We should not, or so we are told, judge a book by its cover, but when that book is an “Atlas of Finance”—and one of the two people featured on its cover, a clever tribute to banknotes, is Karl Marx (the other, reassuringly, is Adam Smith)—it’s reasonable to think that the image hints at what may be lurking inside….
Read MoreUntil gang warfare and the bombings that went with it broke Sweden’s calm (the consequences of recent mass immigration have proved rougher-edged than many Swedes chose to expect), the Nordic region had for a long time been renowned for its tranquility, making it somewhat surprising that it gave birth to Nordic noir, a genre of thriller often as chilly as the realm from which it emerged. Each Nordic country has its leaders in this field, and in Norway the top dog is Jo Nesbø, hip, stylish, something of a polymath (soccer player, stockbroker, musician), and the best-selling Norwegian author of all time, renowned above all for a series of often brutal stories (recommended) featuring Harry Hole, a brilliant, awkward Oslo detective with a fondness for the bottle…
Read MoreRe-examining the Third Reich remains, even now, essential. Its lessons are too important to be deemed safely settled. But when Richard Evans argues that the task has “gained new urgency and importance” due to the emergence of “strongmen and would-be dictators” within the world’s democracies “since shortly after the beginning of the twenty-first century,” he risks trivializing past horrors by wielding them as a weapon in the current debate over populism. That’s unless he has Vladimir Putin in mind, which would make for a very different discussion…
Read MoreIn Rupert Brooke’s best-known poem, a soldier says that if he dies, there will be "some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England." As I discovered nearly 30 years ago, such corners, dating from 1918 and 1919, can be found in a cemetery in Archangel (Archangelsk) in Russia’s far north. In her latest book, British journalist and historian Anna Reid explains how they came to be there.
Read MoreOn Oct. 12, 1964, three smallish men, shrunk still more by a strict diet, squeezed into an aluminum sphere 8 feet in diameter. Earlier in the year, Nikita Khrushchev learned that the Americans were planning to send the first two-man capsule into orbit, and he wanted a Soviet trio in space ahead of them. The red team had neither a three-man craft nor a rocket powerful enough to shoot such a craft into space. The idea that they could quickly build both was ridiculous, but not so ridiculous as thinking that the Soviet leader’s demand could be ignored. So this particular sphere, a Vostok tailored for one (smallish) man, had been all but emptied out, given the minimum necessary refitting and relabeled Voskhod 1. The crew, according to author John Strausbaugh, had to do without bulky space suits and helmets and wore woolen leisure suits instead.
Read MoreIn 2006, Peter Pomerantsev, a British writer born in Soviet Ukraine (his parents emigrated shortly after his birth), moved to Moscow, wanting to work in television. As set out in his Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (2014), most media programming there was organized to entertain, beguile, and distract, to preserve the illusion of freedom even as its remnants were being dismantled. His latest book, How to Win an Information War, revolves around the World War II activities of Sefton Delmer (1904–1979), a British propagandist dedicated not to preserving illusions but to whittling them away. His most remarkable project (probably) was using GSI, a “radio station” purportedly based in Germany (in reality in the south of England), not to win over his German listeners but to unsettle them in ways that the Nazis would not welcome.
Read MoreThe remarkable An Ordinary Youth (now available for the first time in English in a translation by Michael Lipkin), an autobiographical novel by Walter Kempowski (1929–2007), opens with a fictionalized version of his family moving into its new apartment in Rostock, a formerly Hanseatic port on Germany’s Baltic coast. The plants on the balcony include “Jew’s beard geraniums.” It is 1938.
Read MoreFor years now, I have been grateful for the brief warnings that conclude New York Times film reviews. Brutal violence. Check. Nudity. Check. Smoking. Book that ticket. Not far into Danzy Senna’s sparkling foreword to the new edition of Robert Plunket’s My Search for Warren Harding, I read this:
“Sensitivity readers, be warned: the protagonist of this novel, Elliot Weiner, is cruel, racist, fat-phobic, homophobic, and deeply, deeply petty.”
Read MoreSitting in the lobby of Moscow's Metropol hotel at some moment in the mid-'90s, a client and I (I was working in finance at the time) gazed at those wandering by—hard-looking men involved in who-knows-what business, sleek women involved in we-knew-what business, some wealthy "new Russians" sporting haute couture and ostentatious disdain for Soviet drabness—all stock characters in Weimar Moscow. The two men deep in conversation at a neighboring table were under investigation in a financial scandal then making headlines in the U.K. "What is this, Casablanca?" asked my client, who had never been to Russia before. "Pretty much," I replied.
Read MoreWhen reading Ekaterina Pravilova’s original, fascinating and meticulously researched “The Ruble” it is a good idea to keep in mind its subtitle: “A Political History.” For Ms. Pravilova’s multi-layered account of the evolution of the paper ruble from its inception in the mid-18th century until the post-revolutionary reforms in the early 1920s goes beyond the merely monetary. “The biography of the ruble,” explains Ms. Pravilova, “is a history of the Russian state, written in the language of money.” Regardless of the type of political system in place, she writes, “money does not simply reflect an existing (or imagined) social and political order but creates it; it is not a consequence or an attribute but an integral and constitutive part of any regime.” Ms. Pravilova, a professor of history at Princeton, shows that the ruble has been, above all, a symbol and an instrument of centralized, autocratic and imperial power.
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