Stalin

Tuesday

Neil Barnett

Archive interview: Alexander Litvinenko on ice picks, radioactive thallium and Putin’s assassins

In the 25 November 2006 edition of The Spectator, Neil Barnett recalled his encounters with the poisoned spy Alexander Litvinenko. Two days before the magazine went to press, Litvinenko died from radiation poisoning. As Theresa May reopens the investigation into his death, we are republishing Barnett’s interview once more: The hotel off a main square in a central European capital was a seedy, low-budget place. When I asked the receptionist for Alexander Litvinenko in room 38, she looked at me blankly, then after some rooting around said, ‘We only have a Mr Jones in room 38.’ It was Litvinenko, of course, employing one of his endless ruses designed to throw off

Thursday

Robert Chandler

Doctor Zhivago’s long, dark shadow

For most Russians, Boris Pasternak is one of their four greatest poets of the last century. For most Anglophone readers, he is the man who won the Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago. The first four chapters of The Zhivago Affair give a full picture of Pasternak’s life and the Soviet literary world up until the early 1950s, when Zhivago was nearing completion. Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890, into an assimilated and highly cultured Jewish family. His father was a painter, his mother a concert pianist; among the family’s friends were Leo Tolstoy, Sergey Rachmaninov and Rainer Maria Rilke. Pasternak wanted first to be a composer, then a philosopher

Thursday

Victor Sebestyen

A Pole’s view of the Czechs. Who cares? You will

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

Friday

Ian Thomson

The many attempts to assassinate Trotsky

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

Thursday

Anne Applebaum

Secrets of the Kremlin

A building bearing testimony to the power of eternal Russia; a timeless symbol of the Russian state; a monument to Russian sovereignty. To the modern eye, the Kremlin fortress seems as if it had always been there, as if it had never changed and never will. All of which is utter nonsense, as Catherine Merridale’s fascinating history reveals: the story of this famous compound is not one of continuity, but of construction, destruction and reconstruction. Every reincarnation of the Russian state over the centuries — and there have been many — has been accompanied by a corresponding reincarnation of the Kremlin. Its history is thus a metaphorical history of Russia,

Thursday

William Ryan

One Night in Winter, by Simon Sebag Montefiore – review

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s One Night in Winter begins in the hours immediately following the solemn victory parade that marked the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany — probably the high point of Stalinism. Two teenagers, dressed in 19th- century costume and members of a secret literary club called, aptly as it turns out, the Fatal Romantics, have chosen this moment, of all moments, to re-enact a duel from Pushkin’s Onegin on a bridge beneath the very walls of the Kremlin. Needless to say, when the duel goes fatally wrong and the dead boy and girl are revealed to be the offspring of members of the Soviet leader’s inner circle, we

Thursday

Jasper Becker

The Tragedy of Liberation, by Frank Dikötter – review

The historian of China Frank Dikötter has taken a sledgehammer to demolish perhaps the last remaining shibboleth of modern Chinese history. This is the notion, propagated in countless books and documentaries, that Mao’s regime started off well, deservedly coming to power on a wave of popular support and successfully tackling the evils left behind by the corrupt and incompetent Nationalists. Then, at the end of the 1950s, it all started to go wrong. There were terrible natural disasters, followed by famine; and, seemingly unaccountably, the brotherhood of brave revolutionaries fell out, creating the bloodbath of the Cultural Revolution. This is the version still served up to A-level students in Britain.

Thursday

Ian Thomson

An Armenian Sketchbook, by Vasily Grossman – review

Vasily Grossman, a Ukranian-born Jew, was a war correspondent for the Soviet army newspaper Red Star. His dispatches from the front between 1941 and 1945 combined emotional engagement with independent-minded commentary. A solitary, questioning spirit, Grossman set out always to document truthfully what he saw and heard. His report on the vile workings of the Treblinka death camp, ‘The Hell of Treblinka’, remains a masterpiece of controlled rage and unsparing lucidity. Unsurprisingly, Grossman was mortified when the man who had prevented Hitler’s annihilation of Jewry was suddenly set on their extinction. In early 1953, Stalin announced in the pages of Pravda that a plot to murder Kremlin members had been

Monday

Nick Cohen

Eric Hobsbawm: A man of Extremes

A few years ago, I wrote a review of Eric Hobsbawm’s last collection of essays and noted  ‘Hobsbawm is now 94, and although I have no wish to usher the old boy from the room, I can see his obituaries now. Conservative and liberal writers will say that his loyalty to totalitarianism disfigured his writing, most notably, in his whitewashing of Soviet atrocities in The Age of Extremes, his history of the 20th century. Leftists will say he was the greatest Marxist historian of our times, whose sweeping accounts of the world from the Enlightenment to the present have shaped the way we think. Neither will acknowledge that both have

Thursday

Alex Massie

Stalin: Not Such a Bad Chap Really

That, anyway, seems to be one of the things to come out of Terry Eagleton’s new book, Why Marx Was Right. It’s not published until May but Tyler Cowen reports that it contains these winning arguments: But the so-called socialist system had its achievements, too.  China and the Soviet Union dragged their citizens out of economic backwardness into the modern industrial world, at however horrific a human cost; and the cost was so steep partly because of the hostility of the capitalist West. […] Building up an economy from very low levels is a backbreaking, dispiriting task.  It is unlikely that men and women will freely submit to the hardships

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Caught between two great evils

David Brooks, the great New York Times columnist, recommends the best essays of the year every Christmas. His selection this year includes a brilliant essay by Anne Applebaum, of this parish, on Hitler, Stalin and Eastern Europe. It makes you realise quite how bloody the Eastern Front was—‘On any given day in the autumn of 1941, as many Soviet POWs died as did British and American POWs during the entire war’—and think about the effect on these societies of being caught in the middle of these two extremist ideologies. There is always a tendency for us to discuss how the crimes of Hitler and Stalin compare. But I think Applebaum