Book Review - Lost Kingdom by Serhii Plokhy

 Lost Kingdom: a History of Russian Nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin by Serhii Plokhy

London: Penguin Books, 2018 (first published 2017)     ISBN 9780141983134

This is an interesting and, even nine years after it's publication, timely book. Serhii Plokhy has delved into the murky waters of Russian nationalism with a view to explain its development to the uninitiated. To a great extent he has succeeded in unravelling the twisted skein of Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian ethnicity, culture and history, in explaining why it matters, and how the different ways people interpret that history have a huge geopolitical effect that echoes down to today's world.

Plokhy begins this book with an overview of the beginning of a sense of Russian identity, when the Slavic people that became Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian were under the rule of the Mongol Khanate, and follows on with the formation of Russia under the Tsars, and the gradual increase of territory that was Russian.

From the beginning, Russians were divided into three - "Great Russians" in what we today call Russia, "White Russians" in today's Belarus, and "Little Russians" in Ukraine. For centuries these three groupings despite at time being politically separated (for much of the time Belorussia and Ukraine were part of the Kingdom of Poland), saw themselves as one Slavic unity, with both White and Little Russia looking to their Great Russian counterparts for religious leadership, and recognising the Tsar as the overall sovereign to their people.

It was not until the Nineteenth Century that the question of nationality began to come to the fore, driven in some respects by the wider European milieu. The liberalisation that was slowly taking place in Russia awakened nationalist thinking, and the issue of what it actually meant to be Russian, as opposed to merely a subject of the Tsar. The nationalists based in Great Russia saw the origin of the Russian nationality beginning in Kyvian Rus, and including both Belarusians and Ukrainians. They cited history and the similarities between languages as the core holding them together as one.

It was just at this time that, in Ukraine in particular, a flourishing of the language and the belief that their Cossack heritage made them different to Great Russians gave birth the the thought that Ukraine could be a separate entity from Russia as a whole. This movement grew in fits and starts: at times repressed by St. Petersburg when it became problematic, but at other times supported, when St. Petersburg thought that a heightened sense of Ukrainian nationality could help destabilise their neighbours, who had many Ukrainians living within their borders.

This changing attitude to dealing with both Belorussia and Ukraine continued into the Twentieth Century and communist rule - at times when it was advantageous to the centre, the idea that Ukrainians and Belarusians were separate nationalities was promoted, and at other times repressed. Quite often, as Plokhy explains, it was Ukrainians and Belarusians that were engaging in the repression of their own people.

In the Twenty-First Century, the notion of a greater Russian people spread over three countries has fractured. Ukraine in particular has decided to go in a different direction to Russia (Belarus has stayed much closer to Moscow). Plokhy explains that, even though there may be many Ukrainians who's mother tongue is Russian rather than Ukrainian, they still feel that they are not Russian, but something different. Vladimir Putin on the other hand continues to think in Nineteenth Century terms, denying that there is any difference between the three Russias, with consequences we can all see.

If, like me, you are interested in the deeper politics surrounding the current turmoil in Ukraine, and indeed in how Russians think and behave, this book is worth reading. Plokhy moves through a lot of material in a thoughtful and digestible manner, and his conclusions are clear.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Jerusalem: the Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

 Jerusalem: the Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

London: Phoenix, 2012 (first published 2011)      ISBN 9781780220253

One of the blurbs on my edition of this book calls it "a tour de force", and there is no doubt that Jerusalem lives up to that particular piece of praise as well as all the others that it has gained since publication. It is the story of Jerusalem for sure, but along the way the reader learns much of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, of the Arabs, Romans, Ottomans, Russians and British, of Crusader Kingdoms and Sultanates, and of modern geopolitics.

Like all great works of non-fiction, Montefiore has woven much more into his story than the bare bones. The reader comes away from this work with a much broader knowledge of Western and Middle Eastern history than they would have a right to, given the books ostensible subject matter. The reader does of course gain an intimate knowledge of the development and trials of Jerusalem itself, as well as wonderful little titbits of other information such as the origin of the phrase "Bob's your uncle", the fact that Rudolf Hoess, Franz von Papen and Rudolf Hess were all in Jerusalem at the same time, and that the future King George V got tattooed when there, in the same place as his father.

These little nuggets of information are the cherries on top of the wonderfully rich dessert of history that Sebag Montefiore serves up. Thankfully his style, and the easily digestible short chapters make it both easy to read, and easy to absorb the information.

Sebag Montefiore writes in the last pages of the book that "for 1,000 years, Jerusalem was exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic, and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer."

The history of this city is a history of rapine, destruction, and war. It is also a history of worship, ecstasy and wonder. It is a story of immigration, emigration, and cosmopolitanism. It is the story of a city that on many occasions threatened to die, but is in many ways the most important city on Earth. The origins of Jerusalem are obscure and biblical, although recent archaeology has proven that King David did in fact exist.

Until the arrival of the Romans, and sometimes even after, Jerusalem was a backwater. Holy to the Jews, it was of small interest to others apart from being an attractive place to loot, owing to the gold that was held in the Temple.

Rome and Herod brought some stability to Jerusalem, although religious fever often led to riots, and there was also a continuous underground of Jewish rebellion against Roman rule. This was mainly driven by Jewish fundamentalism; a belief that gentiles could not rule God's chosen people. Jesus was part of this milieu.

The disaster of AD70 when the Romans sacked the city and destroyed the Temple after yet another Jewish rebellion, signalled the end of any Jewish control of the city for nearly 1,900 years. Jews were expelled, and Jerusalem once again became a backwater.

After an interval of Byzantine rule, the Arabs took the city in AD630. Soon after came the building of the Dome of the Rock, which raised Jerusalem to a holy site for its third religion (and which has led to many of the trials and tribulations the city has suffered down the years). Montefiore explains that this move was partially political, as the ruler of Jerusalem, Abd Al-Malik did not control Mecca and so needed a counterweight to the shrine there.

While the Muslims tolerated both Christians and Jews, life was not easy for them under Islamic rule. The Crusaders however were worse. The Crusader Kings, who were essentially freebooters looking for land, were often dangerous to each other, but not as much as they were to both Jews and Muslims.

Saladin's relatively enlightened rule was but a short interlude between the Christian crusaders and the Mamluks and Ottomans, who ruled Jerusalem for 400 years. For most of that time the city was again a backwater - Jews were forbidden the Temple Mount, and Christian worship was heavily circumscribed (although the Christians seemed to rank ahead of the Jews in the eyes of the Pashas and Sultan).

As the Ottoman Empire sank into sloth and corruption, Western countries began to influence what happened at the centre of Christendom. Kings, Czars and Emperors vied with each other to endow churches, fund pilgrimages and gain the upper hand in the machinations to do with the operation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The rise of millenarian ideas in the USA and Britain led to a push to allow Jews back to Jerusalem so that biblical prophecies of the Armageddon could be fulfilled. Montefiore clearly explains how these ideas led to massive changes on the ground in Jerusalem (one of Montefiore's ancestors funded Jewish settlement there) and on policy. The Balfour Declaration was a ground-breaking change in geopolitical thinking, even though one of the major reasons it was made was to mobilise Jewish support for Britain's fight in World War One.

Montefiore brings the history up to the present with descriptions of the internecine terrorism performed by both Jews and Arabs during the British Mandate and beyond, and explains how so many chances to find a workable peace have been missed: when one side felt politically strong enough to offer terms, the other side was too weak to accept them.

The uneasy state of peace that currently entails in Jerusalem has come at the cost of almost total segregation of Jews, Muslims and Christians from each other, and the destruction of what was a unique culture. It seems that we humans have not learnt a thing from the history of this holy and benighted place.

There is so much more in this book than I have noted here - it is an accessible wonder, and well worth reading. You will learn a lot.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A History of the Jewish People by James Parkes

 A History of the Jewish People by James Parkes

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964

This is a handy little crib on the history of the Jewish people, rather than the Jewish faith. Of course, it can be difficult to separate the two; as Parkes writes in his introduction, "[t]he history of the Jews is the story of a people inextricably interwoven with that of a religion. Neither can be told apart from the other. It is obvious that there would be no story of Judaism if there were no Jews; but it is just as true that Jews would not have survived the long centuries of their total dispersion had there not been the cement of a religion moulded to their need either to transform or to tolerate the conditions of their corporate and individual lives."

Parkes' history shows a long tradition of a people trying as much as they can to accommodate themselves to the situation in which they existed at any one time. From the earliest days there were geographically diverse groups of people practicing the religion of Judaism, with more or less oppression from the powers of the time. There have only been very short periods of time when Jewish people have had the capacity to control their own polity - very early and very late in their history.

The story of the Jews after Classical times is one of interaction with both Christendom and Islam, and the changing fortunes of those relationships. Christendom very quickly began oppressing the Jews, as they saw them as a threat to the growth of their own religion. The Jews were, in Christian eyes, apostates, Christ-killers, and subverters of fellow Christians. Islam initially treated Jews much better than did Christians, but as the Muslim world shrunk in the face of Western Christian dominance of Europe and Africa, and Islam withdrew into itself, that relationship too became poisoned and died. During the secular age, rather than religious scares, the route of anti-Semitism runs along the lines of finance and conspiracy - the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi rantings about Jewish control of finance took the place of older tropes of Blood Libel and miscegenation.

Parkes explains how the Jews developed their faith and ideas in separation from each other - the Sephardic Spanish versus the Ashkenazi Central Europeans. While non-Jews were the people's biggest enemy, they were not averse to internecine conflict either. The destruction of the Temple and exclusion from Jerusalem meant that the old ways of Jewish worship had to change, through a "democratic" system of congregationalism, through to a "professional" structure of paid Rabbis. This is not gone into in great detail, but is fascinating to a non-Jewish reader such as myself.

The final section of the book deals with the horrors and hopes of the twentieth century - the Holocaust, and the creation of Israel. Parkes focusses on the British Mandate in Palestine, how something that began with such high hopes ended in disaster, with the British washing their hands (a la Pilate) of the problems they had created with a poorly thought-out plan to let Jews come back home. Written in 1964, this book doesn't cover much of the ongoing disaster that has come out of this recent history.

If you are a person who doesn't know much about Jewish history this book, although dated,  isn't the worst place to start.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Stalin: a Biography by Robert Service

 Stalin: a Biography by Robert Service

London: Pan, 2005 (first published 2004)                        ISBN 9780330419130

For various reasons, I feel like I've been reading this book forever. Which is probably how people who lived under Stalin's rule felt for much of the time: a long-running nightmare without an end.

Robert Service has in this book given us a sweeping overview of the life and politics of one of the most influential and bloody leaders of the Twentieth Century, shooting down some myths while confirming others. It is a monumental book that covers so many great events, over an era where developments in politics and science were huge - at Stalin's birth the car and 'plane had yet to be invented, and much of Eastern Europe lived under the rule of one or other emperor. By the time of his death world influence was shared between the USSR and the USA, there were no empires left, and jet 'planes could fly halfway around the world to deliver nuclear weapons.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the description of Stalin's early years. Growing up in Georgia with a brutal father had a huge effect on the character of Stalin. He inherited the cultural tradition to hold a grudge, and to see conspiracy in everything - his reaction was in most cases to destroy those who (in reality or only in his mind) were against him. These tendencies were reinforced during his early activities as a revolutionary. While some of these characteristics were kept in check during his earlier years in Communism, as his power grew so did his paranoia, and his ability to act on it.

Service shows us that the myth that Stalin was not a major player in the Revolution or the years immediately following is incorrect. Stalin was a doer that did a lot, and was actually indispensable to Lenin as he tried to implement Bolshevik power. He was a forceful organizer, but uncaring of the casualties that he left in the wake of his activities. While the Civil War years were brutal, once Stalin took over the reigns of leadership the brutality increased. Stalin's paranoia led him to try to wipe out  people, classes and nationalities that he perceived to be against his plan to bring about communism in one country.

While the Soviet Union was a country of bureaucracy, Stalin was the undisputed ruler, and whatever he thought was law. He would let his underlings debate policy, to draw out their thoughts, and then pronounce his view: this led quite often to policy paralysis, as people were afraid to state opinions when the consequences of being on the wrong side of the argument was the Gulag or a bullet in the back of the neck. The result of this sort of rule were never more evident than at the time of his death, when his underlings were too scared to check on him when he didn't appear for his usual morning cup of tea.

Stalin's cruelty and ruthlessness was appalling - he ruled more like a medieval Russian Czar than a modern socialist. As he aged, he became less and less in contact with the real world, and only understood what was happening through his bureaucrats and their reports. Knowing the consequences of displeasing the great leader, Stalin only got to hear good news. The one major exception to this was the Russian general Zhukov, who on more than one occasion clashed with Stalin. Zhukov survived, but after the War he was very much pushed into the background.

 It was the War that was the making of the USSR: their victory legitimized Stalin and his government, and made the country a huge industrial power, but ossified the structure of rule as Stalin aged and became if possible even more paranoid, led to Eastern Europe becoming vassals of the USSR, and the final purges and pogroms before Stalin's death.

Service has written a good workmanlike biography. If you don't know much Russian history you are well serviced (forgive the pun), and he has covered Stalin the man, Stalin the politician, Stalin the tyrant, and Stalin the legend. Well worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore

 The Romanovs 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016                       ISBN 9781474600286

This is an epic book on an epic theme - the story of the rise and fall of one of the great dynasties of human history. From the first Romanov, Michael I, who reluctantly took the throne of what wasn't even really a country, to the last, Nicholas II who during his reign ruled from Vladivostok to west of Warsaw, the reader gets a potted history of the country, and an intimate look at the Romanov family and the wider royal families of Europe. The book covers 300 years, and by the time I got to the end, I'd almost forgotten the beginning, so great was the span of time and changes to Russia that this book covers.

There are a few themes that Montefiore brings out in his text. The first is the power of women during the rule of the Romanovs. Obviously Catherine the Great, but there were other female Tsars and Tsarinas who wielded great power. Women as mistresses also played an important part in the history of the dynasty, either being stalwart supporters of their lovers, or through inadvertantly bringing their paramour down. The inevitability of mistresses, and of Tsarinas managing them, flows through the book - there were very few happily married Tsars (Nicholas II being one of them).

The battle between Western influences and traditional Russian culture ebbed and flowed throughout the family over time. The early Tsars were truly Slavic, with their boyar clothes and brideshows, but they soon felt that, to truly become a world power, they had to modernise and take on Western forms of dress and behaviour. The constant friction between the two cultures had its apotheosis in 1917, when revolution broke out, partly fueled by the notion that the royal family were more German than Russian - an idea that would have horrified Nicholas, even as he wrote letters in English to his German wife. The cosmopolitanism of the royal family was at odds with the deep Russian-ness of the populace.

Montefiore also shows the reader how the Romanovs slowly cut themselves off from their natural supporters, the nobility. One can't be an autocrat and be alone, but by continually depriving the nobility of ancient rights - especially freeing the serfs, the family turned the nobles into a disgruntled part of society that felt that they had been cheated. Ironically, freeing the serfs also turned the peasants against the Tsar, as they started to agitate for rights and land, which the Tsars were reluctant to give.

The over-arching sweep of the family is a growth into power, with a some extraordinary individuals (Peter and Catherine, Alexander II) who made the most of their abilities to create the Russian empire as it became, and then of decline, with weakness, vacillation and debauchery claiming quite a few members over the 300 years of Romanov rule, epitomized by Nicholas II, who was emotionally and intellectually ill-equipped to rule in an increasingly complex world.

Montefiore has tackled this huge task with brio, wit and erudition. While keeping the focus on the family, its intrigues, squabbles and triumphs, he also, through judicious asides and footnotes, lets the reader enjoy other tidbits of history. One example I loved is that Vladimir Putin's grandfather was Rasputin's chef....

This is not a history of Russia; it is a history of the Romanovs: where both of those histories intersect, we learn Russian history, where they don't, we learn about the family. I think, if you wish to try to understand Russian history, this book plays an important part, but it is not the whole. Fortunately, while we learn, we are entertained, as sometimes this reads better than any fiction. 

The apparatus of the book is useful, with a decent bibliography and index. Montefiore has chosen to split the book into various "Acts" with a list of "Players" at the beginning (somewhat like a Shakespearian play). This quirk has its uses, with a useful family tree at the beginning of each of these "Acts". Even with this assistance, it can be difficult to keep track of who is who and how they fit in to the milieu of the Romanov court and government.

Overall, this is a great book, and one I would recommend. I enjoyed it a lot.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell