The Border of Borders

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In 2019, writer and historian Timothy Phillips embarked on a 3,000-mile trek along the route of Europe’s postwar dividing line—almost a third was on foot. The trip began in Norway’s far north and ended where Turkey and Azerbaijan meet, and in his engrossing “Retracing the Iron Curtain,” Mr. Phillips uses that journey to tell the story of this brutal “border of borders,” which in the early days after World War II reached much further than is typically recalled.

And so Mr. Phillips shows up in Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic, which was still being “liberated” by the Soviets when Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain….

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Wars After The Fall

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Despite a subtitle that suggests that it covers Russia’s two revolutions and the subsequent civil war, Antony Beevor’s new book is best seen as a history of that war (or, more accurately, wars) prefaced by a lengthy prologue chronicling the events that triggered it. To anyone reasonably familiar with the story of the months that culminated in the Bolshevik coup, there is little that is new in that preamble, although Beevor tells the tale of that year, 1917, briskly, with brio and characteristically sharp insight. Thus, the liberal February revolution that overthrew the czar is generally seen as a relatively peaceful affair, which it was compared with what was to come, but, as Beevor shows, that still left room for lynchings, rapes, mutilations, drownings, shootings, burnings to death. “The people’s hatred has been brewing for too long,” wrote one cousin of the czar.

Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, knew how to manipulate that hatred…

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Cometh the Hour

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History has no "right side." It follows no predetermined path and has no inevitable endpoint. This may dismay those hoping to find some meaning in the march of time, but the logical consequence of its absence is to leave room for an individual to make a significant difference to the course of history.

In Personality and Power, Ian Kershaw, the distinguished British historian best known for his two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, identifies 12 people who managed just that over one period in one place….

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On the Ground in Ukraine

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Walking home after dinner in Kyiv on Feb. 23, British journalist Luke Harding answers his phone: The Russian attack, he is told, is expected within hours. “Invasion” is his account of the war that ensued. Gripping and often moving, the book is primarily journalistic but goes beyond mere reportage as Mr. Harding draws on his knowledge of the region and a background that includes serving as head of the Guardian’s Moscow bureau.

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Hard times

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There is something peculiarly unnerving about glimpses of lives being lived without any awareness of approaching catastrophe—film footage of Edwardian England, say, or jfk at Love Field. This can be true too in fiction. Profoundly moving and, at times, surprisingly lyrical, Grey Bees, by the Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov, is gently powerful, and made even more so by what has happened since it was first published in 2018 (the American edition, translated by Boris Dralyuk, was released this year)…

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Facing Impossible Odds

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“It is hard to pin down,” notes Halik Kochanski toward the end of her enormous, but eminently readable, history of resistance to German occupation during World War II, “why certain people chose the path of resistance . . . . [T]he resisters themselves often give unsatisfactory responses: ‘one had to do something’ or ‘one just did what one could.’ ”

Perhaps that is because the experience was, in retrospect, so strange, so out of time and place. Ms. Kochanski, a British historian, quotes Jean Cassou, a resistance leader in Toulouse who remembered this “as a unique period . . . impossible to relate to or explain, almost a dream. We see . . . an unknown and unknowable version of ourselves, the kind of people no one can ever find again, who existed only in relation to unique and terrible conditions, to things that have since disappeared, to ghosts, or to the dead.”

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Berlin as the Unreal City

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Berlin has too much [history].” Sinclair McKay cites this rueful observation in the preface to his new book about the city. Given that he is not simply discussing Berlin between the wars, or during the second of those wars, or in the Cold War that followed, but all of it, this may come off as a cry for help. History may — in those words attributed to, well, take your pick — be “one damned thing after another,” but when it came to Berlin, those things hurtled through time in a horde, colliding, overlapping and refusing to form an orderly line. And, in Berlin’s case, they had a way of mattering. Not for nothing does this book’s subtitle refer to Berlin as “the city at the center of the world.” Bad news for a writer aiming, presumably, at a degree of concision.

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The imperfect spy

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On one level, Lis Wiehl’s enthralling and grimly astonishing A Spy in Plain Sight is simply the story of Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent whose espionage activities were described by the Department of Justice as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history,” a crowded field even at the time of his arrest in February 2001. “Over twenty-two years,” explained the DOJ in a 2002 report, Hanssen had “given the Soviet Union and Russia vast quantities of documents and computer diskettes filled with national security information of incalculable value.” And his betrayals had cost lives. Wiehl cites three (although there will have been more): each had been fingered as American agents by both Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, Hanssen’s predecessor as, in Wiehl’s description, “the most notorious spy in modern US history,” which gave the Soviets the corroboration they appear to have required.

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Unimaginable, imagined, imaginary

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The rage of the totalitarian state never ebbs, but the pace at which it kills can vary, sometimes being spasms of spontaneous-seeming violence, sometimes a slower, relentless closing of the trap….

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Legends Of the Black Sea

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When the Argonauts—so the story goes—sailed toward the Black Sea, they had to deal with giants, harpies and murderous women. When, in April 2018, Jens Mühling, a German journalist and a writer, arrives on the Black Sea coast during the early stages of the journey he so vividly describes in “Troubled Water,” he ends up drinking—a river of alcohol flows through this book—with a Russian (Oleg, naturally) and a Crimean Tatar (Elvis, naturally) in the courtyard of a rundown fishing cooperative on the western tip of Russia’s Taman Peninsula. A mile away, a newly built bridge awaits its formal opening. It connects the peninsula with Russian-occupied Crimea: “We screwed up our eyes, shelled Black Sea shrimps, and observed the world’s largest country in the act of growing.”

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