Yet the truth is that many dictators were very well-read — bibliophiles even — in comparison to today’s political leaders, who rarely give the impression of ever having read anything more challenging than a cabinet briefing.  Their vast and impenetrable bibliographies, much praised by sycophants, reflect a yearning for that which they could not have: the respect accorded those who actually can write great books.

Dictators also tend to spoil their pet authors: Stalin’s gifting Gorky a mansion may have reflected a Faustian pact on the author’s part, but there were few downsides to Castro’s providing Gabriel García Márquez with a house in Cuba, or the signature lobster dish named in his honour.

In short, the bonfires and bans are actually a sign that dictators revere the written word and fear its power. Nobody would bother to suppress something they considered irrelevant. But on what basis was this reverence established? What literature did they read?

Vladimir Lenin, the father of the Russian Revolution, was a prolific writer: the most complete edition of his collected works runs to 55 volumes, excluding sensitive documents that lay in the Soviet archives until the USSR collapsed. As the son of a regional school inspector and hereditary nobleman, he grew up in a world of books. Supported by his parents, then by the rents of tenants, then by bank robberies organised by Stalin, he always had plenty of time to read.

Lenin not only read Marx and Engels, but Russian radicals such as Sergei Nechaev and Georgy Plekhanov. He also read the books of his enemies, dedicating time to studying and savaging the work of theorists he despised (his own Materialism and Empirio-criticism was the result of a sustained hate-read of rival Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov and his sources).

But there was another, more literary side to Lenin’s tastes. As a youth he enjoyed Virgil, Ovid and Horace in the original Latin. He was also familiar with Goethe and the works of Russian satirists such as Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin, as well as (then) contemporary authors such as Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, whom he befriended.

Dostoevsky, and avant-garde writers such as Mayakovsky left him cold, but Tolstoy was another matter. In his essay “Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution”, Lenin forgave the author his pacifism and religiosity, and praised him for his portrayal of the people’s striving for “a better lot”. The American novelist and activist Jack London was another favourite. As a wheelchair-bound Lenin teetered on the brink of death in 1924, his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya read him the story “Love of Life” in which a man dying of hunger fights a starving wolf and wins. Lenin enjoyed it a lot. The next story was less satisfying. Soon afterwards he died.

But Lenin’s favourite book was What is to be Done?,  written in a St Petersburg prison by the anti-Tsarist journalist Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Didactic, politically radical and not very well-written, the novel is no classic; yet it had a huge impact on a generation of revolutionaries. Indeed, according to Orlando Figes, “It converted more people to the cause of revolution than all the works of Marx and Engels put together.”

Lenin read it five times in a single summer and carried a photo of Chernyshevsky in his wallet. He consciously modelled himself after one of its minor characters, Rakhmetev, an austere revolutionary who cuts out everything that distracts him from the cause of revolution. Duly inspired, Lenin abandoned such pleasures as chess and the study of the classics while also taking up weightlifting. And so it was that a bad book overwhelmed the influence of all the good books he ever read.

Stalin was obsessed with culture and ascribed near-metaphysical power to writers. In 1932, he famously toasted a group of authors meeting in Maxim Gorky’s house as “engineers of the human soul”. A poet in his youth, he would on occasion call writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov or Boris Pasternak for late- night telephone chats and he corresponded with Alexander Afinogenov, a leading playwright of the time.

Unlike Lenin, however, he was not born into a world of learning. His father was a drunken cobbler, his mother a cleaner. The only education available to a poor boy in rural Georgia was that of a priest and so his mother pulled strings to get him accepted into the Tiflis seminary. Later, he would adapt much of what he learned there to provide the USSR with its own array of secular icons, catechisms and sacred relics (foremost among them Lenin’s mummified body). Like many teenagers, he was also drawn to that which was forbidden, which in the seminary included high-quality literature of the kind you couldn’t pay most teenagers to read these days.

Thus Stalin devoured Balzac, Zola, Maupassant and Hugo, as well as the Russian authors Lenin had read. Stalin had more time for Dostoevsky, enjoying The Devils despite its portrayal of Russian radicals as pathological murderers and liars (perhaps as with many readers of Paradise Lost, he found the bad guys more interesting). He also enjoyed Victor Hugo’s classic Ninety-Three, in which the Jacobins who suppressed resistance to the Revolution in France’s Vendée  in 1793 are celebrated as heroes.

As with Lenin, however, early exposure to great writing did not inoculate him against the appeal of lower-quality work. Stalin’s favorite author was Alexander Kazbegi, a Georgian noble who wrote melodramas packed with cultural detail. Stalin so loved The Parricide ­­— the tale of a Robin Hood-style bandit who fought against aristocratic Russians — that he adopted the name of the book’s hero, Koba, as his primary pseudonym for many years. Like Lenin, he chose the simple over the sophisticated and saw himself reflected in fables of the fight against oppression.

But what about dictators on the Right? Mussolini projected a strongman image and publicly glorified violence. He also had a puerile, scatological side: his Fascist bands forced their foes to drink castor oil until they lost control of their bowels. Hitler, meanwhile, was burning thousands of books in public within months of becoming Chancellor (including those of Jack London) and chased more than 2,000 authors out of Germany, among them such literary titans as Thomas Mann and Erich Maria Remarque.

Yet these men, too, were steeped in literature. Mussolini, who had trained as a teacher and could read in several languages, had a roving eye when it came to books. He knew the classics: as a youth he had memorised chunks of Dante which he recited aloud as he strolled through town. While living in Switzerland in his early twenties, he practically camped out in the library of Lausanne University, where he read Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and the French philosopher Georges Sorel, who denied the goodness of human nature and extolled violence.

His own writings further demonstrate the catholicity of his reading. His first publication, in an educational magazine, was an essay on the Russian novel. He wrote about Frederick Klopstock, a German poet who wrote an epic religious poem entitled “The Messiah”, and in another essay described Nietzsche  as “the most extraordinary mind of the last quarter of the last century”. He was so impressed by Kropotkin’s Words of a Rebel that he translated it into Italian. In 1927, he became honorary president of the International Mark Twain Society.

Mussolini attracted Thomas Marinetti, author of the Futurist manifesto, and the Modernist playwright Luigi Pirandello to the party. Meanwhile, he stole heavily from the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who had seized power in the city state of Fiume after the First World War. The Roman salutes, black shirts and war cry of Fascism were D’Annunzio’s inventions, which Mussolini appropriated (D’Annunzio later joined the party and was rewarded with a national edition of his works). In short, for all his bluster and buffoonery, Mussolini was a literary voyager, far more widely read than either Lenin or Stalin.

As for Hitler, the homeless ex-corporal turned anti-Semitic book-burner was also a stupendous bibliophile, although his own writings provide little evidence of the fact. In Mein Kampf,  he cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but is otherwise keen to present himself as sui generis. However, upon his death, his library contained some 16,000 volumes. Hitler had claimed that he read one book a night (even at that rate, it would have taken him close to 44 years to work through every book on his shelves).

Hitler had a writer-mentor, Dietrich Eckart, who had written a highly successful adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. He  owned many books on the occult, including the 18th-century Rosicrucian textbook Annulus Platonus, and the more snappily titled The Dead Are Alive! from 1922. But he also had a special fondness for the literature of a land he could not subjugate: England. Hitler preferred Shakespeare to Goethe and he was also fond of tales of far-off lands, such as Robinson Crusoeand Gulliver’s Travels.

Yet Hitler was primarily a pulp fiction enthusiast obsessed with the faux-Western tales of the German novelist Karl May, who cast the white man as villains and the Indians as heroes — his Indian brave Old Shatterhand remains famous in Germany today. When the war went awry, Hitler, it is said, advised his generals to read May’s books to learn about strategy. He also brought a set to with him to his bunker.

Mao Zedong’s bedroom was full of books even as his minions in the Cultural Revolution wrought havoc outside. The Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha enjoyed vampire novels. Fidel Castro loved Ernest Hemingway and reviewed Gabriel García Márquez’s novels before publication. In 2015, the Ayatollah Khameini took to Twitter to praise the works of Mikhail Sholokhov and Alexei Tolstoy, Leo’s less talented, pro-Bolshevik cousin.

The reading habits of dictators have long-lasting consequences. Lenin and Stalin’s preference for the classics over the avant-garde helped keep Russian literature half-preserved in amber for the best part of a century. This legacy was not entirely terrible: some great literature enjoyed huge print runs. There were other curious consequences: Jack London had a lake named after him in the Magadan region.

Meanwhile, new literature was severely compromised. Under Stalin, the Socialist Realists wrote their own interpretations of the socially-engaged literature of the past as flat pabulum aimed at moral uplift and political instruction. Writing that aspired simply to entertain, such as detective fiction, did not exist. The dictators were serious people and literature had to follow suit.

What does this mean for our understanding of literature itself? At the very least, the fact that some of history’s worst mass murderers were avid bibliophiles should kill any lingering notion that there is something innately ennobling about the book. Literature is far too ambiguous for that. We take what we want from it and dictators are no different. When Lenin wrote his essay on the religious-vegetarian-pacifist Tolstoy, he focused on the prophet’s “pent-up hatred”. When Mussolini read Dante, he enjoyed the poet’s invective best of all.

It is also striking that all these well-read men preferred mediocrity to masterpieces. Just as their political theories reduced the ambiguities of history to simplistic narratives of good and evil, they were most inspired by crude tales with a moral or political message.

They could burn and censor books or shoot and exile writers, but their own libraries contained a truth: that all their efforts at controlling the written word were, in the long run, futile. Literature is a slippery thing: bad books, too, can inspire doubt, dissent and even revolution in the hearts of those who desire it.

The post Why good books could not deter bad leaders appeared first on Standpoint.

We’re following in the footsteps of a squad of British Indian troops. On April 13, 1919, 50 Gurkhas, Baluchi and Pathan Muslims and a few Sikhs armed with Enfield rifles marched in, commanded by a couple of British officers. They took up position, facing a huge crowd estimated at between 5,000 and 30,000. Thirty seconds later, their commanding officer, Brigadier-General Reginald (“Rex”) Dyer, ordered his men to open fire.

“When fire was opened, the whole crowd seemed to sink to the ground,” Dyer’s personal bodyguard later noted. “A whole flutter of white garments, with however a spreading out towards the main gateway, and some individuals could be seen climbing the high wall.” The squad fired exactly 1,650 rounds, non-stop for six to ten minutes until the entire crowd had fled or fallen. Today,  the walls still bear the highlighted bullet-holes.

Even in the sunshine with holiday-makers around me, there is something eerie and deeply moving about this place. I read a large plaque near the entrance, estimating the casualties at 2,000. Sukumar Mukherji, my guide to the Bagh and its third-generation caretaker since 1988, well remembers the Queen visiting in 1997 when Prince Philip remarked with characteristic frankness that this casualty figure was an exaggeration. He had served with Dyer’s son in the Second World War and been told it was only a few hundred.

The precise casualty figure, though hotly contested, seems irrelevant. This is largely because of difficulties in estimating how many of those wounded in the Bagh later died in their homes or on the streets. Best estimates are that between 500 and 600 people were killed and roughly three times that number wounded.

In October 1919,  the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, set up the Hunter judicial inquiry under a British high court judge to report on the Punjab unrest, with five British members and three Indians, including the eminent Bombay jurist, Sir Chimanlal Setalvad. The committee reported 379 people killed and up to 1,200 wounded. Richard Attenborough’s famous 1982 biopic of Mahatma Gandhi had a highly emotive scene of the massacre, showing many women and children in the crowd. The reality was far more banal. Only two women were listed among the fatalities, reflecting the fact that Punjabi women rarely joined such large gatherings and would certainly not have ventured out during riots.

In a narrow Amritsar alleyway, I visit the aged descendants of survivors of the massacre. They tell me how their uncle, then only a child, insisted on accompanying his father to the mass meeting on the maidan. While his father died in the firing, the boy survived under a heap of dead bodies.

How and why did any of this happen? Was it a pre-meditated slaughter or the massive over-reaction of an insecure man, panicked by a hostile mob of thousands?

Certainly, the Punjab in 1919 was a place of widespread agrarian unrest, to which the First World War had added its own pressures. The Punjab had supplied roughly 60 per cent of the British Indian Army, the world’s largest-ever volunteer fighting force, numbering 1.5 million men. While there had been no conscription in India, there had been allegations of forced recruitment. New tensions were caused by widespread demobilisation after the war ended.

The Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab was Sir Michael O’Dwyer, a Catholic Irishman born into a poor family in Tipperary. Like Dyer, he was more loyal to the British Raj than its most aristocratic officers. The unrest coincided with a major initiative to democratise the Raj — which, like most autocracies, was weakest while it reformed. A declaration by the War Cabinet in London in 1917 held out the goal of responsible government for India on the lines of the white dominions in Canada and Australia. Unfortunately, the reforms — largely the brainchild of the Liberal Jewish Secretary of State, Edwin Montagu — were preceded in March 1919 by the notorious Rowlatt Act, renewing the preventive detention powers introduced in  wartime.  Wild rumours circulated about the iniquities of the Rowlatt Act, including even that it could be used to get a husband out of the way if a policeman coveted his wife.

Mahatma Gandhi, until then still loyal to the Raj and locked in a power struggle for control of the congress with the Irish theosophist Annie Besant, who advocated a constitutionalist demand for Home Rule, led the opposition to the legislation and launched his own brand of direct action.

Though intended to be peaceful, his anti-Rowlatt satyagraha (non-violent protest) rapidly did turn violent, especially in the Punjab, with mobs virtually seizing control of the provincial capital, Lahore. The authorities were forced to take refuge in the Mughal fort, besieged by crowds armed with makeshift pikes, shouting “Let’s kill the white pigs.” Significantly, there were unprecedented displays of Hindu-Muslim unity, encouraged by Gandhi’s somewhat opportunist espousal of the Khilafat movement, in which the Indian Muslim masses were mobilised with the cry of “Islam in danger”. They wrongly believed the British  were attacking the caliphate in Turkey. In  reality, it was being abolished by the Turkish secularist Kemal Ataturk against British advice.

Telegraph and telephone wires were cut all over the province, railway lines uprooted and British communications seriously disrupted. Not surprisingly, there were many in the Raj who thought they were facing a major revolt with echoes of 1857. Their worst fears were confirmed when a poster appeared on the clock-tower next to Amritsar’s fabled Golden Temple, calling on people to be prepared to “die and kill”.

On April 10, a peaceful Gandhian hartal protest turned violent with an angry mob rampaging through Amritsar. The town hall was set on fire, the telegraph office and several post offices were looted. By now, almost all Europeans had been evacuated to the old fort outside the city walls. In a scene reminiscent of the infamous 1857 Siege of Lucknow, women and children were lined up on camp beds in unsanitary conditions. Meanwhile, the mob vented their fury on the few European civilians who fell into their hands. Attacks on two banks in the city centre resulted in the brutal murder of three British  staff,  who were bludgeoned to death, with one of them set on fire while still alive.

Two days later, a train was stopped by a local mob, its European passengers were beaten up and two railway staff bludgeoned to death, like a British electrician found with his head bashed in. The most emotive attack was on Miss Marcella Sherwood, the 45-year-old superintendent of the city’s mission schools. She insisted on cycling into the city alone to close down the five schools she managed. Riding though the narrow alleyways of the old city, she suddenly came upon a large crowd. She tried to escape, took a wrong turning and fell into their hands. She was stripped naked and mercilessly beaten and kicked by a group of young men. Local residents carried her to a mission school where an Indian doctor bandaged her wounds, and she hovered between life and death for several days.

One of Miss Sherwood’s first visitors was Dyer, summoned to Amritsar with about 500 predominantly Gurkha troops to help restore order by civil authorities unable to cope. Though very popular with his troops and fluent in Hindustani, Dyer was something of a loner among his fellow-officers.

Second-generation country-born and bred and the scion of a family of brewers, Dyer was considered to have a chip on his shoulder when dealing with colleagues “from the top drawer”.

He was said to be deeply distressed by Miss Sherwood’s plight and by the wider breakdown of order in the city. On the morning of April 13, Dyer marched his troops through Amritsar, stopping at 19 locations to read out a proclamation prohibiting gatherings of more than eight people. It’s questionable how widely this ban was publicised since Dyer, ignorant of the city’s layout, took a route that left out its entire central and eastern parts, including both the Sikh Golden Temple and the neighbouring Jallianwala Bagh.

A counter-proclamation by a boy with a tin-can announced a public meeting at 4 o’clock that very afternoon at Jallianwala Bagh. The meeting had been planned the previous day and was not in defiance of Dyer’s proclamation. But to him it appeared a direct provocation. Dyer claimed in his later accounts that the massacre that followed was carefully premeditated, like the unrest it was designed to quell. The  facts suggest that neither was the case. To start with, Dyer’s decision to take along 40 Gurkhas armed only with kukris, in addition to the 50-strong firing squad, was itself practical evidence that he was expecting some hand-to-hand fighting in the narrow streets.

Dyer himself had never before been to the Bagh, so was surprised to find that his two armoured vehicles, mounted with machine-guns, had to be abandoned at the narrow entrance. Then he seems to have been genuinely shocked by the sheer size of the gathering facing him.

“The assembly of the crowd that afternoon,” he later wrote, “was for all practical purposes a declaration of war by leaders whose hope and belief was that I should fail to take up the challenge . . . I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself . . . I realised that my force was small and untrained, and to hesitate might induce attack . . . The responsibility was very great. I had made up my mind that if I fired I must fire well and strong so that it would have a full effect.”

Dyer followed up the massacre with a highly effective curfew, marching through the city himself that night to enforce it. The same deathly calm might have been said to have descended on the province and on the country as a whole. Gandhi called off his anti-Rowlett Act satyagraha, calling it a “Himalayan blunder”. The Punjab now became the most quiescent province in the Raj, dominated by a conservative coalition of Muslim landlords, Sikh princes and a Hindu business elite, delighted by what they saw as Dyer’s firm action to restore public order. The priests in charge of the Sikh Golden Temple were no exception.

Only three days after the slaughter at Jallianwala, Dyer was invited to the Golden Temple for an event extraordinary in Sikh history. The priests had decided to confer on him the highly unusual honour of a public conversion to Sikhism. The General politely thanked them for the honour, but objected that he could not as a British officer let his hair grow long. A priest laughed: “We will let you off the long hair.” Dyer then protested: “But I cannot give up smoking.” “That you must do,” said the priest, “but we will let you give it up gradually.” “That I promise you,” joked the General, “but only at the rate of one cigarette a year.” The priests chuckled and proceeded with the initiation.

During the subsequent months, Gandhi initially held back from any direct criticism of the government, assuming that the promised judicial inquiry would do its job. “The fury that has been spent on General Dyer is . . . largely misdirected,” he wrote in his journal Young India. “No doubt the shooting was frightful, the loss of innocent life deplorable. But the slow torture, degradation and emasculation that followed was much worse.”

He was referring to the infamous “crawling order”, in which Dyer ordered that for five days anyone using the alleyway where Miss Sherwood had been assaulted had to crawl on all fours. Martial law was proclaimed in the province immediately after the Jallianwala massacre, involving hundreds of arrests and some fancy punishments such as being made to skip, salaaming with the forehead touching the ground, and even being made to compose pro-Raj poetry.

From the outset, opinions were deeply divided both as to the enormity of what had occurred at Jallianwala and Dyer’s culpability for it. “We’re in a bit of a mess out here,” wrote Malcolm Darling, a liberal-minded ICS officer in Lahore, to his close friend, the novelist E.M. Forster. “Racial hatred in towns leaping in a twink to pillage and murder, murder too of the most horrible kind. Then panic and cruelty — the two go together . . . God it makes me sick to think of it.”

But there were many who took an opposite view. “No European who was in Amritsar or Lahore doubts that for some days there was a real danger of the entire European population being massacred,” wrote one of the women who had taken refuge in Amritsar fort. “It was General Dyer’s action alone saved them.” For almost a year, the issues were investigated and hotly debated by the Hunter inquiry, which finally reported in March 1920, with the three Indian members submitting their own minority report.

By the time the seven-volume report of the Hunter Committee, hundreds of pages long, was finally completed, the distance between its British and Indian members had become only too apparent. According to Setalvad, “The discussions, which were on occasions heated, led to some unpleasantness, particularly because of the intolerant attitude adopted by Lord Hunter towards any difference of opinion. During one of the discussions I had with Lord Hunter, he lost his temper and said: ‘You people (meaning myself and my Indian colleagues) want to drive the British out of the country.’ This naturally annoyed me very much and I said: ‘The driving out process will only become necessary if the British are represented in this country by people as short-sighted and intolerant as yourself.’ After this, though under the same roof, we, the Indian members, ceased to talk to Lord Hunter.”

The minority report submitted by the three Indians went further than the majority in its condemnation of Dyer, now generally regarded by the Raj as an embarrassment to be removed from the scene as soon as possible. A couple of weeks later, his wife and he boarded a ship in Bombay bound for England. Most of the Anglo-Indian community, then defined as Britons settled in India, saw Dyer as “the saviour of Punjab”, and he was given a hero’s send-off, with a testimonial signed by more than 200 survivors of the Punjab troubles.

On the nationalist side, the massacre had the opposite effect. The Nobel prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore, then probably the Indian best known abroad, reflected the prevailing mood when he returned his knighthood in protest. Gandhi, too, returned the medals awarded for his wartime services to the Empire and formally withdrew his loyalty to the British government. The massacre had the unintended consequence of catapulting him to unrivalled leadership of Congress, isolating or converting moderate constitutionalists like C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru, who would have preferred to work the new reforms as a step towards dominion status.

The massacre finally came before the House of Commons during a debate on Dyer’s future on July 8, 1920. In his opening speech Edwin Montagu asked the House, “Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation and subordination, and frightfulness, or are you going to rest it upon the goodwill . . . of the people of your Indian Empire?” The debate turned highly acrimonious, and Montagu was repeatedly interrupted and heckled by Conservatives. One eminent Tory later recalled: “I think I have never seen the House so fiercely angry — and he [Montagu] threw fuel on the flames. A Jew, rounding on an Englishman and throwing him to the wolves — that was the feeling.”

It was Winston Churchill’s speech as Secretary for War that ultimately won the day. “Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopœia,” he proclaimed. “What happened at Jallianwala Bagh is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire . . . It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation . . . Such ideas are absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things.”

The government won with 230 to 129 votes for its motion upholding the censure of Dyer. A week later, he received the letter from the War Office informing him of the Army Council’s final decision to offer him no further employment, but to take no disciplinary action either. Dyer then formally resigned and, as far as the government was concerned, that was the end of the matter. The conservative Morning Post launched a patriotic appeal for funds for the benefit of Dyer, portrayed as an honest officer stabbed in the back by armchair liberals. More than £26,000 was raised, which meant that Dyer could buy himself a house and retire in comfort in rural England. In poor health, he died a few years later.

It’s ironic that that the Jallianwala massacre made the Raj far more tolerant of dissent in future and far more reluctant to use its firepower. The Rowlatt Act, over which so much blood had been spilled, became a dead letter, quietly repealed a few years later. New military manuals issued for engagement with civilians meant that there were no more Dyers after 1919 and no more massacres in British India. So reluctant were British troops to fire on civilians that they even refused to intervene against murderous mobs during the partition riots of 1947.

On a more positive note, Marcella Sherwood, aged 70, returned to the Punjab in 1947 to help with relief work among the thousands of uprooted refugees. When the British Prime Minister David Cameron visited Jallianwala Bagh in 2013, he wrote an apologetic message in the visitor’s book: “This was a deeply shameful event in British history, one that Winston Churchill rightly described at the time as ‘monstrous’. We must never forget what happened here. And in remembering we must ensure that the United Kingdom stands up for the right to peaceful protest around the world.”

Would more formal apologies matter to descendants of victims of the massacre? Those I interviewed complained vociferously that they had been neglected by the politicians who had for generations made political capital out of them. Others pointed out that Jallianwala is important not so much for the numbers killed, but because it changed the course of history. It remains a potent reminder that violence breeds violence in a spiral in which there are no winners, only losers.

The post Amritsar: beginning of the end of Empire appeared first on Standpoint.

Whether or not the Romans did in fact introduce the cultivation of wine to Palestine — it seems hard to credit, given what we are told in chapter 9 of Genesis about Noah, the vineyard he planted, and the unfortunate consequences which overtook him when “he drank of the wine, and was drunken” — it is nevertheless easy to believe that the Romans, restless and innovative above all in agriculture, greatly improved the quality of wine wherever they went.

It is the Elder Pliny who in book XIV of his Natural History provides a wealth of information about the cultivation of vines and the making of wine in the Roman empire. The Romans had not always been particularly devoted to the grape, even though when Pliny is writing he estimates that Italy produced two thirds of all the various kinds of wine, and was in some sense wine’s natural homeland:

Supremacy in respect of the vine is to such a degree the special distinction of Italy that even with this one possession she can be thought to have vanquished all the good things of the world, even in the matter of scents, since when the vine is in blossom all over the country it gives an unsurpassable scent.

Pliny dates the beginnings of wine’s importance to the Romans around the 600th year after the founding of the city (that is, about 150 BC).  For the earliest Romans the most important symbolic liquid had been milk.  Romulus used milk for libations, and Numa forbad funeral pyres to be sprinkled with wine — presumably because wine was then such a scarce commodity. Ancient records of votive offerings specified milk, not wine.

But once their interest in wine had been aroused, the Romans pursued it with their customary energy. Pliny tells us about several Roman wine-growers who enjoyed especial success. There was Acilius Sthenelus, a plebeian, the son of a freedman, who improved a vineyard of not more than 60 iugera in the region of Mentana which he sold for 400,000 sesterces. Above all there was the grammarian Remmius Palaemon (an early example of the natural affinity between literature and wine), who bought a farm for 600,000 sesterces in the same region of Mentana. He had the vineyards dug and re-trenched under the superintendence of Sthenelus, and finally got the estate into such superb condition that within eight years a single vintage while still hanging on the trees was knocked down to a purchaser at a price of 400,000 sesterces. 

Two facts about ancient viticulture which are at variance with modern practice can be deduced from this account of conspicuously successful Roman wine-making.  The first is that the Romans (rather like, until comparatively recently, their Italian descendants) seem to have prized volume of fruit above all things, and thus had not realised the benefits to the quality of the resulting wine which can be achieved by restricting the crop and concentrating the energy of the plant into the most promising fruit. The second is that they liked to train their vines to grow up trees, sometimes to such a height that the standard contract for a vineyard worker stipulated that the cost of his funeral and grave would be covered should he fall and die while about his work.

But in other respects the Romans had anticipated some modern practices and attitudes. Pliny, at least, was committed to the concept we now associate with the French word terroir, namely the twin propositions that some sites are uniquely well-suited to particular vines, and that the resulting wine is most properly thought of as an expression of its site, in which the type of grape and the interventions of the winemaker play less important roles:

It is the country and the soil that matter, not the grape, and . . . it is superfluous to go on with a long enumeration of kinds, since the same vine has a different value in different places.

The “passi” wines that Pliny especially praises, where the grapes have been dried in the sun, have obvious modern counterparts in the Amarone wines made in Valpolicella. Our undergraduate drinking societies probably have little to learn from the drinking games of antiquity, in which “one man gets a prize for tipsiness on condition of his eating as much as he has drunk; another drinks as many cups as are demanded of him by a throw of the dice.” Pliny’s counsel for the situation of a cellar — try to make it north-facing, and keep it away from dunghills and fig-trees, as smells can easily pass into wine — still seems like good advice, even if the sources of unwanted smells are today likely to be rather different.

Other details are surprising or hard to understand. It is difficult to see much good coming of the ancient practice of mixing wine with sea-water (although we should remember the still current maxim — surprisingly not often heard in Burgundy — that vines like to breathe sea air). It would be particularly handy to know more about a wonderful grape which produces strong wine which nevertheless does not intoxicate; as well as to know which modern grape is descended from its dangerous opposite, which infallibly produces a hangover which lasts until the following lunchtime. It is not clear why Pliny believes that the thinner a wine is the more aroma it possesses, or why he thinks that an infallible sign of imminent spoilage is when the wine changes the colour of a sheet of lead dipped into it.

Other stray facts are simply tantalising.  Pliny describes the wine made from a particular variety of vine which flourished in the region of Vienne, in the Rhône valley, which of itself produced a flavour of pitch in the wine. This was very much to the Roman taste, and the discovery of a vine which produced this flavour naturally would have been very exciting, because otherwise it had to be produced artificially and expensively through the use of smoke or additives. Might this grape have been an ancestor of modern-day Syrah, the noblest red grape of the area round Vienne, which even today can give a tarry taste to wine?

The post Veni, Vidi, Vinum appeared first on Standpoint.

I hand over an extra £6.50 (a paltry contribution, considering that it costs more than £6,000 a day to keep the cathedral open), and begin the ascent. Does a spiral of breathless tourists constitute a congregation? Not a word passes between us as we progress in single file up each uneven step, but as the handrail grows clammy and our sighs fall together in time, we might as well be hymning in unison.

The cathedral has recently become the set for a new £100 million drama series. The BBC had hoped to make it, but lost out to online film streaming service Netflix. The Crown, which follows the lives and marriage of Queen Elizabeth II (Claire Foy) and Prince Philip (Matt Smith) and is due for release next year, is being marketed as the story of “two houses, two courts, one crown”.

American viewers (no doubt the primary target audience) will not be disappointed with the backdrop to the wedding scene, at least. No less than Westminster Abbey, where the royal wedding actually took place, Ely Cathedral is the perfect encapsulation of the history of England and her architecture.

The surviving building dates back to the 11th century, although 400 years earlier the Saxon princess Etheldreda established a monastery here, of which she became abbess. From the second gallery of the tower, perhaps a third of the way up, the eye can even separate the layers of the past: the architectural orders, Victorian restorations, and shadows of the Dissolution, before falling upon the traces of one of the rounded Romanesque arches that has been converted into a stronger Gothic one.

The closer one gets to reaching the final, 288th step of the West Tower, the more these changes seem to matter. Another of the towers collapsed in 1322, having been built on uneven ground. It is hard to believe it, for the surrounding Cambridgeshire landscape looks so flat from the summit that one finds oneself forming a pretty good cinematographic picture of the invading Danes stomping over these parts in the tenth century.

Ely from above is a handsome patchwork of biscuit-brown, largely Georgian buildings and neat walled gardens. Below are what remain of the monastic quarters and the house where Oliver Cromwell once lived, now a museum dedicated to the rogue himself.

One suspects that the cathedral would be better used to inspire a 1,000-year English epic of its own, rather than as a jolly backdrop for yet another royal biopic. Still, anything to keep it open.

Writing of Ely in 1722, Daniel Defoe observed how the cathedral “totters so much with every gust of wind”. The building feels more stable today. In the 14th century a magnificent Octagon was erected to replace the fallen Norman tower, while the spectacular Lady Chapel — the largest in England — was constructed to the north of the Presbytery. The chapel bears the scars of the Reformation, but goodness, does it make one glad for surviving the heady descent from the roof.  

The post Royal Ely appeared first on Standpoint.

The Coventry raid has stuck in the collective memory for a number of reasons. It was, as Frederick Taylor says, a “sinister novelty”, the first time in Britain’s war that a smallish city had been subjected to concentrated aerial attack. The results were spectacular. However its importance lies not so much in what happened as for what the raid revealed and what it initiated, as these two books in their different ways admirably demonstrate.

Coventry in 1940 was a complex place. Its medieval core was surrounded by motor industry factories modified to churn out war materiel. The buoyant job market had drawn in many outsiders and the place had a brash boomtown air with a 1,500-seat cinema and a host of pubs where relatively well-paid munitions workers could spend their spare cash.

It was a natural target for the Luftwaffe which, having failed to wipe Fighter Command from the skies in the summer, was now seeking to bomb Britain into submission. The high death rate would allow British propaganda to present the raid as aimed primarily at civilians and therefore an example of innate German beastliness, and that is certainly how it played in the American press.

The fact was that by either side’s rules of engagement the city’s war industries made it a legitimate target. But it was also true that the Luftwaffe hoped to kill large numbers of workers as well — easy enough to do given that many of the factories lay near the city centre, surrounded by residential streets. The Germans believed they were delivering a double blow that would hurt military production and crush civilian morale.

Both sides clung to the belief that air raids could fatally undermine the will of non-combatants to support the war effort. Publicly, the authorities declared that Britons could take anything Hitler could throw at them. Privately, they were not so sure. Considerable resources were devoted to discovering how ordinary people were reacting to events. The quasi-official Mass Observation organisation spent much of the Blitz rushing from city to city quizzing the inhabitants on their feelings. The results were treated with surprising reverence, given that the methodology amounted to little more than a journalistic vox pop.

It was the capital that suffered most at the beginning of the Blitz and Londoners had passed the guts test. But it was understood that the great size of the place lessened the physical and psychological impact of the Luftwaffe’s blows. Coventry had a population of around 240,000 and the intensity of the trauma was magnified accordingly so that as Tom Harrisson, a co-founder of Mass Observation put it, every bomb felt personal.

Both these books describe intimately what the city went through that night and chart precisely the experiences and reactions of all involved. It is a moving story and an uplifting one with numerous examples of  courage and decency and few of bad behaviour.

Once the bombers departed, the population counted the dead and surveyed the wreckage with dumb horror. Their morale had survived one battering. The great official worry was whether it could endure another. Mercifully, the Luftwaffe did not return on the following nights and spirits were raised by a visit from the King. Coventrians got back to work and the place was up and running again in remarkably short order. 

For the authorities this was a huge relief. There were other revelations that were not so welcome. The most important was the realisation that the RAF was incapable of defending British cities from night attacks.

Ultra and other sources had given reasonable warning of the raid. Evacuating Coventry, as Taylor explains in the process of demolishing the hoary old conspiracy theory that the intelligence was suppressed by Churchill to protect the Ultra secret, was simply not feasible. Instead, a plan codenamed “Cold Water” was in place to intercept and punish the attackers and mount counter-strikes against German targets. It failed miserably. The onboard radar with which some of the fighters were equipped was useless and the defenders were unable to locate the attackers even in the bright moonlight. Only one of the 500 attacking aircraft was shot down, and that by anti-aircraft fire. The RAF continental bombing operations also failed to do any worthwhile damage.

The debacle demonstrated the yawning gap between the claims the air force made for itself and its real abilities. Everything was the wrong way round. The German air force was designed to support ground operations, not to mount a strategic bombing campaign. The opposite was true of the RAF. Yet the Luftwaffe was much better at hitting Home Front targets than Bomber Command was.

The Luftwaffe used a system of radio navigation beams — Knickebein and X-Gerät — which guided them to their targets. The RAF at this stage was still often relying on dead reckoning. It was little wonder that British bombers frequently hit the wrong location or that much of their ordnance was dumped in open country.

In time these deficiencies would be rectified. But until navigation and bombing aids improved the RAF had to e seen to do something. In one way the example of Coventry made it easier for it to step down a path which it had already been considering but had held back from for fear of the propaganda consequences. Two weeks before the raid, the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, had directed that Bomber Command should select targets in populous areas. If the bombs didn’t hit the intended targets as they almost certainly wouldn’t, they could at least “affect the morale of the German people”. After Coventry, the light flashed green. A month later British bombers attacked the centre of Mannheim killing 34, all but one of them civilians.

Coventry made a great impression on the RAF top brass. They deduced, rightly, that concentrated bombing with a mixture of incendiaries and high explosives could produce devastating results. But they also concluded that the resulting death and destruction would have a catastrophic effect on German morale. It was a lazy assumption, based on an irrational belief that Britons could take it but Germans could not. It took a long time for its falsity to be demonstrated. By then Coventry had been avenged a thousand times over.

The post The First City To Be Coventried appeared first on Standpoint.

Wolsey’s imaginative approach to college funds is recalled in an hilarious memoir by one of his more recent successors as senior bursar, R.W. “Bill” Johnson, the politics tutor at Magdalen for more than 20 years and a renowned journalist and commentator, particularly on the woes of his native South Africa, where he now resides. A terrible swimming accident in which he fell victim to necrotising fasciitis — flesh-eating bacteria — led to amputation of his left leg above the knee and an agonising recovery in hospital. This allowed him the time to write this extraordinary memoir.

Magdalen is now one of the more successful Oxbridge colleges. A few years back, more than half of its examinees won firsts, and this year it topped the Norrington Table for the highest strike rate of firsts and upper seconds.

I have to confess I went up to Magdalen in the same year as Bill Johnson, 1964. Though I knew him, it was a distant acquaintance. At that time, it was a relaxed community, famed for its friendliness. I received outstanding teaching in the college — all four of my tutors became friends, and one, John Stoye, is still working and writing at 98. They changed my life.

What I didn’t realise was how badly the place was run, and would be for a decade to come. The way Bill Johnson graphically tells it, a major British academic institution was being governed with all the acumen and ethics of the average whelk stall.

All was revealed when a brilliant economics fellow in his forties, Keith Griffin, was elected President of Magdalen in 1979, rather against the run of play. A group of younger fellows, the electoral college, realised the place was in a mess. Under the outgoing President, the genial Falstaffian bachelor James Griffiths, who always had a four-course dinner at High Table throughout term, the college was living beyond its means.

Griffin supported Bill Johnson to be the new senior bursar. What happens next, described in a chapter entitled “Cleaning Up” with commendable understatement, beggars belief. The chapter comes towards the end of the book, but is well worth the wait — it knocks spots off any fictitious account of Oxbridge college skullduggery by Tom Sharpe or C.P. Snow.

On the second day of a supposedly three-month handover, Johnson’s predecessor as bursar, Colin Cowe, did a runner and was not seen in the college again. By day three, Johnson found that the man really in charge — what I believe certain sections of Sicilian society call un pezzo di novanta — was the college accountant, Stanley Bond. He and the college surveyor,  Stanley Latham,  ran their domain as a medieval fiefdom. Their own salaries were not declared in the accounts. Unsurprisingly, their self-remunerations were later revealed to be among the highest in Oxford.

Under their reign, soft loans and perks were dished out to dons and pals, rents of college properties went unreviewed — in one case an international gangster, an untouchable to any real-life Inspector Morse, Lewis or Hathaway — occupied a large house at almost nil rent. College builders and maintenance staff moonlit at the college’s expense. Van loads of provender went into the kitchens only to go out of the next door, to be sold on at a profit.

Meanwhile the place was falling down. Restoration of Wolsey’s status symbol, Magdalen Tower, stalled, as appeal funds dried up. No architect was appointed and supervision was lax. At one point skeletons were unearthed close to the foundations. They were believed to have been plague victims from the late 15th or early 16th century. The surveyor and accountant were having no truck with such inconveniences and ordered the bones to be shoved into the builders’ skip. This was happening while some of the finest medieval historians Britain could offer were teaching in the college.

At the end of the first year in office for  Johnson and Griffin, the accounts showed the college had to draw down £750,000 from its capital funds in order to make up the shortfalls in the current account expenditure, with all its deficits and shortfalls, soft loans and privileges to the dons, Spanish customs of the building staff, and excessive indulgence in college feasts and fancy dinners.

One of the worst aspects was the mismanagement of the grounds, including the deer park and gardens. Gates to St Catherine’s College had been allowed to remain open, so the gardens became a playground for plant raiders, motorbike scramblers and unleashed dogs who proceeded to attack and kill the deer. Three rapes were reported in college grounds. A militant Oxford City Council tried to lay claim to run the grounds as a community asset, and part of their expanded programme for tourism.

I am sure that Johnson and Griffin did manage to turn things round dramatically, and that they confronted the biggest crisis in the college’s recent history, and faced it down. But I think there are more characters in the story than this author allows, or mentions. Wealth has been restored to Magdalen by Griffin’s successor, Tony Smith, a former BBC editor. He managed to raise a staggering £144 million in donations and has hugely widened its international appeal.

Besides, Magdalen always had its rackety side. My old tutor, K.B. McFarlane, nonpareil of late medieval historians, always said there was “something a bit bogus” about the deeds of foundation of the college by Bishop William Waynflete in 1458. This was the time of civil war, raging litigation by Waynflete’s peers and neighbours, including the Pastons and Sir John Fastolf, whose muniments MacFarlane acquired for the college and are now among its greatest treasures. Moreover, McFarlane once told me, “My investigations suggest that for years the college retained [i.e. bribed] a dozen justices and more than 20 potential jurors,” in what must be one of the most longlasting acts of legal embracery (bribery of office holders) in English history.

The most celebrated excoriation of Magdalen by a former alumnus, of course, comes from Edward Gibbon. Of the Fellows of Magdalen in the mid-18th century, he wrote: “From the toil of reading, or thinking, or writing, they had absolved their conscience; and the first shoots of learning and ingenuity withered on the ground, without yielding any fruits to the owners or the public.” Magdalen then stagnated under the 63-year presidency of Martin Routh, who died in 1854, still insisting on wearing a wig and knee-breeches in the 18th-century fashion.

The college hadn’t reached the depths of Gibbon’s depiction in the latter part of the last century, and good academic work and teaching were being done, but its finances were being driven into the ground. Unchecked, it could have stared bankruptcy in the face, as Pembroke College did a few years ago.

The efforts of Johnson and Griffin were heroic, but not without controversy. Johnson always was a bit of an intellectual bruiser — an “ego on stilts” according to one of those mentioned as a friend in this book. He likes a fight, whether rescuing the Rhodes Foundation at Oxford, criticising corruption in South Africa, or investigating duplicity in high places in the downing of the Korean Airlines Flight 007. He doesn’t like argument or contradiction overmuch. Some of the pen portraits in this book seem distorted, and his blunt dismissal of the personal tutorial system, no doubt the result of many a dull hour with a dull pupil, seems wide of the mark. He himself acknowledges his debt to his personal engagements with Philip Windsor and Thomas Hodgkin.

His book — which is a rattling good read, I must confess — raises two important questions, one macro and the other micro. First, how is it that a collection of some of the best minds in Oxford, as the Magdalen fellows persist in believing themselves to be, made such a mess of running their own gaff — and allowed it to become a hotbed of minor, and not-so-minor, racketeering?

The micro question is for alumni like Dr R.W. Johnson himself, the editor of Standpoint, and myself, not to speak of  numerous Cabinet members past and present. We are continuously importuned,  begged, blagged and berated to contribute funds to Magdalen appeals on an annual basis. I advise all fellow Magdalenses to hold on to their chequebooks and ask where the funds will go, before ponying up. As Thomas Cromwell said, again according to the gospel of Wolf Hall, on appointment as Secretary to the Council and chief consigliere to Henry VIII: “Sire, I would like to see the accounts.”

The post Magdalen’s Bad Old Days appeared first on Standpoint.

At that time the Bank employed no economists. It saw itself very much as a bank, if a rather special kind of bank because it was by far the dominant issuer of legal-tender notes and could freely expand these note liabilities. Strictly, it had to have enough gold to back the notes, but on a day-to-day basis it could do what it liked. That made it different from all other English banking institutions, which by law could not increase their note issues at all. It was a proto-central bank. It had this status even though at that stage the distinction between the central bank and commercial banks had not been clarified.

Since the Bank’s directors had let Overend, Gurney & Co go bust, they plainly did not see their job as being to rescue insolvent organisations. But the failure of that bank had wider ramifications, as it sparked “runs” on banks that were generally believed to be solid, well-managed and profitable. The Bank let it be known that it would lend notes freely to solvent banks. As its notes were the best-quality asset in the system, their injection into the economy restored confidence and the runs were brought to a halt. 

There were two stings in the tail. The first was that, while the Bank made loans freely available, it charged heavily for them and demanded good collateral. The second was that, as Britain was on the gold standard, the Bank rate had to soar to 10 per cent to attract gold and maintain an adequate metallic cover for the Bank’s much-expanded liabilities. But life went on. According to statistics prepared more than a century later by the eminent economic historian Charles Feinstein, the UK’s gross national product fell by 1.5 per cent in money terms in 1867 and stayed down in 1868. But it moved ahead by 3.5 per cent in 1869 and surged by almost 8 per cent in 1870.

The Bank’s actions prevented the crisis at Overend, Gurney & Co from having too serious an effect on economic activity. In his celebrated 1873 book Lombard Street, Walter Bagehot, the first and most famous Editor of the Economist, said the Bank had “more or less” fulfilled its duty of making “enormous advances” in a “panic”. But he entered the caveat that it had not gone far enough.

According to Bagehot, not only should a central bank lend freely at a penalty rate against good collateral, it should also let its banking customers and the public at large know that this was its policy. By explicitly accepting a responsibility to lend in a crisis, the Bank could go a long way to ensuring that such crises did not happen at all. He warned, “Until we have on this point a clear understanding with the Bank of England, both our liability to crises and our terror at crises will always be greater than they otherwise would be.”

Bagehot’s doctrine was contested. The Bank’s directors did not like it, as it put them in the spotlight and carried the danger (the “moral hazard”, indeed) that they might be seen as a soft touch in a crisis. The most articulate opponent was Thomas Hankey, whom even Bagehot conceded was “one of the most experienced” of the Bank’s top brass. In Hankey’s words, “the Economist newspaper has put forward . . . the most mischievous doctrine ever broached in the monetary or banking world . . . Until such a doctrine is repudiated by the banking interest, the difficulty of pursuing any sound principle of banking in London will be very great.”

In the following decades the Bank behaved as Bagehot recommended. In that sense the arguments in Lombard Street, and in many trenchant editorials for the Economist, won the debate. The doctrine that central banks should lend freely to check a loss of financial confidence became textbook orthodoxy. The Bank’s reputation for crisis management was enhanced in the 1930s when not a single bank in the British Empire went under. The contrast with the United States, where thousands of banks closed in the Great Depression between 1929 and 1933, was obvious and compelling. For more than a hundred years Britain’s banks benefited from a central bank that understood their businesses and would help them to fund their assets when threatened by a run. When Northern Rock found it difficult to roll over inter-bank liabilities after the closure of the international money market in early August 2007, it took precedent and history as its guides. It immediately reported its problems to officialdom and expected assistance, not least because it had complied with regulations. Critically, its activities were audited every six months, and it deemed itself to have positive shareholder funds and to be fully solvent.

Because of a foolish decision in 1997 by Gordon Brown to split bank regulation from central banking, the regulator with direct responsibility for Northern Rock was not the Bank of England. Instead, it was the Financial Services Authority. But the FSA was full of people who had served many years at the Bank and thought they knew how its executive team, including its Governor, would behave in a crisis. As recorded by Ivan Fallon in his recent book Black Horse Ride (Robson, £25), top FSA staff looked around for potential buyers for Northern Rock. They soon found one in the shape of Lloyds Bank, which had been conservatively managed in the credit boom of 2006 and early 2007, and was regarded as having good assets and adequate capital.

According to Fallon’s account, based on personal interviews, insiders estimated that “the business value of Northern Rock to Lloyds would be £2.5-3 billion”. This was well above Northern Rock’s then value in the stock market and gave a sound commercial basis for a deal. But even Lloyds relied on the inter-bank market for financing to some degree. Given that the money market was paralysed by a lack of confidence, Lloyds Bank’s board was not 100 per cent certain that it could obain sufficient retail deposits or an inter-bank line to fund the combination of its existing business and Northern Rock. For the deal to go ahead, Lloyds needed a standby loan facility which might have to be as large as £45 billion. With the money market closed, only the Bank of England could provide a facility of this sort. (Of course, if the money market were to return to normality, the Bank money might not be needed at all.)

What would Bagehot have recommended that the Bank do in these circumstances? To recall Lombard Street again, it was the Bank’s job not just to make “enormous advances” in a panic, but also to “lend as fast as” it can, because “ready lending cures panics, and non-lending or niggardly lending aggravates them”. By the end of the first week in September 2007 all of the FSA’s senior staff and Paul Tucker, the Bank’s senior executive for markets, wanted the Bank to provide Lloyds with a standby facility to facilitate its takeover of Northern Rock. Some haggling over the cost of the facility remained, but everyone close to the negotiations wanted to avoid an intensification of the banking crisis.

But there was an obstacle — the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. At a fraught meeting on the afternoon of Sunday, September 9, he said that the Bank would provide no help at all. When Hector Sants, chief executive of the FSA, set out the reasons that such help was essential to pre-empt worse funding strains at Northern Rock, King was belligerent. To quote Fallon, “‘No,’ he said decisively and abruptly, ‘I could not in any way support that. It is not our job to support commercial takeovers. I’m not prepared to provide any liquidity on that basis.’”

The next few days saw bad-tempered exchanges between King on the one hand and top FSA and Bank staff on the other. The antagonisms became bitter and personal. The truth is that King loathed bankers and the City of London. The crisis gave King an opportunity to translate the loathing into action. Fallon quotes one banker as saying, “Mervyn saw his job as being to teach the banks and the markets a lesson.”

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, was sometimes brought into the loop, but — under the terms of legislation his own government had passed — he could not overrule the Governor of the Bank of England. Darling’s version of events in his 2011 memoir Back from the Brink is consistent with Fallon’s. Although less hostile to King personally, he does say that in late 2007 he was being told “time and again” by bank chief executives that the Bank of England “did not understand the nature of the problem they were facing”. Britain’s banks were solvent and confronted only a “lack of liquidity”. Darling thought that King had some good qualities, but “the lack of relationship between Mervyn King and the bankers” became “a real problem”, not least because King was “incredibly stubborn” and “could be exasperating”.

For some days after the September 9 meeting it was hoped that something could be salvaged from the proposal that Lloyds might acquire Northern Rock. But, given King’s intransigence, these hopes came to nothing. Northern Rock still could not roll over wholesale liabilities to other banks and was running out of cash. It had no alternative but itself to seek a loan from the Bank of England, with an announcement due early on Friday, September 14. Unfortunately, Robert Peston, then the BBC’s business editor, somehow got hold of the story prematurely, but his scoop overstated Northern Rock’s weakness.

The first big retail run on a British bank since 1866 — since, indeed, the crisis of Overend, Gurney & Co that had inspired Bagehot to write his classic Lombard Street — began on the morning of September 15, 2007. With depositors’ “terror” fanned by the Peston story and overblown newspaper headlines, cash withdrawals ran into the tens of billions. The Bank of England had to lend the full amount of those withdrawals to ensure that depositors did receive cash, with its loan peaking at more than £40 billion. The UK’s reputation for high-level competence in finance and banking was badly dented, and may never recover to what it was before autumn 2007.

When asked a few weeks later by the Commons Treasury Committee whether a Lloyds takeover of Northern Rock would have avoided the disaster, King claimed that no meaningful discussions had ever take place. His evidence did not deny that the Lloyds proposal had been on the table, but dismissed it as consisting of “one pretty vague phone call which came to Bank officials and then passed to me, originating in the FSA”.

A fair interpretation of Fallon’s book is that King’s statements to the Treasury Committee amounted to an outright lie. They were certainly misleading. Fallon writes: “For his part, Hector Sants still boils with anger at the way things worked out.” Sants is quoted as saying (evidently on the record), “I believe to this day that the Bank of England’s decision was one of the biggest mistakes made in the UK in this period. If we had stopped Northern Rock failing in a disorderly fashion, we would have been seen as the leader by the rest of the world and in control of the situation.”

On February 17, Northern Rock was nationalised by the British state, with no compensation for its shareholders. The lack of compensation contrasted sharply with Lloyds’ preparedness to pay £2 a share some months earlier, which would have given a valuation of almost £1 billion. It is now more than seven years later, and most of Northern Rock’s loan portfolio has either been sold off or run down. What has happened to all those allegedly dodgy mortgages? Was Northern Rock indeed a bank that had behaved so recklessly as to be worthless?

It is now official that the British state has made a thumping profit, into the low billions, on its seizure of the business. On June 10 this year, the Treasury published a report from Rothschild on The UK investment in Royal Bank of Scotland. The report showed that, overall, UK Asset Resolution had made a net profit of £9.6 billion for the taxpayer. UKAR contains two businesses, Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. The Northern Rock part made pre-tax profits in the six years to end-March 2015 of almost £5 billion. By implication, it contributed at least half of the £9.6 billion of the state’s booty. (What was that a famous novelist once wrote about Robbery Under Law? Wasn’t that sort of thing meant to happen only under Latin American caudillos? Or in Putin’s Russia?) I was myself a shareholder in Northern Rock and gave expert witness advice on behalf of the sharholders. In 2008 I correctly predicted Northern Rock would eventually make the government a profit. 

The key issue in the whole sorry saga was the subject of the Bagehot-Hankey dispute almost 150 years ago: does the central bank have a responsibility to lend — at a penalty rate on good collateral — to a solvent commercial bank that has trouble funding its assets and is vulnerable to a run? And should that responsibility be spelt out formally in legislation? Bagehot’s answer was yes, Hankey’s was no. For many successful decades the Bank of England behaved as if Bagehot was right. In 2007 and 2008 its Governor apparently deemed Thomas Hankey, who was after all one of his predecessors on the Bank’s Court, the greater authority on the purpose and functions of a central bank.

Ivan Fallon’s Black Horse Ride is a lively, readable, necessary and outstanding book. Fallon has done an important public service by putting on record the views privately held by nearly all the prominent players at the time, although — it has to be said — he seems not to have interviewed Mervyn King himself. By his behaviour in early autumn 2007 King repudiated Bagehot’s intellectual legacy, with results that were catastrophic for both the Bank of England and the British banking system as a whole. Bagehot’s ghost might perhaps be chuckling about the September 20, 2007, front cover of the magazine which he had edited during the Overend, Gurney & Co crisis in May and June 1866. Its headline was “The Bank that failed”. Quite so.

The post How Mervyn King Got Northern Rock Wrong appeared first on Standpoint.

Certainly no leader in the West has attempted to call a halt to the savagery, for example by the despatch of commandos, such as the Delta force that killed the Isis “oil minister” Abu Sayyaf and about 50 other jihadis in Syria last May. According to Walid al-Asaad, son of the murdered director of antiquities, Isis commanders are squatting in his father’s house — a sitting duck for US or British special forces. No doubt any operation to save Palmyra would have risked damaging the ruins — though now they are being smashed anyway. David Cameron dare not risk losing another parliamentary battle over Syria. To have committed even a handful of troops to save Palmyra, rather than to rescue refugees, might have implied that buildings mattered more than people. No politician dares risk a charge of lacking compassion. Hence one of the greatest surviving relics of antiquity has been sacrificed without a fight.

The story of Palmyra’s rise and fall, an arc that spanned the first three centuries of the Christian era, has fascinated modern historians since Theodor Mommsen, who was the first to supplement the testimony of the Historia Augusta with evidence from inscriptions and archaeology. According to the Hebrew Bible, Palmyra was founded by Solomon, but this claim is considered dubious and the city’s origins are shrouded in mystery. What is known is the source of its prosperity: an oasis on the caravan route from Damascus to the Euphrates, Palmyra grew so rich that its engineers were able to build vast underground reservoirs and aqueducts to make agriculture possible.  The temple complex was on a scale to rival those of Athens and Jerusalem, attracting pilgrims and merchants from across the Near East. Its art and architecture merged Graeco-Roman classicism with Jewish, Syrian, Mesopotamian and Persian motifs to create an inimitable and unusually well-preserved confluence of oriental and occidental cultures.

Having been granted not merely the privileges of a Roman colony but the status of a semi-independent monarchy to defend the eastern marches of the Empire, Palmyra finally overreached itself under Queen Zenobia. One of the most remarkable women in history, she was born in 240 AD and claimed descent from both Dido of Carthage and Cleopatra of Egypt, but in her conduct more closely resembled Boadicea of Britain. Gibbon tells us that she was “esteemed the most lovely as well as the most heroic of her sex”, spoke four languages and was so renowned for her chastity that “she never admitted her husband’s embraces but for the sake of posterity”, i.e. postponing sex until her monthly fertile period. Widowed by the assassination of her husband, the warlike Odenathus, she unwisely heeded the advice of Cassius Longinus, an elderly Hellenistic philosopher, to declare independence. The motives of Longinus are unclear, but we are told that in Palmyra he lacked the books to which he had been accustomed elsewhere; so perhaps he coveted the library of Alexandria, the largest in the ancient world. Having broken free of Rome, defeated its army at the head of her troops, and seized control of Egypt, its richest province, Zenobia styled herself Queen of the East.

Provoked by her insurrection, the Emperor Aurelian marched on Palmyra. After defeating Zenobia twice, at Antioch and Emesa, and braving the Syrian desert, Aurelian surrounded the city. Of the protracted siege that ensued, during which he was wounded, the emperor wrote back to Rome: “The Roman people speak with contempt of the war which I am waging against a woman. They are ignorant both of the character and of the power of Zenobia.” As hopes of relief from Persia faded, Zenobia attempted to flee by camel but was captured. Palmyra soon surrendered. Aurelian treated the vanquished Palmyrenes leniently, but was stern with their queen and her entourage. “The courage of Zenobia deserted her in the hour of trial,” writes Gibbon. He castigates her dishonourable betrayal of her “friends”, while lavishing praise on Longinus for embracing a true philosopher’s death. “Without uttering a complaint, he calmly followed the executioner, pitying his unhappy mistress, and bestowing comfort on his afflicted friends.” But Zenobia’s life was spared. She suffered the indignity of being led in triumph through Rome in chains of gold. Her subsequent fate is obscure, but according to one account she so impressed Aurelian with her dignity in defeat that he granted her freedom and a villa in Tivoli, where she married a senator, had several daughters and presided over a literary salon. Among her descendants may be St Zenobius, a Christian bishop who lived in Florence two centuries later.

Gibbon, however, sides with the sage against the warrior queen: “The fame of Longinus . . . will survive that of the queen who betrayed, or the tyrant who condemned him.” There are two things wrong with Gibbon’s account. Firstly, he is so prejudiced against what he sees as Zenobia’s inconstant lack of manly fortitude — not only was she a woman, but an oriental woman too — that he fails to put himself in her shoes. Lacking a convenient asp about her person, she did not have Cleopatra’s option of suicide, even if she had wanted it. It was natural for a queen to value her own life more highly than those around her (monarchs, then and now, do not have “friends”) because she embodied Palmyra: their sacrifice was necessary for her survival — and Zenobia was nothing if not a survivor. By choosing captivity over death Zenobia was obeying raison d’état. What of “the sublime Longinus”? He was not, as Gibbon supposed, the author of the celebrated treatise On the Sublime, which had been written two centuries earlier. In fact, none of Cassius Longinus’s works has survived; if he is remembered at all, it is mainly due to his ill-fated association with Zenobia. Moreover, despite his grey hairs, Longinus may have been justly served by her denunciation and his execution. Like Plato and Aristotle, he appears to have been an early example of that baleful phenomenon: the intellectual who meddles in politics. In the case of Longinus, it was Palmyra that paid the price for his decision to turn the lady he served into the vehicle of his ambition.

For Aurelian had not finished with Palmyra. Returning to Rome, the emperor was enraged to hear that its people had risen again and massacred his garrison. The emperor retraced his steps and this time he laid waste both to the city and its citizens. Palmyra’s temples were ransacked and the noble metropolis was left a smouldering ruin. The year was 273 AD.

Palmyra never recovered. As Gibbon observes, “it is easier to destroy than to restore. The seat of commerce, of arts, and of Zenobia, gradually sunk into an obscure town, a trifling fortress, and at length a miserable village. The present citizens of Palmyra, consisting of 30 or 40 families, have erected their mud huts within the spacious court of a magnificent temple.” Gibbon knew this because he had read and learned from Robert Wood, the British antiquarian who had recently visited the site and in 1753 published a pioneering description of what he had found there. The story of Palmyra’s rediscovery is as interesting as any other part of its long history, and even more momentous. For it was thanks to Wood’s great work, The Ruins of Palmyra, and especially to its engravings of the superb drawings of Giovanni Batista Borra, that the genius of Palmyra was to extend its influence throughout the Western world.

Who was this antiquarian, or archaeologist avant la lettre? Born in 1717 in County Meath, Ireland, the impoverished son of an Anglican clergyman, Wood was educated at Glasgow University and read law at the Middle Temple before becoming a “travelling tutor and an excellent classic scholar” (in the words of his friend Horace Walpole). Already well travelled in Europe and the Middle East, in 1749 he embarked with two wealthy young companions, John Bouverie and James Dawkins, on an expedition to Greece via Rome. Their purpose was, as Wood put it, “to read the Iliad and Odyssey in the countries where Achilles fought, where Ulysses travelled, and where Homer sung”. Borra was engaged as “architect and draughtsman”. Bouverie died during the two years of the party’s travels around the Levant, but in March 1751 Wood, Dawkins and Borra arrived in Palmyra. They remained for two weeks, making notes and copying inscriptions, while Borra amassed numerous sketches in pen, ink and wash. Then the expedition moved on to Baalbek, where they did the same, before returning home.

Two years later The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor in the desart [sic] appeared in London. The most impressive study of an ancient city that had been published hitherto, it included 57 folio plates plus explanatory notes, seven pages of inscriptions, a dissertation on ancient Palmyra and a journal of the expedition. Some of the plates extend over several pages and are so beautiful that copies of the first edition with the illustrations intact are today extremely rare. But what made Borra’s drawings so important was their photographic precision. Unlike his more famous contemporary Piranesi, whose depictions of ruins are primarily intended to be picturesque, under Wood’s tutelage Borra devoted himself solely to archaeological accuracy. They thus provided perfect templates for architects and designers to adopt.

Critical opinion throughout the republic of letters was unanimous in praise of Wood, and a French edition followed immediately. Four years later, a second, similar volume followed: The Ruins of Balbec, otherwise Heliopolis in Coelosyria, again to general acclaim. Only two decades later, after both Dawkins and Wood had died, would Gibbon sound a discordant note when he appended a sour footnote to chapter 17 of his Decline and Fall, claiming that Wood had “disappointed the expectation of the public as a critic and still more as a traveller”. Later in his History, however, Gibbon admitted his debt to Wood, acknowledging “the magnificent descriptions and drawings of Dawkins and Wood, who have transported into England the ruins of Palmyra and Baalbec”.

The story of the reception of Wood’s scholarship and Borra’s images deserves a book in its own right. Almost immediately, imitations of Palmyrene colonnades, capitals, reliefs and other architectural features became ubiquitous in neoclassical architecture and design, especially in Britain and the American colonies. One of Wood’s friends was the architect Robert Adam, who incorporated motifs from Palmyra into such great country houses as Syon, Osterley, Kenwood and Harewood. In the newly independent United States, there are ubiquitous echoes of Palmyra, most prominently where Jefferson copied the Temple of the Sun for the east portico of the Capitol in Washington. Even the eagle used in the Great Seal is also borrowed from a soffit in the same temple. Indeed, the debt is so extensive that a major Anglo-American exhibition is overdue. It is time that the great museums and libraries of London, New York and Washington joined forces to highlight what has been lost in the destruction of Palmyra.

Robert Wood’s life did not end with his books on the desert cities. He went into politics, became under-secretary of state to Pitt the Elder and spent a decade as an MP for one of his patron the Duke of Bridgewater’s pocket boroughs. But his political career was most notable for his pursuit of John Wilkes, the radical journalist, politician and campaigner for civil liberties. Wood was only a minor player in the battle between Wilkes and the British government, but he scarcely covered himself with glory. In 1763 he seized the papers of Wilkes on the orders of Lord Halifax, secretary of state, only to be fined £1,000 after Wilkes brought an action for trespass — a notable blow for liberty in which Wood found himself on the losing side. As under-secretary to Lord Weymouth, Wood again pursued Wilkes. The irony is that Wood had more in common with Wilkes than he did with the philistine ministers whose cause he defended. For Wilkes, like Wood, had spent time in Rome among the dilettanti who gathered there, chief among them Winkelmann, the historian of antiquity, and the artist Mengs, who had painted Wood’s portrait.

The only minister Wood served who shared his passion for antiquity was the aged Lord Granville. It fell to Wood to bring the preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years’ War, to Granville as the Lord President of the Council lay on his deathbed. Wood offered to return later, but Granville quoted Sarpedon’s speech from the Iliad, pointing out that great men must prove their merit with great deeds. He insisted that Wood should read him the text of the treaty and gave it “the approbation of a dying statesman, as the most glorious war and most honourable peace this nation ever saw”. In later years, Wood returned to his first love: his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, with a Comparative View of the Ancient and Present State of the Troade was published posthumously in 1775, with engravings of the drawings done by Borra in the region around Troy during their travels there a quarter of a century before. After his death in 1771, Wood’s works were not forgotten. Still quoted today is Horace Walpole’s prophetic tribute, in a letter of 1774: “The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”

Palmyra itself, meanwhile, remained in a state of suspended animation for another century before another British traveller encountered it in the Syrian wilderness. Gertrude Bell, the subject of Werner Herzog’s new film Queen of the Desert, was not merely the adventuress portrayed by Nicole Kidman, who falls in love with a married consul (played by Damian Lewis), but an accomplished archaeologist, Arabist, diplomat and spy, who played a big part in the creation of modern Iraq and founded the Iraqi Archaeological Museum in Baghdad. In May 1900 she wrote to her stepmother, Florence, about her arrival, after passing “the famous Palmyrene tower tombs”, in Palmyra itself: “I wonder if the wide world presents a more singular landscape. It is a mass of columns, ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven. Beyond them is the immense Temple of Baal; the modern town is built inside it and its rows of columns rise out of a mass of mud roofs . . . It looks like the white skeleton of a town, standing knee deep in the blown sand . . . Except Petra, Palmyra is the loveliest thing I have seen in this country.” Her friend and brother officer T. E. Lawrence echoed her, in words that are inscribed on a plaque in Palmyra: “Nothing in this scorching, desolate land could be so refreshing.” Agatha Christie, who stayed there in the charming old Hotel Zenobia (now destroyed along with the ruins whose visitors it served), gushed: “It is lovely and fantastic and unbelievable, with all the theatrical implausibility of a dream . . . It isn’t — it can’t be — real.”  

It is unbearable to think that the unique urban landscape Gertrude Bell, Lawrence of Arabia and Agatha Christie described a century ago no longer exists. But Walpole’s thought experiment, in which a traveller from Lima “gives a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra”, no longer seems such a remote fantasy. The same atavistic theology that now justifies the levelling of the Temple of Bel also encompasses the destruction of churches and synagogues on an even grander scale. We need to recall Gibbon’s similar jeu d’esprit when he considers what might have happened if Charles Martel had not stopped the advance of Islam into Europe at the Battle of Tours: “Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the truth and sanctity of the revelation of Mahomet.”

The full significance of the demolition of Palmyra thus only emerges when we consider what it implies about the perpetrators’ attitude to Western civilisation. Ruins that had stood for nearly 1,800 years mean less than nothing to the genocidal ghouls of the new Caliphate, whose aim is to throw history into reverse and annihilate even the memory of all non-Islamic cultures. By harnessing the resources of Western culture — not only military technology but above all using the internet as a propaganda tool — the marauders of Isis have forced themselves into the forefront of our consciousness. Islamism is the face of nihilism in our time. The paralysis of the Western democracies when confronted with such radical evil is not unprecedented — we did not stop the Holocaust or the Cultural Revolution either — but what is new seems to be the brazen self-aggrandisement of the perpetrators. The great crimes of the 20th century were largely hidden from the world while they took place. This time, Isis has forced us to watch the agony of a civilisation. Whose civilisation is it? Ours — for the ruins of Palmyra belong to our cultural heritage no less than their architectural progeny, the English country house or the Capitol. The casual murder of Khaled al-Asaad in front of the antiquities that had been his life’s work recalls the death of Archimedes, who according to Plutarch was slain in Syracuse by a Roman soldier because he would not look up from his geometrical diagrams in the dust. Yet the Roman general, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, was apparently furious, having given orders that Archimedes was not to be harmed.

The Romans often behaved in a barbaric way — for example, by reducing Palmyra to a ruin — but they were not barbarians. The Islamists of the new Caliphate glory in their barbarism. They also have a growing number of admirers and apologists here. Once Isis has finished with Palmyra, the media caravan will move on to another oasis of death, with a new horror show to fill our screens. But the voyeuristic atrocities we are witnessing in Syria and Iraq are a foretaste of what the future has in store for the West — including Britain — unless we act now.

The post Why Palmyra Should Matter To The West 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.