Book Review - The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey

 The Ministry of Truth: a Biography of George Orwell's 1984 by Dorian Lynskey

London: Picador, 2019                                ISBN 9781509890743 

I purchased this book on a whim - it tempted me sitting on the shelves of the second-hand book dealer by being filled with newspaper cuttings to do with Orwell. I confess I didn't have a huge desire to read the book, as I feel that I have drunk enough from the well of Orwell, having read most of his work, and several biographies and critical pieces over the years.

However, I'm glad I did decide to go beyond the cuttings, as Ministry of Truth is a fascinating insight into both the journey Orwell took in life that led him to 1984, and the strange and wonderful "life" of the book itself, mostly "lived" without its "father" (Orwell died 227 days after publication - as Lynskey describes, the act of writing 1984 considerably hastened Orwell's death).

In many ways, the short focussed life of Orwell depicted by Lynskey in these pages is more than enough for most Orwell fans. The book shows how many of the events of Orwell's life led up to the moment when he finished 1984. It seems to me that Lynskey sees Orwell's time in Spain during the Civil War as a turning point for not only for how he viewed Communism, but a solidification for him of what he did believe in - individual freedom and a democratic socialism. His experiences in Spain certainly opened his eyes to totalitarianism, and steeled him for the fight against it - he fought in the best way he could - with words.

Orwell was, as we all are, full of contradictions and blind spots: despite himself, his education and upbringing coloured his view of society, and he was a man of his time in his view of women (thankfully Lynskey doesn't belabour these points too much - one can't blame someone for not having the same outlook on things as we do, seventy five years on).

Orwell saw 1984 as more a satire rather than a prediction: it was a book of possibilities to be avoided rather than a foretelling of future history. It's clear from Lynskey that Orwell was thinking about the book long before he put pen to paper. He drew inspiration from everything around him as well as from his own lived experience: from friends such as Koestler, and from his time working for the BBC, as well as through closely dissecting societal and governmental changes brought by the Second World War.

For me, it was the second part of Ministry of Truth that brought something new to the map of my Orwell world. Despite the subtitle, it's not really a "biography" of the book itself (there is no detailed analysis of its publishing history for example), but more a discussion of the many ways 1984 has gone on to influence political, social and artistic activity down to the present day. Lynskey references a gamut of voices who have felt that influence, from Terry Gilliam, Margaret Attwood and David Bowie, to Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump. There are also fascinating snippets of information, such as the fact that so many actors that have played the character of Winston Smith in television, radio and film have gone on to play one of the Doctors in Doctor Who. Lynskey references much utopian and dystopian literature in the first half of the book as well as in the second half - Orwell's complex relationship with the work of H.G. Wells is discussed, as is the effect 1984 had on modern literature.

The reception of 1984 down the decades of politics is also well covered. It has over the years been adopted by both the Left and the Right as a talisman, often with a huge distortion of Orwell's thinking and message. At first the Left reacted against the book, treating Orwell as a traitor to the cause, of writing a polemic against Stalinist Communism. He certainly did that in Animal Farm, but 1984 is an altogether more subtle book, with a message that bites both sides of the political spectrum. Orwell was a committed Socialist, but also a committed believer in personal freedom.

At the end of the Cold War, there were some who felt that the changing political scene would lead to a diminution of the power of Orwell's book. However, Lynskey explains that 1984 has continued to be relevant - while the ideas about totalitarianism may have faded somewhat, Orwell's description of a surveillance State and of the destruction of language are more relevant than ever. Lynskey also makes some neat points about current political movements, from Trump to Putin, and how Orwell foresaw much of today's politics in the book as well.

While 1984 may not be the height of literary style, its ongoing influence more than seventy years after it was first published means that it qualifies as a great book. I think Ministry of Truth goes some way to explaining why it still has such influence. It is well-written and engaging, and even an Orwell expert may learn something new.

My only gripe with the book is that while it contains good notes there is no bibliography, the lack of which was painfully felt by me.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

London: Penguin Books, 2000 (First Published 1949)         ISBN 9780141187761

I'm not sure how many times I've read this book, and I'm also not sure how many copies I've owned over the years... I always seem to be giving it away to someone who has yet to read some of the most prescient writing on the nature of modern political life, in the hope that it will change the way they think about society, and learn to value individual freedom.

Orwell is rightly seen as the most clear headed writer to tackle the rise of totalitarianism, both Left and Right, in the early to mid Twentieth Century. With Animal Farm and the novel under review, Orwell skewered the falsity of ideological dictatorship, and the absurdity of following a cause even when it had turned on the path to evil. While Animal Farm is a satire of Soviet Communism, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a much deeper look at the way society - particularly politics and tyranny - can destroy the individual.

On this re-reading, I'm struck once again by how far society has headed down Orwell's dystopian tunnel seemingly without coercion from an all-controlling Party. It seems we have willingly submitted to constant surveillance, we participate in the destruction of history, and willfully deny science  ("If he thinks he floats off the floor and if I simultaneosly think I see him do it, then the thing happens"), and we, as mob, make people "unpersons". The prescience of Orwell, his understanding of human nature in that sense, sends chills down one's spine.

One thing though, that I hadn't really picked up on before to such an extent, is the fact that Ingsoc, Newspeak and the Thought Police were all wiped away, as is clear in the Appendix on the Principles of Newspeak. So, Winston Smith's vision that there was "some spirit, some principle - that you will never overcome....The spirit of Man" was in fact the truth, rather than O'Brien's assertion that "The Party is immortal." The hope of Winston Smith is the hope that we all cling to during times when it seems humanity is on the path to destruction: thankfully, amidst the gloom, evidence of the "spirit of Man" keeps re-appearing, to remind us that those that would like to control us are not all-powerful.

The book asks many questions of the reader: what does it mean to be free? What does it mean to have power? and, importantly, what is power for? These questions have resonated for hundreds of years, and are still important now. Freedom, as the Party well knows in this book means many things, but most importantly the ability to think. With Newspeak the Party works to take that ability away, but until that project is completed, they have moved one step beyond the historical totalitarianisms that we have known. It is not enough to confess, it is not enough to betray: in Oceania, one must truly believe before the final bullet in the back of the neck. Power means the ability to coerce, and what is it for? "Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution to establish the dictatorship.

While we may not have dictatorships, we increasingly see in the democratic West the quest for power for its own sake. Our parties have atrophied as politics has become yet another career path. While we bemoan this fact, perhaps the rise of independent politicians will in fact improve our polity, and steer us to a brighter future. Or perhaps, like Winston, I'm dreaming.

As to the literary qualities of Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is not so much to write about. Orwell was definitely a supreme craftsman of prose, but the book rises to no great stylistic or linguistic heights. Partly I'm sure, that was Orwell's plan, given his subject matter and the message he was trying to impart. The story, as it goes, is quite a good one, and the philosophizing, when it comes, can be a little dry, although easy enough to understand.

It seems superfluous for me to add that this is one of the classics of Twentieth Century literature. If you haven't read it, why not?

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 by Victor Serge

 Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 by Victor Serge, translated and edited by Peter Sedgwick

London: Oxford University Press, 1967 (this translation first published 1963)

I have been meaning to read Victor Serge for many years - in my peregrinations through the literature of revolution and totalitarianism and the tortured history of the Twentieth Century his name crops up again and again (in fact it's generally accepted that he coined the word totalitarian). I've finally got around to his memoirs, and what a fascinating and depressing read they are.

Depressing in the sense that he catalogs in great detail the failure of Socialism in the first half of the 1900s, specifically the descent of the USSR into despotism and a police state, far from the hopes of those that fought the Revolution hoping for a worker's democracy.

Serge does not in this memoir really go into his personal life: he briefly describes his childhood in Belgium and France (his parents were exiled Russian socialists), and while we know from the book that he has a son, and that his first wife was eventually driven insane by the privations and persecutions Serge and his family suffered in Russia, they are the background to the wider story Serge wishes to tell.

While this is not a history of the Russian revolution, Civil War and times up until the Terror, it provides all the background information to such a history: wonderful pen-portraits of major and not so major figures in Russia during the 1920s, descriptions of the tightening grip of the Cheka on Russian society and government, and the increasingly difficult time to be weathered by those that did not absolutely conform to the Bolshevik line.

Serge never stopped fighting for the Socialism that he believed in - he went to Russia to help the worker's revolution, he joined with the Bolsheviks because he believed at the time that they were the only group that could deliver such a revolution. When the Bolsheviks went down the path of authoritarianism and repression Serge fought from within the system, as to his mind that was the only way he could make a difference.

He watched with dismay as the Bolshevik leaders consistently chose the path of repression over openness. Instead of worker's tribunals, the leadership chose unlawful detention. Instead of abolishing the death penalty, they chose to allow the Cheka to shoot people without trial or recourse to any mechanism for reprieve. Serge laments that the new regime had learnt from the Tsarist one, and continued many of the unjust activities of the past - as he writes "[t]he Russian Revolution, although led by men who were upright and intelligent, did not resolve this problem; the character of the masses had received, from the experience of despotism [i.e. under the Tsars], a fatal stamp whose effects were imprinted in the leaders themselves."

Eventually, Serge's opposition to such despotism made him a marked man, for "[o]ur great Marxists of Russia, nurtured on Science, would not admit any doubt concerning the dialectical conception of Nature - which is, however, no more than a hypothesis, and one difficult to sustain at that." Because Serge espoused this, he was hounded out of his positions, and sent into internal exile. He most probably would have been shot or died in a prison somewhere as happened to many of his friends, but because of his international fame, particularly in France where he was well-known as a novelist, he was eventually expelled from Russia.

That was not the end of his troubles - the Russians made it very hard for him anywhere he went in Europe. Pushed to the edges of the socialist movement, Serge just barely scraped by financially (although lack of money or the finer things of life never worried him), and when the Second World War came, he was forced to flee to Mexico, the only place that would take him. Although Trotsky (whom Serge often disagreed with) could not escape Stalin's vengeance in Mexico, Serge managed to spend his last years there in relative, if miserly, calm; writing this memoir before dying in 1947.

Serge's legacy is that of a true revolutionary socialist, and a clear thinker much in the mold of George Orwell. He was always working for the proletarians, and against the apparatchiks and place seekers. When he wrote this memoir he was hopeful that the War would finally bring about the socialism he was looking for - it didn't, but certainly, in the West at least, many people's lives have been improved by governments adopting some measures that alleviate the lot of the workers.

I finish this review with a quote that bears repeating again and again, for totalitarianism in all its forms continues to be a blight on the human race, and we need to keep fighting for freedom. Serge wrote that "Totalitarianism has no more dangerous enemy than the spirit of criticism, which it bends every effort to exterminate. Any reasonable objection is bundled away with shouts, and the objector himself, if he persists, is bundled off on a stretcher to the mortuary. I have met my assailants face to face in public meetings, offering to answer any question they raised. Instead they always strove to drown my voice in storms of insults, delivered at the tops of their voices."

This book is dense, but full of wisdom and pathos. If you are a student of the history of the Twentieth Century, I can recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Joke by Milan Kundera

 The Joke by Milan Kundera, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim

London: Faber and Faber, 1983 (original Czech publication 1967)   ISBN 0571130194

Milan Kundera is probably best-known for his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but The Joke - his first novel - certainly made him well-known not just in his native Czechoslovakia, but also in the West. In fact in an author's note inserted in this particular edition of the book he explains how previous editions of his work in English were not only unauthorized, but bowdlerized by those who wished to use his book as a propaganda tool when, as he claims - "The Joke is a love story!"

Well yes, it is a love story, but it is also much more than that. It is a brutal satire on the Communist system as it existed in Czechoslovakia, an exploration of hatred and revenge, and of love and forgiveness. Told in an episodic fashion, it is the story (mainly) of Ludvik and Lucie, their love story, the story of how they came together and split apart, and the story of how life led them in the directions it did, and how "a person's destiny often ends before his death".

We see that for Lucie, the one thing the Ludvik wanted from her to seal their love was the one thing she couldn't give him, and the one thing that Ludvik was too self-absorbed to understand. Ludvik's betrayal by his party comrades sent him to a penal battalion and a totally different life to the one he had been expecting. His burning desire for revenge spectacularly backfires when he commits adultery with his oppressor Zemanek's wife, only to find out they were no longer living together. Ludvik's journey through the novel not only shows the reader the dangers of going against the cultural norms of any time (and how those norms change through Ludvik's journey - at the end of the book he finds Zemanek espousing the very views which sent Ludvik off to the mines), but the dangers of looking for revenge after the moment; Kundera, - through Ludvik - explains that once time has passed the people or institutions one wants to have revenge on have changed - they are no longer what they were. And so revenge becomes hollow.

Lucie's story is one of trying to find love, and instead finding sex and violence. After being traumatized by gang-rape in her youth, her reaction to Ludvik's demands is more than understandable, except for Ludvik, who in his state of incarceration did not think of Lucie at all in his desire for physical release. Lucie eventually finds some sort of solace in religion, the forgiveness of God, and a new life in a new town.

While we can believe Kundera's assertion that The Joke is a love story, it is a love story conditioned by the regime that Czechs were living under at the time he wrote it. It is depressing to read of a society where conformity or prison were the only options, and that love becomes just another thing that is controlled by the State and its minions. When the simple joy of music is corralled, controlled and used to indoctrinate, what life can truly flourish? At the end of the book, when Ludvik comes full circle playing his treasured folk music with his oldest friend to an unfeeling crowd, Jaroslav's heart attack while playing sums up the themes of constriction and repression that course through this book.

The one thing I'm still not sure I understand, pampered bourgeois that I am, was whether The Joke was intended to be funny.....I'll leave that to wiser heads than mine.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys

Chinese shadows by Simon Leys

New York: Viking Press, 1977                 ISBN 0670219185

A few years ago I really enjoyed reading Hall of uselessness by Simon Leys  (the pen-name of Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans), and having read other glowing reviews of his work, including the volume under review here, I will slowly hunt them down and read them.

Chinese shadows consists of a selection of impressions from a six-month visit to China in 1974, when the country was still endeavouring to recover from the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. Ryckmans casts a critical eye over not only the state of the country at that time, but at the standard of critical commentary coming from the West about China and its recent history.

The book has longer and shorter vignettes and reflections on just how badly the Maoist experiment had gone wrong, and how all totalitarian societies end up with the same problems, no matter whether they espouse a leftist or a rightist philosophy (Ryckmans has a lot of fun with the forms of words used by the Chinese government and bureaucracy "sometimes,...leftism is a rightist error").

Ryckmans has several larger points to make in this work. The first is that the first thing that suffers under totalitarian rule is culture. This applies especially to Communist totalitarian regimes, where all of history must lead to the inevitable success of the revolution. When, as had happened in China, some heroes of that history needed to be purged, or the importance of an historical moment changed, one needed to try to change history. This resulted in China in the closure of museums, the destruction of monuments, and the censorship of literature and opera, to the extent that the only theatre that could be shown was that written by Mao's wife, the only books on the shelves were those by Stalin or Mao, and Ryckmans could not visit any University classes or academics in his entire six month sojourn. The destructive power of this sort of repression on a culture is hard to gauge.

The reaction of the lower functionaries in a system where white can be black, and the established structure and hierarchy can change in an instant, is another theme in this book. Ryckmans is constantly frustrated in his attempts to visit archaeological sites, or to meet people, or even in the simple act of asking directions. This, as he explains, is down to the natural fear of functionaries to give him permission to do something when the view of the regime is unclear on whether permission is allowed. It is easier, and safer for the flunky involved, to do nothing and admit nothing. As he writes of the cadres - "...we should consider how unrewarding and dangerous their job is....Directives from on high are deliberately ambiguous; in case of failure, the leaders thus have a fall-back position, while those who applied the policy are stranded and unprotected, and can be sacrificed to the rancor of the masses. It is unfair to criticize Maoist bureaucrats for their slowness and inertia: most often nonaction is their best chance of survival."

Ryckmans is more scathing of those apologists in the West who were writing paeans about China at the time - as he writes about one of them "She could have written in Europe, without leaving her room, if she had had some issues of Peking Review at her disposal; she would have gotten the same results. Her China experience was limited to a visit of a few weeks, and to three dozen interviews." He points out that many of the so-called Sinologists cannot speak or read the language, and have no understanding of the history or culture of China. Yet it is their views that were in the ascendancy at the time of writing.

All of the above smacks of the polemic, but Chinese shadows is much more than that: an elegy to what was lost during the Cultural Revolution, a celebration of innate Chinese cheerfulness, and a corrective to a flawed Western understanding of Chinese history - "If the start of the industrial revolution in Europe had coincided with one of those times when China was wide open to the outside world - which was its normal historical situation - China would never have been out-distanced in the modern 'race to progress'....In fact, because of this fatal historical accident - the establishment of the isolationist and totalitarian Ming system...China confronted the modern world blind and paralyzed, with the worst possible political heritage."

As a reminder of the path taken by China to get to where she is today, and as a book that still has a lot to give the reader, Chinese shadows is worth picking up.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, translated by Daphne Hardy

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1947                                              (first published 1940)


What to write about this book that hasn't already been written? Along with a few other classics from the 20th century, Darkness at Noon sheds an almost unbearable ray of light into the mindset of ideological dictatorship and the brutality toward individuals that inevitably results.

Koestler himself was a member of the Communist party between the wars, and in a prefatory note states that "The characters in this work are fictitious. The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real. The life of the man N.S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials. Several of them were personally known to the author."

The story of Darkness at Noon is quite simple: we follow Rubashov from his arrest, through his interrogation and trial, until in the final pages his sentence of execution is carried out. The action obviously takes place in the USSR, although no countries or leaders are mentioned by name - Stalin is referred to as "No. 1", Hitler as the man with the small moustache, and so on.

Through Rubashov's thoughts, and the progress of his interrogation, we have laid bare for us the tragedy of the Russian Revolution, and the terror and horror it released not only in the USSR, but across Europe. Rubashov is portrayed as one of the original revolutionaries who sacrificed his life for the cause and now in prison, sure of his eventual fate, he is led to the question of whether he was on the right side of history. Up until this time he had no qualms in sending people to their deaths for the greater good of the revolution, but now wavers on the question of whether it is justified to sacrifice individuals for a grander scheme. For some time he has doubted the ability of the Party to bring the human race to a better future, especially through the methods of destroying people in the here-and-now. The minor character of an old monarchist in the cell next door, which Rubashov at first ridicules, later seems not as stupid as Rubashov wonders if his ideals and actions were in fact in any way different from that old soldier.

Rubashov has two interrogators - Ivanov and Gletkin. Ivanov is a friend of Rubashov's from the Civil War times, and feels he knows how to get Rubashov to admit to his crimes, by treating him well, and arguing the points of contention. Of course that process doesn't last, and Ivanov is himself shot for being too "cynical" about the process. Gletkin is one of the new generation, who has only known the Revolution - his methods are much more straightforward, and, it turns out, successful. He manages to get Rubashov to confess to outrageous crimes by logically stepping through the implications of his feelings: if Rubashov feels the party has failed, the logical outcome of that is that he would begin to sabotage the party (the charge) even if he had not yet started to do so. If Rubashov thought that No. 1 was destroying the Revolution, the logical outcome of that train of thought is for Rubashov to arrange to have him assassinated (the charge), even if he had yet to do so. And so on. Rubashov, who we have seen in flashbacks applying the same rigorous logic to others who have variously ended up in Nazi or Communist jails, executed or killing themselves, cannot deny the charges in the way they are put. And yet both we and he know that the whole process is absurd.

Just before his sentence is carried out, Rubashov ruminates in his cell "The Party denied the free will of the individual - and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives - and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one.....For forty years he [Rubashov] had fought against economic fatality. It was the central ill of humanity, the cancer which was eating into its entrails. It was there that one must operate; the rest of the healing process would follow. All else was dilettantism, romanticism, charlatanism. One cannot heal a person mortally ill by pious exhortations. The only solution was the surgeon's knife and his cool calculation. But where the knife had been applied, a new sore had appeared in place of the old. And again the equation did not work out......Perhaps it was not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion."

Koestler wrote this book in the years 1938-1940, when the clash of the two great totalitarian systems was moving into its final phase. It is ironic that this clash probably enabled the Communist dictatorship to hold on for longer than it might have otherwise done - Koestler hints at this throughout the book. In so many ways Darkness at Noon presages 1984, in that we see the process where the dictatorship not only eliminates dissenters, but actually tries to change the way they think before they are eliminated.

This book is deservedly a classic, and even though the old Communist dictatorship is dead, is still required reading on the dangers of unfettered ideology.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Comrades come rally! by John Sendy

Comrades come rally : recollections of an Australian Communist by John Sendy

Melbourne : Nelson, 1978                                                     ISBN 0170052141


A fascinating and frustrating book. John Sendy was a life-long Communist, joining the Party during the War, and rising through the ranks to be President, before he retired in 1974, disillusioned. As the title suggests, this book is a personal look at a life spent working for the Party, and is about the happenings within the Party - there is not much theoretical material in this book (which is ironic given that Sendy suggests a lack of theoretical muscle in the membership led to many of the problems the Party suffered). In fact Sendy admits he was never much of a theorist, being a person who thought that the aims of Communism seemed right to him, and something worth striving for.

Sendy grew up in Adelaide and environs, and was seen early on as a potential leader in the Party, so was sent to China for three years of training. This experience was very formative in Sendy's thinking, as he drank in the Chinese way of Communism, which led him to begin to question the way Communism was practiced in the USSR. Later on he began to question the Chinese ideology as well, and moved toward the thinking of the Italian and French Communists, who were working through representative democratic forums to effect change, something that to Sendy seemed to make more sense in the Australian situation.  He deplored the inability of the CPA to see that they should support the efforts of the Australian Labor Party, along the lines of Italian support for Centre-Left parties. He notes that the Italian Communists ended up in a Left government in Italy by following such a policy.

This thinking brought him into conflict with some of the other leaders of the Party, who more slavishly followed the Moscow or Peking line. Sendy doesn't explicitly say so, but implies that the lack of intellectual strength within the Party led to this sort of outcome.

The history of the Communist Party of Australia after the war, and especially from the 1960s on, is one of grievances, fights, and splits, mostly over who was more "pure". Like many fundamentalist organisations, members ended up devouring each other. Sendy deplored this situation, continually advocating a more inclusive Party, that allowed it's members to disagree and argue to come up with policy. This was not how much of the other leadership wanted to run the Party - being more authoritarian in approach - with an "if you're not with us you're against us" attitude.

Sendy's fears of the outcome of this kind of thinking came true - the party kept shrinking and became more irrelevant to the Australian polity as time went on. From a high of over 20,000 members in the 1940s, by the time Sendy retired in the mid seventies the party numbered less than 2,000 members. Sendy recounts with sadness the split that led to the formation of the Socialist Party of Australia, something he thought was avoidable, and that unnecessarily diffused the Socialist effort in Australia.

Comrades come rally chronicles the decline, and the internecine backbiting that caused it. It also chronicles many of the characters of the party, and stories of their achievements, both good and bad. Sometimes what's written here comes across as very naive, but Sendy tried at all times to move the Party in a direction so that it could make a difference in politics in Australia. That he failed is not an indictment of his efforts.

An interesting document of the times, this book is neither completely personal reminiscence, nor is it history, nor is it an ideological statement. Falling between these stools, it is not quite as satisfying as it could be, but is interesting nonetheless.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Khrushchev's Russia by Edward Crankshaw

Khrushchev's Russia by Edward Crankshaw

Penguin Books, 1959

Ah, the Penguin Special. I've noticed recently that the special, or book published about a current event, is making a comeback, after a few decades of obscurity. The book under review comes from an earlier time when such books were more popular. While most of these types of books deservedly spend only a short time in the shops and a long time sitting unread on some dusty library shelf, they are occasionally worth revisiting.

Khrushchev's Russia is a useful little primer on what is now a relatively forgotten time in the history of the USSR. The death of Stalin led to a significant time of change in the government of the Soviet Union. As Crankshaw makes clear, the leadership wanted to make a clean break with the tyranny of the past, and the initial period of collective government was effective in doing that. Crankshaw shows throughout this book that Khrushchev's subsequent rise to power, while having outward similarities to Stalin's rise, was in fact very different, with Khrushchev needing to find a consensus view to remain in power. The power struggle between Malenkov and Khrushchev is well described, with Malenkov seeking the backing of the technocrats, while Khrushchev increased his grip on the Party in an endeavour to have its backing. In the end he succeeded, and as Crankshaw writes, to have the Party behind you means victory, for two reasons: one, the party structure means that someone in control has a voice that penetrates to the smallest village, and all the apparatchiks will follow the voice from the centre.

After the description of the quest for power, Crankshaw spends some pages discussing "the size of the problem", laying out in clear terms how far the USSR lagged other powers, and how the focus on heavy machinery had limited the availability of consumer goods to citizens. The backwards and forwards politics in this area seems to have been the product of the power struggle going on at the highest levels of the Party at the time.

This book is most interesting when it discusses the "thaw", the name given to the relaxation of culture after Khrushchev's famous "secret speech" denouncing Stalin. This led to a brief flowering of literary output, with the likes of Yevtushenko and Pasternak coming to the fore. Crankshaw puts this flowering, and the subsequent crackdown, into context with the uprisings in Poland and Hungary - bringing them into a larger context of the people flexing their "muscles" and seeing how far they could go. Khrushchev is never idealised in this book, and his chilling speech to the Russian writers where he threatened them with being shot reminds the reader that for all the discussion of a new way the old realities of the Stalinist system were not too far from the surface. The appendix to the book, containing the rejection letter to Pasternak from Novy Mir is a fine example of what artists had to cope with in such a system.

Crankshaw ends his special on a note of hope, describing the upcoming generation of Russians as ones with intelligence and a lack of fear. With the benefit of hindsight (this book was written before the intensification of the Cold War in the '60s) we can see that generation did not fulfil its promise, and the dull formalism of Soviet life continued.

It's always worth reminding ourselves of the relatively short duration of the Russian experiment - when this book was written the Revolution was barely forty years old, and there was no indication of its eventual decline thirty years hence - and at the time of writing it was quite possible to imagine that Russia may indeed surpass the wealth of the USA in another generation. Only fifty years ago there was no consensus that the Capitalist system would come out on top. This book, while pulling no punches in describing the worst excesses of the Soviet system, is a reminder of that.

You might find this book floating somewhere on a library shelf - it's a more entertaining read on 50s Russia than the Wikipedia entry.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book review - Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum

Iron Curtain : the crushing of Eastern Europe 1944 - 1956 by Anne Applebaum

New York: Doubleday, 2012    ISBN 9780385515696


The basic facts of the segregation of Europe after the end of the Second World War are well known - both the Soviet Union and the Western Powers (USA, Britain and France) divided the defeated Germany between them, and spheres of influence over other countries were split approximately along the lines agreed at the Yalta Conference, confirmed by "feet on the ground" at the cessation of hostilities.

And while those of us who are of a certain age or older know what we know about the Warsaw Pact, and the Cold War, for those of us who had no experience of what it was like to live under the Communist yoke, Anne Applebaum's book is valuable. As a bonus, it is also, for a scholarly book, readable and interesting.

Applebaum has taken the post-war histories of East Germany (GDR), Poland and Hungary as her subject, but by inference many of the things she discusses in these places happened in the other countries of the Eastern Bloc (Romania, Albania, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria).

From the opening chapter which describes the way the Red Army took control in newly liberated areas, Applebaum devotes each chapter to a certain area of society to show how the local Communist movements, usually under instruction from Moscow, converted all areas of society to their pursuit of power. First the police and security forces, the media, then the electoral process, then education, to then destroying or replacing other non-state groups, from the Church to charity groups such as the Polish Women's League, Applebaum uses a judicious serving of archival material and interviews with residents to describe how this resulted in a total takeover pretty much by the turn of the decade in 1950. Her description of "High Stalinism", with it's emphasis on parades, production quotas, and hagiography of leaders, is particularly compelling.

Also compelling is her description of the bewilderment of the high officials on the occasions the public let them know they weren't as popular than they thought, although their Soviet minders usually had a much better idea than they did of the mood of the country.

Some things she describes are less well known, at least to this reader - the fact that there were anti-communist partisans in Poland until the early 50s , and the revelation that there was a version of the Mods / Rockers clashes in the 50s between the Communist Youth and those young people who chose to show their independence by listening to Jazz and wearing distinctive clothing.

The final part of the book deals with the repercussions from the death of Stalin, which led, via riots in the GDR and Poland to the 1956 revolution in Hungary. What Applebaum emphasises is the lack of preparedness of the hierarchy for such a spontaneous uprising, despite the secret service states they had built. Mentioned in passing are the different responses each country had to the disturbances, which led to some individual flavour in the Communist experience across the region.

Her epilogue is worth quoting at some length (discussing the legacy of these governments)-

"Yet such regimes can and did do an enormous amount of damage. In their drive for power, the Bolsheviks, their Eastern European acolytes, and their imitators farther afield attacked not only their political opponents but also peasants, priests, schoolteachers, traders, journalists, writers, small businessmen, students, and artists, along with institutions such people had built and maintained over centuries. They damaged, undermined, and sometimes eliminated churches, newspapers, literary and educational societies, companies and retail shops, stock markets, banks, sports clubs, and universities. Their success reveals an unpleasant truth about human nature: if enough people are sufficiently determined  and if they are backed by adequate resources and force, then they can destroy ancient and apparently permanent legal, political, educational, and religious institutions, sometimes for good. And if  civil society could be so deeply damaged in nations as disparate, as historic, and as culturally rich as those of Eastern Europe, then it can be similarly damaged anywhere. If nothing else, the history of postwar Stalinization proves just how fragile civilization can turn out to be."

An erudite and illuminating book, Iron Curtain is well worth reading.


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell