In February 1983 the five members of the editorial board of Militant were expelled from the Labour party. They were the leadership of the Militant Tendency — a Marxist group which had decided it could better further the interests of its brand of Trotskyism, not by being a free-standing revolutionary party but by getting its members to join Labour, pretending to be simply a newspaper (hence terming the leadership as an editorial board) and trying, with some success, to take over individual constituency Labour parties. It took some time for Foot to be persuaded, but he eventually realised that such entryism had the potential to destroy Labour. The move against the Militant Tendency was the beginning of Labour’s long march back to sanity and electability.

Militant has not been the only entryist organisation trying to subvert what Labour had traditionally stood for. Another such Trotskyist group — again masquerading as a paper — has been Socialist Action. This group emerged out of the International Marxist Group, the British affiliate of the Fourth International, when it decided to adopt entryist tactics in 1982. 

Socialist Action’s influence on Labour had been more shadowy than that of Militant, until Ken Livingstone was elected Mayor of London. Of Livingstone’s eight top advisers — handsomely paid out of London taxpayers’ funds — four were drawn from the Socialist Action milieu. One of these, Simon Fletcher, was Livingstone’s chief of staff. He subsequently became Ed Miliband’s liaison with the trade unions.

Fletcher was the campaign director for Corbyn’s leadership bid. He is likely to be the most important figure in the new Leader of the Opposition’s backroom team. Here lies the difference between Foot and Corbyn: Foot eventually fought the Trotskyist infiltrators and realised they needed to be rooted out; Corbyn has brought in the erstwhile leader of a Trotskyist entryist group as his key adviser.

The post Corbyn’s Trots appeared first on Standpoint.

In John Maynard Keynes’s book Essays on Persuasion there is an article about Russia written in 1925 shortly after he attended a conference in Leningrad. In it he maintained that “Russia will never matter seriously to the rest of us, unless it be as a moral force,” and continued: “If Communism achieves a certain success, it will achieve it, not as an improved economic technique, but as a religion.” He finished the essay with a comment that could be interpreted as not entirely pessimistic: “Out of the cruelty and stupidity of Old Russia nothing could ever emerge, but that beneath the cruelty and stupidity of New Russia some speck of the ideal may lie hid.”

There is no doubt that lots of people were expecting the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were dreamers among them like Andrei Amalrik, who based his prediction on his observations of Soviet society and the external threat from China. In his 1970 book he asked the question: Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984? His observations were good but his predictions precipitate. There were many other forecasts. In a Wikipedia article entitled “Predictions of the dissolution of the Soviet Union”, as many as 31 names are listed, although some of them are politicians who are in the habit of making off-the-cuff statements that might be regarded in the fullness of time as valid predictions.

To our mind the best prediction not included in the Wikipedia list wasmade by O.L. Smaryl (an anagram of L. Solymar, one of the present authors) in a 1984 article published in Survey, “New Technology and the Soviet Predicament”. Smaryl was no expert on Soviet economics. He was a natural scientist who often visited laboratories in the Soviet Union. By 1983 he could see how poorly equipped they were. He also saw how jealously the Soviet authorities guarded their monopoly of information.

In Kiev, for example, if a laboratory wanted to copy a Western scientific article they had to send it to some central office where the article was copied and sent back. Everybody knew that a computer could store information, hence it was a dangerous piece of equipment. Smaryl wrote:

A properly coded computer, aided and abetted by a printer, could appear to any KGB investigator as poised to print the collected works of V. I. Lenin, whereas as soon as the agent is out of sight it could churn out the latest news broadcast of the BBC or the last seven editions of a popular samizdat paper.

Brighter members of the Soviet establishment must have realised that in order to increase efficiency (military, economic, managerial and scientific) computers had to be introduced on a large scale. They did their best but under the circumstances that did not go far.

Having recognised that they had fallen behind in the military race, the Soviet leadership decided to reduce East-West tension. Glasnost and perestroika followed, which the leadership hoped would change Soviet reality. Their failure was predicted by Smaryl. The best theory to lean on was classical Marxist theory, with its concepts of “base” (relations of production) and “superstructure” (political institutions). According to Marx, when the two are no longer in harmony that society will perish. We should credit Gorbachev with the attempt to change both the base and the superstructure but those attempts failed. By the late 1980s, the Soviet system was beyond repair.

For those who prefer not to rely on Marxist theory to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union, there could be a similar explanation based on the Soviet power structure. The two main components were the government (let’s include in this both the nominal government and the Communist Party) and the intelligence services. In the second half of the 1980s there was an increasing mismatch between the aims of the KGB and those of the General Secretary, culminating in the participation of Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, in the anti-Gorbachev coup of August 1991. Smaryl’s prediction for the second part of the ’80s was: “In international relations the Soviet Union will adopt increasingly softer stands. It will first withdraw its support from the various revolutionary movements and then, slowly and reluctantly, will relinquish its hold over Eastern Europe.” Smaryl concluded: “Economic efficiency will increase accompanied by a spread of pluralistic ideas and there, at the end of the tunnel, will loom the inevitability of free elections.” He was wrong about economic efficiency. The relaxation of strict political control under Gorbachev led to declining, not improving, efficiency, but in all other aspects Smaryl was right.

The merit of Smaryl’s paper is that it gives only one reason for the USSR’s collapse: the emergence of new technology. Everything else followed from there. To give only one reason is a technique often followed in the natural sciences. It has the merit of simplicity, and it focuses the reader’s attention on one thing.

For later scrutiny another advantage of providing only one reason is that it offers critics the means of disproving whatever the author claimed. Playing the role of a critic now, could one conclude that the Soviet Union was bound to perish? By the beginning of the 1980s the writing was on the wall although nobody could as yet decipher it. But had circumstances been different in the 1950s and ’60s, could the Soviet Union have survived?

To answer that question we need to recall how new technology was born. In the early 1950s there were already well-defined research projects aimed at integrated circuits, i.e. combining several components. They were sponsored by the three arms of the US military, each of which had its own pet project. Had any of those projects been at least moderately successful, research money would have flown in that direction and the microchip (which came from a different project) would never have been realised. As it happens, it was. In the course of 40 years the number of  integrated components in an area covering a human nail rose to 15 billion. The invention of such an extraordinary device combined with such a fantastic growth rate was unlikely indeed. It was a lucky historical accident — for the West.

Accepting for the moment that the invention and subsequent growth of the microchip was a historical accident, can we imagine other historical accidents which would have been favourable to the Soviet Union? Let’s consider one of them: assume that Soviet researchers in biology managed to produce a set of super-intelligent mice by injecting into an embryo’s brain a certain substance one week before birth. With no more than a moderate amount of further research they decided to start experiments with human beings. They had plenty of volunteers who would have regarded their patriotic duty to allow surgical interference with the embryos they carried. The experiments on humans turned out to be successful. The children born could read and write at the age of three. By the time Chernenko came to power, the Soviet Union could have had a division of superhuman men and women, a division of John von Neumanns. It is futile to speculate how these superhumans would have made the Soviet Union an even greater power but we can imagine the Western reaction. Mice would have been fine, possibly even monkeys, but humans? Definitely not. The West would have fallen behind. The ultimate victory of Communism would have come that much nearer.

This example may be too specific. The point is that if there was danger to human life in any experiment the Soviet Union would always have had volunteers ready to please the authorities, whereas such experiments would have been banned in the West. So our conclusion is that the collapse of the Soviet Union could have been avoided if new technology had not come to the fore in the West. But it did.

The Soviet Union duly collapsed. The planned economy has been abandoned, a free-market economy has been installed. Russia has changed completely. But has it?  Russia has never had an independent judiciary. Corruption, collusion and narrow interests still prevail, inflation is rampant and military expenditure is once more enormous. Admittedly, there is now a middle class, more reluctant to accept official propaganda but once fear is reintroduced it will keep quiet.

We may safely conclude that not much has changed. The diseases of Soviet times are still there but they no longer threaten the existence of the regime. The base and the superstructure are once more in harmony: it is a capitalist economy upheld by the intelligence services. Putin has given up the messianic mission to convert the world to Communism. He just wants to get back what he believes was stolen from him. His ambition is to restore old Soviet borders. Can he do it? Can he challenge the West? Can he catch up with Western technology?

Our answer to the last question is no, the technological gap will remain. He might achieve some success in a few specialist fields but he will not be able to build a semiconductor industry comparable with that of the US. Will continued technological inferiority curb his ambitions? Unlikely. So what will happen in the next five years?

On the domestic front, it is unlikely that Putin would want to reconstruct the internal conditions that prevailed in Russia before Gorbachev. Times have changed. A little more freedom can be granted. In fact, it has to be granted because the hermetic sealing of the Soviet borders is no longer possible, nor is the monopoly on holding information. If he can’t ban everything Putin will realise that his best bet is to allow an opposition. Opposition broadcasting would be too risky but the opposition will be permitted to run a small-circulation newspaper, maybe even a daily paper financed by the government. This will be a kind of tame opposition. A genuine opposition will not exist in five years’ time. Putin will ensure that by using the time-honoured Soviet methods of intimidation, defamation, loss of employment, hounding by the security services, imprisonment for imaginary crimes, beating-up by thugs and the ultimate weapon,  assassination. Indeed, it is happening already.

Freedom of travel will be curtailed but restrictions will not be as strict as in Soviet times. All those who have shown loyalty to the regime and are wealthy enough to pay a “travel tax” will be allowed to leave the country for a limited stay abroad. To live abroad for extended periods will also be allowed but with the condition that a large proportion of the money earned has to be repatriated in foreign currency. Those who have dual citizenship will fare worse. They will be given a chance to return to the motherland with all their possessions but if they don’t they will be deprived of their Russian citizenship and their property in Russia will be confiscated.

Textbooks will be rewritten, children further indoctrinated, propaganda strengthened, patriotic mass movements initiated. The standard of living will be somewhat above that of Brezhnev’s time although with a lot of regional variations. And if it declines because of the overgrown military sector the vicious campaigns of the American imperialists against the Russian people will be blamed. That will only strengthen Putin’s regime, not weaken it.

There will be multi-party elections. Election fraud will be routinely perpetrated (once a certain habit is acquired it is difficult to discontinue it). That said, Putin might receive a stunning 85 per cent of the votes without any manipulation of the results. Russian nationalists will always back him to the hilt. He will forever be the hero of Crimea, the man of destiny who managed to restore the Soviet borders.

How will Putin proceed in his foreign policy? Slowly. He is an opportunist, but one who likes to create opportunities. It seems very likely that former President Yanukovich’s flight from Kiev was engineered by Putin. Once he could claim that Ukraine was ruled by fascists who had deposed the democratically-elected president, he had the excuse to annex Crimea. By encouraging and supporting the Ukrainian rebels he has managed to make Ukraine a failed state. For the moment he is just keeping it on the boil but sooner or later, very likely within a year, he will find an excuse to occupy the coastline needed to establish land access to the Crimean peninsula.

In the following years he will bring further parts of Ukraine under his control but not the whole country. To incorporate the various former republics would be easy: they will respond to intimidation. But it is unlikely that Putin will have to impose regime change on any of those countries. The present leaders will voluntarily accept Russia’s tutelage.

The sticking point will be the Baltic states. They are part of Nato. They want to remain independent. Nato makes lots of noises about defending them against Russian aggression but it is a hopeless mission.

Putin will start with Latvia, which has a large Russian minority. He will want them to return to the bosom of the motherland, and he can do that by making Latvia part of the motherland. He will foster angry demonstrations, demand full citizenship for the Russians, and then cabinet posts. By these means he will make Latvia ungovernable. The Latvians might then decide that Putin is the lesser of two evils. In this case Nato would have no chance of intervening.

But other scenarios are possible. Russian agents might murder a few Russians, attribute the killings to the Latvians, and send in the tanks to “protect” their compatriots. In principle this should invoke Nato’s immediate intervention but will Nato risk the Third World War for the sake of Latvian independence? Unlikely. With Latvia occupied, the Lithuanians and the Estonians will be surrounded, and will soon surrender. Finland? It will be Finlandised.

Having restored the Soviet borders, what will be Putin’s next move? He will rest on his laurels. He will assess the global military balance and realise his limitations. There will be no further territorial demands. The former satellites of Eastern Europe will breathe a sigh of relief. Putin will instead turn his attention to raising the living standards of the long-suffering Russian nation. He will be able to do so thanks to his country’s enormous natural resources.

What will happen after Putin? A difficult question but let’s be optimistic for a change. Feeling pressure from China and some of the Muslim states, Putin’s successor might start negotiations to join the European Union.

The post Will Putin’s Empire Outlast The Soviets? appeared first on Standpoint.

In the hermetic foreign community of Russia the five writers knew each other and had various degrees of experience and expertise. Gerhardie was a native speaker of Russian; Lockhart spoke it fluently, with an excellent accent, and was sometimes mistaken for a Russian; Ransome, Walpole and Maugham learned to read and speak the language. In their different ways, they were supposed to carry out the official policy of the British government: support the moderate socialist regime of Alexander Kerensky and keep Russia in the war against Germany; oppose Lenin and the Bolsheviks and prevent them making a separate peace that would free massive numbers of German troops to fight against Britain and France on the Western front. Ransome and Lockhart eventually contravened British policy by supporting the Bolsheviks and opposing British military intervention in the civil war that followed the Revolution.

The pre-revolutionary situation was complex and volatile.  In the spring of 1917 Joseph Stalin had arrived in Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) from Siberia, Leon Trotsky from America and Vladimir Lenin (courtesy of the Germans) in a sealed train from Switzerland to the Finland Station. Lockhart slyly called Nicholas II a “man of all the domestic virtues, but of no vices and no will-power,” and said he wasn’t fit to run a village post office. After the strikes, riots and mutinies during the first revolution in March, the Tsar abdicated, ending three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty.

 The problems facing the new government were overwhelming, indeed insoluble; the masses angry and violent. A biographer wrote, “A war with millions dead, food and supplies on a downward spiral, a people expecting, now that [the March] revolution had come, either the immediate transformation of their lives or an outlet for all their accumulated hatred and envy — these were the circumstances the Provisional Government had to master, and without constitutional authority, a secure basis of power or popular support, or strong, unified leadership.”

On November 7, the Revolution — provoked by cold winters, insufficient fuel, poor transport, inflated prices, food shortages and starvation as well as propaganda, strikes, barricades, civil and foreign wars, and terror — broke out in Petrograd. With Lockhart’s help, Kerensky fled the country. Lenin became Chief Commissar, Trotsky Commissar for Foreign Affairs. In March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, on the Russian-Polish border, which took Russia out of the war. In July the Tsar — first cousin of King George V, who refused to give him refuge in England — was murdered with his family in Yekaterinburg. That month the German ambassador, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, was assassinated. This was intended to sabotage Brest-Litovsk, but his death failed to provoke a German attack and bring Russia back into the war. In August a weak and insufficient Allied force landed at the north-western port of Archangel to fight the Reds. At the end of that month the socialist revolutionary Dora Kaplan shot and wounded Lenin. The “Red Terror” then rounded up and killed a thousand political opponents. Lenin’s persuasive slogans were “bread, land, peace” but the people did not get bread, the peasants did not get land and there was no peace during the next five years of civil war.

William Gerhardie (1895-1977) was born and spent his childhood in St Petersburg, where his father was a British cotton manufacturer. In the First World War he was posted to the British Embassy in Petrograd as military attaché and given the notably undemanding tasks of receiving visitors, writing letters and deciphering telegrams. Lockhart disdained Gerhardie as “a kind of office-boy in military uniform”. But he praised Gerhardie’s commanding officer, Major Alfred Knox, the liaison officer with the Russian army: “Up to the Revolution no man took a saner view of the military situation on the Eastern front and no foreign observer supplied his Government with more reliable information.” Gerhardie’s biographer, countering Lockhart’s biased opinion, maintained that Knox valued him highly as “the most practically useful officer” on an important mission to Vladivostok.

Despite his military training and lifelong experience in Russia, Gerhardie was an unreliable witness who seriously misjudged the leaders, gravity and consequences of the revolution. He mistakenly called the humane but weak Kerensky a first-rate prime minister. (When I heard the dignified, white-haired Kerensky speak in Berkeley in the early 1960s it seemed clear that he would have been helpless against the completely ruthless Lenin.) Gerhardie also failed to understand Lenin, a fierce and fiery orator,  asserting that nothing in his “speech or looks gave an inkling of his future career”. Though Lenin proclaimed “through Red terror to peace” and wiped out the opposition, Gerhardie welcomed the Revolution that overthrew the old regime and promised to give power to the long-suffering underdogs. Unaware of the impending disaster, he treated the entire historical episode as a kind of joke and declared that the Bolsheviks “behave like real gentlemen and there is really no actual danger living in this place. The whole thing is a Gilbert and Sullivan Comic Opera.”

By a strange twist of fate the rather obtuse Gerhardie was the only one of the five writers who actually witnessed both the March and November 1917 revolutions in Petrograd. In March he reported the events in a series of terse bulletins that resembled newsreel flashes: “The revolution had already broken out. The [British] Admiral had just witnessed the sacking of the Arsenal by a disorderly crowd. Regiment after regiment was going over to the revolution. Solitary shots, and now and then machine-gun fire, were heard from various quarters of the city.” In a mixture of pointless riot and deliberate destruction, the rebels “all seemed drunk with the revolution. Shots were heard every now and then, mostly fired in the air, while the law courts had gone up in flames.” When the real revolution exploded in November, Gerhardie still refused to take it seriously and merely noted, “Barricades appeared in the streets. Bridges were being suspended. Lorries of joy-riding proletarians became familiarly conspicuous.”

After the revolution, the crucial question was whether the British government should intervene in the Russian civil war and help the pro-Tsarist Whites defeat Lenin’s Reds. Here again, Gerhardie got it all wrong and had no idea of how disastrous the Bolshevik regime would be both to the Russians and the British. He believed that Bolshevik rule would be short-lived and that a foreign invasion would only arouse popular support for the Reds. According to Gerhardie’s biographer, he thought that “intervention was a waste of time, effort and money, and, if anything, only served to prolong the misery of the Russian people. He believed that Bolshevism in its militant and objectionable form would last only as long as there was military opposition to it. It was impossible to beat the Bolsheviks, and therefore intervention was nothing short of ‘insanity.’” But the newly established Red army, fighting a war against experienced Tsarist generals on several fronts, was perilously weak and could have been defeated by strong Allied invasion.

The British ambassador Sir George Buchanan was courteous and gentle, and had a kind of baffling simplicity that often caused adversaries to consider him stupid. Like Kerensky, he was not capable of dealing with these apocalyptic events. Early in March 1918, Gerhardie and Buchanan returned to England with most of the British officials. In August Captain Francis Crombie, the British naval attaché, was killed while defending the embassy from invaders.

Arthur Ransome (1884-1967), fleeing an unhappy marriage in England, first arrived in St Petersburg in 1913 to study folklore. He became fluent in Russian by reading children’s books and published a collection of legends and fairy stories, Old Peter’s Russian Tales (1916). He also wrote a guide to St Petersburg, which could not be published after the war broke out in August 1914. He became the correspondent of the liberal Daily News, provided valuable information to British intelligence and when the war started he saw the Tsar greet the people from the balcony of the Winter Palace. Ransome attended many sessions of the parliament, the Duma, which soon became powerless. He made three trips to observe the armies at the Russian front, getting as far as Bucharest, and saw the great disparity between the army’s enormous potential and its actual weakness. After witnessing the disastrous Russian defeats in 1914 and 1915, he watched the Russian autocracy disintegrating before his eyes and thought only a miracle could prevent a complete military and political collapse. Like Lockhart, he believed the country was heading for a revolution and accurately predicted that Russia would leave the war by the end of 1917.

Ransome, who actually came under fire in March, felt like “a horribly observant warder in a lunatic asylum who cannot help imitating the grimaces of the patients”. He vividly reported some surrealistic scenes: “a machine-gun brought up in a hired sledge and planted on the snow” and “soldiers handing over their rifles to anybody who would take them, and small boys and youths shooting with army rifles at pigeons”. The March revolution, which Ransome welcomed, was easily suppressed. But since the new government made no significant reforms and remained in the war, the November revolution was inevitable.

Ransome saw Lenin arrive and be welcomed by the crowd at the Finland Station in Petrograd. Thus far Russia had sacrificed two million men dead, five million wounded and two-and-a-half million taken prisoner, and Lenin urged an immediate peace treaty with Germany. Three months later, in June 1917 — with the economy ruined, no prospect of peace and Kerensky weak and futile — several Russian leaders told Ransome that “no power on earth will keep the Russian army in the trenches this winter”. Ransome predicted that a Bolshevik revolution would take place in January 1918. In October 1917 he made a serious error by returning to England to advocate his political views and missed the long-awaited revolt.

Returning to Russia in December, Ransome saw Trotsky every day and began an affair with the Commisar’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina. He eventually left Russia with her as his common-law wife, and after obtaining a divorce from his estranged wife, married her in 1924. Ignoring Trotsky’s brutal tactics and attempts to eliminate the political opposition, Ransome praised him as a high-minded idealist. He declared, “I do not think he is the man to do anything except from the conviction that it is the best thing to be done for the revolutionary cause” — though this gave Trotsky plenty of leeway to justify his atrocities.

Constrained by his official position, Gerhardie had to suppress his political views and later expressed them in his books. Ransome was free to oppose British policy in his newspaper reports and confidential advice. In January 1918 he advised the government to establish diplomatic relations with the Bolsheviks and use them to defeat the Germans instead of invading the country and trying to overthrow them. He was then considered a dangerous Red and suspected of disloyalty by the British intelligence services.

The New Zealand-born polyglot and Russian expert Harold Williams, also on the scene, opposed Ransome’s views and accurately predicted: “They want external peace for internal war. Remember my words, the Bolsheviks will fight no one except the Russians.” Dogmatically following Marxist theory, the Bolsheviks mistakenly believed that their revolution would spread to the industrial workers of Germany. When that uprising failed to take place, Lenin continued to argue that further military resistance was hopeless and that the Western allies would not rescue Russia. In March 1918, when Russia finally withdrew from the war, Germany imposed extremely harsh conditions at Brest-Litovsk. Russia was forced to cede the Baltic states to Germany and part of the South Caucasus to Turkey, recognise the independence of Ukraine and pay reparations of six billion German gold marks.

Ransome began to shift his allegiance from Trotsky and became a close friend of the powerful Polish-born leader Karl Radek, who introduced him to the most influential Bolsheviks and gave him valuable inside information. Radek, who had been on the train with Lenin from Zurich to the Finland Station, was Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs and had been a leading negotiator at Brest-Litovsk. Even after Russia signed the treaty, Ransome remained adamant and insisted that it was only an expedient measure: “Every step taken against the Soviets helps Germany. Russia is temporarily concluding a separate peace. If the Soviet power is overthrown, that peace may be permanent.” He even blamed Britain rather than Russia for the crippling agreement signed by the Russian dictators: “The old fools who governed England had rejected the friendship of democratic Russia and driven her to make peace with Germany.” Denying reality, Ransome saw only the Lenin he wanted to see.

Despite British policy, Ransome and Lockhart continued to work together to create a rapprochement with the Bolsheviks. Though he supported the Bolsheviks, Ransome also thought they would soon fall from power and told Lockhart that “the show was over”. The two colleagues got along well and became good friends. Ransome called the hedonistic Lockhart, who was three years younger, “a popular, cheerful young man with a taste for gypsies, wine and dancing, that much endeared him to the Moscow society of business men, landed proprietors and actors of the old regime”. When analysing Ransome’s genial character, Lockhart zeroed in on his crucial defect: his over-active imagination and poor grasp of reality, which cast doubt on the information he provided and the reports he sent back to his newspaper: “Ransome was a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache, a sentimentalist, who could always be relied upon to champion the under-dog, and a visionary, whose imagination had been fired by the revolution. He was on excellent terms with the Bolsheviks and frequently brought us information of the greatest value. An incorrigible romanticist, who could spin a fairy-tale out of nothing, he was an amusing and good-natured companion.” After returning to England, Ransome used his imagination more fruitfully and wrote the highly successful series of children’s books that began with Swallows and Amazons (1930).

Hugh Walpole (1884-1941), born in New Zealand and rejected by the army for poor eyesight, made his first trip to Russia in September 1914, a month after the start of the war. He despairingly wrote to his mentor and idol Henry James: “The streets swam in mud, I got no news of the war because I couldn’t read [Russian], the food was all sweets and cabbage, and I was lonely beyond belief. I felt too that I was utterly useless.” In the Kremlin cafeteria, even high Party officials had to dine on horse meat and turnips. Walpole used his Russian adventures in his novels The Dark Forest (1916) and The Secret City (1919).

While praising Walpole’s engaging character, Lockhart suggested that civilian life continued unchanged in the big cities while thousands of soldiers were being slaughtered on the Russian front. Walpole’s biographer wrote that “he and his wife entertained Hugh constantly at their flat, introduced him to the English colony, took him to the ballet, the opera, the circus, and altogether looked after him. Lockhart’s impression of him was of someone ‘entirely unspoilt, who could still blush from an overwhelming self-consciousness, and impressed me more as a great, clumsy schoolboy, bubbling over with kindness and enthusiasm, than as a dignified author, whose views were to be accepted with awe and respect’.”

Maugham (who, like Walpole, was homosexual) later satirised him in Cakes and Ale (1930) as Alroy Kear, a pushy mediocrity with a bogus reputation. But the boyish Walpole experienced more combat at the front than any of the other writers, including Gerhardie, a professional soldier. Describing the Polish front in December 1916 with a novelist’s eye, Walpole captured the almost cinematic beauty of the battlefield: “Wonderful views from the hill — the river, the fields of horses, the riding Cossacks, the regiments crossing the bridge, the cannon getting nearer and nearer, the endless lines of carts on the horizon, the smoke of the battle and the reflection of the shrapnel, the evening with the sky all red, the black village and all the army moving about silently, the graves, the wounded riding in bleeding, the dead coming in on carts, the burnt houses.”

In May 1915 Walpole, one of the rare Englishmen who became a Russian officer, joined a Red Cross medical unit in the Carpathian mountains of Romania. The following month he recorded an exciting and dangerous moment: “I had a most perilous adventure — shrapnel bursting very close to us, all amongst the lines, creeping in and out avoiding the moon, crossing the river, stumbling over hidden soldiers who didn’t cheer us by telling us to be quick as they were going to begin firing.” That year he was decorated by the Russian army for rescuing a wounded soldier under fire. After battle he seemed confident and energetic, and Lockhart was impressed by him: “Walpole, resplendent in a Red Cross uniform, was as tremendously enthusiastic and as refreshingly sentimental as ever. He had just returned from England, where the first of his Russian books, The Dark Forest, had had a great success.”

In February 1916, Walpole became head of British propaganda, with offices on the Admiralty Quay and a staff of 12. He predicted the murder of Rasputin two weeks before the event, and wrote influential articles for the leading Petrograd newspapers. Ransome admired Walpole’s speed as a writer, but they quarrelled bitterly when Ransome wrote articles that disagreed with official views. During the March revolution Walpole heard “a terrific noise of firing and shouting; went to our windows and saw whole revolutionary mob pass down our street. About two thousand soldiers, many civilians armed, motor lorries with flags. All orderly, picketing the streets as they passed.” November 7 brought the outbreak of the revolution and the ten days that shook the world. Walpole described the tumultuous scene in his diary: “The latest news that Kerensky has defied the Bolsheviks and arrested their committee . . . News in the morning that the Bolsheviks have the upper hand . . . Firing in the evening. Shelling of Winter Palace . . . Learn as I go to bed that the whole town in hands of Bolsheviks . . . Putting barricades up in the streets. Saw the damage shells had done to the Winter Palace.” Noting that he and Maugham (like Ransome and Lockhart) had worked together in the autumn of 1917, Walpole emphasised their swift change from high-minded hopes to bitter disillusionment: “Very depressing those months were, when the idealism of some of us got some hard knocks, and when all our preconceived notions of Russia and the Russians fell to the ground one after the other.”

Robert Bruce Lockhart (1887-1970) — the most colourful character among the writers — was born in Scotland, spent three years as a rubber planter in Malaya and was forced to leave the country after a scandalous affair with the daughter of a Malay prince. He recorded: “I arrived in Moscow early in January 1912, as a young Vice-Consul of 24 and, apart from two short visits to the United Kingdom in January 1913 and in the autumn of 1917 [when he was recalled to London and briefed King George V], I remained in Russia until October 1918.” In January 1918 he returned as a secret agent and first British envoy to the Bolsheviks, and became the lover of the flamboyant Moura Budberg. The widow of a murdered Tsarist diplomat, she was a heavy-drinking double-agent for Russia and Britain. Later on, she became the mistress of Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells.

The tough and daring Lockhart disingenuously noted that he was cursed with an ultra-sensitive nature that was responsible for his mistaken “reputation of calculated insolence”. But he gained considerable popularity by playing soccer for the British team in Moscow. Lockhart praised his own expertise in Russia by stating that “I had excellent sources of information . . . I had friendly relations not only with the leading lights of the Moscow intelligentsia, but also with the big industrialists. I knew intimately the editors of the Moscow newspapers, and I had immediate access to the Prefect of Moscow.” Moura Budberg confirmed his egoistic claims and thought he was perfect for his job: “Lockhart was intelligent, he spoke Russian, he was observant, he knew how to cultivate contacts, he had wit and vigour and a great many friends everywhere.” The French ambassador to Russia agreed that Lockhart “at once intelligent, energetic and clever, was one of those whom the English government employs, with rare felicity, for confidential missions, and whom it reserves, should the occasion arise, for disavowal.” Lockhart would soon provide excellent reasons for official disavowal.

In June 1915 Lockhart saw the first signs of the mob’s rampage against the enemy that would soon be directed against the government: “Every shop, every factory, every private house, owned by a German or bearing a German name, was sacked and looted . . . I went out into the streets to see the rioting with my own eyes.” In September, when the incompetent Tsar mistakenly assumed command of the army, Lockhart wrote that Nicholas “became personally responsible in the eyes of the people for the long succession of defeats” and intensified their desire to abandon the war. He accurately predicted the revolution in March 1917, and recorded that with no armed defenders of the old regime there was, strangely enough, no bloodshed in Moscow. He also gave a lucid account of the main causes of the revolution: “It took place because the patience of the Russian people broke down under a system of unparalleled inefficiency and corruption . . . the disgraceful mishandling of food-supplies, the complete break-down of transport, and the senseless mobilisation of millions of unwanted and unemployable troops . . . the shameless profiteering of nearly everyone engaged in the giving and taking of war contracts.”

Opposing the official view, Lockhart thought the only way to save Russia from the Bolsheviks was to allow them to make peace. He wrote that Kerensky’s “face has a sallow and almost deathly pallor. His eyes, narrow and Mongolian, are tired. He looks as if he were in pain, but the mouth is firm, and the hair, cropped close and worn en brosse, gives a general impression of energy.” But Kerensky — not energetic enough and out of touch with the Russian masses — was overthrown because he would not make peace and, unlike Lenin, would not shoot his political opponents.

In a dispatch to Ambassador Buchanan, Lockhart predicted the approaching November revolution and stated that it would cripple Russia’s ability to remain in the war: “It seems impossible that the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat can be liquidated without further bloodshed. When this clash will come no one knows, but the outlook for the war is full of foreboding.” After the November revolution, the city seemed eerily calm: “For some days life in Petrograd continued more or less normally. Shops and cinemas stayed open, and on the surface there was little indication that Russia had passed a decisive turning-point in her history.” Agreeing with Gerhardie and Ransome (Walpole had to propagate official policy), Lockhart opposed British military intervention in Russia.

In September 1918 Lockhart was accused of plotting to assassinate Lenin, arrested, imprisoned in the Kremlin and condemned to death. The following month he was fortunate enough to be exchanged for Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet representative in Britain, and permanently expelled from Russia.

Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was born in Paris, the son of a lawyer at the British Embassy. Orphaned at the age of ten and with a debilitating stammer, he was educated at the King’s School, Canterbury and at Heidelberg University before qualifying as a doctor. He was an extremely successful playwright, novelist and story writer as well as a restless traveler, and had served with the Red Cross in France during the war.

“I am going to Russia,” Maugham dramatically announced in June 1917, “and shall be occupied there presumably till the end of the war.” He had taken some Russian lessons on Capri in 1905 and in a few months knew enough to read the plays of Anton Chekhov. Once in Petrograd he continued to study the language and was soon fluent enough to conduct his business in Russian. Incredibly, the relatively inexperienced Maugham, who had been a spy in wartime Switzerland, was the principal agent in Russia for the British and American secret services during the crucial few months before the Bolshevik coup in November. Sir William Wiseman, director of British espionage in Russia, sent him there alone and with only $21,000 to pay his expenses, finance newspapers and buy arms. His task — like that of the other four writers — was to support the Kerensky government, prevent the Bolshevik revolution and keep Russia in the war against Germany. He had to work independently of the Allied embassies, and planned to blow up an Austrian-owned ammunition factory and sacrifice many civilian lives. He stayed in Russia for only two-and-a-half months, and his task, with hopelessly limited resources, was impossible.

Maugham received valuable help from two Russian friends: Alexandra (Sasha) Kropotkin and Boris Savinkov. The lively, dark-haired Sasha was the daughter of the notorious anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment and escaped from Siberia. She was born in England in 1887, during her father’s years of exile, and grew up in the socialist circles of William Morris and Bernard Shaw, who knew her as a child and called her a “most lovely girl”. In London in the early years of the century, Maugham had had a short but amiable affair with Sasha that concluded with friendly feelings on both sides. Intellectually as well as sexually attractive, she served Maugham Russian tea in glasses and talked for hours about Marx and Gorky, fate, passion and the brotherhood of man. Maugham found her extremely intelligent, with an alarming love of intrigue and a lust for power. Sasha returned to Russia in 1915. In a striking contrast to the dull, shabby life she had been forced to lead in London, she was soon on intimate terms with Kerensky, and became Maugham’s main liaison and translator. She knew and had access to every important official and, by an extraordinary change of fortune, was now a powerful figure in Russia.

Maugham’s other close colleague and source of inside information was the ruthless terrorist and underground man, Boris Savinkov. He had assassinated V. K. de Plehve, the reactionary Tsarist minister of the interior, in July 1904. In February 1905, Savinkov also blew up the Grand Duke Sergius, uncle of the Tsar. During Kerensky’s regime Savinkov — who had first fought the Tsarists, then the Bolsheviks — was minister of war and governor-general of Petrograd.

Through Sasha and Savinkov, Maugham saw a good deal of Kerensky and was astonished by his meteoric rise to fame and power. He thought Kerensky was a man of speech, not action, a leader whose vanity did not permit disagreement and whose colleagues were no more than toadies. Poorly educated and uncultured, without imagination or magnetism, he lacked physical and intellectual strength. He looked strangely haunted and nervous, completely exhausted, unable to act and crushed by the burden of power. When Lenin was in hiding in Petrograd, Kerensky supposedly knew where he was but didn’t dare to arrest him.

In his secret dispatches to London, Maugham stressed that it was impossible to combat German espionage and that the Bolsheviks would inevitably win: “Our agent reported the situation in Russia was entirely out of hand, and that no propaganda or organised support undertaken by the Allies could possibly stem the rising tide of Bolshevism.” During their personal meetings, Kerensky seemed bitter, desperate and defeated. He asked Maugham why The Times was so hostile to Russia, why the British kept their incompetent ambassador to Russia and why they had failed to send the promised military aid.

Maugham, the secret agent of a democratic government, had always refused to treat with the Bolsheviks and was now a marked man. If captured by the Reds, who were shooting all their enemies, he would certainly have been executed. On November 5, two days before the revolution, he hastily left for London with an urgent personal message from Kerensky to the Prime Minister, Lloyd George. In January 1918 Maugham wrote that he had had an exciting time in Russia and was sorry to be recalled, but he had to deliver Kerensky’s message and get himself out of danger. He had planned to return after a week in London, but the revolution broke out while he was en route to England and everything he had been striving for came to naught. On December 5 Russia signed a preliminary armistice. Maugham believed, perhaps naively, that his mission might have succeeded. In 1933 he told Lockhart that if he had been sent to Russia sooner, and with greater resources and power, he could have made the “Bolshevik coup d’état impossible.”

Despite the considerable limitations imposed upon him, Maugham showed great insight into the chaotic political events in Russia and the precarious state of the provisional government. An expert on espionage has concluded that his reports, highly valued and seriously considered, were immediately sent to the highest authorities:

Unlike other sources of intelligence, he gave due warning of Kerensky’s infirmity, of Bolshevik strength, and of Polish and Czech possibilities [against both Russia and the Habsburg Empire] . . . His findings were accurate compared with those of other contemporary reporters on the Russian scene; and, following Wiseman’s brief, Maugham sensibly advised the Allies on political and financial methods which might enable them to “guide the storm” in East Central Europe.

Maugham’s political activities and penetrating reports were so highly valued that the authorities wanted to send him back to Russia, but this plan had to be abandoned when his health broke down.

Despite their intelligence, experience and expertise, all five writers failed in their mission to support Kerensky and keep Russia in the war. Instead, the Bolsheviks seized power, repudiated the Tsarist treaty with the Allies and signed a separate peace. The Russian-born soldier Gerhardie took part in secret missions, but was the least perceptive. The fanciful Ransome, often at the battlefront, wound up writing children’s stories. The clumsy schoolboy Walpole was decorated for gallantry under fire. The crafty, self-assured Lockhart was almost executed. Maugham, the gentleman spy and shrewd observer, barely escaped with his life. They were amateurs and observers rather than men of action, and found it difficult to make accurate predictions under volatile and cataclysmic conditions. Ransom and Lockhart thought the Bolsheviks would be defeated and Russia would remain in the war. Both men were influenced by their romantic involvement with revolutionary Russian women: Ransome with Evgenia, Lockhart with Moura.

Through misjudgment, bad timing and threat of death all but Gerhardie left Russia shortly before or immediately after the revolution. Ransome did not expect an imminent revolt, and left for consultations in England on October 9. Walpole left to work in London on November 8. Lockhart was recalled to London in the autumn. Maugham escaped with his life two days before the Bolsheviks seized power.

British policy, conceived in distant London, was sound. The government — and especially Winston Churchill — recognised the Bolshevik danger and the possibility of overthrowing the revolutionaries by invading Russia. On the scene but too close to the action, the writers were strongly influenced by their dislike of the corrupt Tsarist regime and by their lack of faith in Kerensky’s weak government. They were impressed by Lenin’s powerful personality and effective propaganda, by their friendships with charismatic leaders like Trotsky and Radek, by the enjoyment of special privileges and access to confidential information.

The writers did not want to or were unable to advance British interests. Gerhardie, Ransome, Walpole and Lockhart were pro-Bolshevik, though the first two thought the regime would collapse and the last two became disillusioned with the murderous Reds. Gerhardie, Ransome and Lockhart were also opposed to military intervention. The shrewdest of all witnesses was Maugham, who opposed the Bolsheviks and urged a more powerful Allied invasion. He believed that with the help of the Cossacks and the Czech Legion fighting in Siberia the Allies could overthrow the Reds, who were struggling for survival on several fronts. An Allied victory in Russia would have prevented the inconceivable horrors that took place under Stalin: the Ukraine famine, the purge trials, the cruel domination of Eastern Europe and the millions of prisoners who died in the Gulag. But the writers were overwhelmed by the powerful tide of history.

The post British Witnesses To Lenin’s Revolution appeared first on Standpoint.

However, the contemporaneous diaries of protagonists, especially those composed without obvious intention of publication, have proved to be of quite different value.  These often displayed a complexity of motive, even a confusion of purpose (let alone effect), that have served serious study well. No one better exposed the utter cynicism of the Nazi regime than Goebbels. Mussolini’s fake grandiosity was seldom more graphically described than by Ciano. And Britain’s grim determination to prevail still lives in the words of Alanbrooke. But nothing of comparable quality emerged from the ex-Soviet Union. This was scarcely surprising. Stalin’s Terror discouraged all but the most foolhardy from writing much down. Only the suicidal contemplated anything so self-incriminating as a diary. That, at least, is what we thought until now. 

Gabriel Gorodetsky is one of the leading historians of 20th-century Soviet foreign policy. In 1993, seeking information on Ivan Maisky’s involvement in the Soviet decision to support the Palestinian partition plan of 1947, he discovered The Maisky Diaries. He has devoted much of the last 20 years to collating, editing and interpreting what may turn out to be the most important contribution of 21st-century historical scholarship to our understanding of the causes, course and consequences of the Second World War.  The full, unexpurgated, text runs to about 500,000 words. It will eventually be published in three volumes. This is an abridged edition, reproducing about one-quarter of the original. It is a revelation. It will be read — it will be metaphorically devoured — by anyone remotely interested in understanding the history of humanity’s darkest century. 

Maisky was a Soviet diplomat of the old school. He was intelligent, educated and fluent in several languages. He travelled widely before the Revolution. He began as a Menshevik, later shifting his allegiance to the Bolsheviks. He was appointed Soviet Ambassador to London in 1932, remaining there for 11 years. During that time, he set about systematically courting and manipulating anyone who mattered in Britain to Russian advantage. That involved cultivating around 500 of the most influential men and women of the time, beginning with the Foreign Office, then working his way through Parliament and the press. His method, beautifully set out in a nine-page “lecture” to Fedor Gusev, one of Molotov’s moronic yes men, is admirably summarised in this book. It repays the most careful scrutiny. 

Maisky was a Marxist. But he never doubted the significance of the individual in history. Thus he took careful stock of its most important specimens in inter-war England. He despised Simon and distrusted Halifax. He loathed, but also feared, Chamberlain. He continually rated Lloyd-George (an “astonishing man”) highest of all, at least before 1941. He did his best to bully lesser political fry, like Butler (with little effect), and to influence sympathetic officials, like Vansittart (with rather more success).  He exploited the credulity of indigenous fellow-travellers for all they were worth. Their value varied. Even Maisky was surprised by quite how idiotically Dr Hewlett Johnson interpreted his duty to be useful (“I consider . . . Stalin’s Russia . . . to be the only truly Christian country in our day”). In contrast, the Webbs’ commendable socialist orthodoxy was hampered by their residual “snobbery” (his word). Hence Beatrice’s efforts to hinder his cultivation of Churchill (“He is not a true Englishman, you know. He has negro blood . . . inherited from his mother. You can tell [by] his appearance”).

In these, as in so many other respects, Maisky’s Diaries are endlessly illuminating.  But they cannot be taken at face value.  There are long gaps in the narrative, witness to those moments when even Maisky felt too frightened to write. The instinct for self-preservation also persuaded him to ascribe his own ideas to others, sometimes to a degree wholly at odds with reality. He was invariably disingenuous in his descriptions of Stalin. That was, no doubt, wise. So what remains must be carefully interpreted. Gorodetsky has achieved this feat by continually placing Maisky’s words in the context of other contemporary documents, both Soviet and foreign. He has also compared Maisky’s private and public accounts of events — his were perhaps the most self-serving of memoirs. The editor’s frequent but discreet commentaries give voice to the silences and correct the misapprehensions.  They allow the reader not simply to follow the story but comprehend the text. It is a magnificent editorial achievement.

What The Maisky Diaries, rightly read, reveal is not simply the Soviet perspective but the Soviet dimension to European relations during the decade after Hitler’s rise to power. This has the effect of changing our view on seemingly well-understood events, again and again. We long knew that Hitler was dissatisfied by Munich. We can now appreciate why Stalin regarded that agreement as a disaster. Conversely, the Polish guarantees had the unanticipated effect of making Soviet Russia the pivot of Europe’s balance of power. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was not Stalin’s desperate response to allied procrastination over a Russian agreement.  He and Molotov had long since contemplated the greater advantage to be gained from a rapprochement with Hitler. This became their long-term plan. That, rather than asinine self-deception, better explains Stalin’s seemingly craven appeasement of Hitler up to the summer of 1941. By the same token, the Japanese neutrality treaty was not an inspired, last-minute, defence of Russia’s eastern flank. It was part of a premeditated effort “to collaborate extensively with [our] Tripartite Pact Partners”.  It took two years hard slog — down to Stalingrad — to reverse the impact of that misjudgement. No wonder Stalin took such pains to conquer Eastern Europe after 1944.

Maisky’s Diaries, for all their observational panache, are in many ways a record of professional failure. He did not succeed in persuading the Western allies to join a Soviet-sponsored policy of “collective security” after 1935. He did not succeed in securing Anglo-Soviet military cooperation in the summer of 1939. He did not succeed in cajoling Britain and America to open a second front in Europe, either in 1942 or 1943. Yet he was eventually recalled less for his shortcomings than for his success. Stalin could not abide the possibility of so popular an envoy in London. This could have been disastrous for Maisky. But he survived. He even survived his subsequent disgrace, in 1955.  He died in his bed, aged 91, in 1975. Maisky was not a nice, still less a good, man. Read his account of the Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 and feel your blood run cold. Yet one cannot help but admire him.  Legend has it that Talleyrand, on being asked what he had done during the French Revolution, simply replied, “J’ai survécu.”  Maisky might have said much the same. And his was surely the tougher task.

The post Stalin’s Man In London appeared first on Standpoint.

Fidel Castro, a keen chess player, had the notion of luring the mercurial Fischer, who seemed to have retired from international chess tournaments. Fischer was still furious about what he saw as “Russian cheating” in the Curaçao world championship event of 1962. Instead he had concentrated on purely domestic events, with phenomenal results. Between 1963 and 1965 he achieved the remarkable feat of winning 22 consecutive tournament games, including an unprecedented 11 straight wins in the US championship.

But Castro’s offer of a $3,000 first prize (then a huge sum for a chess event) was enough to tempt Fischer to re-enter international competition — and doubtless he also would have reckoned on beating the three Soviet players competing: former world champion Vasily Smyslov, Efim Geller and Ratmir Kholmov.

Fischer did not reckon on the US State Department, which refused him a visa to travel to Cuba. The US Grandmaster Larry Evans had been granted a visa to play in the same annual event in 1964, only two years after the Cuban missile crisis. But, as we now know, the FBI was monitoring the 22-year-old Fischer’s mother, suspected of Communist sympathies, and it doubtless saw Fischer’s participation as a propaganda coup for Castro.

Fischer was not so easily thwarted. He came up with the idea of playing all his games via telex from New York. Castro, unsurprisingly, agreed to meet the $10,000 cost: and the other participants could hardly object to this unusual arrangement, as they were largely from Communist countries so would have to do as they were told. Besides, to play Fischer had become the dream of any ambitious master. Then, however, Fischer heard that the Cuban leader was boasting how he had got him to play against the wishes of the US government. Fischer cabled Castro, saying that he would withdraw unless “you immediately send me a telegram declaring that neither you nor your government will attempt to make any political capital out of my participation.” Castro’s response was perhaps not what Fischer had expected: “Cuba has no need of propaganda victories. If you are frightened . . . then it would be better to find another excuse.”

Fischer backed down and agreed to play. As David Edmonds and John Eidinow observe in their book Bobby Fischer Goes To War: “Castro’s riposte is an interesting lesson for students of Fischer’s psychology . . . scornful counter-attack was the mode.” The point is that everyone else buckled at Fischer’s demands — and found it only encouraged further aggression.

Once under way, Fischer started with two wins — taking his tally of successive victories to 24, a record which has never been matched, let alone superseded. The last of those victories — before Fischer finally conceded a draw—was against the man who won the event, Smyslov. The former world champion piled up 15.5 points out of 21 games, half a point ahead of Fischer, Geller and Borislav Ivkov of Yugoslavia. Ivkov, a former junior world champion, was actually running away with the event, including a victory with the Black pieces against Fischer. But in a totally winning position in the penultimate round against the Cuban in last place, he made a stupendous blunder — and, as he put it later, “in a delirium” lost again in the final round.

Fischer would not have been happy with his joint second place, still less with the fact that he also lost against Geller (whom he always found a difficult opponent) and Kholmov. However, he played the event under a considerable handicap as the length of the delay down the telex line meant that he was at the board for two hours longer than normal each playing day, a burden which his opponents would endure only once.

But at least he had the pleasure of defeating the great strategist Smyslov at his own game, a victory which Fischer included in his collection, My Sixty Memorable Games. Here it is, with some of the author’s own comments from that remarkable book.

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 a6 4.Ba4 Nf6 5.d3 (Fischer wrote: “Steinitz’s favourite, long abandoned, and the first time I’ve employed it”) d6 6.c3 Be7 7.Nbd2 0-0 8.Nf1 b5 9.Bb3 d5 10.Qe2 dex4 11.dxe4 Be6 (Smyslov volunteers for doubled pawns, in order to control the key squares of d5 and f5. But Fischer’s build-up of pressure on the now weakened Black pawns becomes the game’s theme) 12.Bxe6 fxe6 13.Ng3 Qd7 14.0-0 Rad8 15.a4 Qd3 16.Qxd3 Rxd3 17.axb5 axb5 18.Ra6 Rd6 19.Kh1! (stopping Smyslov’s threat of playing 19…Nd4! 20.Rxd6 Nxf3+ before recapturing on d6.) Nd7 20.Be3 Rd8 21.h3 h6 22.Rfa1 Ndb8 23.Ra8 Rd1+ 24.Kh2 Rxa1 (Here Smyslov telexed the offer of a draw. But Fischer never agreed to splitting the point if there remained the faintest chance of victory) 25.Rxa1 Nd7? (Fischer wrote: “When I spoke to Smyslov on the direct phone line immediately after the game, he congratulated me on a beautiful performance and attributed his loss to his reluctance to play b4 at some point — and this is his last chance. After 25…b4 26.axb4 Bxb4 27.Nf1 Black obtains much more freedom than in the actual game) 26.b4! Kf7 27.Nf1 Bd6 28.g3! (Fischer’s comment: “Once and for all negating all possible combinations with …Nd4) Nf6 29.N1d2 Ke7 30.Ra6 Nb8 31.Ra5 c6 32.Kg2 Nbd7 33.Kf1 Rc8 34.Ne1! (heading for the wonderful square d3 and also freeing his f-pawn to advance) Ne8 35.Nd3 Nc7 36.c4! bxc4 (Unfortunately necessary as 36…Ra8 is answered by 37.c5 winning a piece) 37.Nxc4 Nb5 38.Ra6 Kf6 39.Bc1! (Another exquisite manoeuvre: now the Bishop is heading for b2 to bring even more pressure on the e5 pawn) Bb8 40. Bb2 (and this threatens f4) c5 (Fischer describes this as “a desperate bid for counterplay”. Too late) 41.Nb6! Nxb6 42.Rxb6 c4 43.Nc5 c3 and after telexing this move, Smyslov resigned without waiting for Fischer’s next move to come down the line. After the forcing continuation 44.Bc1 Nd4 45.Rxb8! Rxb8 46.Nd7+ Ke7 47.Nxb8 Nb3 48.Ba3 c2 49.b5+ Kd8 50.Nc6+ Kc7 51.Ne5 c1=Q+ 52.Bxc1 Nxc1 53.Nc4 the Knight and pawn ending is trivially winning. One of Fischer’s greatest games and worthy of the record it set.

The post Fischer’s Cuban Crisis appeared first on Standpoint.

But because such behaviour was “unacceptable in a hospital setting” Odent quietly discontinued the experiment and didn’t talk about it — understandably, considering that the drug in question, GHB, is now notorious in the context of “date-rape”. It facilitates the release of the mysterious hormone oxytocin and in the case of these women (were they told of the experiment?) stripped away the layers of cultural inhibitions which separated them from their supposedly quick-birthing distant ancestors.

As befits the Maurice Chevalier of midwifery, Odent suggests in his new book, Do We Need Midwives? (Pinter and Martin, £11.99), which may well be his swansong, that champagne can speed up labour because it contains GHB.

Ever since that very Sixties experience, Odent has been trying to explain to us that human society is the enemy of childbirth, because we can’t help messing about with it. Only by suppressing the “thinking brain”, the neo-cortex, can women hope to reclaim the ability of their distant ancestors to birth quickly and easily. Very simple societies let women labour on their own, with an experienced companion waiting some distance away, but we do the exact opposite. 

Then, often, we find out we were totally wrong. Only recently have we learned that babies physically need to be with their mothers straight after birth, not whisked off to a nursery. We used to shave and evacuate women, and scrub their nipples, before they could touch their babies; then we discovered that babies needed those microbes after all. (And the National Institute for Clinical Excellence has only just twigged that our decades-old practice of clamping and cutting the umbilical cord within seconds of birth has deprived millions of babies of up to 30 per cent of their natural blood volume.)

Even adjusting for age, height and weight, women take three hours longer on average to birth than they did 60 years ago. More women who aren’t very good at birthing pass on their lack of ability to their daughters, thanks to the success of caesareans, so the proportion of women in society who literally cannot birth without help is also growing. At the same time we move further and further away from the ability to experience what Odent terms, inelegantly, the “fetal ejection reflex”.

Are we really losing the ability to birth, as Odent believes? As I found when I studied with him a decade ago, Odent’s long-term thinking is not always practicable in the short term. An American medical malpractice lawyer recently admitted to me that one drug, Pitocin (known in the UK as Syntocinon) brought him more business than any other single factor in maternity care because it is implicated in so many cases of brain damage at birth. But Odent, frustratingly, is more interested in digging up highly inconclusive studies which allege a distant association between caesareans, Syntocinon/Pitocin and autism — a condition whose definition is still being rewritten — than in looking at the very immediate problem of brain-damaged babies whose mothers were induced.

To many women’s ears, Odent’s ideal birthing scenario sounds awful: a woman labouring alone (no midwife, or the midwife only very discreetly present, and definitely no male partner) in a darkened room. Once she has gone over her time limit, it’s time for the knife. If the woman can’t birth with the “fetal ejection reflex” then, he reasons, a caesarean is a better choice than prolonging her agony with other interventions.

Hmm. All by herself in a dark broom cupboard with the threat of major abdominal surgery hanging over her — you tell her, Dr Odent. We’re right behind you: well behind.

The post Unhappy Birth Days appeared first on Standpoint.

You might think that it would be difficult to murder a large number of people in a totalitarian society and get away with it, but you would be wrong. This is the engrossing premise of a cracking new thriller directed by Daniel Espinosa, produced by Ridley Scott and based on the best-seller of the same name by Tom Rob Smith.

The action is set in the early 1950s, in the late Stalinist Soviet Union, where the MGB state security apparatus is still omnipotent and omnipresent. Despite this, there is a serial child murderer on the loose who has been eviscerating boys and depositing them by railway tracks. Child 44 is the latest victim, the son of the hero Leo Demidov’s brother, who gives the film its name. His principal enemy is not the killer himself, who accepts his fate remarkably passively once uncovered, but the Soviet bureaucracy and the suspicion and apathy of the population at large.

The reason is that the Soviet Union is supposed to be a worker’s paradise, and as Demidov’s superiors remind him there cannot be crime, let alone a serial mass child murderer in paradise. So the vast repressive apparatus of the state is turned not against the perpetrator, but on the honest MGB agent Demidov (an indestructible Tom Hardy) whose insistence that the dozens of deaths are not only murder but also connected is a terrible reproach to the Soviet state myth.

 Instead, the authorities are obsessed with foreign influences and agents. The hero begins the film chasing a suspect. It soon becomes clear that the quarry is running not because he is guilty of anything but because he is being chased. The sequence ends with Demidov asking the captive whether he is a foreign agent. “Does it matter?”, the doomed man asks, the point being that the regime generates and thrives on paranoia anxieties the truth-content of which are entirely irrelevant.

Likewise, when the state finally accepts the killer’s existence it can only do so on the basis of a double lie. First, that Demidov’s sworn enemy within the MGB, whom he has just slain after a desperate struggle, has in fact fallen heroically in mortal combat with the killer. Secondly, that the murderer—who has in fact been scarred by the terrible famines of the 1930s and the experience of Soviet orphanages—had been turned into a human time bomb during his time as a prisoner of war by the Nazi camp commanders as a planned “late revenge” of the vanquished foe against the triumphant Soviet Union. The anti-foreign paranoia with which the film begins thus comes full circle at its close.

To be clear, Child 44 is a thriller not a profound work of historical-political criticism; it is multiplex, not arthouse. Some of the characters, and the accents, verge on or topple over into cliché. The final scene, when Demidov and his wife adopt two peasant children his squad had orphaned at the start of the film sits uneasily with the bleakness of the rest of the movie.

 It is nonetheless a powerful film, rich in allusions to past productions, such as David Lean’s Dr Zhivago, a sprawling epic on Revolutionary Russia, and Peter Weir’s The Way Back, which starts with an extended Soviet camp sequence. It greatest debt, however, is surely to Fritz’s Lang’s classic M, which as much a study of the ills of society as the mind of Peter Lorre’s murderer. Similarly, the actual killings and their detection is almost incidental to Espinosa’s persuasive depiction of the sheer drab awfulness of everyday life in late Stalinist Russia and the deadening effect of state terror on a population numbed by more than three decades of revolution, famine, war and repression.

This is most effectively demonstrated by the relationship between Demidov and his wife Raisa. The story of their first encounter is related in macho fashion by the husband as one in which he had forgotten the girl’s name. Very soon, however, it becomes clear that she had been so worried about being wooed by an agent of the MGB that she had originally given him a false name. Once tracked down, she feels that she “had no choice” but to marry him. The marriage is near breaking point when the MGB accuses Raisa of espionage. Even when Demidov is convinced of his wife’s innocence and refuses to abandon her, state security punishes them with banishment, despite knowing them to be not guilty. This particular story is fictional, to be sure, but it depicts a scenario that was all too true for millions of Russians at the time.

What makes all this more interesting is the fact that Child 44 has recently been banned in Russia. Ostensibly, this is on the grounds that the film dishonours the dead of the Great Patriotic War, who have just been honoured with great pomp in Moscow. There is something in this: the film begins with the final Red Army assault on the Reichstag in April 1945, when the iconic moment of the hoisting of the Soviet banner is marred by the presence of stolen wristwatches on the sleeves of the victors, which have to be air-brushed out of the official photograph.

The real reason, though, is that the brutal depiction of life in Stalinist Russia, with its lies, evasions, and general crumminess, not to mention its murderous state power, unsettles the regime. It too silences opposition through incarceration and even death, having murdered or connived in the assassination of countless journalists and lately of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. It too seeks to create mass psychosis about foreign spies and influences, on whom all Russia’s ills are blamed. It too has created an alternative reality where, as Peter Pomerantsev’s much-discussed recent book on Russia Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible (Faber, £14.99).

Mr Putin has clearly got the message. It is time we did too.

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Economically its statistics read like an idealised Britain: a global market centre dependent on trade, but with a manufacturing base of around 30 per cent and the world’s third-highest per capita income. Socially Lee promoted clean living, respect for elders, high educational standards, meritocracy in the best Chinese tradition, and a well-paid, high-quality civil service staffed by elites of talent. It is a place our politicians might envy too, with a multi-party system where only one — the People’s Action Party (PAP)— has ever won elections, thereby avoiding the instability and policy switches that afflict less tidily run states.

And that is the nub. Its constraints on press freedom and civil rights mean that Lee’s model city will never be one for Britain. Yet admiration for authoritarian regimes — some of it not so grudging — gained ground during the recession and in the wake of the Arab world’s poisoned spring. The buzzwords “multi-polar system” now slip easily off the tongue, as if the brutalism of Russia and China, the chaos of Brazil, the institutionalised corruption of India or the theocratic thuggery of Iran were evidence of some much-needed diversity in a lamentably white Western democratic world.

The greatest beneficiary has been Beijing, and Lee’s death is a good time to refocus on the suggestion by those of a panda-hugging persuasion, and occasionally by Lee himself, that the future of China could be Singapore writ 2,000 times larger. Just as (before Ukraine) the Poles were said to be showing us that even Russians might not be congenitally immune to democratic delights, so Singapore (75 per cent Chinese) has been seen as a stepping stone to a post-Communist future for the Middle Kingdom, complete with a multi-party system. Imagine a Lee Kuan Yew figure as Chinese leader.

His growing confidence about the country was based on 32 visits and discussions with every Chinese leader from Mao to Xi Jinping, with whom he was clearly impressed. After his death Xi returned the compliment, praising Lee’s “outstanding contributions to peace and development in Asia”, and allowing his ancestral home in Guangdong province to be turned into a tourist attraction.

Margaret Thatcher rightly admired Lee for his foresight, though on Xi his optimism is proving questionable, and a comparison he once made with Nelson Mandela unfortunate. His point was that like the African leader Xi would rise above the persecution he and his father suffered during the Cultural Revolution, and learn the lessons. Since acceding to the leadership in an aura of expectation nearly three years ago Xi has in fact become increasingly repressive and domineering. What the Chinese Mandela is most passionate about, he keeps reminding us, is not letting the Chinese Communist Party go the way of the Soviet one, and to prevent it there seems little he would not do.

Far from putting China’s catastrophic Maoist past behind him, politically Xi has begun jobbing back. Just as the strongman syndrome and voluntary serfdom seem in vogue again in Russia, so under Xi, with his Putinesque paranoia about “colour revolutions”, things are moving in a direction that would have gratified the Chairman. The abandonment of collective leadership at the top, an anti-corruption purification campaign which echoes Mao’s last fling and picks out potential opponents for punishment, or a reversion to the personality cult, complete with heart-shaped posters, are not what Lee had in mind.

There is something Ubuesque about a system that contrives to combine a new Great Helmsman, complete with totalitarian kitsch, with an increasingly educated, travelled and sophisticated middle class. There isn’t even much of a dissident culture any more; Xi is seeing to that. So why is Beijing haunted by a new Tiananmen Square — when students and workers, it should be remembered, did not even demand the end of the primacy of the Communist Party? Because Communism and paranoia are inseparable, and in a country with China’s history — civil wars, colonialism, invasion and totalitarian rule, and a billion and a quarter population — there remains an elemental fear of things getting out of hand.

Lee was big on “Asian values”, a soothingly unspecific phrase, but how far does the elastic stretch? From Singaporean social discipline and a monitored press to Chinese mass surveillance and lawless repression? Lee did not argue that state controls and prohibitions were merely a temporary necessity while democracy incubated underneath — “Asian values” being presumably timeless, in the same way as Beijing’s democracy “with Chinese characteristics”.

If China is shifting backwards, what of Singapore itself? Like Xi, its prime minister is the son of his distinguished father (another Asian value?), though Lee Hsien Loong is also a highly able and experienced man. (Brigadier-General Lee was Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, with a First in mathematics and distinction in computer science, and studied public administration at Harvard.) But then Lee is relaxing his father’s paternalistic style in favour of public dialogue with younger voters as support for PAP erodes, while Xi is toughening up. So China and its model future look like drifting apart.

As a Western-educated “wise man of the East” Lee was anxious to reconcile nations, races and cultures, which made him want to see the best in Xi. But our wise man could admit to being wrong, and if he had lived on I like to think he would have had something to say about where China is going.

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This radical and far-reaching breakthrough brought us many positive improvements. We were happy,  joyful, full of hope. We were fascinated with ourselves, and praised by our friends and supporters in the rest of the world. We enjoyed their approval and our rapid acceptance into the community of free nations. The overwhelming majority of our citizens have no doubt that they now live in a much better world. 

It is also the appropriate time to say that when we became part of the free world we had mixed feelings. We realised that the world did not quite understand us, our fate, our experience, our dreams and our ambitions. The lack of freedom, the irrationality of the Communist system and the oppression we had to go through were severely underestimated. But our understanding of the free world, which we were not part of for such a long time, our ability to behave quite normally, our level of education, and our knowledge of our common European culture proved to be greater than most people in the West expected. Despite long-lasting Communist propaganda and indoctrination, we knew more about the capitalist West than the non-Communist world knew about us. I am afraid this asymmetry persists even now.

Communism still remains misunderstood. It ceased to be discussed and analysed too quickly, especially its later stages, its gradual weakening and softening, as well as its complete failure to defend itself or, luckily, to fight back. In the final stages of Communism, practically nobody believed in the original pillars of its ideology. If we do not correctly interpret the later, in many respects milder, stages of Communism we cannot understand its sudden and bloodless end, comprehend all the tenets of the post-Communist transition, and focus more intensely on the present era.

The Communist regime was in many respects already an empty shell. As a result, Communism melted away; it was not defeated. There are people who don’t like this interpretation of events, and claim that they defeated Communism. It isn’t true. I don’t want to diminish anybody’s merits, but Communism in 1989 needed just one last straw. The subsequent chain reaction of millions of people happened spontaneously and automatically.

Everyone — especially in the West — expected that the end of Communism would bring about shock, chaos, disorder, even civil war. As we know, this did not materialise. Even in the Soviet Union, where Communism lasted for more than seven long decades, it foundered more or less quietly. All of us who knew the book by Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, written at the end of the 1960s, expected much more dramatic events. This relatively quiet end reveals the weakness and effective defencelessness of Communism at the end of the 1980s.

Despite all my criticism of subsequent developments in my country and elsewhere — which I experienced both as a citizen and as a leading politician — I must admit that the post-Communist transition (or transformation) was a success. Criticism of certain aspects is undoubtedly justified but the fact that it was essentially positive cannot be disputed.

In Czechoslovakia we rapidly succeeded in establishing the framework of a fully-fledged parliamentary democracy. It proved that it was not necessary to create a political system: it was sufficient, to use economic terminology, to begin the process of entering the political market.

This favourable political structure lasted until the end of the last decade, and the outbreak of the 2008-09 financial and economic crisis. Different political tendencies then started to prevail. It led to the shift from standard politics to post-political, post-democratic arrangements, from authentic, ideologically well-defined political parties to ad hoc political projects based more on marketing than on ideology or party membership.

It was not a consequence of the economic crisis; the crisis only accelerated it. I am afraid this is a more general European trend. It is the consequence of the increasingly destructive weakening, if not destruction, of the nation-state by the European Union and of the strengthening of global governance. It is also a result of the gradual replacement of traditional European and Western values with politically correct norms based on new “isms” — cultural relativism, human rightsism, multiculturalism, NGO-ism, feminism, homosexualism, environmentalism, juristocracy and mediacracy. Classical political democracy is, I am afraid, finished.

On the economic side, we organised a rapid systemic change. We proclaimed very early and quite explicitly that we wanted capitalism. We resolutely refused any kind of “third way” or any convergence of existing economic and political systems. What we are now getting, however, is not the “first way”. It is the old, well-known “second way” — European socialism. This is another reason for our frustration.

What we really wanted 25 years ago was to avoid a non-transformation. We didn’t want to give a chance to all kinds of groups which sought to preserve the status quo and/or steal the whole transformation process for the benefit of their vested interests. This influenced our position vis-à-vis all versions of gradualism, which we considered a non-reform. We did not believe that gradualism was a realisable reform strategy (in a politically free society) and we disagreed with the term “shock therapy”, both as a useful reform concept and as a description of the reality of our country and elsewhere. We refused to accept the “shock therapy vs. gradualism” dilemma that is even now discussed in economic debate as meaningful alternatives. The term “shock therapy” is not an analytical term. It is a political charge used by socialists like Joseph Stiglitz.

We considered economic and political reforms to be interconnected and indivisible. To separate them à la China was, in Central and Eastern Europe, impossible. The unrealistic concept of gradualism was (and is) based on the belief in the possibility of a detailed programme of reform. It would have been, however, possible only in the absence of political freedom, which was not our case.

We knew that the transformation project had to be ours, based on our ideas and realities. We did not consider ourselves representatives of international institutions and we did not feel any reason to please them. We tried to find our own “Czech way” and to give the people a chance to be part of the game, not just passive observers.

The decisive part of the transformation process was massive, wholesale privatisation. In our case, it was based on several ideas:

• Our goal was to privatise practically all the existing state-owned firms, not just to allow the setting up of new firms on “green fields”.
• Swift privatisation was considered to be the best contribution to the much-needed restructuring of inefficient state-owned firms (we did not believe in the ability of the government to restructure the firms prior to privatisation).
• Privatisation of firms in the real economy couldn’t wait for the completion of bank privatisation (it had to go in parallel).
• Because of the lack of domestic capital (which did not exist in the Communist era) and because of the very limited number of serious potential foreign investors, firms had to be privatised at a low price. This idea led us to the concept of “voucher privatisation”, which played an important, but not dominant, role in our country which is often misunderstood. Less than a quarter of the Czech privatisation programme was carried out by means of vouchers.

From the very beginning, we knew we had to privatise the economy we inherited as quickly as possible. We did not want to leave our shortly-to-be-privatised-firms in a pre-privatisation limbo in which they would rapidly lose their value. For that reason, we did not have any great interest in the maximisation of the proceeds of privatisation. The speed of privatisation was seen as an asset, not a liability.

At the same time, we liberalised, deregulated and desubsidised the economy radically and quickly. This liberalising tendency lasted, to our great regret, for only part of the last 25 years. Partly because of the slowing of our own reform momentum (for domestic political reasons), but mostly because of our applying to and finally entering the EU, we started a reverse process. That is why our economy is more regulated and subsidised (and harmonised and standardised) now than 10-15 years ago. The final blow came with the recent financial and economic crisis, and with the methods of its “treatment” by means of very extensive government intervention.

Our economy is now more regulated and subsidised than we imagined at the time of the collapse of the fall of Communism. We did not believe it could ever happen. It seemed to us that the masterminding of the economy from above was so discredited by the Communist experience that it could never return. We were wrong.

We also assumed that everyone understood that government failure is inevitably much bigger than any imaginable market failure, that the visible hand of the state is always much more dangerous than the invisible hand, and that vertical relations in society must be less productive (and less democratic) than horizontal relations. Again, we were wrong.

Twenty-five years ago, I warned against creating a negative expectations-reality gap because it would have undermined our reform process. I have to accept that I myself feel such a huge expectation-reality gap now. I expected to live in a much more free and democratic society and economy than is the case today.

It was caused partly by the victory of social democracy in our country and partly by the importing of the European economic system, with its overregulation, high taxation and redistribution, welfare state, and fascination with all kinds of anti-market measures, connected nowadays mostly with environmentalism, with its anti-democratic social ideology which successfully hides its real substance while pretending to care about nature, the environment and our Blue Planet. We may be oversensitive in this respect because of our long Communist experience but we see many similar phenomena, tendencies, ambitions   and arguments around us today.

To allow this to happen means that we have learned nothing from history, and especially from the Communist era. It means that celebrating the end of Communism is inappropriate. It is creeping back in different forms, under different flags and slogans, without sufficient resistance from us.

The post Communism’s Comeback? appeared first on Standpoint.

In 1991 America appeared completely victorious in the Cold War and in the Middle East. The Soviet Union had collapsed, China was poor and rattled, and Saddam Hussein had been trounced. Yet, when one surveys the world today, the West sees itself outmanoeuvred in Ukraine by a revanchist Russia, challenged in the Pacific by Communist China, and embarrassed by chaos in the Middle East after a second squandered victory in Iraq.  One might wonder whether history repeats itself — and why.     

Part of the answer is that victories can look more decisive than they really are. A devastated nation may regrow its economy or population in a generation. A victorious one may be saddled with debts that take decades to pay down. The main reason, though, is complacency. Victorious powers convince themselves that their prevailing values were the foundation of their economic or military success. In reality it is often the other way round: economic and military superiority produce cultural dominance.  They must be maintained if that dominance is to endure. But victors find it easier to luxuriate in the apparent success of their values than to maintain the strategic foundations that support them, or to do the hard work necessary to entrench those values in a defeated enemy.  The notable exception was the Allies’ reconstruction of Japan and Germany after 1945. 

But there was no successful “de-Leninisation” to match the de-Nazification of Germany. In contrast, allowing the experience of capitalist democracy to be so disastrous in Nineties Russia was as big an error as it was allowing it to be so disastrous in Twenties Germany. As so often in the past, the victors allowed humiliation then reassertion, rather than combining generosity with firmness.

So could the Cold War victory over Communism yet be squandered? Not if the West stays united and willing to pay the price of enforcing its values, by making co-operation more profitable than hostility. History has shown us that victors must be robust as well as magnanimous if they are to deter old opponents and avoid having to refight conflicts they thought had been won.

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