Communism

Sir Ian Kershaw won his knight’s spurs as a historian with his much acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and Nemesis. He is now attempting to repeat the feat with a two-volume history of modern Europe, of which this is the opening shot.Inevitably, the figure of the Führer once again marches across Kershaw’s pages as they chronicle the years dominated by Germany’s malign master. First the Great War that gave Hitler his chance to escape obscurity, and then the greater one he launched himself. Opening with the continent’s catastrophic slide into generalised conflict in 1914, Kershaw apportions blame or the disaster more or less equally to all the combatant nations.

In Marianne in Chains, his last book on Occupied France, Robert Gildea offered an original view of life in that country between 1940 and 1944, arguing that outside the cities it had not always been as bad, nor had the Vichy regime always been as reactionary, as was subsequently claimed. Confining his research to three departments in the Loire valley, Gildea also suggested that for most people most of the time the Resistance was a dangerous irrelevance, to be avoided wherever possible. These conclusions were presented at a conference in Tours where they caused a minor uproar among French specialists. Gildea, professor of modern history at Oxford University, now turns

Robert Conquest, the historian of Soviet Russia who has died aged 98, was also The Spectator’s literary editor between 1962 and 1963. The following essay was published in the magazine on 4 May 1961, in response to a letter published in the Times about the Bay of Pigs Invasion.  The round robin on behalf of some supposedly Leftist cause is a well-established little nuisance which we should all have got used to by this time. The letter sent by Mr. Kenneth Tynan and others to the Times on Cuba has, I find, been felt as more than customarily irritating by a number of writers and others to whom I have spoken about it

The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia was the second world war’s greatest event. The Asian theatre, much of it water, was seven times larger than the European theatre. America’s mobilisation was the most complex in history, Japan’s crimes among the most sadistic. Metaphysically, the atomic consummation altered our relationship to our habitat. Yet only three comprehensive, single-volume accounts of the war in Asia have appeared — until now the most recent being Ronald Spector’s Eagle Against the Sun in 1985. Hirohito’s War by Francis Pike sets a new standard: oceanic in scope, comprehensive in detail, subtle

For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with. Like so much connected with the Congo, details were lost in the murk of Africa’s magnificent but broken giant. He had been fed to Katangan pigs, drowned in the river — or was perhaps even still alive and being held hostage in the Ituri rain-forest. So radiotrottoir assured me variously in January 2001 when I made my first visit to Kinshasa around the 40th anniversary of Lumumba’s disappearance. The reason for my trip felt darkly familiar: one of Lumumba’s successors as national leader, Laurent Kabila, had himself just been assassinated

Transnistria is not an area well-served by travel literature or, really, literature of any kind. The insubstantial-seeming post-Soviet sandwich-filling between Moldova and Ukraine, it doesn’t have a bad reputation. It has no reputation. As Rory MacLean, the author of the ‘across-the-old-Iron-Curtain-in-a-Trabant’ bestseller Stalin’s Nose, explains: ‘Transnistria is a breakaway republic of a ba lot smaller than Devon. And it is recognised by no country in the world except itself. You could indeed be forgiven for thinking that Transnistria is a made-up place (and at times the author of this book almost treats it as if it is). In the wake of the dissolution of the USSR, Transnistria declared independence in

Much has been written about Deng Xiao-ping (1904–1997), most recently by Ezra Vogel in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. But apart from his fondness for eating croissants and playing bridge, and the fact that his second wife left him for a party colleague — Michael Dillon records the divorce only — we still know little about Deng himself. Mao Zedong’s personality, on the other hand, was often remarked on — from Edgar Snow’s first meeting with him in 1936 to Henry Kissinger’s in 1971(both men swooned in his presence). Dillon rightly notes that Vogel compressed a large part of Deng’s life into a mere 30 pages. In this

Thuringia, a region of former East Germany, occupies a special place in the thoughts of Germans, who like to regard it as the origin of all their best virtues. It’s an alluring place, full of wonderfully untouched stretches of densely forested hills; the occasional small historic town seems hardly to have changed for decades, and the tourist can spend a happy week pottering from Schmalkalden to Ilmenau to Eisenach in the illusion that none of those unpleasant realities of the last century ever touched this place. I once asked the guide at the Wartburg, the magnificent medieval and mock-medieval castle on a snowy crop outside Eisenach, what this place meant

When this extraordinary book was about to come out in French four years ago its author was told by his editor that it was likely to fail miserably. As Mariusz Szczgieł explains, the doubts were reasonable. No one was sure if anybody in the west would be interested in what a Pole had to say about the Czechs: ‘A representative of one marginal nation writing about another marginal nation is unlikely to be a success.’ But in 2009 Gottland won the European Book Prize (a serious award; the late Tony Judt’s Postwar won it the previous year) and it has been well received throughout the continent. There must have been

Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in the house in Mexico City where his grandfather was murdered in 1940 with an ice-pick. Volkov had grown up in that house surrounded by 20-foot garden walls and watchtowers with slits in them for machine-guns. The protection was no defence against Trotsky’s eventual assassin, the Spanish-born Stalinist Ramón Mercader, who very ably infiltrated Trotsky’s Mexico circle and, on 20 August, struck the revolutionary on the front of his head with that gruesome weapon. Trotsky bellowed in pain but managed to fend off his assailant before collapsing. His bodyguards hurried in