Some time ago I read Vasily Grossman's A Writer at War 1941-1945, a book of extraordinary reportage from the Red Army front line. So when I saw Everything Flows in the bookshop, I bought it.
Written between 1955 and Grossman's death in 1964, but first published (in the Soviet Union) in 1989, it is part fictional story of a man just released, after many years, from the Gulag and part political essay about the Russian soul, about the Russian experience of serfdom, about Lenin as begetter of Stalin.
There are two chapters (14 and 15) which provide a detailed, precise and harrowing account of the artificial famine (the Holodomor) which killed millions in Ukraine in 1932 - 33. The narrative is written as if from the knowledge of a (female) eye-witness. I was astonished that Grossman knew so much about something which in the Soviet Union of the Khruschev years was still barely acknowledged. But then I discovered from the biographical notice that Grossman, who I had previously thought of as a Russian Jew, was in fact a Ukrainian Jew from Berdichev (its Jewish community was finally exterminated in 1941). And I guess as a major figure in Soviet literary life, people told him things.
Though there is ongoing and highly charged debate about the Holodomor (see the Wikipedia entry for example), these two chapters by Grossman astonished me as evocations of what it is like to die of starvation and in pinpointing details of what was involved in engineering it or allowing it to happen. I felt these chapters deserve to be read.
When I got to the end of the book and read the Afterword by Grossman's daughter, I found her saying "I have always thought that the two chapters about the famine...are the most powerful in all Grossman's work" (page 288). So now you have two recommendations.
____________________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Saturday 9 June 2012
Review: Rodric Braithwaite, Afgansty: the Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89
American ambassadors are political appointees, rewarded for financial contributions to election campaigns, and they are often enough stupid or crooks: try the examples in Alex von Tunzelmann's Red Heat for proof.
British ambassadors are career appointees and often enough clever and honourable. Sherard Cowper-Coles who wrote Cables from Kabul is a good, recent example. So too is Rodric Braithwaite.
His book is partly an unspoken ("diplomatic") critique of the current NATO occupation of Afghanistan. Every chapter of his book about the Russian Occupation of 1979 - 1989 allows parallels to be drawn with the current disaster.
The book is remarkable for its clear-headed portrayal of the horrors of war, and especially, the horrors of wars of occupation. Perhaps surprisingly for a former ambassador engaged in high diplomacy, Braithwaite dwells at length on the experience of ordinary Afghans and ordinary Russian soldiers and technical advisers. He writes a very humane book, readable from cover to cover. But quite often, it is disturbing reading.
At the same time, Braithwaite presents the leadership and higher authorities (military, intelligence, civilian) of the Soviet Union as less sclerotic and less vicious than is often imagined. At times, I guess that what he writes will make people in the Foreign Office think that he is just another of those ambassadors who "went native". (He was Ambassador to Moscow, 1988 - 1992).
The Soviet Union got itself into a mess in Afghanistan, found it hard to get out, and when it did so left a legacy of bitterness both in Afghanistan and in Russia where veterans of the war and parents of dead soldiers felt betrayed.
15 000 Soviet soldiers died in Afghanistan; somewhere between 600 000 and 2 500 000 Afghans: no one was counting and perhaps 1 million is the safe guess. See pages 346-47 for the number crunching.
In due course, when we have left, writers will tally the figures from the current war.
__________________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
British ambassadors are career appointees and often enough clever and honourable. Sherard Cowper-Coles who wrote Cables from Kabul is a good, recent example. So too is Rodric Braithwaite.
His book is partly an unspoken ("diplomatic") critique of the current NATO occupation of Afghanistan. Every chapter of his book about the Russian Occupation of 1979 - 1989 allows parallels to be drawn with the current disaster.
The book is remarkable for its clear-headed portrayal of the horrors of war, and especially, the horrors of wars of occupation. Perhaps surprisingly for a former ambassador engaged in high diplomacy, Braithwaite dwells at length on the experience of ordinary Afghans and ordinary Russian soldiers and technical advisers. He writes a very humane book, readable from cover to cover. But quite often, it is disturbing reading.
At the same time, Braithwaite presents the leadership and higher authorities (military, intelligence, civilian) of the Soviet Union as less sclerotic and less vicious than is often imagined. At times, I guess that what he writes will make people in the Foreign Office think that he is just another of those ambassadors who "went native". (He was Ambassador to Moscow, 1988 - 1992).
The Soviet Union got itself into a mess in Afghanistan, found it hard to get out, and when it did so left a legacy of bitterness both in Afghanistan and in Russia where veterans of the war and parents of dead soldiers felt betrayed.
15 000 Soviet soldiers died in Afghanistan; somewhere between 600 000 and 2 500 000 Afghans: no one was counting and perhaps 1 million is the safe guess. See pages 346-47 for the number crunching.
In due course, when we have left, writers will tally the figures from the current war.
__________________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
This is not an easy book to read; it does not stray from the cataloguing and analysis of policies of terror, destruction and extermination between 1933 and 1945. But the analysis is new (to me)and there is much in the detail which I had simply not encountered before.
The analysis is new insofar as it places the Jewish Holocaust (six million dead) in the context of fourteen million dead from policies pursued by Hitler and Stalin in what Snyder calls "The Bloodlands" - Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and, to a lesser degree, the Baltic States.
Big numbers to the death tally are contributed by Stalin's deliberate creation of famine in 1932-33 Ukraine (3.3 million, page 411), with which Snyder begins his narrative. More big numbers are added by the German treatment of Soviet Prisoners of War, captured in vast numbers as the Nazis swept into the Soviet Union in 1941 and either shot or allowed to die of starvation in horrific conditions (3.1 million, page 184):
"In late 1941, when [Soviet] prisoners of war were very likely to starve to death, some of them survived by fleeing - to the Minsk ghetto. The ghetto was still a safer place than the prisoner-of-war camps. In the last few months of 1941, more people died at nearby Dulags and Stalags than in the Minsk ghetto" (page 230; see also the figures at page 179)
In this connection, Snyder clearly has no patience with the distinction between a "good" Wehrmacht (professional soldiers doing their duty) and the Nazis: in the Bloodlands, the Wehrmacht were enthusiasts for killing.
The tally increases hundreds of thousands at a time from other policies of Stalin and Hitler:
- Stalin's Great Terror of 1937 - 38
- Stalin's selective executions and mass deportations of ethnic groups from Soviet border areas where they were thought likely to sympathises with an invader
- Hitler's and Stalin's joint actions in exterminating Polish elites, military and civlian. The Katyn Massacre of the Polish Officer class is the most familiar. The Soviets were responsible but it could equally have been the Germans.
- Hitler's "Reprisal" killings of civilians, notably in Belarus and Poland. In Belarus there was quite a lot of Soviet inspired Partisan activity and in Poland, there was both the Home Army of the Polish government in exile and Soviet-directed Partisans. After the Warsaw Uprisings, all of Warsaw was razed to the ground.
- The advancing Soviet Army's raping and killing spree in 1944-45
Snyder's list is longer than this summary.
New to me was his emphasis on the fact that Hitler did not want either the people or the cities of the occupied East: he wanted a tabula rasa on which to start again: new inhabitants and new infrastructure. What seems to an outsider wanton destruction was almost always part of a policy. The same is true of Stalin's Ukraine Famine.
Snyder does not write about acts of individual humanity or resistance to horrific policy and behaviour. The book is unremittingly bleak. Nor does he look at the role of institutions which still existed to some extent independent of Nazi or Communist control. He says nothing about the churches, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and (in the Baltics) Lutheran. Some of them were complicit in murderous policies and that should be analysed. Some of them housed individuals who risked their lives for others.
Snyder does emphasise that the Western allies - the USA, the UK - took little or no interest in what was happening in the European lands fought over between Hitler and Stalin, and declined to act on what they did know. I quote one story which was new to me:
'Shmuel Zygielbojm, the representative of the [Jewish socialist] Bund to the Polish government-in-exile in London, knew that the [Warsaw] ghetto was going up in flames. He had a clear idea of the general course of the Holocaust from Jan Karski, a Home Army courier who had brought news of the the mass murder to the Allied leaders in 1942....In a careful suicide note of 12 May 1943....he wrote: "Though the responsibility fro the crime of the murder of the entire Jewish nation rests above all upon the perpetrators, indirect blame must be borne by humanity itself" The next day he burned himself alive in front of the British parliament...' (page 292)[* but see my Footnote below]
In the shadow and the wake of fourteen million dead people, there were also those who survived, often Displaced, often Deported, often in Exile and almost inevitably traumatised. Their contribution to the post-war world often demonstrated an extraordinary ability to triumph over adversity. At times, their contribution was not constructive - so much so that in his book Political Journeys Fred Halliday concludes that the role of diasporas in the politics of their homeland is always negative. But the world of the survivors is another book.
I am glad I read Snyder's extraordinarily broad and detailed work, cover to cover. I recommend it.
___________________
Footnote added 19 May 2012: In his 1944 autobiographical book, Story of a Secret State,Jan Karski gives a detailed and moving account of his meeting in London with Zygielbojm. But the suicide is described as having been committed at home, by turning on the gas (page 366 of the 2012 Penguin edition). The Wikipedia entry for Zygielbojm makes no mention of a public suicide. It does, however, say that Zygielbojm's body was cremated at the time in symbolic solidarity with Polish Jews and that because this was contrary to Jewish burial traditions, it posed problems for the interment of his ashes, when they were located in 1959, and which were not resolved until 1961.
_______________________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
The analysis is new insofar as it places the Jewish Holocaust (six million dead) in the context of fourteen million dead from policies pursued by Hitler and Stalin in what Snyder calls "The Bloodlands" - Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and, to a lesser degree, the Baltic States.
Big numbers to the death tally are contributed by Stalin's deliberate creation of famine in 1932-33 Ukraine (3.3 million, page 411), with which Snyder begins his narrative. More big numbers are added by the German treatment of Soviet Prisoners of War, captured in vast numbers as the Nazis swept into the Soviet Union in 1941 and either shot or allowed to die of starvation in horrific conditions (3.1 million, page 184):
"In late 1941, when [Soviet] prisoners of war were very likely to starve to death, some of them survived by fleeing - to the Minsk ghetto. The ghetto was still a safer place than the prisoner-of-war camps. In the last few months of 1941, more people died at nearby Dulags and Stalags than in the Minsk ghetto" (page 230; see also the figures at page 179)
In this connection, Snyder clearly has no patience with the distinction between a "good" Wehrmacht (professional soldiers doing their duty) and the Nazis: in the Bloodlands, the Wehrmacht were enthusiasts for killing.
The tally increases hundreds of thousands at a time from other policies of Stalin and Hitler:
- Stalin's Great Terror of 1937 - 38
- Stalin's selective executions and mass deportations of ethnic groups from Soviet border areas where they were thought likely to sympathises with an invader
- Hitler's and Stalin's joint actions in exterminating Polish elites, military and civlian. The Katyn Massacre of the Polish Officer class is the most familiar. The Soviets were responsible but it could equally have been the Germans.
- Hitler's "Reprisal" killings of civilians, notably in Belarus and Poland. In Belarus there was quite a lot of Soviet inspired Partisan activity and in Poland, there was both the Home Army of the Polish government in exile and Soviet-directed Partisans. After the Warsaw Uprisings, all of Warsaw was razed to the ground.
- The advancing Soviet Army's raping and killing spree in 1944-45
Snyder's list is longer than this summary.
New to me was his emphasis on the fact that Hitler did not want either the people or the cities of the occupied East: he wanted a tabula rasa on which to start again: new inhabitants and new infrastructure. What seems to an outsider wanton destruction was almost always part of a policy. The same is true of Stalin's Ukraine Famine.
Snyder does not write about acts of individual humanity or resistance to horrific policy and behaviour. The book is unremittingly bleak. Nor does he look at the role of institutions which still existed to some extent independent of Nazi or Communist control. He says nothing about the churches, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and (in the Baltics) Lutheran. Some of them were complicit in murderous policies and that should be analysed. Some of them housed individuals who risked their lives for others.
Snyder does emphasise that the Western allies - the USA, the UK - took little or no interest in what was happening in the European lands fought over between Hitler and Stalin, and declined to act on what they did know. I quote one story which was new to me:
'Shmuel Zygielbojm, the representative of the [Jewish socialist] Bund to the Polish government-in-exile in London, knew that the [Warsaw] ghetto was going up in flames. He had a clear idea of the general course of the Holocaust from Jan Karski, a Home Army courier who had brought news of the the mass murder to the Allied leaders in 1942....In a careful suicide note of 12 May 1943....he wrote: "Though the responsibility fro the crime of the murder of the entire Jewish nation rests above all upon the perpetrators, indirect blame must be borne by humanity itself" The next day he burned himself alive in front of the British parliament...' (page 292)[* but see my Footnote below]
In the shadow and the wake of fourteen million dead people, there were also those who survived, often Displaced, often Deported, often in Exile and almost inevitably traumatised. Their contribution to the post-war world often demonstrated an extraordinary ability to triumph over adversity. At times, their contribution was not constructive - so much so that in his book Political Journeys Fred Halliday concludes that the role of diasporas in the politics of their homeland is always negative. But the world of the survivors is another book.
I am glad I read Snyder's extraordinarily broad and detailed work, cover to cover. I recommend it.
___________________
Footnote added 19 May 2012: In his 1944 autobiographical book, Story of a Secret State,Jan Karski gives a detailed and moving account of his meeting in London with Zygielbojm. But the suicide is described as having been committed at home, by turning on the gas (page 366 of the 2012 Penguin edition). The Wikipedia entry for Zygielbojm makes no mention of a public suicide. It does, however, say that Zygielbojm's body was cremated at the time in symbolic solidarity with Polish Jews and that because this was contrary to Jewish burial traditions, it posed problems for the interment of his ashes, when they were located in 1959, and which were not resolved until 1961.
_______________________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience
Russia was an empire, but (except in the case of Alaska) no oceans separated its centres of power from its colonies - only marshes, steppes and desert. The colonies were on the periphery - Siberia, Central Asia, Transcaucasia, the Baltics - but also in the heartlands over whose Russian peasants their masters - though often of the same race and speaking the same language - exercised an uncertain dominion. Russia's colonial history in many respects reflects this specific and unusual geographical character of the Empire.
Alexander Etkind comes at this subject as a University teacher of Russian Literature and Cultural History.
In the past (quite distant now), his subject matter would have been fair game for writers and intellectuals receiving no specific state subvention for their work. They would have produced belles-lettres, sometimes idiosyncratic and unreliable. Professors aim for something different and so Etkind pays his respects to the theorists of cultural history who matter in his world - Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin - though he largely spares us Derrida.
But having paid his respects, I am not sure that it makes much difference to what he writes. He starts from a Bibliography to die for (pp 257 - 82) and turns in some virtuoso performances, for example on the fur trade. But overall the book is a collection of sketches from an academic's album: seminar papers ("In this chapter, I will re-read these novellas together with two lesser known non-fiction texts by the same authors..." (page 214), biographical entries for little-known writers, "compare and contrast" literary essays,and - at worst - plot summaries and cabinets of curiosities. It is modern belles-lettres, with an academic cover story, and perhaps no worse for that.
On the other hand, Etkind does miss the opportunity for an integrated narrative of Russian colonial experience when he throws away a very interesting and important idea in just two pages (pp 143 - 144). He reprises this idea in his Conclusion:
"the Russian Empire demonstrated a reversed imperial gradient: people on the periphery lived better than those in the central provinces. The Empire settled foreigners on its lands, giving them privileges over Russians and other locals. Among all ethnicities in the Empire, only Russian and some other eastern Slavs were subject to serfdom..."(p 252)
This idea struck a lot of chords. Not so long ago I read Nicolas Breyfogle's Heretics and Colonizers ( 2005). He shows how religious heretics (schismatics) originally exiled to the Caucasus to keep them away from the Orthodox in the Russian heartlands ended up both enjoying very obvious privileges, such as exemption from military service, and being relied on by the Imperial administration to provide valuable services to the Empire, for instance maintaining postroads and post stations on the Imperial periphery. At one and the same time, the heretics were outcasts, privileged and indispensable.
The Caucasus was also home to communities of foreign (mostly German) sects - Wurttemburgists, Mennonites - who were allowed enough autonomy to put their energies to long-term productive use. In the settlement of [H]elenendorf (after 1914, Elenino / Eleneno) in predominantly Muslim Elisavetpol guberniya, Wurttemburgists - who had arrived as far back as 1818 - produced wine and marketed it through a company of some importance, Concordia. The community survived until 1940 when Stalin exiled these Germans to Kazakhstan. There were a score or more communities like Elenino.
In another direction,the striking fact that peasants in the heartlands lived worse than those in the "colonial" periphery could be seen as critical to understanding both the collapse of the regime in 1917 and later (1918 - 21) features of War Communism.
In relation to the collapse, it was workers and peasants in the Russian heartlands who disproportionately provided the manpower to fight the First World War and who bore the brunt of German assaults. They were on the sharp end of the failings of the Imperial regime, not least the class (Estates, Ranks) system which made officers completely foreign to their men.
In contrast, and by way of example,for almost the whole war period, Russian Poland was under German Occupation. The subjects of the Tsar got on with their lives under German Occupation and parts of the civil administration were devolved to them. In the East, the Germans were not defeated - and after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, they took control of even more Imperial territory (the Baltic provinces, Ukraine).
The Bolshevik re-conquest of Russia in the East - Ukraine, the Don and Kuban,Central Asia, Siberia - which involved the defeat of all the opposing "White" forces by the end of 1920 - also deployed soldiers recruited primarily from the Russian heartlands from among poor workers and peasants. As the Red Army moved south and east, into areas richer in food and other products than the heartlands, so it requisitioned produce for the centre - for Petrograd and Moscow. And, at an individual level, soldiers looted or acquired on favourable terms food and other goods which they shipped back home by post. In a very crude and violent way, there was a redistribution from the wealthier periphery to the poorer centre.
Under Stalin, that redistribution from periphery to centre became larger and even more lethal, culminating in the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932 -33 [ see my review of Vasily Grossman's Everything Flows in a previous Blog].
So I think that Etkind in the idea of the "Reversed Imperial Gradient" touched on something which could perhaps have been developed at much greater length and which might have integrated some of the disparate material in this interesting book.
__________________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Alexander Etkind comes at this subject as a University teacher of Russian Literature and Cultural History.
In the past (quite distant now), his subject matter would have been fair game for writers and intellectuals receiving no specific state subvention for their work. They would have produced belles-lettres, sometimes idiosyncratic and unreliable. Professors aim for something different and so Etkind pays his respects to the theorists of cultural history who matter in his world - Edward Said, Homi Bhaba, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin - though he largely spares us Derrida.
But having paid his respects, I am not sure that it makes much difference to what he writes. He starts from a Bibliography to die for (pp 257 - 82) and turns in some virtuoso performances, for example on the fur trade. But overall the book is a collection of sketches from an academic's album: seminar papers ("In this chapter, I will re-read these novellas together with two lesser known non-fiction texts by the same authors..." (page 214), biographical entries for little-known writers, "compare and contrast" literary essays,and - at worst - plot summaries and cabinets of curiosities. It is modern belles-lettres, with an academic cover story, and perhaps no worse for that.
On the other hand, Etkind does miss the opportunity for an integrated narrative of Russian colonial experience when he throws away a very interesting and important idea in just two pages (pp 143 - 144). He reprises this idea in his Conclusion:
"the Russian Empire demonstrated a reversed imperial gradient: people on the periphery lived better than those in the central provinces. The Empire settled foreigners on its lands, giving them privileges over Russians and other locals. Among all ethnicities in the Empire, only Russian and some other eastern Slavs were subject to serfdom..."(p 252)
This idea struck a lot of chords. Not so long ago I read Nicolas Breyfogle's Heretics and Colonizers ( 2005). He shows how religious heretics (schismatics) originally exiled to the Caucasus to keep them away from the Orthodox in the Russian heartlands ended up both enjoying very obvious privileges, such as exemption from military service, and being relied on by the Imperial administration to provide valuable services to the Empire, for instance maintaining postroads and post stations on the Imperial periphery. At one and the same time, the heretics were outcasts, privileged and indispensable.
The Caucasus was also home to communities of foreign (mostly German) sects - Wurttemburgists, Mennonites - who were allowed enough autonomy to put their energies to long-term productive use. In the settlement of [H]elenendorf (after 1914, Elenino / Eleneno) in predominantly Muslim Elisavetpol guberniya, Wurttemburgists - who had arrived as far back as 1818 - produced wine and marketed it through a company of some importance, Concordia. The community survived until 1940 when Stalin exiled these Germans to Kazakhstan. There were a score or more communities like Elenino.
In another direction,the striking fact that peasants in the heartlands lived worse than those in the "colonial" periphery could be seen as critical to understanding both the collapse of the regime in 1917 and later (1918 - 21) features of War Communism.
In relation to the collapse, it was workers and peasants in the Russian heartlands who disproportionately provided the manpower to fight the First World War and who bore the brunt of German assaults. They were on the sharp end of the failings of the Imperial regime, not least the class (Estates, Ranks) system which made officers completely foreign to their men.
In contrast, and by way of example,for almost the whole war period, Russian Poland was under German Occupation. The subjects of the Tsar got on with their lives under German Occupation and parts of the civil administration were devolved to them. In the East, the Germans were not defeated - and after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, they took control of even more Imperial territory (the Baltic provinces, Ukraine).
The Bolshevik re-conquest of Russia in the East - Ukraine, the Don and Kuban,Central Asia, Siberia - which involved the defeat of all the opposing "White" forces by the end of 1920 - also deployed soldiers recruited primarily from the Russian heartlands from among poor workers and peasants. As the Red Army moved south and east, into areas richer in food and other products than the heartlands, so it requisitioned produce for the centre - for Petrograd and Moscow. And, at an individual level, soldiers looted or acquired on favourable terms food and other goods which they shipped back home by post. In a very crude and violent way, there was a redistribution from the wealthier periphery to the poorer centre.
Under Stalin, that redistribution from periphery to centre became larger and even more lethal, culminating in the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932 -33 [ see my review of Vasily Grossman's Everything Flows in a previous Blog].
So I think that Etkind in the idea of the "Reversed Imperial Gradient" touched on something which could perhaps have been developed at much greater length and which might have integrated some of the disparate material in this interesting book.
__________________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Ferdinand Mount, The New Few or a Very British Oligarchy
Inequality in Britain has increased, is increasing and ought to be reduced. This is now part of the British political consensus, with no one against except for the nastier kinds of self-made men.
In respect to those, Mr Mount (he could call himself Sir Ferdinand but chooses not to - the title came from an uncle) voted in 2010, moving his money from Bob Diamond-geezer's Barclays to the Co-op.
That may not seem bad for a former head of Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street Policy Unit (1982-84), though in reality Mr Mount was not a Thatcherite and is perhaps best described as a life-long, old-fashioned "One Nation" Tory, formed in the schools of Eton and Christ Church.
As such, he is very much in favour of things like the London Living Wage campaign (pp 263 - 68) which aims to raise wages at the bottom. Equally, he is in favour of shareholder vetoes over executive remuneration which would damp down wages and bonuses at the top without the need for legislative capping.
Mr Mount's economic oligarchies are made up of new men - the bankers at the forefront. He has nothing to say about old money, but old money is still up there on the Sunday Times Rich List. Think only of the Duke of Westminster, who through the Grosvenor estates owns the posh bits of London.
Mr Mount is also agin the new political oligarchies which over decades have weakened local government, the political parties, the House of Commons and installed Sofa Government in their place. Both Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair very much wanted to have their own way and the outcome is what other writers (though not Mount) call a "democratic deficit".
Mount sees things moving the other way under the Coalition government though, ironically, the vote against elected mayors in most English cities suggests that those who vote aren't in favour of more democracy. Ditto for the rejection of proportional representation.
Popular rejectionism also shows in attitudes to economic oligarchies and economic inequalities.
Voters of the middling kind didn't much like "Equality of Opportunity" since there was a risk that the 11+ would move their own children down rather than up. Faith schools now shelter anxious parents from such risks.
Voters of all kinds are generally rather impressed by those who can command very large sums of money for doing little or (in the case of the Lottery) nothing. Leave aside occasional outbreaks of Fred Goodwin-rage and there seems a great deal of tolerance for paying millions to footballers who don't actually score many goals and singers who - well, I won't say can't sing, - let's say, singers who can belt out popular tunes.
So I think the malaise is deeper than Mr Mount allows. He comes across as quite an optimist and also as someone who doesn't ask that very much should change. The book is an easy read, and good in parts - on local government and, perhaps surprisingly, on the 2011 urban riots.
___________________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
In respect to those, Mr Mount (he could call himself Sir Ferdinand but chooses not to - the title came from an uncle) voted in 2010, moving his money from Bob Diamond-geezer's Barclays to the Co-op.
That may not seem bad for a former head of Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street Policy Unit (1982-84), though in reality Mr Mount was not a Thatcherite and is perhaps best described as a life-long, old-fashioned "One Nation" Tory, formed in the schools of Eton and Christ Church.
As such, he is very much in favour of things like the London Living Wage campaign (pp 263 - 68) which aims to raise wages at the bottom. Equally, he is in favour of shareholder vetoes over executive remuneration which would damp down wages and bonuses at the top without the need for legislative capping.
Mr Mount's economic oligarchies are made up of new men - the bankers at the forefront. He has nothing to say about old money, but old money is still up there on the Sunday Times Rich List. Think only of the Duke of Westminster, who through the Grosvenor estates owns the posh bits of London.
Mr Mount is also agin the new political oligarchies which over decades have weakened local government, the political parties, the House of Commons and installed Sofa Government in their place. Both Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair very much wanted to have their own way and the outcome is what other writers (though not Mount) call a "democratic deficit".
Mount sees things moving the other way under the Coalition government though, ironically, the vote against elected mayors in most English cities suggests that those who vote aren't in favour of more democracy. Ditto for the rejection of proportional representation.
Popular rejectionism also shows in attitudes to economic oligarchies and economic inequalities.
Voters of the middling kind didn't much like "Equality of Opportunity" since there was a risk that the 11+ would move their own children down rather than up. Faith schools now shelter anxious parents from such risks.
Voters of all kinds are generally rather impressed by those who can command very large sums of money for doing little or (in the case of the Lottery) nothing. Leave aside occasional outbreaks of Fred Goodwin-rage and there seems a great deal of tolerance for paying millions to footballers who don't actually score many goals and singers who - well, I won't say can't sing, - let's say, singers who can belt out popular tunes.
So I think the malaise is deeper than Mr Mount allows. He comes across as quite an optimist and also as someone who doesn't ask that very much should change. The book is an easy read, and good in parts - on local government and, perhaps surprisingly, on the 2011 urban riots.
___________________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Review: Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War
This is a lively, well-written book which even though published by the best kind of university press (Harvard 2011) has a polemical, one-sided style and content which will no doubt attract commentary and criticism.
What the book does, most valuably, for an English (or West European) reader is to point out that the First World War was a war between Imperial powers, the strong among which all had designs on the territory of the weakest, the Ottoman Empire. In addition, Russia also wanted to seize territory from the second weakest Empire, Austria-Hungary - and from non-Imperial Persia.
Russia aimed to seize Austrian Galicia (Eastern Poland, Western Ukraine) and, after initial successes, failed; it did not succeed until 1939 when the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact carved up Poland. That success proved enduring: Galicia is now part of modern Ukraine.
At the same time, Russia aimed to seize Eastern Anatolia (Western Armenia)and, more importantly, Constantinople and all such territory as was necessary to control the waters between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It made remarkable advances into Turkish territory as late as 1917 but never succeeded in either aim. Indeed, when the Bolsheviks finally made their peace with Turkey, the Turkish borders were extended eastwards into what had been Imperial Russian territory (Kars and so on).
Russia also lost the control it had achieved over northern Persia, though it tried again unsuccessfully at the end of World War Two.
Russia's Imperial drive was partly motivated by its perennial anxiety, border insecurity. With by far the longest land borders of any country, Russia always faced the problem of enemies across the border. Its Imperialist response was always to push to expand the borders - east (into Mongolia and China), South (into Persia and Turkey) and East (into Austria). At no point does it seem that anyone realised the paradox and futility of this behaviour, as if by making your borders even longer you could solve the problem of long border insecurity.
Mc Meekin writes from a position sympathetic to Turkey (he is a Professor at a Turkish university, Bilkent). He shows in a very interesting way how the Russians manipulated Armenian nationalists in their own expansionist interests, and abandoned them when it suited. Along the way, they certainly gave the Ottoman Turkish authorities cause to be wary of their own subjects.
But in emphasising Imperial predatoriness, he perhaps underestimates the real drive for autonomy and independence among national or quasi-national groups of the old Empires. In a similar if exaggerated way, apologists of Milosevic's Serbia (like the late Sean Gervasi), see only the predatory dismemberment of Yugoslavia by American imperialism, aided by their European allies, and fail to see the genuine drive for self-determination among increasingly reluctant and abused parts of the Yugoslav Federation.
In emphasising Russia's successes on the Eastern front, with consequent high morale, McMeekin has a bit of a problem with the overthrow of Nicholas and then the Bolshevik revolution. If the senseless butchery of Verdun and the Somme did not lead the citizens of France or Britain to string up their leaders from the lamp posts, how come Russia had a revolution when it was winning?
McMeekin does not answer this by pointing to failures on the Western front - the loss of Poland and then the Baltics. Rather, he suggests that the Tsar fell between two oppositions: those who believed he and his ministers were not prosecuting the war vigorously enough (because they were basically pro-German traitors)and those who believed that Russia should not be prosecuting the war at all, because it was an Imperialist war. In this scenario, the Provisional Government of March - October 1917 is an energetically pro-war government which came to power at a time of increasing war-weariness in the Russian heartlands. The Bolsheviks seized the opportunity this created with the call for Peace linked to that for Bread and Land.
There is a great deal of unfamiliar material presented and discussed in the pages of this unusual and very readable book.
_____________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
What the book does, most valuably, for an English (or West European) reader is to point out that the First World War was a war between Imperial powers, the strong among which all had designs on the territory of the weakest, the Ottoman Empire. In addition, Russia also wanted to seize territory from the second weakest Empire, Austria-Hungary - and from non-Imperial Persia.
Russia aimed to seize Austrian Galicia (Eastern Poland, Western Ukraine) and, after initial successes, failed; it did not succeed until 1939 when the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact carved up Poland. That success proved enduring: Galicia is now part of modern Ukraine.
At the same time, Russia aimed to seize Eastern Anatolia (Western Armenia)and, more importantly, Constantinople and all such territory as was necessary to control the waters between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It made remarkable advances into Turkish territory as late as 1917 but never succeeded in either aim. Indeed, when the Bolsheviks finally made their peace with Turkey, the Turkish borders were extended eastwards into what had been Imperial Russian territory (Kars and so on).
Russia also lost the control it had achieved over northern Persia, though it tried again unsuccessfully at the end of World War Two.
Russia's Imperial drive was partly motivated by its perennial anxiety, border insecurity. With by far the longest land borders of any country, Russia always faced the problem of enemies across the border. Its Imperialist response was always to push to expand the borders - east (into Mongolia and China), South (into Persia and Turkey) and East (into Austria). At no point does it seem that anyone realised the paradox and futility of this behaviour, as if by making your borders even longer you could solve the problem of long border insecurity.
Mc Meekin writes from a position sympathetic to Turkey (he is a Professor at a Turkish university, Bilkent). He shows in a very interesting way how the Russians manipulated Armenian nationalists in their own expansionist interests, and abandoned them when it suited. Along the way, they certainly gave the Ottoman Turkish authorities cause to be wary of their own subjects.
But in emphasising Imperial predatoriness, he perhaps underestimates the real drive for autonomy and independence among national or quasi-national groups of the old Empires. In a similar if exaggerated way, apologists of Milosevic's Serbia (like the late Sean Gervasi), see only the predatory dismemberment of Yugoslavia by American imperialism, aided by their European allies, and fail to see the genuine drive for self-determination among increasingly reluctant and abused parts of the Yugoslav Federation.
In emphasising Russia's successes on the Eastern front, with consequent high morale, McMeekin has a bit of a problem with the overthrow of Nicholas and then the Bolshevik revolution. If the senseless butchery of Verdun and the Somme did not lead the citizens of France or Britain to string up their leaders from the lamp posts, how come Russia had a revolution when it was winning?
McMeekin does not answer this by pointing to failures on the Western front - the loss of Poland and then the Baltics. Rather, he suggests that the Tsar fell between two oppositions: those who believed he and his ministers were not prosecuting the war vigorously enough (because they were basically pro-German traitors)and those who believed that Russia should not be prosecuting the war at all, because it was an Imperialist war. In this scenario, the Provisional Government of March - October 1917 is an energetically pro-war government which came to power at a time of increasing war-weariness in the Russian heartlands. The Bolsheviks seized the opportunity this created with the call for Peace linked to that for Bread and Land.
There is a great deal of unfamiliar material presented and discussed in the pages of this unusual and very readable book.
_____________
Previously published on my Blog, The Best I can Do
Wednesday 6 June 2012
Review: Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder
Four hundred and sixty nine pages of small print in my paperback edition plus another eighty pages of apparatus, but it's a very readable as well as an immensely knowledgeable book.
For your money (a mere £9.99 even before 3 for 2)you get four major biographies - of Joseph Banks, of William and Caroline Herschel, of Humphry Davy - with lesser biographies of Montgolfier and other early balloonists, Mungo Park, Mary Shelley, Michael Faraday and others. The Lives, Loves & Labours of these pioneering explorers and scientists are vivid and packed. I didn't skip any of them.
But I did skip most of the occasional excerpts from Romantic poetry which illustrate how closely the Romantic poets interested themselves in contemporary science, responding to it in verse. That's the problem: poetry is an unfortunate medium in which to wrestle with real science and its implications. It's a prose subject. Holmes does briefly allude to the possibility that that is the case: see page 344.
He also gives us excerpts from the versifying of the scientists themselves, usually addressed in lyric mode to young women who they are wooing or have wooed. Yes.
Richard Holmes isn't really aiming at a history of science in the academic mode and this is what allows him to write such a very readable book. But along the way there is a great deal which could be turned to further use by someone more theoretically minded. Holmes does a lot of spade work on how women were able to find some kind of place in science at this time (the 1760s to the 1830s). And there is a great deal here on social mobility - and resistance to it - and on the role of patronage and sponsorship, state and private. I just pick out one charming bit of information: the first person to salary a woman (Caroline Herschel in 1787) as a professional scientist was King George III.
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