Fight for Your Right To Fight

Battle in Seattle

The New York Sun, September 19, 2008

One doesn't have to agree politically with a movie to appreciate the skill with which it was made or, for that matter, to enjoy it. To combine a bad film, however, with worse politics is to add insult to injury, which brings us to the topic of "Battle in Seattle," a ham-fisted, sanctimonious blend of leftist agitprop, by-the-numbers melodrama, and excruciating self-righteousness that arrives in theaters Friday. If you are currently taking orders from Rage Against the Machine, Michael Moore, or Naomi Klein, go and see it; for anyone else, this is one "Battle" you're going to lose.

The movie begins with a brief but remarkably paranoid introductory history sequence, a sort of Protocols of the Elders of GATT, designed to expose the supposedly sinister evolution of the postwar international trade regime. Having set this bleak, menacing, and thoroughly conspiratorial scene, "Battle in Seattle" then gets down to business — or, more accurately, to stopping business. The film is a fictionalized account of the 1999 anti-globalization protests that trashed Seattle, wrecked the World Trade Organization negotiations, and left a legacy that has bedeviled the WTO ever since.

Its writer-director, Stuart Townsend, tells the tale through the stories of a handful of protagonists, primarily some noble protesters. But he reinforces it with a noble Médecins Sans Frontières-type physician (Rade Serbedzija), a noble representative of the Third World (Isaach de Bankolé), an eventually noble TV journalist who comes to see the error of her corporate media ways (Connie Nielsen, a long, long way from "Gladiator"), and a potentially noble, basically good-hearted cop (Woody Harrelson) who, prompted in part by what befalls his wife (the ever-decorative Charlize Theron), finishes the movie at least dimly aware that he is being duped by the Man.

The case for free trade is, of course, never made. The benefits it has brought the developing world don't rate a mention. All we hear about is exploitation. "Battle in Seattle" is a modern morality play, and like most morality plays, it's drawn with little nuance and less character development. As Mayor Tobin (presumably a rendering of real-life Seattle mayor Paul Schell), Ray Liotta turns in a cleverly convincing portrait of a soixante-huitard bewildered by a radicalism he once would have understood. But Mr. Liotta's sensitive, well-judged performance is the exception. His character is a believable, conflicted human being, a refreshing presence in a drama peopled, if that's the word, by cardboard cutouts.

The protesters at the center of "Battle in Seattle" never emerge from the didactic stereotypes within which they are confined. Beautiful Sam (Jennifer Carpenter) is the sensitive, smart one; Django (OutKast's Andre Benjamin) is the genial joker, and Lou (Michelle Rodriguez) is fiery, feisty, and, let's face it, a bit of a pain. Needless to say, they are all passionate, sincere, idealistic, and selfless, none more so than their leader, the charismatic Jay (Martin Henderson), who is determined, inspiring, and replete with tragic backstory and Jesus hair-and-beard. The only surprise is that when he is restored to his people after a time of tribulation, it is not on the third day.

That's not to say that "Battle in Seattle" doesn't have its moments: The scenes outside the prison where some protestors have been detained are powerful; with the help of a surging melody, they even stirred my own dark, reactionary soul. What's more, the film occasionally — very occasionally — has something useful to say. The two acts of brutality that come to define Mr. Townsend's portrayal of the police response to the protests may dissolve into a bloody sludge of karma and caricature, but the director's depiction of a police department unprepared for what hits the city rings true. So does the obvious implication that the resulting confusion inflamed a situation that may not (as is sometimes claimed) have been a "police riot," but was certainly chaotic and, at times, all too heavy-handed.

To be fair, Mr. Townsend doesn't dodge the fact that the protesters were themselves responsible for much of the violence that marked the Seattle protests, although he is careful to pin the blame on an anarchist minority. There's some truth to that latter claim, but only some, and it sidesteps the awkward question of whether large crowds swarming downtown Seattle with the intention of stopping people from going to a conference they wish to attend can, in any meaningful sense, be considered "nonviolent." At the very least, such "direct action" (to use the usual euphemism) is intimidation, if not mob rule — something that Mr. Townsend veers dangerously close to endorsing in a closing sequence that seems to celebrate the trouble that has surrounded subsequent WTO gatherings.

Judging by his movie's script, Mr. Townsend's justification for this appears to be that the WTO lacks democratic legitimacy, an argument with emotional, if not always logical, appeal in an era when globalization has left many feeling as though they've lost control of their economic destiny. It might have more force, however, if moviegoers could believe that Sam, Lou, Django, Jay, and their ilk would have protested just as vigorously against, say, the no less undemocratic Kyoto treaty. Fat chance. Their real beef, of course, is with nasty old capitalism (the ugliest expletive throughout "Battle in Seattle" is "corporate"), a dreary, shop-soiled grudge to which this film adds little beyond a city's smashed shop windows.

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

The Duchess

The New York Sun, September 19, 2008

Barely more than a decade after that tragic dash through Paris and the unhinged, hysterical carnival of lamentation that followed, it is no great surprise that Princess Diana continues to cast a shadow over popular culture, particularly in the country where she once seemed destined to be queen. It is, nonetheless, disappointing to detect that elements of her tawdry, strip-mined melodrama have been slipped into Saul Dibb's new film "The Duchess," which arrives in theaters Friday. The British director gives what should have been a perfectly respectable biopic of Georgiana, an 18th-century Duchess of Devonshire, contemporary resonance it neither needs nor deserves.

Yes, Diana was the duchess's great-great-great-great-niece and, yes, both women weathered marriages that were indeed (to borrow a word) "crowded," but neither genealogy nor (very) superficially similar matrimonial difficulties are good reasons to blend their (very) different stories. The lure of the box office is, I suppose, to blame. Diana still sells.

Very loosely based on Amanda Foreman's clever, immaculately researched, and enthralling biography of Georgiana, Mr. Dibb's movie has taken the story of one of the most fascinating Englishwomen of her epoch — a celebrated socialite and political campaigner — and transformed it into a big-budget blend of Lifetime television, Masterpiece Theatre, and Diana Spencer tribute movie. Thus, the young duchess (Keira Knightley) speaks in the soft Sloane tones more typically associated with Lady Di in her early years than with the Georgian grandee she is meant to be playing. Meanwhile, Ralph Fiennes, in a subtle, show-stealing portrayal of the duchess's cold, buttoned-up, and older husband, manages to punctuate his performance with very specific hints of Prince Charles's lugubrious tics, mannerisms, and phraseology — hints that will make a British audience, at least, shudder or snigger, depending on mood.

For the most part, however, this film's sins are of omission. Georgiana may have been a famed fashion icon, but she was also a genuinely effective power broker, a fiercely intelligent woman known as much for her Whiggery as for her truly remarkable wigs, an angle the filmmakers have downplayed in favor of crowd-pleasing emotional drama and roller-coaster marital crises. It's typical that the movie ends on a note of gently accommodating family reconciliation, concluding its narrative at a point that may make some sort of soap-operatic sense, but is well before Georgiana's final period of political prominence. To be fair, at various times we do see the duchess electioneering, and at others she's shown hanging out with Charles James Fox (a potato-faced Simon McBurney, sufficiently wily, sufficiently charming, insufficiently louche) and the rest of his clique, but, taken as a whole, the film leaves the clear impression that the duchess's political role was primarily ornamental. In reality, it was substantially more than that, no small achievement more than a century before female suffrage.

Rather more flatteringly for the duchess, we are not told, except through the most oblique of references, the extent to which her love of gambling (one of the main aristocratic pastimes of that period) became an addiction, bringing in its wake losses that might have brought a blush to the Lehman Brothers's mortgage bond team and which, in part, explained why the poor duke might sometimes have looked a little pained. The reason for this particular omission is probably the filmmakers' wish to present cinemagoers with a suitably sympathetic romantic heroine (so far as they reasonably could, given the tricky historical record). To show her losing tens of thousands at the faro table wouldn't really have done the trick.

Similarly, the duchess's love life (something she pursued with a splendidly 18th-century gusto) is mainly reduced to misery at the hands of her unfeeling husband (that was true enough, alas), a series of harmless flirtations, a not-quite seduction by the woman who goes on to become the duke's live-in mistress, and then one great romance with a future prime minister, Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper, doing his unconvincing best to channel the BBC's Mr. Darcy). The truth was considerably busier, rather more complicated, and much more interesting.

If Georgiana's biography has been prettied up, so has the country in which she lived. Eighteenth-century England was a grubby, smelly, uncomfortable place. Even its grandest houses were just a pace or two from squalor and were, for the most part, none too clean themselves. The same could be said of their inhabitants, not to mention those unfortunate enough to live beyond ducal walls. The beautifully filmed England of "The Duchess" (courtesy of cinematographer Gyula Pados) is, by contrast, immaculate, a land of lush landscapes, Augustan charm, and gorgeous Palladian magnificence. It bears about as much resemblance to the real thing as Marie Antoinette (a friend of Georgiana's, not that you'd know it from this movie) did to the simple shepherdesses she occasionally pretended to be.

No matter. As a backdrop to what is, in essence, a well-crafted, well-acted, period romance, this prettily stage-set, sceptr'd isle will do just fine. We'll leave the slums, the stench, and, for that matter, the disease that was later to wreck the lovely Georgiana's looks to some other, more realistic film.

But if you allow yourself to overlook the historical inaccuracy, the faint feminist subtext, and the forced, tiresome parallels with the Windsors' domestic disasters, "The Duchess" can be fun. So why not take a break from Wall Street worries and wallow instead in an hour or two of spectacle, splendor, and sentimentality?

Aided by landscape, architecture, and costume, "The Duchess" looks terrific and the script does its best, too, helped along by a cast stronger than this film probably deserves. Mr. Fiennes may steal the show, but as Lady Spencer (Georgiana's mother), a matriarch who combines strong maternal affection with a steely sense of dynastic obligation, the perennially formidable Charlotte Rampling dominates every scene in which she appears. By comparison, Ms. Knightley was bound to struggle, but with her strangely old-fashioned beauty, she at least looks the part, and the pathos she successfully brings to her performance reinforces the aura of victimhood without which no romantic heroine is complete. In such a shamefully enjoyable film, what more could one ask?

Dragging Kennedy Into a New Fight

Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived

The New York Sun, September 16, 2008

At its best, counterfactual or "virtual" history (to use Harvard historian Niall Ferguson's term), the exploration of what might have happened if history had not taken a certain turn, can be a fascinating intellectual exercise, a "what if" that illuminates what did happen. Unfortunately, "Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived," which begins a two-week run at Film Forum tomorrow, is neither fascinating nor illuminating.

Helmed by first-time director Koji Masutani, and featuring Brown University professor James Blight (previously known for his work on "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara"), this new documentary is, at least superficially, devoted to the question of whether President Kennedy would have extricated America from the Vietnam conflict long before it could spiral into the quagmire that, under his successor, it became.

Despite the best efforts of Oliver Stone, that's an old debate that can never be resolved. This film adds little to it other than artfully selected news footage, some interesting audio recordings of discussions within the Kennedy administration, and an inordinate amount of wishful thinking. The filmmakers examine the foreign policy crises that defined Kennedy's term, and use the way he handled them to conclude that he was a president who did everything he could to avoid all-out war, whether of the nuclear variety (over the construction of the Berlin Wall or the installation of Russian missiles in Cuba) or something less apocalyptic (the decision to abandon the anti-Castro forces at the Bay of Pigs, and an early reluctance to commit significant ground forces in Indochina).

Add to this some comments contemplating withdrawal from Vietnam that Kennedy made not long before his assassination, and a case begins to come into focus. But begin is all it does. Most of the rest of the film is devoted to images of an embattled President Johnson and brief glimpses of the Vietnam war itself: nothing new, in other words. The movie's point, it's claimed, is the hardly novel idea that it really does matter who is president. President Kennedy might well have called a halt in Vietnam; President Johnson didn't.

But that's not really what "Virtual JFK" is about. The movie's real target finally emerges emerges in its closing moments when the following quotation appears on-screen: "Every time history repeats itself, the price of the lesson goes up." Ah, so that's it. This film is not about Vietnam — not really. It's about Iraq, and Kennedy's role in it is to act as El Cid, a "virtual JFK" in a very different sense, sent forth to do battle with those wicked Republicans one more time. Thus we see Kennedy in press conference after press conference, his deftness, charm, and eloquence a devastating rebuke both to the sourpuss, crudely belligerent, Grand Old Party he occasionally finds time to tease and also, by implication, to the current occupant of the White House — tongue-tied, bellicose and, as president, responsible for a war that need not have been.

If you think some of that sounds like caricature as much as history (actual or virtual), you're right.

Imitation Jules

The New York Sun, July 11, 2008

On March 9, 1886, poor, deranged Gaston Verne shot his uncle Jules, the French writer often credited with the invention of science fiction. The great man survived, but if he'd known what filmmakers would do with his books in the centuries to follow, he probably would have reached for that revolver himself.

The latest movie to spring from Verne's pages, "Journey to the Center of the Earth," may turn out far better than what has come before, but the precedents are not encouraging. Previous "Journeys" — no fewer than five television projects and four feature films have worn the name — have been more trudge than adventure, despite attempts to boost the novel's sometimes leaden pace with additional love interests, murderous rivalries, a martyred duck, a massive ape, humanoid dinosaurs, sexy primeval girls, noble Maori rebels, gunrunning, and, in a confusing 1989 version that doubled as a sequel to "Alien From L.A.," Kathy Ireland.

The idea that Verne's fanciful stories are, by themselves, no longer enough to draw a crowd can be detected in many of the films that have been made of his work. The two best-known versions of Verne's 1874 novel, "The Mysterious Island," added giant animals into the mix, and one of them also threw in a giant bomb just to make sure. Disney's simpering, sickly "In Search of the Castaways" (1962) hit the rocks when an aging Maurice Chevalier broke into saccharine song.

On the other hand, if we avert our eyes from the grotesque blend of martial arts, slapstick, and ham that was Hollywood's most recent take on "Around the World in 80 Days" (with Jackie Chan as Passepartout), Phileas Fogg's legendary circumnavigation has been treated relatively kindly, notably in its 1956 retelling starring David Niven. Notwithstanding a balloon transplanted from an earlier Verne novel, this effort stuck fairly closely to the original story line and offered its audience a spectacle that the old Frenchman, a man fully in touch with his inner Barnum, would have relished.

Verne would also have been intrigued by the way "Around the World" was enriched by the nostalgia with which it is saturated. Just 11 years after Hiroshima, it depicted the mid-Victorian world as a gentle, almost prelapsarian place, its disorders more antic than dangerous, its inventions amusingly retro contraptions. Similarly, and ironically, Fogg's hectic dash had been transformed by time and technology into a symbol of a leisured era, into something that now seems almost stately. Understanding the implications of these changes in perception helps explain those added dinosaurs, karate kicks, and Maoris: Many of the wonders chronicled by Verne are, nowadays, anything but. Making the filmmakers' task more difficult still, the characters created by this most Joe Friday of novelists are, more often than not, cutouts, sketches, and caricatures. The most worthwhile exception is, of course, Captain Nemo, that enigmatic specter of alienation, vengeance, and the utopian violence of the century to come. The captain has benefited from compelling performances by some of cinema's finest, including James Mason (the most convincing Nemo of all), Michael Caine, Herbert Lom, and, appropriately, another captain, the Starship Enterprise's Picard (Patrick Stewart).

But if Nemo has fared well at the movies, the same cannot be said of his lonely odyssey. Neither Mr. Lom nor Mr. Stewart managed to extricate his respective "Mysterious Island" film (the former in 1961, the latter in 2005) from the wreckage of its screenplay, while even the best "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" project (the Walt Disney version from 1954, with Mason) modified, sweetened, and dumbed down Verne's original in a way that sapped much of its power. That said, it is one of its rivals — the Michael Caine film, one of two made-for-TV versions of this story produced in 1997 — that may indicate the best way forward for renderings of Verne. The narrative, bloated by a bitter father-son rivalry, a romance with the girlfriend from "Ferris Bueller" (Nemo's daughter, remarkably), and, yes, the resettling of Atlantis, is the usual Verne movie shambles. But the film's evocative, almost steampunk aesthetic — an exhilarating blend of brass, iron, pumps, and valves, of William Morris, satanic mills, and a science that never quite emerged — is not.

Verne's future may, in one sense, be behind us, but as an alternative reality, or as an imagined universe of (to borrow William Golding's lovely phrase) "astronauts by gaslight," it still has the potential to enchant. There are glimpses of how this could be in Captain Nemo's appearance in Alan Moore's graphic novel "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," but Verne's stories themselves still await such treatment.

The Man Who Would Be Kingpin

Wanted

The New York Sun, June 27, 2008

Whatever else you might want to say about it, Mark Millar's graphic novel "Wanted" was one of the most effective evocations of nerd-boy rage since the days of Bobby Fischer. Obscene, misogynistic, scatological, and saturated with a nasty geek nihilism, it's a clever, unsettling, and unpleasant bloodbath only occasionally softened by signs that it was intended as some sort of parody. Reports that "Wanted" was to be turned into a major Hollywood vehicle made for a bad day. The news that it was going to be filmed by Timur Bekmambetov made a bad day worse.

Mr. Bekmambetov is a Russian director best known in the West for "Night Watch" and "Day Watch," huge hits in his home country that were, if nothing else, reassuring evidence that the era of the Soviet collective-farm epic has, mercifully, drawn to a close. Indeed, the Russian appetite for flashy, empty-headed movies with pretensions of saga status is, these days, just as great as our own. The first installments in a confused and barely comprehensible fantasy trilogy, "Night Watch" and "Day Watch" have been compared by the deluded or the hired with the "Lord of the Rings" films, a comparison not unlike claiming that "Van Helsing" should be ranked with "Dracula." The prospect of Mr. Bekmambetov taking his restless, gimmicky, and derivative camera into the depths of Mr. Millar's perverse multiverse was almost too awful to contemplate.

Remarkably, however, the director and his scriptwriters (previously best known for their contributions to "The Fast and the Furious" canon) have surmounted both their limitations and the business problem presented by Mr. Millar's original material by coming up with a plot that is not only pretty much their own, but, once one has accepted its fundamental absurdity, fairly easy to follow. The starting point in "Wanted" owes much to Mr. Millar and his concept of a geeky loser trapped in Dilbertland who comes to discover that he is the heir to something powerful, dangerous, and strange (wish fulfillment, anybody?).

From there, however, the film mainly goes its own way (apart from the watered-down finale), with only the occasional allusion to the original "Wanted." Mr. Millar's key dystopian premise has been shelved, and with it, his supremely unattractive super-villains (including a Thing-like creature composed of serial-killer fecal matter), the use of random killings and rape as methods of empowerment, and rather too many sequences of peculiarly grotesque violence.

Instead, moviegoers will be treated to a mildly enjoyable piece of hyperkinetic hokum. Innovative it is not. "Wanted" is overreliant on car chases as dully prolonged as a mid-'70s guitar solo and about as original, age-old conspiracies with more than a hint of Dan Brown about them, and slow-motion bullet ballets of a type already clichéd by the end of the first "Matrix" film. If "Wanted" feels by-the-numbers, that's because it is: Even its mayhem comes across as just a touch too planned. Crash the car. Wreck the train. Kill someone.

The movie has its moments, one or two good jokes, and a satisfactory number of exploding heads, but, whatever its director's aspirations, it fails to convey that sense of another world — ours but not quite — that ought to be key to any comic book adaptation. A film of this type should be a magic carpet ride, exhilarating and impossible. "Wanted," by contrast, is as functional as a trip on the crosstown bus, complete with stops, starts, and periods of boredom.

When given the chance, the cast does the best it can. Mr. McAvoy is splendid as Wesley, the bright, put-upon office drone who discovers that he is a member of an ancient caste of assassins. Slight and not particularly tall, Mr. McAvoy is not an obvious action hero, but as Wesley is taught the ways of the Weavers (the ancient caste, not the ancient folk group) in a series of tutorials that appear mainly to involve repeated beatings, target shooting at corpses, and riding the roofs of Chicago's 'L' trains, the actor offers a surprisingly convincing picture of a nerd being transformed into possibly the planet's most lethal killer — no small achievement for a man who played a faun in the first Narnia movie.

Meanwhile, as Weaver chief Sloan, Morgan Freeman takes a break from playing the president and God to remind us that he can portray someone altogether less lofty. Clad in what looks like early Reagan-era Men's Wearhouse, he's bureaucrat, capo, and mentor — a blend of organization man, Don Corleone, and the X-Men's Professor Xavier. He's also an individual with secrets to hide, something that Mr. Freeman manages to convey with little more than a deft glance. Under the circumstances, it's an amazingly subtle performance.

And then there's Angelina Jolie as Fox, the Weaver who is the first to wrench Wesley away from his previously humdrum life before becoming his trainer and, on his first mission, accomplice. Fierce, chiseled, and commanding, Ms. Jolie dominates nearly every scene in which she appears. As is to be expected of the former Mrs. Smith, she makes a very believable assassin. Nevertheless, it's difficult to shake the feeling that her role is as much "Angelina Jolie" as it is Fox, as much a riff on her own public image as an interpretation of the character she is allegedly depicting. Either way, it's a hypnotic performance, if it is a performance: There's an alarmingly feral glint in her eye that must, I imagine, be very, very tricky to fake. There are times when I tremble for Brad Pitt.

Angela’s Ashes?

National Review Online,  June 16, 2008

LisbonNO1

If there were any last, few, pitiful remaining scraps of doubt about the depth of the disdain felt by the European Union’s leaders for the people of their wretched union, they ought, surely, to have been dispelled by the miserable saga of the Treaty of Lisbon, the sly, squalid, and cynical pact that has just been rejected by Irish voters, the only mass electorate given the chance to do so.

From its very beginnings, the Treaty of Lisbon was an exercise in deception, deliberately designed to deny the EU’s voters any more chances to slow down the construction of a European superstate that relatively few, outside an elite chasing power, privilege, and the chance to say “boo” to America, actually appear to want. Its origins can be found in the 2005 decision by some of those voters, the ones in France and Holland, to take the opportunity presented by two referenda to say non and nee respectively to the draft EU constitution that had been prepared so meticulously, so proudly, and so expensively on their behalf. Lesson learned: The voters were never again to be trusted. In future they would have to be bypassed.

Nevertheless, in a pantomime of responsiveness to that non and that nee, the constitution’s ratification process was suspended in the late spring of 2005. What ensued was officially described as a “period of reflection,” but was, for the most part, a period of frantic scheming. Its aim: To investigate how the draft constitution could be revived and, this time, be ratified. Sure enough, just about a year later German chancellor Angela Merkel announced that one of the objectives of her country’s upcoming EU presidency (the presidency currently rotates between different member states every six months) would be to “review” the constitution’s status. The message was clear: The people had spoken, and they were to be ignored. Chancellor Merkel was brought up in East Germany — and sometimes it shows.

Within two weeks of Germany assuming the presidency on January 1, 2007, Merkel declared the period of reflection to be over. She wanted, she said, a “road map” for the adoption of the constitution to be completed by the conclusion of the German presidency. And so it was, but with a clever twist. By the end of June, the EU’s governments had agreed to hold a conference to amend the union’s existing treaties in ways that mimicked much of the rejected constitution but without the bother of reintroducing the constitution itself, a bother that might run the risk of an extra referendum or two.

In essence, a number of largely cosmetic alterations were made (thus the proposed EU foreign minister was now re-dubbed a “High Representative”), and the new document generally avoided repeating those provisions of the old draft constitution already enshrined within EU law (why remind voters of what they had already given up?). Most of the changes were meaningless, flimflam designed to minimize the risk that ratification might be subject to the whims of a popular vote. Meanwhile, the “substance” of the rejected constitution had, boasted Merkel, been “preserved.” Indeed it had. The constitution was dead, long live the “Reform Treaty.” Six months and a few concessions later, the treaty was signed in Lisbon at a ceremony notable mainly for the absence of British prime minister Gordon Brown. He signed the paperwork a discreet few hours later.

For a while it looked as if Merkel’s coup would proceed without too much democratic interruption. This time around the French and Dutch governments were able to avoid consulting the electorates they supposedly represented. Holland’s Council of State, its government’s highest advisory body, helpfully decided that a referendum was not legally required. The Reform Treaty did not, apparently, contain sufficient “constitutional” elements, a ruling that undoubtedly pleased a large majority of Holland’s establishment politicians on both left and right: Off the hook! The lower house of parliament approved the Treaty of Lisbon earlier this month. The senate was expected to follow suit later in the year. In France, President Sarkozy made it quite clear that, whatever French voters might want (opinion polls suggested that a majority favored a referendum), he had no intention of consulting them. Last November he warned that a referendum “would bring Europe into danger. There [would] be no treaty if we had a referendum in France.” There was no referendum. Both national assembly and senate approved the treaty in February.

As for Britain, that perennial member of the EU’s awkward squad, departing Prime Minister Tony Blair was unable to resist giving one more kick to the country he had already done so much to trash. He announced that there would be no referendum, and so did his successor, Gordon Brown. Sure, a referendum had been promised in Labour’s 2005 manifesto, but only in the event of a revived constitution. The new treaty didn’t count. The argument was, typically for both men, absurd, dishonest, and insulting, something later highlighted by two parliamentary committees, not that it made any real difference.

In October 2007, the (cross-party) European Scrutiny Committee concluded that the Reform Treaty was “substantially equivalent” to the original constitution, a statement of the obvious – but one, under the circumstances, well worth making. Additionally, the committee had a few tart observations about the way that Merkel’s team had handled the crucial June negotiations. It highlighted their secrecy and timing: “texts [were] produced at the last moment before pressing for an agreement.” Meanwhile the compressed timetable then being arranged for the discussions in Portugal “could not have been better designed to marginalize” national parliaments. In January 2008, the Labour-dominated foreign-affairs committee concluded “that there is no material difference between the provisions on foreign affairs in the Constitutional Treaty, which the government made subject to approval in a referendum, and those in the Lisbon Treaty, on which a referendum is being denied.” Not to worry, soothed Britain’s glib young foreign minister, the Reform Treaty would “giv[e] Britain a bigger voice in Europe and enshrin[e] children’s rights for the first time.”

Ireland’s leading politicians behaved better. Under Irish law, significant changes to EU treaties require an amendment to the Irish constitution and all amendments to the Irish constitution have to be approved by referendum. No serious attempts were made to argue that the changes encompassed within the Treaty of Lisbon were too trivial to warrant a referendum. The “substance” of the rejected EU constitution had, admitted Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, survived. He added later that it was “a bit upsetting . . . to see so many countries running away from giving their people an opportunity [to vote]. . . . If you believe in something . . . why not let your people have a say in it?” That’s easy to answer. Those who now direct the EU project believe in it too much to accept placing the union’s future in the hands of its voters.

Mind you, when Ahern made those comments, he was probably confident that his electorate would approve the treaty. Despite a bout of recalcitrance a few years back (Irish voters had rejected an earlier EU treaty in 2001 before being bullied into changing their minds the following year), his countrymen were, and are, reasonably enthusiastic supporters of the EU. The EU has been good for – and to – Ireland, and the Irish know it. But gratitude is not a blank check and that, increasingly, is what the electorate came to believe that it was being asked to sign. In many respects, such as its notorious passerelle clauses (it’s a long story), that’s what the treaty is, but growing suspicions that the whole thing was nothing more than an elaborate con were also sharpened (sometimes unfairly) by the complexity of the treaty’s language.

Ironically, the treaty’s supporters had once regarded that complexity as an asset. As one of them, former Irish Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald, put it in June 2007:

The most striking change [between the failed EU constitution and the Reform Treaty] is perhaps that in order to enable some governments to reassure their electorates that the changes will have no constitutional implications, the idea of a new and simpler treaty containing all the provisions governing the Union has now been dropped in favor of a huge series of individual amendments to two existing treaties. Virtual incomprehensibility has . . . replaced simplicity as the key approach to EU reform.

At a meeting in, tactlessly, London the following month, another former premier, Italy’s Giuliano Amato reiterated the advantages of incomprehensibility: “If it is unreadable, it is not constitutional, that was the sort of perception. Where they got this perception from is a mystery to me. . . .  But, there is some truth [in it]. . . . the U.K. prime minister can go to the Commons and say “Look, you see, it’s absolutely unreadable, it’s the typical Brussels treaty, nothing new, no need for a referendum.” Amato may have been speaking fairly light-heartedly, but he was also quite right. Legislators everywhere are accustomed to approving laws they don’t understand. The man in the street is not. The opaque language of Merkel’s deceptively crafted treaty was a brilliant device to help those politicians looking to dodge a referendum, but a disaster for those who had no choice but to win one.

But last Thursday’s Irish “no” was a rejection of more than elaborately misleading drafting. As the EU’s bureaucracy has extended its reach deeper and deeper into territory once reserved to the nation state, it is bound to provoke opposition, even among many of those who broadly support European integration. Much of that opposition is reasonable, but much of it is not, and who is to blame for that? The EU’s political class has made a mockery of truth for so long that we should not be surprised that some Irish “no” voters preferred to believe (as, reportedly, some did) that the Treaty of Lisbon would pave the way for a pan-European draft.

The “no” coalition was wide, messy, crazy, sane, pragmatic, romantic, all-embracing, and self-contradictory, sometimes well-informed, sometimes not, sometimes paranoid, sometimes prescient, sometimes socialist, sometimes free market, sometimes high tax, sometimes low tax, sometimes honest, sometimes not, sometimes more than a little alarming (Sinn Fein was the only official party of any size to lend their support) and sometimes more than a little inspiring. Marvelously, miraculously, they won, and they won well, 53.4 percent to 46.6 percent (on a respectable turnout of 53.1 percent). If you think that sounds like democracy, you’d be right. And if you think that sounds like a nation, you’d be right too.

But if you think that it’s too soon to declare victory, you’d also be right. Early indications are that the ratification process will continue. As Jose Barroso, the EU’s chief bureaucrat, announced within minutes of the Irish result, “the treaty is not dead.”

And that tells you much of what you need to know about the EU.

The Man Who Would Be Khan

Mongol

The New York Sun, June 6, 2008

On vacation some years ago in a post-communist Mongolia now free to venerate its most famous son, I asked one of the locals if he thought Genghis Khan, the founder and posthumously declared emperor of what became the largest contiguous empire in history, had been, well, just a touch brutal. "Oh, yes," came the reply, "but he was provoked."

That's pretty much the spirit in which the Russian director Sergei Bodrov has made "Mongol," a lavish, highly praised (it was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this year) movie that opens in the city today and depicts the rise of Genghis as a well-deserved triumph over adversity. To be fair, this is also the way this tale is told in "The Secret History of the Mongols," a 13th-century Mongolian text that, despite its misty mix of myth, history, and propaganda, is probably the most accurate account of the khan's early years.

It's from there that Mr. Bodrov has taken the core of his story about the young man, known as Temudjin, who will be khan. The film begins in his childhood, and as childhoods go, it's rough, a blend of the bleaker elements of "Oliver Twist," "Harry Potter," and the princes in the tower, transported to Central Asia and reimagined by the creators of "A Man Called Horse." The 9-year-old Temudjin (Odnyam Odsuren) witnesses the murder of his father, is robbed of his right to succeed to the chieftaincy of his clan, and, finally, is forced to escape into the wilderness. As the years pass, ordeals pile on. Even Temudjin's much-delayed honeymoon is transformed into a nightmare when marauding members of an enemy tribe kidnap his gorgeous, free-spirited bride, Börte (Khulan Chuluun).

That ought to be quite enough misery for anyone, but Mr. Bodrov, a true Slav, adds more. In sequences that owe nothing to "The Secret History of the Mongols" and everything to the need to provide a vaguely respectable rationalization for one of Genghis's later massacres, Temudjin is handed over to the rulers of the neighboring Tangut kingdom. They treat him very nastily indeed. At this point, astute cinemagoers will know that the Tanguts are toast. And so they turned out to be, although in "Mongol" this barely merits a footnote. The Tanguts were, in fact, annihilated. Their once-advanced civilization was reduced to desolation, archeological fragments, and something less than a memory. Their only crime was to have been in the way.

Not that that appears to worry Mr. Bodrov much. Once best-known for the lyrical, haunting "Prisoner of the Mountains," an adaptation of a Tolstoy novella updated to reflect today's Chechen conflict, the director has abandoned his earlier, subtle take on the cost of war in favor of something cruder. His last film, "Nomad," was a cack-handed Kazakh "Braveheart," a laughably acted, lamentably written slab of nationalist kitsch redeemed only by its deft use of a landscape so lovely, so strange, and so huge that John Ford should have been there to film it.

That same terrain, or somewhere very much like it, adds an equally hallucinatory grandeur to "Mongol." What's more, like "Nomad," the new film shows clear traces of "Eurasianism," a distinctively Russian, distinctly shaky interpretation of history sometimes deployed to explain why Western-style democracy could never work in Russia. Whatever the similarities between the two movies, however, "Mongol" is a significantly better film. This time around, the screenplay is refreshingly adequate (despite sporadic slips into portentousness, narrative muddle, and shamanistic hocus-pocus).

The acting is much more than that. Casting a Japanese actor to play the 20-something Temudjin may irritate some purists, but at least Tadanobu Asano is considerably more "authentic" than his most notorious predecessor, John Wayne, who played the role in "The Conqueror," Howard Hughes's bizarre, irradiated (it's a long story), and very approximate take on the same tale. Mr. Asano is also far more convincing: His compelling, carefully calibrated performance should quiet most doubts. His Temudjin is watchful, stoic, and self-contained, his terrifying, patient stillness that of the predator waiting his turn, even under the most horrific duress.

Mr. Asano is beautifully counterbalanced by the Chinese actor Honglei Sun (most of the rest of the cast here is, tactfully, Mongolian) as the ebullient Jamukha, Temudjin's rescuer, blood brother, ally, and, ultimately, adversary. Mr. Sun delivers an unexpectedly touching performance as a man driven by custom, power politics, and fate into a savage conflict that he would have given almost anything to avoid.

This sense of destiny galloping onward and ominously at an ever-increasing pace lends the film much of its force, which is only amplified by our knowledge of where the saga will lead. Those first skirmishes on the vast grasslands, wild lightning horseback clashes conducted at a speed that would shame the Comanche, are precursors of a razzia that will, eventually, rage across two continents with a brutality that is breathtaking even by the demanding standards of the 13th century. But as those quick clashes evolve into brilliantly filmed, dizzyingly choreographed massed battles, it's impossible not to wonder if the spectacle is not a dazzling, distracting camouflage deliberately designed by Mr. Bodrov to mask the horrors he purports to show — horrors that foreshadow the hecatombs to come.

"Mongol" concludes with Temudjin imposing a bloody unity on his perpetually feuding nation — an objective, justification, and excuse typical of strongmen throughout the ages that have, in Mr. Bodrov, clearly found both a willing listener and a talented apologist. The director is now proposing to turn his attention to Temudjin/Genghis's subsequent wars of conquest. If "Mongol," the first of a planned trilogy, is anything to go by, the remaining two films will be wonderful to watch and troubling to ponder: Atrocities are still atrocities, however much time has passed.

With Her People

Rebecca Schull: On Naked Soil - Imagining Anna Akhmatova

National Review Online, May 23, 2008

When, in 2005, Vladimir Putin labeled the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century,” he was only confirming the fact that Russia’s understanding of its Communist past is once more in flux. History is again being rewritten, distorted, and manipulated — this time in the interest of creating a national narrative in which all Russians can, supposedly, take pride. The crimes of the fallen dictatorship are being shrouded in comforting patriotic myth, or, increasingly, just denied.

In the West, by contrast, there are signs that Joseph Stalin, the most monstrous of all the Soviet despots, may finally be penetrating public consciousness as an embodiment of an evil that has rarely, if ever, been equaled. Within this context, it’s interesting to note that New Yorkers could have seen not one, but two, evocations of Stalinism on stage this April. The remarkable Rupert Goold/Patrick Stewart Macbeth-as-Stalin attracted more attention, and deservedly so. Nevertheless it would be wrong to overlook a quietly effective production at the Theater for the New City where the focus rested mainly on just one of the “wonderful Georgian’s” victims. On Naked Soil: Imagining Anna Akhmatova is a new play by Rebecca Schull (yes, Fay from Wings,but also the author of an earlier drama about the Gulag memoirist Eugenia Ginzburg) revolving around Anna Akhmatova, the poetess who was among the most eloquent of all the witnesses to the atrocities of the regime that tormented, stifled, but never quite destroyed her:

In the fearful years of the . . . terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody “identified” me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): “Can you describe this?” And I said: “Yes I can.” And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.

And describe it she did, in lines of hideous beauty and terrible sadness:

In those years only the dead smiled,

Glad to be at rest: And Leningrad city swayed like

A needless appendix to its prisons.

It was then that the railway-yards

Were asylums of the mad;

Short were the locomotives’

Farewell songs.

Stars of death stood

Above us,

and innocent Russia

Writhed under bloodstained boots, and

Under the tires of Black Marias.

On Naked Soil shuttles back and forth between two eras, the late 1930s and the early 1960s, but it is the former, deep in those “fearful years,” that define it. The play opened with Akhmatova (Ms. Schull) alone in her room in Leningrad. The décor hinted at what had been lost: the once elegant furniture had known better days, a nude by Modigliani still teased, but behind broken glass. An ancient wind-up gramophone conjured up memories of St. Petersburg’s long-silenced bohemia. What we saw was a wreck of a room, a wreck of a life, a wreck of a nation. That Ms. Schull is some three decades older than the Akhmatova of 1938 didn’t really matter: It only emphasized the exhaustion of a woman old before her time and the immense distance between the weary, crumbling figure on stage and the siren she once was.

In 1914, Akhmatova had been a leading figure in the chaotic, fabulous, and wildly innovative avant-garde that was the perverse and paradoxical glory of late imperial Russia. Tall and striking, with a love life to match, she was a scandal, a sensation, and a star. Then war came, and revolution. Her verse darkened, and so did her life. Somehow she hung on through the early years of Soviet rule, almost, but not quite, a “former person,” reduced to near-poverty, writing, writing, writing, brilliant, unacceptable, her poems sometimes too dangerous to be committed to paper for long, dependent for their survival on the memories of a few devoted friends.

And in the room of the banished poet

Fear and the Muse take turns at watch,

And the night comes

When there will be no sunrise.

In one of the play’s most compelling scenes, the audience watched what could never be witnessed, the spectacle of Akhmatova repeating an old anecdote (for the benefit of hidden microphones) to her friend, the loyal Lydia Chukovskaya (Sue Cremin), while Chukovskaya frantically memorized lines of poetry written on a manuscript that would soon have to be burned.

For the most part, Schull’s portrayal (as playwright and actress) of Akhmatova is, understandably enough, admiring. While her Akhmatova is no saint (Schull successfully conveyed a sense of the neediness, neurosis, and self-absorption that were essential aspects of Akhmatova’s personality), it’s difficult not to suspect that she chose to smooth over some of her heroine’s rougher edges. Thus the play has relatively little space for the most enduring of Akhmatova’s affairs, the decade and a half she spent with the art critic Nikolai Punin.

That’s a mistake. A clear grasp of the trajectory of this painful, complicated, and essentially polygamous liaison is crucial to understanding how Akhmatova actually spent most of the 1920s and 1930s, but is likely to have eluded any playgoers not already familiar with the story. The pair finally split up in 1938, not long probably, before the opening scenes of On Naked Soil, although, as too often in this play, the chronology is frustratingly vague. Punin was arrested, for the third time, in 1949. He died in the camps four years later. His Gulag mugshot was just one of many images projected onto the set to flesh out the play’s dialogue, but it’s one that lingers in memory, a lined, sunken face, furious, finished.

No less discreetly, the full nature of Akhmatova’s difficult relationship with her son, Lev, is largely glossed over in favor of the more conventional saga of a determined, grieving mother doing what she could to help her imperiled offspring. In 1938, he had just been re-arrested. It was for Lev that Akhmatova had been standing in those prison queues for those 17 appalling months, desperate for a word, a glimpse, a chance to deliver a parcel of supplies, anything:

Son in irons and husband clay.

Pray. Pray.

But the horror was undoubtedly made worse for Akhmatova by guilt. She knew that Lev had neither forgiven her for sending him away to live with his grandmother for most of his boyhood, nor for what the circumstances of her private life had done to him. This element in his agony, and hers, is underplayed in On Naked Soil. As a result, Lev is reduced to little more than a proxy, an Ivan Denisovitch rather than a character in his own right, an irony that the real-life Lev would have recognized but would have been unlikely to appreciate. That said, his ordeal, even if reduced to something more generic than it deserves, is one of the worst of the nightmares that force their way so savagely into this play and its faded, solitary room. This was underpinned by the way the set design incorporated elements of a prison wall. It was there for use in just one scene but its presence onstage throughout the whole performance served as a pointed illustration of the fact that in the Soviet Union it wasn’t necessary to be in jail to be imprisoned.

After Stalin died, the jailers eased up a touch. Akhmatova was even allowed to travel abroad. Those parts of On Naked Soil set in 1965, about a year before Akhmatova’s death, show her in conversation with Nadezhda Mandelstam (Lenore Loveman), the widow of her old friend, Osip, another poet who perished at the hands of the regime. As in the sections set in 1938, Schull uses the dialogue between two women to recount Akhmatova’s story. These passages, like most of this play, come freighted with memory, and have a certain wistful resonance, but they lacked the intensity of the scenes from 1938. In those, Akhmatova’s interlocutor, Lydia Chukovskaya, a gifted writer who became the poetess’s Boswell, was nervous, tense, and visibly aware that she was herself in danger. Her own husband had been arrested earlier that year and, unknown to her, had already been shot.

Reviewing the play in theNew York Times, Caryn James worried that it became “a virtual recitation of events in [Ahkmatova’s] life, and extraordinary though those events were, simply recalling them isn’t enough to make a drama.” There’s something to that, but not much. The simple retelling of events like these ought to be enough to hold the attention of any audience. Besides, there was very little that was simple about this retelling, not least the fact that many of the words used were Akhmatova’s own, either delivered (often beautifully, if with few traces of Akhmatova’s distinctive incantatory style) as poetry, or embedded into the dialogue, jewels waiting to catch the light.

Buttressed by strong performances from its three actresses, On Naked Soil worked well enough as drama, but it has to be seen for what it is, a chamber piece, not an epic — a reflection, the tiniest piece of a hecatomb. If the play was occasionally overly didactic (with its slide projections and moments of densely packed biographical detail, it had a hint of the college lecture about it), that’s a trivial offense: this is a tale that needs to be kept alive as a memorial — and a warning. Quite what Akhmatova herself would have made of this play, however, I don’t know. One of the subtleties of Schull’s script is the way it makes clear that Akhmatova wanted to be remembered for her lines, not for a life she never truly considered to be her own:

I, like a river,

Have been turned aside by this harsh age.

I am a substitute. My life has flowed Into another channel

And I do not recognize my shores.

She began, and probably would have preferred to remain, as a poetess of the personal, if one captivated also by legend, landscape, and the past. But history had other plans. Akhmatova never fled the country that had abandoned her. Instead she took it upon herself to become a symbol, an inspiration, and a reproach, a reminder of the Russia that might have been, a chronicler of the Russia that was:

I was with my people in those hours,

There where, unhappily, my people were.

There’s a sense of nationhood in those words that Vladimir Putin could never reproduce or, for that matter, even understand.

A Cabinet of Soviet Curiosities

Paul R. Gregory: Lenin's Brain 

The New York Sun, May 21, 2008

Moscow, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

Sometimes the smallest of things can illuminate the largest. A fossil tells the story of massive planetary change, a line or two of poetry does more to explain trench warfare than a dozen history books, and the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard bring Gloriana's long vanished England back to iridescent, dangerous life. In writing "Lenin's Brain" (Hoover Institution Press, 163 pages, $15), Houston University professor Paul R. Gregory has mined the Hoover Institution's extraordinary collection of Soviet archival material to come up with 14 brief, deftly chosen tales that brilliantly illuminate the cruelties, the absurdities, and the failures of the USSR's malignant, broken-backed utopia, with a precision and a concision that have rarely been equaled.

Professor Gregory's book is as grim as it is fascinating; the nearest it comes to offering any sort of relief is with its account of the fate of its eponymous red-gray matter. The Soviet leader's brain was not the source of much laughter in the course of Lenin's lifetime, but the absurd, darkly funny story of its subsequent fate is a farce that would have delighted Mikhail Bulgakov and must surely, one day, tempt Tom Stoppard.

The saga begins with the removal of the brain in the immediate aftermath of its owner's death, to be poked and prodded, examined and venerated. From there it went on a long, strange trip from skull to jar to slide, ending up divided into 30,953 carefully selected slices. (I am unclear whether this total includes the portion that was dispatched to Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.) A German brain specialist was put in charge of the project for a while, but he proved unacceptably foreign and irritatingly independent. In the end, however, Stalin's Politburo got the result it wanted from a team of more biddable experts, "proof" that Lenin was smarter than just about anybody else — a mixture of pseudoscience and elitism that was all too typical of the Bolshevik project. As the episode reminds us, the Soviet leadership believed that the masses were inherently unreliable: Without an "enlightened elite to manage [them], there would never be a peasant-worker paradise. By this logic, the creators of this dictatorship must themselves be head and shoulders above the rest."

The rest of "Lenin's Brain" shows the society these geniuses created. It was a civilization where mass murder was commonplace ("the Leningrad troika sentenced 658 defendants to death in a single day"), where history (such as the truth behind the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn) was almost infinitely malleable, and where, in 1944, 180,014 Crimean Tatars were exiled from their ancestral homeland "without incident," a comment from the secret police chief that, in just two words, shows how brutal and brutalized this paradise had become.

And so it goes on. Mr. Gregory introduces his readers to the notion of "former people" (byvshie liudi), individuals whose background, behavior, or associations (such as who they were related to) meant that "they were no longer [to] be regarded as human beings." We read how debate was suppressed (even at the Party's highest levels), and are given details of a paranoia that ran so deep that the notion of "anti-Soviet agronomists" could be taken seriously. In the end, ironically, the result was that the Kremlin's bosses no longer had access to the information they needed to run their empire efficiently: The chapter describing how the decision was taken to invade Afghanistan is a devastating portrait of a secretive and fumbling gerontocracy seduced by conspiracy theory and ancient ideological assumptions into a disastrous international adventure.

But of all Professor Gregory's stories, the most haunting is that of Vladimir Moroz. After the arrest of his parents and older brother in 1937, Vladimir and his younger sibling were transferred to (separate) secret police-run orphanages. There he made the mistake, records show, of expressing "dissatisfaction with the arrests" of his family. He was then arrested himself, tortured, and sent to a corrective-labor camp. He died there six months later.

He was 17 years old.

Round Two?

Edward Lucas: The New Cold War

National Review, May 5, 2008

Putin

It’s not just the fact that Edward Lucas is a quietly proud, quietly amused holder of Lithuania’s Order of Gediminas (Fifth Class) that distinguishes him from many other non-native (he’s English) commentators on Eastern Europe; it’s also the depth of his interest in, and sympathy for, this long-contested stretch of territory’s cultures and peoples, an interest and a sympathy that resonate throughout this fine, timely, and thought-provoking new book.

It’s an interest he has pursued at first hand. Lucas (whom — full disclosure — I’ve known for more than 20 years) spent time in Poland as a student, and has been covering the region as a journalist since the late 1980s in a career that has included stints in Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Tallinn, Vilnius, and Moscow. He is now the Central and East European correspondent for The Economist. It’s his sympathy for the nations once trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and his grasp of their struggles — past, present, and, quite possibly, future — that now lead him to warn of the danger that a revived Russia might represent not only to their independence but also, for that matter, to the West.

To be sure, The New Cold War is, as its title reveals, a polemic. Obviously sensitive to accusations of hyperbole, Lucas takes care to stress that today’s threat is subtler than in the days of a divided continent and Mutually Assured Destruction. Nevertheless he’s out to alarm. He describes a Russia now run by, and for, its security services, a power once again on the prowl beyond its borders. Domestically it has, he shows, reverted to a form of authoritarianism, albeit one that, Lucas readily concedes, allows far more leeway than in the grim, gray, grinding Soviet past: “Never in Russian history have so many Russians lived so well and so freely.”

This is not an unfamiliar tale (news coverage of Putin’s rule has been more critical than Lucas sometimes appears to think), but here it’s recounted with fluency, authority, and an eye for detail that, even in this book’s lighter moments (of which there are a respectable number; he is a dryly amusing writer), betray its author’s long experience of the ramshackle, turbulent, and bewildering space that is all that remains of the utopia that never was:

I went to visit a new [Georgian] finance minister . . . who was being energetically promoted by the ever-optimistic American embassy. His office was bright, modern, and computerized. We had an enjoyable chat about e-government and zero-based budgeting. . . . As I left, I used an old journalist’s trick and asked to use the restroom, saying that I would find my way out. Not only was the toilet worse than a midden, but my detour to some of the other offices produced a much more convincing picture: a warren of ill-lit and dingy offices, each filled with rickety wooden furniture. Dumpy little men in ill-fitting brown suits were engaged in chain-smoking conversation with thickset men in leather jackets. Not a computer was in sight.

Clearly Lucas retains an unromantic, often skeptical view of the states that stumbled, lurched, and strode into the murky post-Soviet dawn. He’s often their cheerleader, but he’ll heckle too. Equally, his view of Russia is more balanced than his book’s title might suggest. After witnessing the chaos, violent criminality, and, for many, penury of the Yeltsin era, he can appreciate the attraction of the (partially) restored order and increasing prosperity associated with Putin, if not their political consequences. It’s telling that mounting suspicions (in Lucas’s view, “the weight of evidence so far supports the grimmest interpretation”) that the security services were behind the “terrorist” apartment bombings that helped pave the way for Putin’s election in 2000 have done little to dent his popularity: Russians have been prepared to pay dearly for the hope that the trains might someday run on time.

This is yet another reminder that the benign “universal” values (liberty, democracy, and so on) so cherished by Lucas are far from being universal priorities. Freedom may be important to Russians but it has demonstrably mattered less than the restoration of stability, and, probably, the desire that their country be, once again, a force to be reckoned with. But if nationalism can function as a valuable social glue, it can also gum things up. Adopting an increasingly rancid notion of the national interest may play well at home, but it has proved to be better theater than policy, and it’s leading Russia in a direction that is not just destructive, but self-destructive.

Bullying small neighbors is one thing (it’s an example of derzhavnichestvo, something that great powers just tend to do — and get away with), but Putin’s diplomacy has often appeared to put petulance before realpolitik. Aiding the Iranian theocracy may be an enjoyable way to taunt the West, but it makes little strategic sense for a country with mounting Islamist problems of its own. As for Putin’s embrace of China, Lucas approvingly quotes a Russian observer who despairingly, and reasonably, depicts such a partnership (presumably designed to act as a counterweight to those wicked Americans) as “an alliance between [Russian] rabbit and [Chinese] boa constrictor.”

Similarly, there is clear evidence, repeated by Lucas, that increasing meddling (to use a mild term) by the Kremlin has held back economic development. Times have been good but they could have been better. Investment has been deterred, delayed, or distorted. The high price Russia now receives for its oil and gas has been a godsend, but the resulting bonanza has both encouraged and financed the damage that an ever more assertive state is inflicting upon a still fledgling free market. Despite this, the prospects of rich pickings from Russia’s petro-economy not only have, as Lucas demonstrates in some of the most unsettling sections of his book, dampened Western criticism of Putin’s rule, but also look likely to set in motion a process that will leave Europe unhealthily dependent on Russian energy resources. To Lucas, “the growing [Western] business lobby tied to Russia represents a powerful fifth column of a kind unseen during the last Cold War. Once it was Communist trade unions that undermined the West at the Kremlin’s behest. Now it is pro-Kremlin bankers and politicians who betray their countries for 30 silver rubles.”

That’s a tirade too far, but it inevitably brings to mind Lenin’s best, if apocryphal, jibe: the one about rope, revolutionaries, capitalists, and selling. It’s a comparison that would gain added resonance were Lucas able to prove his contention that there is, once again, an ideological element to Moscow’s rivalry with the West. I’m not convinced that he is. To be sure, some of Putin’s more intellectually enterprising acolytes have managed to cobble together a doctrine of sorts, a haphazard jumble of grandiloquent, nostalgic nonsense that goes by the name of “sovereign democracy,” but nobody appears to take it terribly seriously. Nor should they. Russia has some traditions of government that are, mercifully, all its own, but these days they are, mercifully, no longer for export. There is no ideology behind Russia’s current maneuverings abroad, merely an old-fashioned pursuit of power, influence, and wealth — legitimate aims for any nation, great or small, flawed in this case by a profound misunderstanding of where its people’s best interests really lie.

But if the Kremlin is to play these games, so must we. Lucas concludes his book with some recommendations as to how to shove back. Some are sensible (focus on energy security), some naive (would Russia really care, or even notice, if it were suspended from the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly?), and some unnecessarily antagonistic (Georgia in NATO?). The first stage in any effective response, however, is a realistic understanding of what Russia is up to. This bracing, dismaying book doesn’t tell the full story (in particular, there’s not enough discussion of the extent to which Russia’s ambitions are both hobbled and inspired by its weakness), but it’s an excellent place to start.