The Red Broom

Anne Applebaum - Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine

National Review, November 27, 2017

Nearly 40 years ago, I met the parents of a graduate-school friend. They were exiles, Ukrainians, a people said not to exist, not really. Their son had told them that I took an unfriendly interest in Soviet history, and that I knew a little about their lost homeland.

The father asked if I’d heard about a famine there in the early 1930s. I had: something to do with collectivization.

“There was more to it than that.”

In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum, a prominent journalist and the author of fine histories of the Gulag and the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe, recounts just how much more there was. Red Famine is powerfully written, extensively researched, and, frequently, painful reading. It tells of a meticulous annihilation that tore a nation away from its traditions, its language, its morality, its past, its future, its everything: “A woman whose six children died over three days in May 1933 lost her mind, stopped wearing clothes, unbraided her hair, and told everyone that the ‘red broom’ had taken her family away.”

Her life had unraveled, her culture had unraveled — there’s accidental symbolism in that unbraiding — and she unraveled. The land around her unraveled too: once a breadbasket, now a wasteland, a domain of the dead and those waiting to die, Muselmänner, as they were known in Auschwitz.

Neighbor was set against neighbor, cannibalism was far from rare (yes, you read that right).

By the time — it took less than a year — the red broom had completed its 1932–33 sweep (there were smaller sweeps before and after), roughly 3.9 million Ukrainians were dead: a decimation, and more. Countless others were deported, many to a Gulag that had plenty of demand for slave labor. Large numbers never returned.

Some of this came with collectivization, Stalin’s decision to impose larger collective or state-owned farming across the USSR. Even Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent and a reliable shill for the Soviet dictator, admitted that collectivization had been a “mess”; still, he said, while there had been casualties, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” And quite often those casualties were not unwelcome to the regime. Communism, like the millenarian movements it succeeded, rested on the notion of a great sorting between sinners and saved. Collectivization could be used to weed out enterprising, more successful private farmers, the relentlessly demonized “kulaks” (a category regularly expanded to include peasants who owned, say, a cow or a pig more than their fellow villagers), who were too smart to be won over by deceptive promises of the bounty that Communism would bring to agriculture: They were another of the Soviet Union’s disposable classes, “former people” in the sinister and, all too often, prophetic terminology of that era.

In Ukraine, the noose was drawn far tighter than anywhere else — a fact still denied by today’s Kremlin and its apologists. The millions who starved to death there, like those who died in famines elsewhere in the USSR at that time, were, it is maintained, the victims of a reckless agricultural experiment, nothing more. Applebaum agrees that the “chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine,” but rightly goes on to argue that neither chaos, nor the weather, nor crop failure can account for the death toll in Ukraine, and especially that terrible spike in the spring of 1933. For that, the better explanation is a series of measures enacted by the regime that can only have been intended to kill. There’s a reason this famine is known to Ukrainians as the “Holodomor,” a term, Applebaum explains, derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger and extermination.

Stalin, writes Applebaum, “launched a famine within the famine, . . . specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians.” It was not enough to hit the region’s faltering farms with grain-production targets they had no chance of meeting and then to requisition what they had managed to grow. Seed corn was often seized too, as were livestock, potatoes, and, eventually, just about anything else that someone might have hoped to eat. Houses were repeatedly ransacked in hunts for any hidden scraps. Cooking utensils (and other goods) might well be taken, too. Tight controls were imposed to restrict movement out of the countryside into hungry cities (which were often unable or unwilling to help in any case), let alone out of Ukraine. Exports of grain, however, continued. Millions in hard currency were worth more than millions of lives.

Traveling to find work elsewhere was out of the question. Farms and villages judged to have fallen particularly short of production quotas — no small number — were “blacklisted”: burdened with yet more restrictions, confiscations, and prohibitions, and denied credit, essential services, and the right to barter or trade. The peasants were trapped, cut off. Not to be starving was a sign of guilt, inviting another search.

Applebaum records how a Polish diplomat crossing the border from rural Ukraine into an adjacent Russian province in May 1933 was left with the impression that he had crossed into “Western Europe,” so great was the contrast. Ukraine had, quite clearly, been singled out.

And the reason for that was Stalin’s recognition that Ukrainians’ belief that they were a people distinct from their Russian neighbors was authentic and thus potentially dangerous. The confused period that followed the Bolshevik Revolution had seen two attempts to establish a separate Ukrainian state as well as a massive peasant uprising that had evolved into a war of all against all — and a serious threat to the nascent Soviet regime. When the Bolsheviks finally secured their hold over the country, they first played, by their dismal standards, nice. Ukrainians were led to believe that their Soviet Republic would, in a real sense, be Ukrainian and, often, run by Ukrainians.

That was never likely to be a solution acceptable to Stalin, that paradoxical Georgian enforcer of Russian imperial control, a man who knew a thing or two about nations — and how to break them. When, in 1925, Stalin declared that “the peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question,” it was Ukraine that was on his mind. If Ukraine was to become “a true fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic,” which Stalin had said that he wanted, the uncomfortably large, uncomfortably independent peasantry, the repository of so much of Ukrainian tradition and, in some sense, Ukraine’s soul, would have to be ground down.

But Ukraine would have to be decapitated, too. Applebaum details the silencing and, often, destruction of much of Ukraine’s intelligentsia, and the purge of a Ukrainian Communist Party with a membership too prone, the Kremlin suspected, to go its own way.

The Holodomor is properly understood only when it is understood as part of a broader, deeper assault on the Ukrainian national idea. Applebaum records how, even as “the famine was raging, . . . Stalin’s de facto spokesman in Ukraine forced through a decree eliminating Ukrainian textbooks as well as school lessons tailored to Ukrainian children” — another warning that Moscow had not finished with Ukraine. Taken as a whole, Stalin’s multifaceted onslaught on Ukrainians as a peoplewould (as Applebaum points out) “certainly” pass the test established for genocide by Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who coined the term. Indeed, Lemkin acknowledged as much. Whether it would meet the narrower definition of genocide set out in the U.N. Convention on Genocide is, Applebaum contends (perhaps too cautiously), a different matter, but, as she notes, that convention was heavily influenced by a Soviet Union that had no interest in being asked to answer for its crimes.

The final stage of genocide or ethnic cleansing — call it what you will — is usually the replacement of the old population with a new one. Russian peasants started to move into the emptied villages, the beginning of what Applebaum describes as a “slow-motion movement of Russians into a depopulated Ukraine” that was to last for decades, further blurring the idea of a Ukrainian Ukraine in a way that helped the Soviets then, and helps Vladimir Putin now.

The Holodomor was unmentionable in the Soviet Union until just before the USSR’s collapse. And shamefully, indifference in the West played a part in greasing its transformation from a topic that was forbidden into one that came close to being forgotten. Applebaum rightly highlights the role played in the original Soviet cover-up by Times man Duranty, not least the way he so effectively smothered the reporting of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who stepped off a train at a place he wasn’t meant to, walked for three days through the hell the Holodomor was creating, and told the world what he had seen.

Memory can sometimes outlast efforts to repress it. When, in the late 1980s, it finally became possible to talk about the Holodomor in the USSR, the long-buried memories of those years played their part in paving the way to Ukrainian independence in 1991. This was perversely acknowledged by the “Russian-backed separatists” who (Applebaum relates) destroyed a Holodomor memorial in the occupied eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne in 2015. It was a desecration that also echoed the Kremlin’s attempts to escape the consequences of the past by evasion and denial, a would-be rewriting of history that makes this compelling book all the more timely — and all the more necessary.

Mueller’s revelations so far aren’t particularly damning—but the White House has been put on notice

Prospect, Oct 31, 2017

The unsealing of a grand jury indictment of Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign manager in mid-2016, did not come as much of a shock. Long-standing suspicions about Manafort’s dealings with Ukraine and what the Washington Post has delicately referred to as his “complicated financial past” were bad enough, but when the FBI descended on his house in a pre-dawn raid in August, well…

Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to look into possible links between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, but he can nose around much more widely than that job description might suggest—and then follow up on whatever it is he thinks that he has found.

What Mueller thinks he has found arises out of Manafort’s career as a political consultant and lobbyist, and specifically the work he carried out for Ukraine’s ‘Party of Regions’, the party of the now-deposed president, Victor Yanukovych, and the party that succeeded it after Yanukovych fled to Russia. Along with his business associate and fellow Trump campaign worker Rick Gates, who has also been indicted, it is alleged that Manafort laundered millions of dollars, failed to declare his full income to the taxman, failed to register as a ‘foreign agent’ and failed to furnish the information that that status would have required. When questioned about this, Manafort allegedly lied to the Feds—something that is also illegal.

The indictment has its theatrical moments, including talk of “conspiracy against the United States”—a phrase that means rather less than non-lawyers might think. As is usual when American prosecutors want defendants to crumble, squeal or both, every imaginable charge—bank fraud, failures to disclose foreign bank accounts, you name it—is thrown into the mix, pushing the potential prison sentence out into some dismayingly distant date (Manafort is 68). The indictment also includes notice that prosecutors will seek forfeiture of any assets traceable back to the alleged money laundering, something that will add to the pressure on the defendants and will not, I suspect, have gone unnoticed by their lawyers.

Bad as this all is, these indictments may have been greeted with a degree of relief in the White House. Donald Trump was quick to—surprise—tweet that “this [was] years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????”

While this isn’t wholly accurate—the allegations cover the period between “at least 2006 and 2015”—the president had a point. The conduct complained about does not—in any direct way—relate to the Trump campaign. It also seems that at least one prominent Democrat, the older brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, has been caught up in the indictment’s backwash: Tony Podesta has announced that he is leaving the lobbying firm he founded amid speculation that it is one of the unnamed firms that came under investigation by Mueller for its work with Manafort.

However, any celebrations in the Oval Office will have been muted by the knowledge that Mueller now has Manafort where he wants him. If Manafort has anything to confess about campaign shenanigans—and, to be fair, we don’t know that he has—he now can be under no illusion about how much he has to lose by not doing so. It is also unlikely to have escaped Trump’s notice that the fact that this indictment has nothing (directly) to do with the election campaign cuts both ways. It is also an unsettling reminder of how far Mueller can cast his net.

Then there’s George Papadopoulos. Before Monday, he was relatively little-known, a low-level foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. Now we learn that he had plead guilty to lying to the FBI about his relationship with the Russians as part of a plea bargain. Court papers were released disclosing that he “met with the [U.S.] Government on numerous occasions to provide information and answer questions”—in exchange, obviously, for leniency.

Previously Papadopoulos had said that he met his Russian contacts—“the overseas professor” and “a certain female Russian national”—before he had joined the Trump campaign. But not only were they far better connected than Papadopoulos had originally let on (he had told the FBI that the professor was a “nothing”), in reality they only took an interest in him after he had boarded the Trump train. It was only then that the professor told him that Moscow had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton: it had “thousands of emails”. With the help of other Russian officials, all three tried to set up a meeting between the campaign and the Russian government. Papadopoulos was also invited to Russia with “another foreign policy advisor,” although he never went.

It is not a particularly pretty picture, but it is neither damning nor complete. We do not know yet who else on the Trump campaign knew what Papadopoulos was up to. We do not know yet what else Papadopoulos knows about contacts between the campaign and the Kremlin. And we do not know yet, to pass on one intriguing theory, whether he’s been wearing a wire.

The president, however, wants you to know now that “there [was] NO COLLUSION!”

Even if there was, it is worth noting that while ‘collusion’ with Russia might be embarrassing, it is not necessarily illegal. So far, there is no proof that the Trump campaign’s dealings with the Russians crossed that somewhat blurry line into criminality.

So, what now? Politically, Trump is in no position to fire Mueller, but legally Mueller is still very far from being in a position to trigger Trump’s departure. The Trump presidency has had a bad day, but it has had many bad days—so many that the indictment of one of his former campaign managers, which would be a monumental drama had it happened under any president, just seems like another pratfall. The legal investigation will grind on, armed with all the formidable weapons that a skilled prosecutor such as Mueller knows how to wield, weapons now reinforced by two indictments and one guilty plea. Trump will have to live with that.

Gods and Monsters

Erich Kurlander: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich

National Review, October 2, 2017

Adolf Hitler once argued that National Socialism represented “a cool and highly reasoned approach to reality based on the greatest of scientific knowledge and its spiritual expression.” If there are any people foolish enough still to fall for that, they will not enjoy this book. While the enthusiasm of some Nazi leaders, most notoriously Himmler, for the occult has been a staple of pop culture and the more disreputable corners of historical “investigation” for years, this volume shows that many others felt much the same way.

Kurlander depicts a Third Reich in which, despite uneven and often ambiguous efforts to rein them in, seers, magicians, and psychics flourished. Buddha was drafted into the master race, parapsychology “so long as it comported with ‘Nordic-Germanic feeling’” was recognized as legitimate, and the grounds were laid for an “Ario-Germanic” national religion as a syncretic (it wouldn’t all be Wotan) “substitute for Christianity.” Meanwhile, charlatan-historians and charlatan-folklorists hunted for proof that large swathes of Europe were part of an ancestral German homeland, charlatan-archeologists searched for evidence of “the Nordic origins of Asian civilization,” charlatan-doctors worked on monstrous human experiments, and charlatan-scientists struggled to develop weapons designed to draw on mysterious untapped electromagnetic forces. This arsenal was intended to include death rays, sound weapons, and anti-gravity devices — an absurdity and a waste made all the more grotesque by the contrast with the remarkably sophisticated technology successfully deployed by Germany during the war.

If the magical weapons proved harmless, the same cannot be said of the mix of superstition and pseudoscience that ran through the Nazis’ thinking about race, a mix that goes some way to accounting for both the intensity of their anti-Semitism and the meticulousness of the slaughter that followed. “Traditional” anti-Semitism rested on a distrust of difference reinforced by religious and then economic resentment. It generated exclusion, violence, and, as time went by, increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories. But the notion of Jews as perpetual enemies of an advanced “Aryan” race was a fairly new confection, dating back only to the mid 19th century.

Kurlander is an excellent guide to the complex and often conflicting “histories” of the Aryans’ origins, versions of which featured sex with angels, God-men from Tibet, a descent from heaven, moons made of ice crashing into the earth (the weirdly popular “World Ice Theory,” in which Hitler was one of numerous believers), and much more besides. These narratives also incorporated tales of a fall: The original Aryans had been scattered. Their racial integrity had been diluted by intermingling with “lesser breeds.” They had been preyed upon by — whom else? — the Jews, routinely smeared as parasitic and as a disease but also in terms that sometimes appeared to be more than metaphor: Hitler dubbed Jews the children of the devil and believed that forestalling the “Jewish apocalypse was our duty, our God-given mission.”

Kurlander contends that this supernatural dread was genuinely felt by “the Third Reich’s brain trust,” a claim that should be treated with some caution. When it comes to the supernatural, what people believe and what they say they believe are frequently very different — more so, indeed, than they might themselves understand.

When studying the translation of concepts of such malevolence into the deeds that became the Holocaust, it is easy to make the all too common mistake of treating the Nazis as a case apart, as an unparalleled eruption of evil. And, yes, there were aspects of the Third Reich — from the particular horrors it devised to an ideology that was as bizarre as it was sinister — that distinguished it from the other mass-murdering regimes of the last century. But take a step back and the similarities between National Socialism and its totalitarian counterparts on the left quickly become visible.

This is true of their shared “supernatural” dimension. All were essentially millenarian. Communist revolutionaries (nominally philosophical materialists despite a fundamentally mystical view of historical forces) would not have appreciated the connection, but it was there all right — the religious impulse is hard to discard — complete with the promise of a merciless sorting, after which the saved would march to a better world. Untethered to atheism, the Nazis could be more explicitly millenarian, referring to a “thousand-year” Reich. This number has, notes Kurlander (citing another author), “deep biblical overtones,” overtones to which he pays too little attention — a curious misstep in a history of this type, as is his relatively cursory handling of the Nazis’ knotty relationship with Christianity.

As Kurlander makes clear, the Nazis’ racial and occult obsessions did not come out of nowhere. The party that evolved into the National Socialists had roots in the Thule Society, a group formed in early 1918, focused on the occult, anti-Semitism, and, as Germany descended into defeat, politics. Its members sported a swastika in homage to the Aryans’ supposed Indo-European heritage — an important, if counterintuitive, theme that ran through much of esoteric German racism and was associated with the admiration for “Eastern” spirituality of the sort later felt by quite a few leading Nazis. The Thule Society (the name is a reference to a “Nordic” interpretation of the Atlantis myth) had in turn emerged out of a broader Germanic intellectual community that had wallowed in a swamp of Grenzwissenschaft (or “border science,” to give this nonsense — astrology, anthroposophy, “natural” medicine, parapsychology, radiesthesia, theosophy, and all the rest — a kinder name than it deserves), Aryan fantasy, and racial hysteria for decades.

There is no “right” side of history, no law that makes what we call progress inevitable. Other parts of Europe were also doing their bit to let the Enlightenment down. As Kurlander points out, it was a Frenchman, Arthur de Gobineau, who, writing some 40 years before the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair, did much to popularize the idea of a superior Aryan race. Anti-Semitism was far from being solely a Teutonic vice. Kurlander accepts that border science had scant respect for borders but maintains (without satisfactorily explaining why) that Germans were more despairing of the growing ascendancy of scientific materialism than most Europeans, and therefore more prone to succumb to the “re-enchantment” offered by border science. If that was true before 1914, it was even more so after a war that shattered any illusions about modernity — and a defeat that brought humiliation, chaos, and revolution in its wake. As Kurlander tells it, “hundreds of thousands of Germans and Austrians” bought “occult and New Age literature,” read “border scientific journals,” and participated in “astrological and theosophical societies, séances and spiritualist experiments.”

A key element in this collective derangement was the suspicion — still flourishing in the West today — that modern science had torn apart the harmony that had allegedly once existed between man, nature, and the divine, a breach that could be restored by a more spiritual, holistic approach. More often than not, the results — such as “biodynamic” agriculture (a more straightforwardly superstitious variant of organic farming) — were largely innocuous, but the fact that there was a biodynamic “plantation” on the grounds of Auschwitz is a reminder of where the retreat from reason can lead, a lesson that, judging by our own overly relaxed response to resurgent pseudoscience (the anti-vaxxers come to mind) or political attacks on the scientific method, has not been learned.

The dream of restoring a lost whole — even one that had never seen the light of day — was particularly toxic when applied to ethnicity. Imagining a heroic national past (even one with mythic or supernatural undertones) was not confined to Germans, nor was a sense of being a cut above other races, but in Germany, such prejudices were unusually intense. Kurlander never specifies quite why, but the comparatively late (1871) creation of a unified German state — a state then partly unraveled by the Treaty of Versailles — must have increased the pressure on Germans, including, in different ways, their kin in the multiethnic Austria-Hungary of Hitler’s youth or the truncated Austria that was left after World War I, to define who they were. Among the ways they responded was by emphasizing who was not German, most notably the Jews, reviled for the threat they were meant to represent to the unity of the Volk: They were an Other that could have no place in a nation that wished to survive as a nation.

Even if he might occasionally exaggerate the contribution of the specific outlandish beliefs he describes to the catastrophe that unfolded, Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits. In remedying that, Kurlander offers a strikingly different and deeply disturbing perspective on the rise and subsequent trajectory of the Third Reich, and, most unsettling of all, on the numinous appeal of its Führer. Hitler both shared and channeled (some contemporaries referred to him as a medium) the discontents of a people so drastically detached from reality that they were seduced by a conjuring trick, albeit one in which the conjurer himself may well have believed. It was a dark magic so potent that it took an apocalypse to break the spell.

Proletarians, Painters and Propagandists

The Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2017

The poet Vladimir Kirillov vowed to ‘burn up Raphael for our Tomorrow’s sake’ but didn’t say what would come next. The Bolsheviks’ was a supremely didactic revolution, intended to produce a new kind of man. Artists were ready to help out. Even before the revolution, painters such as Kazimir Malevich had taken abstraction to new extremes, pursuing what he called the ‘zero of form’—a rejection of everything that had gone before and a timely anticipation, it might be thought, of the Bolshevik ‘year zero’ that lay just ahead.

‘Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932’ (Royal Academy Publications, 320 pages, $65) is a beautifully illustrated account of art that followed upon, but was ultimately discarded by, the revolution. It closes with a 1932 exhibition commemorating the artists of the new order’s first 15 years, a swan song for an avant-garde rapidly being eclipsed by the inspiring banality of Socialist Realism.

While “Revolution” focuses on painting, the lavishly produced ‘Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test’ (Art Institute of Chicago, 324 pages, $65)takes a broader approach with regard to types of artistic expression, documenting theater productions, posters, periodicals and other ephemera as well as painting, photography and design. The works are often of remarkable quality, raising uncomfortable questions about how we are to regard great art that was the accomplice of totalitarianism.

The earlier part of ‘Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922-1992’ (Yale, 278 pages, $55) highlights the debate between those who pushed art’s frontiers forward toward Utopia and those who believed that the masses needed something more easily understood. Stalin, no Utopian, took the latter side, to the delight of artists such as Evgeny Katsman: After a meeting in 1933 to discuss this controversy with the Soviet leader, Katsman rhapsodized in his diary over Stalin’s ‘sweet face’—a vision that only a Socialist Realist could see.

The Road to Red October

The Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2017

‘Few apocalyptic millenarians live to see the promised apocalypse, let alone the millennium,” writes Yuri Slezkine in “The House of Government” (Princeton, 1,104 pages, $39.95), a brilliant retelling of, mainly, the first two decades of the Soviet era in a sprawling saga centered around a famous and infamous Moscow apartment building created for the new elite. The Bolsheviks were a millenarian sect if ever there was one, as Mr. Slezkine, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates. And, even if the millennium proved elusive, they were able to set off an apocalypse in Petrograd, then Russia’s capital, almost exactly a century ago.

That old-time millenarian ardor smolders away in “October” (Verso, 369 pages, $26.95), China Miéville’s history of what he calls the “ultimately inspiring” Russian Revolution: “This was Russia’s revolution,” he writes, “but it belonged and belongs to others, too. It could be ours. If its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.” It is? After the hecatombs created in communism’s name, such a call to arms is evidence of a faith untroubled when prophecy fails again and again.

Mr. Miéville is a respected Britain-based writer of science fiction but also a man of the far left, and “October” is deftly written but so skewed that the book risks tipping over into alternative history. “I am partisan,” writes Mr. Miéville, a confession that comes as no surprise; but “I have striven to be fair,” which does. Mr. Miéville’s narrative is at times—how to put this—selective. On occasion, he’s careless with facts, not least when it concerns the Bolsheviks’ January 1918 suppression of the Constituent Assembly (Russia’s last democratically elected “parliament” until the Yeltsin years): It is misleading to maintain that its membership was “chosen” before the Bolshevik coup.

That “October” is written from a sympathetic perspective is an unsettling reminder of the persistence of ideas—with roots long predating Marx—which can never safely be consigned (to appropriate Trotsky’s words) to the dustbin of history. Nevertheless this book is worth reading for its emphasis on the bitter debates within Russia’s revolutionary left over how to take advantage of the opportunity it had been given by the fall of the czar—and by the fragility of the regime that replaced him in early 1917.

When the year began, Nicholas II was clinging to his throne, Lenin was an exile in Zurich and the Bolsheviks were just one faction in a fissiparous revolutionary underground. Less than 12 months later, they were running the country—or enough of it to count. The czar was overthrown in a revolution in February (dates given are according to the Julian calendar then used in Russia). Food shortages, wider economic difficulties and general war weariness (World War I had entered its fourth year) had all reinforced the feeling shared by many Russians—even some among the ruling elite—that Romanov absolutism had had its day.

There was a wide agreement that the monarchy should go, but no consensus about what should come next. The new liberal “provisional government” had emerged out of a Duma committee during the crisis. Lacking much democratic legitimacy, it was well-intentioned, weak and well-named. A caretaker more naive than negligent, it threw open the door, but (to borrow a phrase from Engels), the hangman stood waiting outside. Dark forces poured through, including Lenin, who returned from Zurich in April, with assistance from Germany.

Russians, Lenin conceded, now enjoyed “a maximum of legally recognized rights,” but he claimed this was a capitalist con. Bolshevism was required, whether the masses realized it or not. That, eventually, was what the second, October, revolution gave them.

The excellent “Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War 1914- 1921” (Oxford, 823 pages, $39.95), by Yale’s Laura Engelstein, is a considerably more objective account than Mr. Miéville’s. It covers not just the two revolutions and their prelude, but also the civil war that ensued—a civil war that the Bolsheviks, Ms. Englestein argues, did what they could to foment. Lenin calculated that a great sorting, a “process of clarification,” as she terms it, would leave the Bolsheviks alone on top. The war turned out to be more terrible than even Lenin envisaged, but he was proved right in the end.

Lenin often was, but one interesting aspect of Ms. Engelstein’s discussion of 1917 itself is the degree to which she depicts the Bolsheviks as storm-chasers, struggling to keep pace with events they could not yet control. The successive iterations of the provisional government, the best known of which was led by the charismatic if not particularly effective Alexander Kerensky, were actually caught up in the storm.

They failed to feed the cities. They could not satisfy the demand by workers and peasants (and the soldiers recruited from those classes) for a system—collectivist and profoundly antihierarchical—very different from the liberal order they had in mind. They could—and should—have ended Russia’s unpopular, perilous participation in World War I, but didn’t. Meanwhile, democratic principles and a justified fear of both ends of the political spectrum kept Kerensky from gambling on a more authoritarian turn until it was too late.

It was a while before the Bolsheviks could take the helm. April, June and July all saw eruptions of popular discontent, which Ms. Engelstein maintains were beyond “the capacity of any political leadership to contain or direct.” The philosopher Fedor Stepun observed that Lenin’s post-exile speeches were merely “sails to catch the crazed winds of the revolution.” The Bolsheviks, writes Ms. Engelstein, were “on the margins of political life [but] . . . the margins were a good place to be.” Amid mounting disorder, “those at the center of authority, tenuous as it was, were in the process of exhausting their political credit.”

According to the Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov (the somewhat more moderate Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks had split in 1903), “Lenin’s group was not directly aiming at the seizure of power [in June 1917] but . . . was ready to seize it in favorable circumstances, which it was taking steps to create.” Ms. Engelstein explains how the Bolsheviks built their base, patiently gathering support among the military and in factories. They then mobilized this “relatively disciplined mass” in a manner designed to increase disorder and topple the flailing provisional government while acting as a “force for order” poised to step in when the moment came. In October, it did.

Contrary to those who assert that the workers and peasants lacked an agenda of their own, Ms. Engelstein believes they genuinely wanted social revolution—though not a Bolshevik dictatorship. But only the Bolsheviks were able “to create the architecture needed to run the successor to the autocratic state and transform the excitement of liberty into a new kind of discipline and power.” The result was totalitarian rule, in which the only “excitement” was the manipulated fervor of a cult on the march.

“Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd” (Harvard, 351 pages, $29.95) is an innovative study that’s about more than its title would suggest. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, formerly a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, shows how the social breakdown that followed the February Revolution triggered a surge in crime that the provisional government could not reverse. It may be too much to argue, as Mr. Hasegawa does, that “the Bolsheviks rode a crime wave to power,” but the chaos did make it easier for them to exploit the growing vacuum in authority. The provisional government faded from shadow to ghost, essentially finished off in late October by the capture of a few buildings, a coup at first barely noticed by many in an exhausted Petrograd. Russia’s new Bolshevik rulers initially did not bother too much about crime, until devastating alcohol-fueled mayhem forced their hand, “inadvertently provoking,” claims Mr. Hasegawa, “the establishment of a new kind of police state”—one, I suspect, that was already on the way.

Helen Rappaport’s “Caught in the Revolution” (St. Martin’s, 430 pages, $27.99) is an account of 1917 as witnessed by Petrograd’s expatriate community, which was itself threatened by the lawlessness Mr. Hasegawa chronicles. A lively if sporadically florid book (“Petrograd was a brooding, beleaguered city that last desperate winter before the revolution broke”), Ms. Rappaport’s account works well as an introduction to a complicated year, but is most valuable for its record of the impressions of those who lived through it. Many of these were relatively privileged (“the servants are beginning to get stuck up with this new-born freedom”), but their observations (“I see Russia going to hell, as a country never went before”) have aged rather better than those of the enthusiasts who welcomed October’s false dawn. Rhapsodizing over workers rallying at the Bolshevik headquarters, American journalist and fellow traveler Albert Rhys Williams wrote that they were “dynamos of energy; sleepless, tireless, nerveless miracles of men.” Visiting the same place a few weeks later, a less easily impressed Frenchwoman saw “dead, doctrinaire eyes.”

Despite its title, the worthwhile “Revolution! Writings From Russia, 1917” (Pegasus, 364 pages, $27.95) features surprisingly little from the revolutionary year itself—editor Pete Ayrton includes nothing, say, from Nikolai Sukhanov or from the diaries of the novelist Ivan Bunin, a harsh critic of Bolshevism. This is only partly compensated for by Leon Trotsky’s vivid report of October 24, the “deciding night” of the Bolshevik coup—complete with the complaint, as revealing as it was dishonest, that “the Revolution is still too trusting, too generous, optimistic and light-hearted.” The next morning Lenin announced that the provisional government was no more.

The inevitable extract from John Reed’s “Ten Days That Shook the World” is a gung-ho depiction of the taking of the Winter Palace on the evening of the 25th. Somerset Maugham makes a rather less-expected appearance with a short story from “Ashenden,” a volume of tales based on his experiences as a British spy. It’s good enough, if not up to the standard set by three sentences from the book’s preface: “In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success.”

Finally, “1917: Stories and Poems From the Russian Revolution” (Pushkin Press, 236 pages, $14.95) is an anthology of literary responses to Bunin’s “damn year.” Neatly chosen by Boris Dralyuk, with room for the familiar (such as Boris Pasternak) and those known less well (the sardonic Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, who wrote as Teffi), the volume is reasonably well balanced between the October revolution’s supporters and those appalled by it. Vladimir Mayakovsky catches the millenarian mood (“We’ll cleanse all the cities . . . with a flood even greater than Noah’s”) while in “The Twelve” Alexander Blok opts for a warmer purge: “We’ll . . . set the world on fire . . . give us Your blessing, Lord!”

History made fools of the cheerleaders of revolution, but the words of those who opposed it still haunt. Anna Akhmatova resolves to stay with her “nation, suicidal” and does so, her great chronicling of Stalinist terror still to come. Marina Tsvetaeva writes of the wine flowing down “every gutter” and a “Tsar’s statue—razed, black night in its place.” Zinaida Gippius mourns the death of long longed-for liberty: “The Bride appeared. And then the soldiers / drove bayonets through both her eyes . . . The royal axe and noose were cleaner / than these apes’ bloodied hands . . . Can’t live like this! Can’t live like this!” Both Gippius and Tsvetaeva went into exile. Tsvetaeva later returned to her homeland. She hanged herself in 1941.

Elegy for the Sons of Asgard

Robert Ferguson: Scandinavians

The Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2017

Baltic Sea, Stockholm-Helsinki, August 1980 © Andrew Stuttaford

Robert Ferguson’s “Scandinavians” is not a book for the beach, but it might well fit the bill on a distant northern shore, with the fog rolling in and memories of long ships stirring. Discursive, meandering, sometimes beautifully written, it presents a historical narrative punctuated by reminiscences, conversations retold, snatches of autobiography, fragments of biography and stories added, one suspects, solely for their strangeness.

Oslo, Norway, May 17, 2009 © Andrew Stuttaford

We learn, for instance, about Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702), scientist, engineer, architect, musician and botanist. “Of all [the] claims for Rudbeck’s polymathic genius,” Mr. Ferguson writes, “none can compare in its scope, its vision, its ingenuity and its sheer weirdness” with his discovery that Atlantis had been located in Sweden and that Swedish was “the proto-language from which Greek, Latin and Hebrew all derived.” Rudbeck devised, Mr. Ferguson suggests, “a golden past worthy of Sweden’s golden present”—in the 17th century, the country was a European superpower. The stormaktstiden (the great power era) didn’t last long, nor did Rudbeck’s reputation. Even so, nowadays he is remembered sympathetically in Sweden for his account of the country’s origins, a saga “in which facts, dreams, myth and waking life, historical personages, biblical and mythological figures merge and flow and part in a mesmerizing drift.”

Stockholm, Sweden, December 2010 © Andrew Stuttaford

Mr. Ferguson, whose earlier books include a history of the Vikings, as well as biographies of Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun, is a rather more reliable source. A Briton, he first traveled to Scandinavia at the tail end of the 1960s with a friend (“He looked like Withnail and I looked like I”). Despite an unglamorous stint in Copenhagen (Withnail was eventually deported for trying to shoplift some cheese), Mr. Ferguson fell for the place. He obtained a degree in Scandinavian studies and, not long after, took up a Norwegian government scholarship to study in that country for a year. It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that he’s still in Norway today.

Arlanda Airport, Stockholm, Sweden, June 2011

The book’s subtitle (“In Search of the Soul of the North”) makes “Scandinavians” sound more daunting than it is. If there is a search going on, the author is in no hurry to find what he is looking for. Instead we are left with an idea—no more than that—of these lands and the three taciturn tribes that make up the bulk of their population. To an outsider, Norwegians, Swedes and Danes seem to be cast from the same mold, but—as I know well from three decades of working alongside them—that is far from the case. Mr. Ferguson touches on this, but too lightly.

Over southern Norway, March 2015 © Andrew Stuttaford

The history that he retells—Vikings, wars, monarchs, writers, philosophers—is an overview, operating both as necessary background and an invitation to dig more deeply. The grand old gods make their inevitable appearance and so does the tale of their demotion, a transition commemorated in 10th-century Denmark by a massive stone that features the earliest known depiction of Jesus in Scandinavian art, a “fierce-eyed warrior ready to jump down from his cross and do battle with the demons of heathendom.” As Mr. Ferguson observes (and as the first missionaries to these unpromising territories understood), “the suffering Christ had no natural appeal among those who formerly worshipped masters of violence like Odin and Thor.”

Oslo, Norway, May 2017 © Andrew Stuttaford

Even once they had dispensed with those roughnecks from Asgard, it took a while for the Swedes, Danes and Norwegians to succumb to that whole “love thy neighbor” thing. The Kalmar Union of 1397 among the three countries lasted barely more than a century: Sweden broke away, although the Norwegians sank into what they cheerfully refer to as their “400-year night” under the Danes. Meanwhile, the Swedes sliced away at Denmark’s domain over the years, finally annexing Norway in 1814.

Hotorget, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

Only nine decades later, Norway split off from Sweden. This history, differing patterns of economic development and subsequent events, not least sharply contrasting experiences of World War II, helps explain some of the distinctions among Denmark, Norway and Sweden today. Nevertheless all three adopted strikingly egalitarian forms of social democracy bolstered by an insistence on self-effacement in the interests, as Mr. Ferguson puts it, “of the greater good of social harmony.” In more recent years, this emphasis on conformity has become, paradoxically, a threat to the harmony it was designed to protect.

Husby, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2016 © Andrew Stuttaford

These societies are now undergoing possibly their most consequential transformation in centuries, “immigration on a scale unprecedented in the recorded history of the region.” Yet particularly in Sweden—a country marked, in Mr. Ferguson’s dismayingly accurate opinion, by “an almost pathological fear of socially conservative views and a demonization of those who hold them”—the inflow has been, in the main and for too long, waved through with too little of the debate it deserved. The situation is somewhat different in Norway and Denmark, but Sweden’s democracy has been damaged by the treatment of those disinclined to join the elite’s passionate embrace of “globalized culture.” Add in the effects of the immigration itself, and it’s easy to imagine a future in which the past will be sorely missed.

Stockholm, Sweden, February 2011 © Andrew Stuttaford

Decades ago Mr. Ferguson set out to live “in what was essentially a nineteenth-century dream of Norway,” and when he arrived there this was in a certain sense possible. Norway, Sweden and Denmark were—particularly before cheap travel, the internet and all the rest—both physically and mentally somewhat remote from the European “mainland.” But since then, Mr. Ferguson writes, there has been a “slow-motion tsunami of change,” and the author has “felt an increasing desire to look back” before these societies “change out of all recognition.” This book may be an introduction to the Scandinavians, but it is also an elegy.

Note: Appeared in the August 3, 2017, print edition as 'Northern Lights.'

Stockholm, Sweden, December 2009 © Andrew Stuttaford

Jeff Sessions Will Continue to be a Thorn in Trump’s Side—Whatever the President Tweets

Prospect, July 28, 2017

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first hand a smartphone. Yes, Donald Trump has been at the Twitter again.

“A.G.” is Trump’s Attorney General, former Alabama senator Jeff Sessions. The “Special Council [sic]” is better known as Bob Mueller, the former FBI director who has been appointed by Sessions’ deputy, Rod Rosenstein, as Special Counsel to investigate alleged links between the Trump campaign and, in essence, the Kremlin. The appointment was Rosenstein’s decision, rather than Sessions’, because the latter had recused himself from having any involvement with the Russian investigation after it emerged that he had not told the Senate about two almost certainly innocuous meetings with Russia’s ambassador, the remarkably ubiquitous Sergey Kislyak.

On July 24, Trump posted again:

And on July 25:

Then, less than ten minutes later:

Awkwardly, it was Trump who had first taken this “VERY” weak position last November. Magnanimous in the immediate afterglow of victory, the then President-elect told the New York Times that he didn’t want to pursue an investigation against Clinton, although, The Donald being The Donald, he left himself wriggle room, saying “we’ll have people that do things”—as the Times put it, “without elaborating.”

Half a year later, Trump is maintaining that his “beleaguered A.G”, has not been doing enough… things.

The approaching tread of a special counsel will do that to a president. Mueller has assembled a formidable legal team. Some of its members have previously given money to the Democrats. That’s also true of a number of Trump’s family and staff, but it’s clearly added to the alarm Team Trump now feels. Always punch back: White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway is now talking about “Mr. Mueller and his band of Democratic donors”.

It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but it’s still telling that Mueller has recruited many more lawyers for his team than Trump has found for the Department of Justice (just one of the parts of this government where the administration has struggled to hire the people it needs). Mueller also has all the funding he needs and, critically, can poke into just about anything that interests him—a feature that few presidents, let alone this one, would relish.

As is so often the case, the problems Trump currently faces owe more to his paranoia, braggadocio and clumsiness than any known wrongdoing. He has done more than many to fuel the frenzy over Russia that has gripped Washington since he took office. That said, National Review’s Andy McCarthy, a distinguished former prosecutor and a “reluctant” Trump voter, has made the case that, as a matter of law, Sessions had no reason to recuse himself to the extent that he did, at the time he did, or, indeed, at all. Maybe so—but as a matter of politics, he had little choice.

That is a subtlety too far for Trump. He complained last week that Sessions should never have recused himself, but that, if he was going to, he should have said so before he took the job and Trump would then “have picked somebody else”. But Sessions assumed office on February 9th and only recused himself on March 2nd, the day after the Washington Post revealed that he had met with the Russian ambassador.

Trump is on firmer ground when he connects Sessions’ recusal to the appointment of a special counsel —with little notice given to the White House—by Rosenstein, an appointment with which Trump disagrees (“I have done nothing wrong. A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case”) and which, as McCarthy has noted, came with a twist. Citing applicable regulations, McCarthy contends that, in the case of a potential conflict of interest within the Department of Justice over an investigation, a special counsel can be only appointed when that investigation is a criminal investigation, “Crimes,” writes McCarthy “have knowable parameters.” That limits the degree to which the special counsel can go nosing around. Yet, rightly or wrongly, in this instance the starting point was not a criminal but a counter-intelligence investigation. Such investigations, observes McCarthy, are designed “to collect information, and from an investigator’s point of view, you can never have enough information”.

Shortly after selecting Mueller, Rosenstein briefed the Senate. Afterwards, its leading Democrat was reported by the Washington Post as saying that if one thing was clear from that session it was that “Mueller has broad and wide-ranging authority to follow the facts wherever they go. That gives me confidence and should give the American people some confidence.” The Donald may not feel quite the same way. When Trump described Sessions as “beleaguered”, he was quite possibly just projecting.

Nevertheless, the attorney general can be under no doubt that he is under attack from his boss. And the blows keep falling, via Twitter, in interviews or even in the course of a press conference with the Lebanese prime minister. The list of offences grows: The recusal, the failure to investigate “Crooked Hillary”, not taking tougher action over “the leaks from intelligence services.” On Wednesday, in a pair of tweets sent by the president while Sessions was actually attending a meeting elsewhere in the White House, he was accused of failing to replace “Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation but got big dollars ($700,000) for his wife’s political run from Hillary Clinton and her representatives,” a claim, incidentally if unsurprisingly, that stretches the facts a little further than they should go.

Sessions is on the outs, but he is not (as I write) yet out. For all the “firings” that marked his long stint at NBC’s The Apprentice, The Donald doesn’t like giving people the sack. He is “very disappointed” with his attorney general, he says, “but we will see what happens. Time will tell. Time will tell.” It will—but in the meantime, it’s hard to tell what’s going through Trump’s mind. If he’s just venting over an ever-more-menacing investigation, this has, even by The Donald’s standards, been a costly tantrum. He has humiliated and angered Sessions, who, by becoming the first senator to endorse candidate Trump, went out on a limb for him last year. The way he’s being bullied now is a lesson to Trump loyalists that, with the Donald, loyalty only flows one way.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans have rallied round Sessions—someone who was, until recently, one of their own. Like their GOP counterparts in the House, they must have already been concerned over how much of a liability Trump, and his approval rating of only 36 per cent, might be in next year’s midterms. They will be even more worried now. The more they fret, the less clout Trump will have on Capitol Hill—and the more his agenda will fray. It will not have escaped their attention, either, that brutalizing Sessions risks angering the significant part of the Republican voter base that appreciates his leading role in driving through tough policies on immigration. Sections of the rightwingmedia are already firing warning shots.

For now, Sessions shows no sign of resigning, and even if he did, Trump’s problems would not go away. After the way he has treated the current incumbent, recruiting a successor will be difficult. Even if the president finds the sufficiently pliable candidate he evidently would prefer, securing his or her confirmation by the Senate will take some doing—although a recess appointment might be a way to circumvent this, if only temporarily. For now, the only person with the power to remove Mueller is Rosenstein, an independent-minded sort who has also come under fire from Trump. He’s unlikely to want to help out.

What’s left for Trump are three main options, none of them much fun. He can live with the status quo, and accept that Mueller’s probing will lead where it will lead. He can try to persuade Rosenstein to refine the scope of the special counsel’s investigation, something that Rosenstein could do but at the cost of setting off a political uproar (and imagine if Mueller resigned in protest). Most dangerously of all, Trump could arrange his own version of Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era Saturday Night Massacre by firing Sessions, Rosenstein and—because he would then probably have the power to do so—Mueller. This may be one option if he calculates that, so long as there is no smoking gun and the Senate and House are controlled by what is at least nominally “his” party, he could dodge impeachment proceedings—if not lesser inquisitions.

And, of course, the president will continue to try to change the subject, whether by renewing the focus on Clinton scandals, or, say, stirring up the culture wars.

It's Time For The Norwegian Option

CapX, July 17, 2017

Extricating the UK from the EU after over four decades of membership was never going to be straightforward. And yet, more than a year after the referendum, David Davis’s talk of moon landings aside, the Government’s approach has been dismayingly vague and delusionally blithe. It has no one to blame other than itself.

Once the voters had (correctly, in my view) “advised” Parliament that the UK should depart the EU, it was up to the Government to decide on the type of Brexit it would put to Brussels. Representative democracy was back. The various Leave groups were self-selected and even Vote Leave’s “official” status was derived from bureaucratic fiat — designation by the Electoral Commission — rather than any popular mandate. This group’s “promises” were what they were, but they were binding on no one. There is also the little matter of the 48.1 per cent who voted to Remain. If such a closely-fought referendum were to be truly advisory, the opinions of the losers ought to count for something in shaping Britain’s Brexit proposals.

Some confusion was to be expected after the referendum’s unexpected result, but, even allowing for the Tory brawl that ensued, not on the scale of the chaos that Britain has witnessed. The months that passed between June’s referendum and the Article 50 notification in March were squandered by a team that didn’t have a clue when it took charge, doesn’t seem to have much of one now and has now blundered further by throwing away its parliamentary majority.

Article 50 gives the two sides two years to work things out. If that deadline is missed (and no extension is agreed), what follows is the hardest of hard Brexits. The clock, as the serpentine Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, warned last week, is ticking.

Theresa May has repeatedly argued that “no deal is better than a bad deal”, a mantra that could — in indicating a willingness to walk away from the table — be defended as a negotiating tactic, but only if the EU is convinced that May is actually ill-informed enough to believe what she is saying. Unfortunately that could well be the case, but awkward reality cannot be wished away. No deal would be bad for the EU, but disastrous for Britain, triggering major economic (and probably not just economic) difficulties at home and, Tory ultra-Brexiteers please note, opening Number 10’s door to Jeremy Corbyn—or some equally sinister successor.

Even if it can be cobbled together in time, a more flexible Brexit featuring some sort of free trade agreement (hopefully including services, but quite possibly not) will still be rough going for Britain’s exporters, used to the “frictionless trade” with the EU that would be torn away from them. Tariffs won’t be a problem, but more insidious regulatory barriers will be. The notion that the UK can bypass the latter by simply importing the relevant rules into its post-Brexit legislation is naïve. Regulations change constantly, and Britain will struggle to keep up, even — fingers crossed — if an increasingly mercantilist EU cooperates, and, if or when it comes to services, particularly financial services, “regulatory equivalence” will only be able to do so much in the face of a bloc that regards the City with a dangerous mix of envy and distaste.

The idea that a buccaneering Global Britain, sailing out into the blue on a smile and a shoeshine, will be able to make up the shortfall anytime soon is fantasy. To be sure, there will be free trade deals to be had, but they will take time and, with the UK not in the strongest of negotiating positions, they will come at a price. And the Britain that signs them won’t be so very buccaneering. There’s a great deal to be said for a post-Brexit UK that goes fully “offshore”, deregulating, cutting taxes, flushing the green crap, but the political party that says so will lose the next election: the buccaneers will be sunk before they can set sail.

If Brexit is to be a way out of Brussels’ ever closer, ever less democratic union, while protecting Britain’s access to the more positive aspects of European integration, the best route (as a growing number of observers are pointing out) runs, so to speak, through Oslo. The much-maligned, much misunderstood “Norway option” — continued membership of the European Economic Area (EEA), and thus participation in the EU’s Single Market, on a basis similar to that enjoyed by Norway and two other European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries — could represent either a transitional arrangement or, arguably less desirably, a final destination in its own right.

Norway, whatever some critics of the Norwegian option may maintain, is not a member of the EU either legally or in practice. Norwegians have twice rejected the delights of EU membership and, judging by opinion polls, they won’t be changing their minds any time soon. Yes, it’s true that Norway does make payments (on a net per capita basis, a bit lower than that now paid by the UK into the EU) connected to its membership of the EEA, but they mainly consist of direct assistance by Norway to poorer parts of the EU, and Britain should expect to pay as well, perhaps — naughty thought — drawing on some of its swollen foreign aid budget to help do so.

It’s also true that remaining in the EEA will imply accepting (much) more of a brewed-in-Brussels regulatory burden than enthusiasts for laissez faire (me, for one), would like. That would be a bigger problem if Brexit promised a bonfire of controls, but, as noted above, with Corbyn at the door and the Tories as they are, it can’t. And Norway has more of a say in those areas of EU regulation that concern it than is often claimed, including, as a last resort (it would risk retaliation), a “right of reservation” enabling it to reject EU legislation.

Then there’s immigration. While Norway has to play by the Single Market’s free movement rules, it also has the right (subject again to the risk of retaliatory measures) to unilaterally apply a temporary emergency brake to immigration from the EU in the event of “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties”, a right likely to be the subject of fierce debate ahead of any agreement to let Britain take the Norwegian option or anything like it. That said, occasional murmurings, admittedly not always from entirely reliable figures (Tony Blair comes to mind), hint that there might be slightly more room for manoeuvre on this topic than hitherto imagined.

It’s also worth adding that Britain’s membership of the EU has little to do with immigration from outside the EU, a net 189,000 people in 2015 alone, compared with a net 184,000 from the EU the same year. If the government wants to reassure voters that it is determined to cut immigration, more effective restrictions on non-EU immigration would be a useful step forward, a step that Theresa May has notoriously failed to take: in 2010, the year she became Home Secretary, net non-EU immigration stood at 217,000, a total not so very different from where it stands today.

And, for the avoidance of remarkably persistent doubt, membership of the EEA is not the same as membership of the EU’s Customs Union. Britain would essentially (there are some technical issues) be free to cut the trade deals it wanted with that excitingly wide world beyond the EU.

With administrative chaos quite likely to add to the pain that a hard Brexit could inflict, a Norwegian-style prix fixe solution also has the advantage of drastically reducing Brexit’s complexity. Given that, and the broader continuity it preserves, the Norway option ought to be welcomed by business, and (polling indicates) not just business, whether as a temporary fix or — a separate debate — a final destination. And for the EU, it safeguards more of the benefits that the status quo gives its members, while (in what would be a tremendous development for Brussels, if not for many of those living within the EU’s borders) removing that perennial British obstacle to ever closer union.

Sadly, there is no guarantee that the Norwegian option (or something like it) is available for Britain to take up. Far from it. The moment may have passed — or been frittered away — if it ever existed, but for the UK even to propose it would suggest a seriousness about what Brexit involves and what Britain wants from it that has, up to now, been lacking. And that, at least, would be a start.

Never the Twain

Peter Conradi - Who Lost Russia? How The World Entered a New Cold War.

National Review, July 10, 2017

History has no right or wrong side. There is little about it that is inevitable. But probability cannot be wished away. To read this book by Peter Conradi (the foreign editor of the London Sunday Times) is to be reminded that the odds were always against a durable rapprochement between post-Soviet Russia and the West, but, as Conradi shows, that doesn’t mean that both sides didn’t do their bit to make them even longer.     

The original sin was Russian: The 1991 “revolution” was, as Conradi puts it, “incomplete.” The old regime poured into the supposedly new, unbothered by fresh elections. Conradi maintains that a “short-sighted” West eventually staked too much on an increasingly authoritarian, increasingly erratic Boris Yeltsin. Maybe, but one of the tragedies of the incomplete revolution was that it had thrown up no credible alternative. Russia in 1992 was not Germany in 1945. There was no Stunde Null, no definitive break, no settling of accounts with the past — no Soviet Nuremberg (who, Conradi wonders, in the deeply compromised “ruling class would have wanted such a reckoning”?) — or even any agreement as to what that past had been. Many Russians, writes Conradi, “felt a sense . . . of disorientation after so much of what they had been brought up to believe in had been denounced as a lie”; so much, yes, but not enough.

The survival of countless relics, physical as well as political and psychological, of the Soviet epoch — those Lenins on their plinths, that mummy in that mausoleum — conveyed a message that the old days had not been as bad as all that, a myth made easier to succumb to by the brutally hard times that followed the Soviet collapse. Conradi finds it “difficult to fault the underlying logic” of the economic reforms of the early Yeltsin years, but it was a logic torn apart by an uncooperative reality that, critically, was deformed by a “political class . . . sharply divided between reformers and Communists.” In Poland, by contrast, “a broad . . . consensus” helped smooth the move away from a command economy after 1989.

Conradi asks whether the West, which was less than openhanded to Russia, might have done more to help out, citing sources that suggest, not unreasonably, that at certain moments of crisis it could have. But he appears unconvinced that even significantly more-generous assistance would have made the necessary difference. That seems fair. In all likelihood, a Marshall Plan 2.0 would have struggled to turn around a land ruined by seven decades of Communism. Unlike the battered recipients of American post-war largesse, Russia lacked the habits, the skills, and the institutions needed to make a free market work. An inflow of massive amounts of aid money might well have done nothing more than further entrench the kleptocracy that had viewed privatization as an invitation to pillage. The misery of the many had been accompanied by the enrichment of the few, a looting that discredited liberal reform — economic and political — and did much to pave the way to Putin’s sly despotism.

Adding insult and yet more injury after the loss of Russia’s Eastern European empire came the dismantling of the Rodina itself under conditions — a quick deal struck in a Belorussian hunting lodge — that fed many Russians’ suspicions, as Conradi observes, of a stab in the back, a Dolchstoss, as they used to say in Weimar. And the breakup of the USSR was made more painful by the failure — stressed by Conradi — by large numbers of ordinary Russians, “elder brothers” (so the party had never ceased to insist) in a “socialist family of nations,” to grasp that their homeland too was an empire. Relentlessly repeated propaganda (the lie that the Baltic States had volunteered to join the USSR was just one of many) and also, not least with respect to Ukraine, a genuinely tangled history, had left their mark. And so had geography: Conradi recalls how Russia’s was a “contiguous empire” undivided by the oceans that split up its French or British counterparts. Moving from one Soviet republic to another was no bigger a deal than crossing an American state line. The disintegration of the USSR left millions of ethnic Russians stranded in what overnight became foreign countries, their plight a reproach to their kin back home and an opportunity for future mischief-making in what, years before Putin’s ascendancy, the Yeltsin government rapidly dubbed the “near abroad.” It was a phrase that signaled Russia’s continuing strategic interest in what went on there.

Conradi correctly dismisses the idea that the West should have accepted a Russian veto over NATO membership for countries that had broken free from its vanished imperium. To do so “would have meant a de facto continuation of Europe’s Cold War division” and a denial of a country’s right, enshrined in the 1975 Helsinki Charter, to choose its own alliances. The NATO–Russia Founding Act of 1997 restricted NATO’s ability to base permanent forces closer to Russia’s borders, but only “in the current and foreseeable security environment.” Moscow’s subsequent behavior has since so changed the environment that, as Conradi notes, the door has opened for the argument that that old constraint no longer applies. And, however tentatively, NATO has marched through it.

The West, contends Conradi, misread Russia in the 1990s. “What it chose to interpret as assent . . . to [NATO’s] eastward expansion was, in reality, weakness and an inability to resist,” a humiliation compounded by the manner in which, as he explains, a “triumphalist” America “had become rather too fond of a unipolar world.” It had become too confident as well, beguiled by an interlude that it mistook for an era. It trampled over the sensitivities of a fallen superpower that had not accepted its fall. Russia believed it still merited a seat at the top table, and not only, as Conradi emphasizes, on American terms.

To be sure, it was wildly optimistic of Russia to expect an invitation to join NATO (something for which Putin was angling in his early period in office): There could be no room for the bear in the henhouse. When West Germany was admitted by its former adversaries into NATO in 1955, it was dependent on the U.S. for its defense and had quite clearly learned from the horrors of the past: It was no conceivable danger to those with whom it wanted to team up. The same could not be said of early-21st-century Russia.

Yet Russia’s support for the U.S. after 9/11 was speedy and helpful (and beforehand Moscow had warned Washington that there could be trouble brewing). The threat posed by Islamic extremism might have formed the basis for long-term cooperation between the two, but that promise was sabotaged by America’s unwillingness to reciprocate, not to speak of the attack on (secular) Iraq, a Soviet client for decades.

And Iraq was not the only longstanding Kremlin ally to fall foul of NATO. Orthodox, Slavic Serbia was also battered into submission, and Kosovo, a rebel province of immense historical significance, was later wrested from it. European borders had been shifted by force. After occupying Crimea six years later, Putin referred to the “well-known Kosovo precedent.”

Yeltsin’s relative liberalism, argues Conradi, will prove an aberration. That too is not inevitable, but under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Russia, nursing the grievances it did, turned into the antagonist it has become. What is surprising is how long it took for it to be taken sufficiently seriously even after the wealth created by a recovering oil price (rather than by the fruits of a well-managed economic restructuring that, had it happened, might have taken the country in a different direction) both entrenched the regime and gave it the resources to punch back. The West was right to pursue the agenda it did in Eastern Europe but was oddly unprepared for countermeasures by the Kremlin, especially after the challenge to the Putin regime posed by the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and then, with catastrophic results, the far greater upheaval in Ukraine in 2014, an upheaval that Conradi chronicles with characteristic evenhandedness.

To Conradi, it’s remarkable that the West has yet to put together the “well-considered and historically relevant” policy that Zbigniew Brzezinski called for over 20 years ago. Well, our statesmen are what they are, but it’s hard to deny that Russia has been treated with striking carelessness and startling complacency, treatment that may not have “lost” Russia but undoubtedly helped make matters worse. The supposition by the Western elite that Russia’s time as a great power had passed played its part in all this, handily reinforced by the pleasantly reassuring assumption that the history it no longer understood had come, as the saying then went, to an end.

Then there was the conviction, particularly within the EU and the Obama administration, that an emerging supranational order was eclipsing “19th century” power politics, a delusion that overlapped with a curious faith in allegedly universal values. What those were was a touch murky, but democracy was ostensibly among them, something George W. Bush declared that he wanted to promote worldwide — a stance incompatible, as Conradi recounts, with Russian calls for “non-interference in the affairs of sovereign countries.” However hypocritical those calls (ask the Balts, the Ukrainians, the Georgians . . .), they revealed a growing ideological dimension to the burgeoning rivalry between Russia and the West.

As President Trump is discovering, that rivalry is unlikely to ease anytime soon, but it could be managed — jostling between great powers is nothing new — and perhaps even reduced. After all, Russia and the West do have interests in common, most notably (but not only) with regard to Islamic extremism. But first the West must learn to toughen up, panic less, preach less, and think more.

Meet Jeremy Corbyn’s Bad Lieutenant

National Review Online, June 26, 2017

 John McDonnell, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s principal lieutenant and — Jezza is not the brightest red in the asylum — much of his brainpower too, isn’t that enthused by this democracy thing. McDonnell, who is also Labour’s “shadow” chancellor of the exchequer (chief financial spokesman), has called on trade unions to support a mass demonstration in London on July 1 designed to put pressure on embattled British Prime Minister Theresa May to stand aside. Barely a week after a general election in which the electorate selfishly declined to throw enough votes his party’s way, he explained how “we need people doing everything they can to ensure [a fresh] election comes as early as possible.” “We want,” he added, “a million on the streets of London . . . ”

Peaceful protest is an integral part of the democratic game, but when McDonnell summons people to the streets, both his record and his rhetoric suggest that — despite a subsequent request, calculated and unconvincing, that demonstrators should follow Gandhi’s example — he has something edgier in mind.

He has, after all (before some half-hearted backtracking), claimed that May’s government is not “legitimate” on the grounds that it failed to win an absolute majority in the House of Commons. No matter that the Tories won many more seats (318 in the 650-seat parliament) than Labour (262), no matter that they may be able to cobble together a de facto majority, and no matter that, if they cannot, they can be voted down in Parliament. To John McDonnell, constitutional scholar, they lacked legitimacy.

But then, so far as McDonnell is concerned, they always do.

Here he is in 2012: “I want to be in a situation where no Tory MP . . . no coalition minister, can travel anywhere in the country, or show their face anywhere in public, without being challenged, without direct action.” They were “social criminals” who should be put on trial.

The Conservative-led coalition government had an absolute majority. It didn’t seem to matter.

  And for a clue as to what McDonnell might mean by “direct action” (“what we  used to call insurrection”), take a look at his celebration of those who kicked “the sh** out of Millbank” (a reference to the building housing the Tory party’s headquarters) at protests in November 2010, the “spark [that lit] all the combustible material that then brought people out . . . and that’s the best of our movement.” To be sure, Ed Woollard, the protester who threw a fire extinguisher at the police from the top of the Millbank Tower, went too far. That, conceded McDonnell, was “wrong,” although the 32-month sentence Woollard collected for his particular exercise in direct action was “too much.”

Protest, McDonnell maintained, neither for the first nor the last time, should be “nonviolent.” Such restraint cannot have been easy for a man who occasionally appears to wrestle with his inner Gandhi. He has recalled how he felt after sitting in Parliament hearing proposals from the government to scale back the public sector in the wake of the financial crisis: “Sometimes you feel like physical force, you feel like giving them a good slapping, because the anger that you feel is because these people who tell us that we’re all in this altogether will go back to their homes tonight, their mansions. They’ll count their shares, they’ll receive their bonuses, and they’ll expect us to pay [for their crisis].”

Mansions, shares, bonuses: McDonnell is a man who exults in the language of class warfare. He may have been an MP since 1997 and an apparatchik, politician, or both since the early 1980s, but his background is proletarian enough. His father was a bus driver and trade-union official. In September 2011 McDonnell warned “any institution or any individual that attacks our class, we will come for you with direct action.”

Our class. We will come for you. Direct action (again).

After musing about “slapping” the elected politicians sitting opposite him, McDonnell promised to resist the government’s economy measures “in every form possible.” He urged his listeners to leave debates to the House of Commons — his contempt for Parliament has been a recurring theme throughout his career that is impossible to miss — and then: “Where we will win will be on the streets and on the picket lines, in the demonstrations and in the strikes and, yes, in the direct action that will be needed to prevent these cuts.” 

“Voters,” wrote the pseudonymous “Habibi” of Harry’s Place in a critical (and valuable) September 2016 piece on McDonnell, “are the ultimate judge, the final arbiter.” The shadow chancellor doesn’t seem to see it that way.

Those MPs who risked a slapping and were targeted (one day) for trial got off rather more lightly than Esther McVey, the coalition government’s (Conservative) employment minister. In McDonnell’s view, she was “a stain on humanity.” He quoted comments that she should be lynched. Lynched. Later he maintained that he had been angry, but no apology was forthcoming.

This did not impress Yvette Cooper, a prominent member of Labour’s soft center (and one of those Corbyn beat in the 2015 leadership election): “It’s really, really not okay. People do say things in the heat of the moment. He should have apologized. He should absolutely have apologized. The idea that a woman MP, as Esther was at the time, should be lynched, it’s just wrong.”

Well, yes.

Cooper continued: “How can we stand up against oppression and bullying by the powerful or by the mob, as Labour has always done, if we are not prepared to deal with the minority in our own party who might be doing that kind of thing?”

Might be doing that kind of thing? No, they were doing that kind of thing. And McDonnell had done his bit to create the climate in which they could

Times change: After Labour’s unexpectedly strong performance in Britain’s June election, the principled Ms. Cooper let it be known that it would be really, really okay if she were offered a senior position in Corbyn’s team, a team in which McDonnell was the second-most-important member. Corbyn accepted her surrender, but rejected her offer.

When, on another occasion, McDonnell announced that he wished he could have gone back to the 1980s and assassinated Margaret Thatcher, he was not, for once, angry, merely, he said, joking. He apologized, although that did not stop him from subsequently quipping that there had been “massive support” for the idea.

The first Thatcher government secured a decent parliamentary majority; the second and third were elected in landslides. It is hard to get more legitimate than that, yet . . . 

McDonnell has also apologized — but not really; it was primarily one of those apologizing-for-giving-offense apologies — for remarks he made in 2003 at an event to commemorate the death by hunger strike of Bobby Sands, a Provisional IRA terrorist (direct action by bombing and a gun battle with the police): “It’s about time we started honoring those people involved in the armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifice made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the action of the IRA. Because of the bravery of the IRA and people like Bobby Sands, we now have a peace process.”

Awkwardly, McDonnell had begun by opposing that very same process. Three months before the Good Friday Agreement, McDonnell had, the Daily Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan revealed, told a nationalist newspaper that “an assembly is not what people have laid down their lives for over 30 years. We want peace, but the settlement must be just and the settlement must be for an agreed and united Ireland.”

Asked to name the ‘most significant’ influences on his thought, McDonnell replied: ‘Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, basically.’

Put another way, negotiations between two democratically elected governments (and Northern Irish political parties) had, if what was eventually agreed was to be abided by, to reflect the demands of a violent minority whose legitimacy to decide on the province’s future flowed, as McDonnell saw it, not from the ballot box but from those “bombs and bullets” and the righteousness of the nationalist cause. This was not the argument of a democrat, but it was the argument that McDonnell chose to make, at least for a while. As Gilligan noted, McDonnell “changed his position when the IRA accepted the accord and supported the agreement.” Oh.

In 2016, the left-of-center New Statesman unearthed an interview McDonnell had given to, appropriately enough, the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty ten years before. Asked to name the “most significant” influences on his thought, McDonnell replied: “Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, basically.” That would be not one but two mass murderers, as well as a millenarian crank who never killed anyone but was certainly excited at the thought of the slaughter to come.

If McDonnell had disclosed that he had drawn his inspiration from the speeches of Goebbels, or, say, what he’d  read in Mein Kampf, his parliamentary career would not have gone much farther, but in today’s Britain some butchers are more equal than others, their catastrophes and their victims ignored, explained away or consigned to the memory hole.

More interesting, if somewhat less reprehensible, was the nod in the same interview to the prewar Italian Communist politician and theorist Antonio Gramsci, the man who may best account for the strategy adopted by Corbyn and his associates after Corbyn’s surprise victory in the Labour Party’s 2015 leadership contest (McDonnell ran his old friend’s campaign). Gramsci is perhaps best known for his advocacy of a “long march through the institutions,” the notion (as the New Statesman’s George Eaton described it) of “working within established organizations (such as Labour) with the intention of winning them for the revolutionary cause.” The Labour party is one of the great institutions of the British state. If the far left could win control of the party, radicalize it, and then keep its traditional support more or less intact (not so difficult given the tribal loyalty that Britain’s two largest parties still enjoy), then it would, almost inevitably, pull the national political debate leftward and, even better, be in a position to take power should the Tories stumble.

That was the plan, and, purge by purge, activist by activist, it was working. What no one anticipated was that the Conservatives would stumble quite so quickly and quite so badly. A hung Parliament and the momentum away from Theresa May’s Tories that has persisted since the election has brought Labour’s extremist leadership far closer to power than any democrat should want.

In 2011 McDonnell said he was “someone who still sees the relevance of Trotsky’s Transitional Program.” What that program envisaged (to put it too simply) was a series of escalating demands by or on behalf of the working class that the existing capitalist system could not satisfy, a failure that would lead, in Trotsky’s words, “to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.”

That’s really, really not okay