The reader is quickly carried along by the plot, one that does no great harm to history, geography or believability. But now, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Brown turns from drama to farce.

We know from information uncovered by the militia chief that the murders, which take place along the Russian railway network, are most heavily concentrated in and around Rostov-on-Don. Demidov and his wife go back to Moscow with false papers, hoping to obtain a description of the killer from a woman who may have seen him with the little boy murdered in the city. Here he himself murders one Ivan, a friend of his wife, who turns out to be a snitch, although the MGB never seem to connect him with the crime. He and his wife are arrested on returning to Voualsk, sent to the Lubyanka in Moscow for interrogation (it turns out that Leo is not Leo at all) and then packed off to Siberia for discrediting the Soviet state. They manage to avoid being murdered on the train-a plot devised by the evil Vasili-, escape by digging up the floorboards of their cattle-truck carriage and dropping on to the line. Yes, that’s right!

Once free they make their way from the east down to Rostov, a huge distance, with the help of benign peasants along the way, avoiding all of the efforts of the MGB to intercept them, avoiding being denounced in a society where fear and denunciation were modes of survival, as the author made clear at the outset. The express rushes on; Smith is in a hurry to finish; Midsummer Murders clashes and blends with Nineteen Eighty-Four by way of Emmerdale Farm ( and who would have thought that a kolkhoz could turn into that!). It’s chaotic, breathless, unbelievable, schoolboy stuff; a tale of the wild east!

No, I’m not going to tell you who the murderer is, though the more perceptive who read the book will have guessed by reflecting back on the opening pages, set in the Great Famine of the early 1930s. Let me just say that the whole case, murder after murder, grim in every degree, turns out to be no more than a grand form of attention-seeking! When the perpetrator is finally tracked down he says-and I had already anticipated this-“What kept you?” Oh dear! Demidov triumphs, Vasili is disposed of, and the criminal turns out, at least according to the authorities, to be an aberration, a man operating under the influence of the decadent capitalist powers. Please, be warned: this is not Gorky Park!

I understand that Ridley Scott, the director of Gladiator, has obtained the film-making rights to Child 44. I’m glad, because I suspect it will turn out to be a far better movie than a book, much like All Quiet on the Western Front and Remains of the Day.

Look, I’m pleased that I read it and I really hope that I haven’t put potential readers off by what I’ve written here, more negative, I think, than I had intended. Never mind me; go with The Independent, which shouts at you that this book “...has everything you could wish for…and more.” All I will say is that I did wish for more…and didn’t get it. The author has promise, but the promise needs to mature. Please, Tom, don’t be seduced by the hype.