My Photo

who we are

sharing......

Categories

February 2012

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
      1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29      

awards in the café cabinet

  •  

     

  • intute UK joint university database recommended

     

     

  • Channel 4 recommended

     

     

  • BBC radio recommended
    Radio 4

     

     

  • SBC Education Blue Ribbon Hot Site!

     

     

  • March '06 páginas recomendado

     

  • May '05 Site of the Month by SovLit, Harvard University.

     

  • April '05 Birmingham GRID for Learning Site of the Week

     

     

worthies who have departed the café

being read on the terrace.....

  • Matthew Parker: The Sugar Barons. Matthew Parker

    Matthew Parker: The Sugar Barons. Matthew Parker
    Parkers history of the West Indies sugar industry is one of the most valuable reads of the year for students of industrial and imperial history. He outlines the origins of the industry which originated on the Caribbean island of Barbados and reached its peak with the cultivation of Jamaica. The final chapters look at eventual decline and collapse. The 17th century saw the cultivation of sugar following ideas first used in Brazil by the Dutch and Portuguese. Other islands soon followed as the price for sugar rocketed in Europe and fortunes were made by the estate owners. Sugar became an essential luxury and demand forced more and more land into cultivation. More was being made in profit than could be spent on the islands- the growing surplus was being spent and invested in England - providing funds for other commercial and early industrial ventures. So far so good, but it is in exploring other aspects of this growth that the book excels: the growth of privateering - the use of ships to attack and loot Spanish treasure ships was encouraged; relations with the New England colonies; the growth of sugar as the key element of the English 18th century economy and the emergence of a sugar lobby that would determine English foreign and economic. However the key thread of the book is that of slavery. Parker makes it very clear that this "modern" slavery was driven by the needs of the Indies. Sugar cultivation is very labour intensive. The islands were amongst the least healthy places on earth with mortality, especially amongst Europeans being very high. Slaves brought in from Africa were the answer for the owners and were employed in ever growing numbers from the mid 17th century, despite their own high death rates. They were considered of little value other than as an economic commodity and Parker shows clearly how dehumanised the owners and their white management had become to slavery. Supported throughout by individual histories with a focus on the Landowners, this is well written and accompanied by good maps and illustrations. Dec '11 (****)

  • Alice Hogge : God's Secret Agents

    Alice Hogge : God's Secret Agents
    Tells the story of Roman Catholic missions and Jesuit priests in England during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. A detailed and thorough account, with care taken to inform the general reader of the specialist contexts and terminology used by historians as the narrative progresses. She tells of the early missionaries from the continent, often educated in colleges founded in Europe by English Catholic exiles and how they travelled the country and lived within the "underground" recusant community. The main thrust of the book outlines the different and changing reaction of government. Initially tending to tolerance, this hardens, culminating in the post 1605 Oath of Allegiance and anti Roman Catholic legislation. The Apellant episode is also explored. Yet the Jesuits seem to have been opposed to regime change, the eventual Gunpowder Plot being the product of the frustration of home-grown subversives (assisted or not by government agents to increase the eventual anti-Catholic spin) at the lack of official change. Hogge paints a credible picture of the Jesuits as scapegoats for both James and Elizabeth’s Government to blame their troubles on. An interesting aspect of the book is the story of the Jesuit Nicholas Owen, arrested and racked to death in 1606, who was the builder of many of the priest-holes found in the country's great houses and used to hide Catholic clergy when a house was searched. Two final sections of note indicate where Owen's building work may be seen today, and draw parallels (already emerging to the reader as the story unfolds) with present day British changes to torture and terrorist legislation and practice in response to current concerns over militant Islam.However, this may be more a book to be dipped into (using the index - for some unexplained reason chapters are numbered like a novel but given no other description to assist partial reading for research) rather than read cover to cover. Perhaps tighter editing might have helped but I found the initial chapters and the final post 1600 section of most use and value (especially those outlining James I's early religious inclinations). During the 1580's and 1590's I tended to get lost amongst the places, names, conversations, letters and travels of those being described. Oct '11 (***)

  • John Simpson: Unreliable Sources: How the Twentieth Century Was Reported: How the 20th Century Was Reported

    John Simpson: Unreliable Sources: How the Twentieth Century Was Reported: How the 20th Century Was Reported
    John Simpson, BBC World Affairs editor, writes an account of how he sees the press reported on key stories from the Boer War to the Iraq invasion. As the focus is on the British press, so the themes are those that affected Britain and its press most strongly over the last 110 years. This probably means it will be of most direct interest to students of modern British history, but the story it tells of relationships between the press and its readers, of press owners and government as well as how far the press supports, questions and/or is restricted by government policy is more global in its significance. Simpson devotes a chapter to a key period that affected how the press operated: clearly Britain’s main wars and conflicts, but also issues such as the Abdication crisis, interwar attitudes to Hitler, Suez, Ireland, and the rise of the Murdoch press. I found the most useful chapters to be ones that examined the press response to government policy during the Boer and First World Wars (in the final chapters Simpson draws several parallels of approach between the Boer War and Iraq invasion). He shows clearly for example how loathe the press was to present the realism of the western front and how much his was resented by those at the front. Students (and teachers preparing courses on the impact of the media) will also find much of value on the interwar chapters which shows clearly which papers were most behind Hitler and the differing views on Appeasement and the actions of Chamberlain. Individual reporters are given mini pen portraits - many seem to be “gentle” and/or “generous…… Meanwhile he explains how the new kid on the block, news reporting on BBC radio, tried to catch up until coming into its own during World War II. Well written and reads easily, it is a large tome with a basic but useful bibliography for each section (although it publishes all chapter notes and the origin of specific sources online). It is sufficiently self-contained so that chapters could be taken on their own. This is worthwhile as Simpson provides many extracts from press reports (good for using as source questions?) and numerous worthwhile, not to say often enjoyable, anecdotes about the individuals he is describing. As for the Beeb, it might have been more valuable to have more on the impact of the BBC World Service reporting after 1945 and less on the BBC’s more recent conflict with the Blair government, which if we are being pedantic was not in the 20th century. Another point of issue is that the book seems to focus on issues that are exclusively political or to do with international conflicts that involved the UK. No mention is made at all of how BBC reporting made the world aware of the famine in Ethiopia and produced such global impact and consequences. Such “social” reporting has grown considerably since the 1980’s even if its thrust has been blunted/hijacked by more recent governments – however is this not the theme of the book? Aug '11 (****)

  • Philipp von Boeselager: Valkyrie - The Plot To Kill Hitler

    Philipp von Boeselager: Valkyrie - The Plot To Kill Hitler
    This is a memoir of Philipp von Boeselager, traditional German aristocrat, cavalry officer and last surviving member of the 1944 Bomb Plot to assassinate Hitler. In many ways this would seem to be of limited value to a historian: it is as said, a personal memoir, and would seem to be ghost written at that. Much of it is devoted to uncritical praise of an elder brother, also involved in the Plot and the amount of the (slim) work on the actual Plot is minimal. Nonetheless, this is a significant piece of history, but not so much on what it says about 1944, rather, it gives an interesting insight into the mentality of the Junker officer class during the Third Reich. Implicitly, the content and presentation of the narrative in the memoir makes clear that the aristocracy saw the Fuhrer as an upstart, but did not intervene to obstruct his accession to power seeing this more as "the will of the people" with which they should not deign to interfere. They also appeared to have exercised considerable informal local authority, but without too much accountability, or desire to use this considerable local and historic influence to resist or reduce the impact of national socialist policies (although a incident of the family assisting fleeing Jews early on is described). Von Boeselager and his brother join the cavalry and there is little questioning of German war aims/strategy until the war turns against the Germans, especially in the east, although the memoir states it was a growing awareness of SS atrocities in the east rather than growing Soviet pressure that brought about plans to assassinate Hitler and stage a coup. We read of how the July 1944 plotters gradually came together and instigated several attempts to kill Hitler in preparation of seeking an anti-Soviet alliance with the western allies, but ultimately failing and most facing arrest, torture and execution. Several take their own lives. The von Boeselager brothers are not betrayed by fellow plotters and survive (although Phillips brother is killed later fighting the Red Army), with Philipp himself living until 2008. These officers of the Junker class were undoubtedly brave and fought determinedly and with a strong sense of historic duty to defend Germany and ensure the well being of their men (Von Boeselager distinguished himself in combat on the Eastern Front, was wounded several times in combat and was awarded the Knights Cross with Oak Leaves for bravery in combat). It is clear that they were principled and honourable with a genuine sense of chivalry. The plotters themselves became the conscience of postwar (western initially) Germany. Unfortunately, these memoirs do little to remove the notion that the principles and sense of duty were misdirected. They had the political awareness, skills and inherited authority to prevent or restrain national socialism at its birth but chose to wait too long to act and when they did von Boeselager's account still makes it is difficult to remove the impression that they did so at a time when their historic interests and privileged lifestyle were most under threat - by the advance of Soviet communism. July '11 (****)

  • Christopher Meyer: Getting Our Way: 500 Years of Adventure and Intrigue: The Inside Story of British Diplomacy

    Christopher Meyer: Getting Our Way: 500 Years of Adventure and Intrigue: The Inside Story of British Diplomacy
    Meyer's book (he was the UK Washington Ambassador 1997-2003) is subtitled "500 years of adventure & Intrigue - the Inside Story of British Diplomacy" but is pretty selective in the episodes it examines. A series of chapters look at specific a stages in the story, some more successful than others. The initial chapter on the Elizabethan ambassador Killigrew in Edinburgh is an interesting example of the rudiments of modern diplomacy at work, as are the three on British relations with China (or should it be the British abuse of those relations?). There is a valuable section for students of the interwar period on Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1938 which clarifies Britain's ignominious role in the collapse of the League of Nations. Least successful chapter is the final somewhat diffuse one on Bosnia in the 1990's. However this is not a history book - footnotes are sparse, bibliographies are limited and contain largely the standard works that might appear on a decent piece of IB/A level coursework. The value of this readable book though is the insight it provides into the mindset of a modern successful British diplomat. From its introduction onwards it provides an argument in favour of reinforcing British diplomacy, and British support for how this branch of government should be enabled to strongly pursue and protect British interests and values in the world. In doing this Meyer writes little of the advantages of internationalism, and seems to ignore what even he writes about regarding the impact of the blind pursuit of British values and interests on 19th century China or on the Ethiopians in the 1930's. He argues diplomacy has to adapt and modernise to protect national interest. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but not at the cost of a "beggaring my neighbour" approach that was so prevalent in the past. He correctly argues that following an ethical foreign policy (as recently with early New Labour) is itself problematical but that should be no reason to revert to past methods (he believes Margaret Thatcher's time was "a notably successful period for British diplomacy").It is telling that there is no chapter on the one great challenge - and questionably greatest failure of modern British diplomacy - Europe. Nothing on how diplomats failed to engage with the early moves for closer co-operation. Even in his own terms of reference, no mention of how greater involvement from the start might have delivered the British influence and values he seeks and how a successful British diplomatic offensive might have embedded them in the heart of the European project. Perhaps because this is the one big area Britain did not "get its way". This is a quick read and it reads well with much to fascinate - not the least of which is as an aid to understand the attitudes and objectives that formed so much of British foreign policy for so long. June '11 (***)

  • Barry Strauss: The Spartacus War

    Barry Strauss: The Spartacus War
    This slim volume is the story of Spartacus, leader of the slave revolt against the Romans in 73BC. Spartacus gathered a force of up to 40,000 slaves and in the course of two years was able to lead them up and down the length of Italy resisting all attempts by the Roman legions to suppress them - until the final campaign against Crassus when he was defeated and killed in battle (in contrast to the Kubrick film which shows him captured - the famous "I am Spartacus" scene happening in Hollywood only!). Spartacus is seen as a charismatic and very able commander and leader, his eventual vanquisher Crassus was not one of Rome's most sympathetic generals - he took 6,000 prisoners and proceeded to crucify each one along the road to Rome.To someone accustomed to reading about modern history, the style is unsettling at first - too many mentions of "might", "perhaps", "likely", "uncertain but" suggest a vagueness that makes for a lack of certainty, but gradually you realise Strauss is using the only evidence available - which is patchy and unreliable. The historians role in the ancient world here is to map a probable route through the possibles for the layman and build up a picture of what might have been. The available evidence allows for no more. Strauss does this well, giving his views on how much value to place on evidence at each stage of the campaign. Good maps and a thoroughly explained bibliography at the end make this a useful read for the non-specialist who wants to find out a little more about the considered reality beyond the film set. May '11 (****)

  • John le Carre: Our Kind of Traitor: A Novel

    John le Carre: Our Kind of Traitor: A Novel
    I am pleased to say this is a return to le Carré’s old hunting ground – the spy novel. As in the past, it also sees the British Secret Service ranged against the Russians and focuses around a high level defection from Russia. But here similarities with the Cold War novels end. The defection is not from the KGB or its modern successor but from the Russian mafia. Nor is the British secret service portrayed as it once was by le Carré. There is still internal rivalry but the conflict is now with a service deeply inbred with the London’s city establishment and it’s role as a financial capital. This is a darker, more political le Carré who is taking aim at what he perceives as another threat to liberal, compassionate, democratic society. The “Constant Gardener” took aim at the hypocrisy of the international aid and pharmaceutical communities, “A Most wanted Man” tackled international terrorism. Now it is the turn of the global banker and the way the establishment of a nation desperate for foreign capital fawns towards them. Perhaps because it is more of a “spy” novel than has recently been the case, this is le Carrés most successful work for some time (although his young central characters do appear to be drawn from the sixties rather then the facebook/twitter generation of today). A good read that encourages you to move through it quickly! April '11 (****)

  • John Keegan: The American Civil War

    John Keegan: The American Civil War
    Keegan, a war historian best known for his surveys of 20th century warfare writes well and clearly. I should imagine that the book provides more than sufficient detail on the campaigns and key meetings between both sides to satisfy most students researching the conflict (however some reviews have expressed concern with accuracy). What is irritating is the habit of repeating points made earlier on in the narrative.The battle maps are particularly useful (although I must admit to moving quickly through some of the land campaign details, lack of personal familiarity with the basic geography of the area trying my patience a little. This though is a personal failing, not one of the authors.). What is made very clear is how inexperienced and unprepared both sides were in the craft of warfare and it is interesting to read the process of natural selection required to find able military commanders. Keegan also provides a number of chapters prior to and after the conflict that are extremely useful articles in their own right on key aspects of the conflict (such as the Life of the Soldier, Generalship, Nature of the Civil War Battle, Home fronts, Black soldiers). In many ways these are just as valuable as (if not more so than) the account of the war itself. One omission is a discrete chapter focusing on the war role of Lincoln himself, which is a pity. Given Keegan's interest in 20th century warfare there are many instances where he shows how the Civil War displayed and introduced features of later wars (as well as how it did not and drew rather on earlier conflict experience in Europe). All in all this is an easily recommendable narrative cum basic analysis of the war if what is required is a primer. March '11 (****)

  • Matthew Brzezinski: Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age

    Matthew Brzezinski: Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age
    It tells the story of "Sputnik and the rivalries that ignited the Space Age". Indeed it starts well with a very atmospheric description of a V2 launch against London, and then goes on to tell the story of the early pre Sputnik US and Soviet space programmes and the internal politics that lay behind them. Centre-stage is rightly given to von Braun, ex member of Hitler's SS and Korolev, survivor of Stalin's Gulag camps (interesting that Korolev had as many failures - probably more than the US before his successful Sputnik launch) with an examination of their respective relationships with Eisenhower and Khrushchev but beyond telling the story, rather like early US attempts to get into space, it fails to really ignite. Brzezinski is a former journalist (for the Wall Street Journal) and this reads like an extended piece of journalism - rather like a long series of articles that you might find in a weekend supplement. The US political context is more satisfactory than the Soviet. The end notes suggest that research is essentially secondary - and much of that from the internet.An appropriate read perhaps if you are new to the period (having just seen the forthcoming movie on "Ham" the space chimp maybe) but don't look to find any novel insights or new archival research. Jan'11 PS If you are wondering why the next two reviews have no images it is because they are available on Kindle only in the US!! (***)

  • David Olusoga, Casper Erichsen: The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism
    Tells the story of German colonialism in South West Africa, showing how German policy towards the native Herero and Nama peoples developed into one of genocide. Shows how a philosophy of white racial supremacy emerged out of the ideas of Charles Darwin and was put into practice. Survival of the fittest becomes justification for white dominance over "inferior" indigenous peoples and genocide an acceptable option. This process is shown though as not just a German process and the German experience is placed in a global context: with British colonists in Tasmania, the US frontier wars, the Argentine wars of the desert all showing the same features.In the German genocide against Herero and Nama we read of extermination orders, forced labour and concentration camps designed to kill off indigenous peoples who were articulate, politically able and well resourced, but ultimately doomed as the Kaiser's troops introduce a policy of "absolute terror and cruelty" in which missionary churches were actively complicit.The second part of the work shows the significance of this colonial experience for future nazism. The colonies first Governor was the father of Hermann Göring, the uniform of the SA was that of the Wilhelm II's brown shirted colonial army. The colonial period saw the emergence of the pseudo science of eugenics and the legal framework to protect the purity of German settlers from racial contamination for a Volk that needed Lebensraum to expand into and escape population pressure at home. These ideas survive the collapse of 1918 and become a core element of the politics of the right.After 1933 races considered impure, German Jews and Gypsies, are subjected to the treatment first employed in South West Africa: Nuremberg Laws to end racial mixing; control and internment in concentration camps, forced labour, extermination. Hitler's war, it is also argued, was ultimately one for colonial Lebensraum in the east. The German treatment of the eastern populations and Red Army was different to the western conflict as Hitler considered the eastern peoples to be similar to uncivilised indigenous colonial peoples. Fighting was more brutal, civilians were treated with even less regard. Necessary he believed to ensure Lebensaum and civilisation. The nazis compared this push East to how Wilhelm's troops had fought the Herero, or the British the Sudanese & Tasmanians, the US the Native Indians, or the Argentines with the tribes of the south. Thought provoking, this is an important, thorough and well written work. It ranks with Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost" as an indictment of European colonialism but develops its arguments beyond normally considered confines to place the events of a short-lived German colony in a far wider context. Jan '11 (*****)
  • Jane Conway: Mary Borden: A Woman of Two Wars
    The story of Ma(r)y Borden, one of those dynamic women who managed to flourish in the male dominated world of the early 20th century. Borden had been given a huge headstart as the daughter of a millionaire from Chicago and this she used to the full. A writer of books achieving both popular and critical acclaim and (second) marriage to a British politician ensured equal social acclaim across the Atlantic. The book is illustrated with many useful photos including several society magazine shots showing her in the 1920's as quite the society woman and hostess. However there was more to Borden than this. She was a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour and bearer of the Croix de Guerre presented for her war work in setting up and managing hospitals very close to the Front and also those with the lowest mortality rates. She repeated this war work in the Second World War and continued to write successfully until late in life. Conway provides a literary commentary on her books as they were published, attempting to link them into Borden's experiences, but for historians what is most interesting are her sections on Borden's war work. In 1914-18 she used innovatory portable hospitals with reinforced windows to withstand blast damage that could be dismantled and rebuilt in a matter of hours. The section on her work in World War II is even more historically interesting. Leading the Hadfield-Spears mobile ambulance unit she managed front line Franco-British nursing care in France, Italy, north Africa and the Middle East and found herself more involved in the political machinations of the Franco-allied relationship. Conway is perceptive on the chaos and amateurism shown during the Fall of France as well as the in-fighting involving De Gaulle (which ultimately sees the disbanding of the unit in 1945). It is hard though to escape the paradoxes of her existence. Living a privileged lifestyle she was critical of the British Labour Party for not doing enough to relieve poverty. Given the hectic nature of her life it is clear that she spent little of what would be called "quality time" with her young family despite fighting a long and (clearly for them) disturbing battle with her first husband for custody of them. A more direct approach at times to some of the paradoxes outlined above would also help ensure that Borden could be seen more clearly in the context and standards of her time if not those of today. It is these contrasts that make understanding the assertive and successful women of the early 20th century (as well as today?) so interesting. In the last few years many unsung stories of the role played by key women in both world wars have become more public. Conway presents us here with the life of one such woman whose work and enthusiasm deserves to be remembered by a clear biography such as this. I would recommend this a book to be read in particular by students of social as well as women's history. Dec '10 (****)
  • Michael Howard: Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany

    Michael Howard: Otherwise Occupied: Letters Home from the Ruins of Nazi Germany
    Howard was a 19 year old officer sent to the Ruhr in 1946 as an intelligence officer for Britains T-Force to help administer British seizures and this is his story of his time as part of that process. He has used the 67 letters he sent home to his mother during the period as a structure to hang the development of the general account on, a narrative that reads well and is clear to follow. Maps and photographs by the author help general understanding and the personal story element of the book. Interesting aspects emerge on the nature of the early British occupation (for example it seemed many of the initial military administrators had a pre-war background in Britain's colonial administrations - his own father was in the Fiji Colonial Service) as well as the reality of life in the immediate postwar period for occupied and occupier and the issue of "fraternisation". Little is said about the wider picture of T-Force work (and indeed this is not the purpose of the book), rather the focus is on the experiences and impressions of a young officer who happened to be part of a wider process (so despite the described efficiency of the authors section, day to day military administration in general during the period comes over as somewhat ad hoc with officers clearly enjoying their occupying role, and much reliance on a public school ethos that was perhaps typical of the period). This is perhaps the key significance of Howards writing. Letters from the war period are relatively common, far less common are letters with a commentary written 60 years later by the same writer. Here this provides not just elaboration but a modern self-evaluation of attitudes and actions contemporary to the period that help the context to be better understood. Of particular value is the (empathetic) development of the author's response to German nationals. As a junior officer the author had no real part in key zonal decisions, so do not look here for new evidence on British postwar occupation policy or relations with the Soviets. However the book has real value to the historian in another way. Recent years have seen an explosion in German witness accounts of the immediate postwar period. Here we have what amounts to an annotated contemporary account of early occupation life by a member of a western occupying force to set alongside them. Nov '10 (****)

  • Sean McMeekin: The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power, 1898-1918

    Sean McMeekin: The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power, 1898-1918
    A thorough and almost magisterial acount of an area of World War 1 not normally given a prime focus; the Ottoman front. It is a very contemporary work using terms very familiar today: the creation of a jihad against the Entente and Britsh in particular; rivalry between Shia and Sunni; Caucasian minority struggles; strategies to control modern Iraq & Iran and at the end a push for middle east oil. McMeekin shows how Wilhelmine Germany had a rich seam of middle east specialist archaeologists. He records the excellent use made of this by Berlin in working on the Ottomans, Arabs, Persians, Afghans and others to promote an anti British & French jihad policy from Constantinople to Kabul via Baghdad. The ultimate aim was to bring about a collapse of British India. New light is cast on the context of many elements of Great war strategy & campaigns: the German push to india increased a British focus on Iraq and Iran that has persisted; the Armenian massacres as an element of Ottoman great war strategy; the success of the Tsarist Russian army and the later growth from it of Yudenich's White forces.The Turks were diplomatically, and often militarily, sharper and shrewder than usually given credit for. McMeekin argues that the Balfour declaration was made by a largely pro arab British government, partly out of pique with German advances to Zionists and a desire to win US zionist support for a speedier US mobilsation. It also traces German - muslim relations to the end of World War 2 showing how these were cultivated as part of the Nazi anti-semitic program. Given the unfamiliarity of the characters to most readers a list of Dramatis Personae would have been helpful. Equally the title perhaps suggests more of a focus on the actual Berlin-Baghdad railroad. Although a vital thread in the narrative, it is no more than that. Railway enthusiasts will be disappointed early on by what is perhaps the title of an over-zealous editor. Nov '10 (****)

  • David Finkel: The Good Soldiers

    David Finkel: The Good Soldiers
    Finkel spent 8 months in Iraq during the "Surge"with the US 2-16 Ranger division and reports on their deployment there, as he himself writes "without agenda". This is not a strategic analysis of their role within the Iraq theatre. Rather the focus is on an infantry battalion of young soldiers who see themselves as being there to do as good (hence the title) and decent a job as possible. They are not politicians or ideologues. Finkel draws a series of pen portraits of key figures – battalion leader, soldiers going out in their humvees to face yet another patrol route seeded with remote controlled bombs, the Iraqis who work with them. Then there are the casualties. The book presents them in their truly awful detail – especially in one chapter which describes a visit by the commander to severely his severely wounded men in hospital in the States. Good Soldiers puts the troops in their human context. Finkel writes empathetically of men trying to survive and do a job they were sent out to do but who grow increasingly disillusioned as their deployment comes to an end. The 2-16 Rangers live in fortified areas as separate from the Iraqi population as it is possible to be and still be in Iraq. This is necessary – they appear to be under constant deadly attack. This is not the more secure confines of Baghdad's Green Zone, but in Rustamiya, on the eastern edge of the city, a violent place where 350,000 Iraqis were hanging on as the war ground ahead. The enemy are faceless, nameless, not explored by Finkel and neither are their motives. This makes them perhaps perceived all the more as the Good Soldiers saw them. This is no gung-ho account. The reader though is left with a great deal of sympathy for those involved, regardless of what might be thought of the reasons for them being there in the first place. For this reason The Good Soldiers is likely to remain a valuable source for understanding the bravery and ferocity but also the futility of the Iraq occupation. Sept '10 (****)

  • Greg Grandin: Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

    Greg Grandin: Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
    Tells the story of Henry Ford's attempt to build a settlement in the Amazon jungle during the 1920's and 1930's. Ostensibly to provide rubber for Ford's factories and so break the monopoly of the Dutch and British plantations of the Far East, in reality Fordlandia was an attempt by the US industrialist to build what he considered a model industrial settlement in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest. Grandin tells the story well, of how Henry Ford was hoodwinked into buying a 5,000 square mile tract of land which he might have gained for nothing from the government; how a New England type town was built in the middle of nowhere for brazilian and expat workers complete with company shops, golf course, barn for square dancing and clapboard hoiuses each with a garden ready for planting flowers; and how ultimately the project collapsed. But the story is more than this. We are taken on an intriguing journey into the mind of the founder of Fordism and his theories of small planned industrial communities which he had already tried out in Michigan. Here was paternalism at its height. Quality housing, above average wages, planned communities with clinics and schools. In this Ford also displayed some ideas recently quite fashionable: dislike of big banking, direct government control and monopoly producers. His communities were planned where possible without any of this. But the downside was company control. No organised labour, intolerance of those who failed to think as Ford men should, entertainment outside the (Ford) approved parameters (ie alcohol, gaming, close-up dancing) frowned upon. There was also a disdain for specialists in favour of individuals who were self trained, who learned from experience. All of this was to come to a head in Brazil. Fordlandia becomes the island of homely "mid-western" modernity in the Amazon. Well laid out housing, clinics and schools combined with above average wages to spend in company shops selling at reasonable rates to encourage the purchase of clean clothing. But the cracks appear. The dislike of experts mean the Ford team in the Amazon have to learn on the job (the pretty houses were solid, but their thick walls and tin roofs made them like ovens to live in). More importantly scant attenton was paid to cultural differences. Clocking in helped produce a riot that destroyed much of the early settlement. The rubber was also a disaster. Blight and bugs spread easily in the damp heat of the Amazon. Plantations at Fordlandia and a new site further north were devastated by disease. Agronomists could have told this to the Ford team of car engineers before they went to Brazil. Eventually after World War II Ford's grandson sold Fordlandia to the Brazilian government. It is now overgrown and much is used for soy production. The inexperienced Ford technicians did devise a new way of cross cutting plants to improve them genetically that was soon to be copied across the globe. A visit to the Ford plantations inspired Brazil's dictator Vargas to make his 1940 "March to the West" speech that formally announced the drive to open up Brazil's interior. In a final irony Grandin explains how this has since led not only to the erosion of the rainforest but also to the explosion of an industrial region in the mid Amazon with squalid living conditions that are the antithesis of Ford's hopes fo rhis Fordlandia. And the irony? This industrialisation is based on the unskilled assembly of parts made elsewhere - the essentials of those Fordist principles which made Henry his fortune. An intriguing and provoking book. Reads well and is accompanied by many instructive photographs. Sept '10 (****)

  • Dee Brown: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (Arena Books)

    Dee Brown: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (Arena Books)
    Brown shows clearly, and with a regularity that begins to distract, how the Plains Indians were dealt with one by one from the 1850's to the 1890's as they fell foul to a combination of the white man's greed, lack of humanity and an almost universal desire to rid the growing USA of an unwelcome people. When written forty years ago the use of the word "genocide" was not one in general use. However this is what Brown is describing. Villages wiped out, tribes herded onto reservations where the land was worthless, meaning they had nothing to hunt or could not grow anything. Then when something of value was found - gold for example - they were moved on to another reservation. All this despite signing supposedly binding agreements with Washington. The Indians were innocent, naive, unable to grasp at first the self interest of what Brown describes as the military-washington-reservation complex which saw them and their original lands (and later on the provisions provided by Washington) exploited for personal and commercial gain. Even those who adopted the "white" lifestyle advocated by Washington: who settled in one place, grew crops and went to church were eventually dispossessed through trickery and military force. Very few whites understood or attempted to understood the Indian position -that they were trying to live with the whites and a culture alien to them but were forced to resist when their lands were illegally settled on or buffalo being hunted out of existence. The old chiefs tried hard to restrain their younger members realising that the white man's power was much greater and resistance would only bring even greater retribution. When finally realising the true determination of the growing white population it was too late. The tribes were too few in number, too divided in intention and left facing an arrogant US military busily building forts across their original lands, equipped with the latest technology (magazine loading rifles, mobile artillery, and the beginning of long distance communications) and using them to ride out and deal with Indian problems and ultimately to round up the survivors of their raids and campaigns and imprison them on reservations. In 1970 this had definite echoes of US military policy in Vietnam but depressingly still equally for modern Iraq. So the tactics developed against the north American Indian continue to drive US military policy. Brown uses a strange mechanism to increase the readers sympathy for the Indians - the narrative is written as if by the Indians themselves. Today this can seem patronising and an encumbrance to a reasoned understanding of the aboriginal position, and although the work is widely sourced, it makes sourcing what is written difficult. Nonetheless the work remains a powerful piece of writing, if not strict history. Aug '10 (****)

  • Rowland White: Vulcan 607: The Epic Story of the Most Remarkable British Air Attack since WWII

    Rowland White: Vulcan 607: The Epic Story of the Most Remarkable British Air Attack since WWII
    This is the story of the first Black Buck V-bomber raid on Stanley airport during the Falklands/Malvinas war. It recalls much that is to be admired from a purely logistical and management aspect: the ingenuity of the engineers as well as the planners, coaching the old superannuated nuclear bombers (due to be scrapped in June 1982) into service and planning a massive in-flight refueling programme to ensure one Vulcan made the islands and was able to disable the runway and prevent its use by Argentine jets, so ensuring the eventual success of the British campaign. A role that has perhaps been underplayed in the past. It also paints a magnificent picture of two of the legendary V-bombers, Vulcan & Victor, at work. However the cover has a quote recommending the book written by BBC petrolhead Jeremy Clarkson which sets its tone quite accurately. This is very much a "Boys Own" account which makes only a limited attempt to view the raid in a broader context than the RAF and the crews involved. This is served especially poorly by brief anecdotal inserts that appear to tell the story of some of the islanders after the Argentine landings. The sources listed at the end are extremely thin on Argentine materials/interviews. This may be a good beach read but it is no Frederick Taylor (Dresden) or Leo McKinstry (Dambusters). July '10 (**)

  • Mark Urban: The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes: The Story of George Scovell

    Mark Urban: The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes: The Story of George Scovell
    Although this does what it says on the tin and tells the story of how Scovell broke the Napoleonic codes during the Peninsular Wars, the key thread is that of the campaigns rather than the code-breaking (presumably because this is not an Enigma type process, rather it relied on the interpreting of a few, albeit vital coded letters and how these contributed to Wellington's eventual victory. Knowing too little of the Iberian theatre this suited me as it would a general reader (it also has excellent maps), but anyone seeking an in depth look at Napoleonic cipher breaking will be disappointed. July '10 (***)

& for café anoraks...

  • also today:

    Today's Birthday

     

    Clicky

  • café watching......

Blog powered by TypePad
Member since 04/2006

Entries categorized ".. ussr/russia"

stalingrad, fate and life – also available as podcast

All of this week BBC radio has been transmitting an 8 hour dramatisation (not all at once - in 13 episodes!!) of Vasily Grossman's novel, Fate and Life. This is a series of narratives based around a family caught up in events at the time of the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. Strongly anti Stalinist, and hoping for publication in 1961, Grossman found the work itself arrested and banned "for 100 years" by the Soviet censor. It is soon clear why. It is not just Stalin that he attacks but the complete corruption of the Soviet system that emerged after the death of Lenin with parallels being drawn between the systems and personalities of Hitler and Stalin.

A war journalist with the Red Army during the Second World War, Grossman (Shown alongside in postwar Germany) wrote incidents down in a notebook for later use in this novel, giving some element of accuracy to the background as he describes it. Today, there is little new about his accusations and portrayal of Soviet life under Stalin. However even in Khruschev's Russia, even after destalinisation, what he wrote would have been political dynamite for the regime. It is this that makes the work most valuable. And after a slowish initial drama, the rest tell a good story – a "War & Peace" for Russias Great Patriotic War.

As for the 8 hours, at first I tried valiantly to keep up each day this week but soon fell behind (even with recording them on my TiVo PVR) only to discover they are also available globally for 30 days as podcasts to keep and listen to in the future. Well worth it!

PS As with most Russian epic novels, cast lists can be a problem. Books usually give a list of characters to refer to but the problem of identifying who is who is even more difficult in sound only. So the beeb have provided a pdf with piccies to help us identify the personas, families, lovers and friends in the plot.

image origin………… ……..post source: BBC

linked casahistoria site: Stalin's Russia


……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

 . .


Posted on Friday, September 23, 2011 at 05:17 PM | | Comments (0)

a brief history of removing possible future shrines

There are strong historical precedents for the US unwillingness to see a fixed burial place for Osama Bin Laden as a quick look through the last century shows:

Adolf Hitler's "disappearance" is the best known example. Despite the many conspiracy theories it is now clear the partially-cremated corpse of Adolf Hitler was dug up by invading Soviet forces from its initial burial site in Berlin before being moved several times - its ultimate fate being shrouded in mystery, with some accounts claiming his skull and jawbone were taken to Moscow. The Berghof, the dictator's home in the Bavarian Alps, was demolished in the early 1950s by the West German government, who feared it would become a focal point for neo-Nazis (although it has now become the location of a hotel....). Other Nazi leaders executed at the Nuremberg trials by the Allies were cremated and their ashes were scattered in a local river to prevent any attempt to by sympathisers to commemorate them later on.

Similar anonymous (and ignominious) fates befell many other charismatic figures and leaders. Ethiopia's last emperor, Haile Selassie, was buried in an unmarked grave after his overthrow. His remains were found in 1992 under a toilet in the Imperial Palace. The body of revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara was photographed perfunctorily by the enemies who killed him in Bolivia before his burial in an unmarked grave to try and presumably prevent the cult his death nonetheless inspired. The corpse of the Philippines' authoritarian former President Ferdinand Marcos lies in a refrigerated mausoleum while his family campaign for a state funeral. In an odd reversal of this logic, Chile's former leader Augusto Pinochet was given a military funeral in 2006 but then cremated as his family did not want a grave or memorial to become a focal point for protest - thousands died or disappeared during his 17-year-rule. Likewise, the Valley of the Fallen near the Spanish capital Madrid, which houses the tomb of dictator Francisco Franco and was partly built by Republican prisoners, divides many Spaniards along civil war lines to this day - the possible exhumation of the Franco remains is under discussion by the Spanish parliament to help prevent this..

The closest analogy perhaps to Bin Laden's fate is that of an earlier Muslim insurgent - Muhammad Ahmad, known as the Mahdi, who led an initially successful revolt against the British in the Sudan. He died of typhus but once the British defeated his followers his tomb in Sudan was destroyed and his bones thrown in the river Nile to prevent it becoming a rallying point for supporters.

Only occasionally does concealment fail. The Romanovs, the family of Russian Tsar Nicolas II - were shot dead during the Bolshevik Revolution, then partially cremated and the remains scoured with acid before being buried in a forest pit by the Bolsheviks after the October 1917 revolution. Again to stop a shrine resulting. However their position indicates the power of the shrine that post death disappearance is supposed to prevent. After the fall of communism their remains were found and reburied at St Petersburg cathedral with honour as a symbol of the new post Soviet & Communist Russia. (The image shoes Russian president Yeltsin bowing before the remains of the murdered family in 1998).

For more discussion on this, the post source has points by Prof Michael Cox, of the department of international relations at the London School of Economics and historian Laurence Rees, author of The Nazis: A Warning from History who looks at how leaders hope to leave shrines behind, not concealment. Some of the readers comments are also interesting.......

Image origin………………… .post source: BBC

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

............

....

Posted on Friday, May 06, 2011 at 03:17 PM | | Comments (0)

from protective help to regime change

A programme broadcast last night BBC Radio draws attention to one of the mysteries of 20th century intrigue. Nearly a century ago, Britain was accused of masterminding a failed plot to kill Lenin and overthrow his fledgling Bolshevik regime. The British, on the other hand, have consistently dismissed the Soviet allegations as far-fetched propaganda.The programme looks at new evidence which suggests it might be true.

In the Soviet Union, then later as Russia, what became known as the "Lockhart plot" has been taught in schools and illustrated in films. In early 1918, in the final months of World War I, Russia's new Bolshevik government was negotiating a peace deal with Germany and withdrawing from the fighting. Robert Bruce Lockhart was sent by the British Foreign Office to stop such a settlement and keep Russia on the allied side.

When the Bolsheviks did sign the Treaty with Germany, Lockhart's attention turned to overthrowing the Bolshevik regime and replacing it with another government that would be willing to re-enter the war against Germany. Documents show that, in June, Lockhart asked London for money to fund various anti-Bolshevik organisations in Moscow. This letter, marked "urgent", was sent from the Foreign Office to the Treasury (who controlled the funds). It sums up the Foreign Secretary's attitude to the Moscow's representative's request:"Mr. Balfour (the Foreign Secretary) is of the opinion that the moment has arrived when it has become necessary to take this action, and I am to request that you will move the Lords Committee to give the necessary sanction for the expenditure of such funds as Mr. Lockhart can collect for this purpose."

Later, in the summer of 1918, Lockhart sent a telegram to London following a meeting with an opponent of the Bolsheviks called Savinkov. It read: "Savinkov's proposals for counter-revolution. Plan is how, on Allied intervention, Bolshevik barons will be murdered and military dictatorship formed."Underneath that telegram is a note bearing the signed initials of Lord Curzon, who was then a member of the British War Cabinet. It says: "Savinkoff's methods are drastic, though if successful probably effective, but we cannot say or do anything until intervention has been definitely decided upon."

Later that year an attempt was made in Moscow to assassinate Lenin. The Bolshevik's secret police, the Cheka, arrested Lockhart a few hours later and he was taken to the Kremlin for questioning. According to Cheka records, Lockhart confessed to being part of a plot proposed by London to kill Lenin and overthrow the Bolshevik government. But in early October 1918, he was freed in an exchange for a Russian counterpart in London.

Lockhart and the British government have always denied there was a plot to hatch regime change in Bolshevik Russia. However, a letter, recently found by the historian Robert Service, and written by Lockhart's son, has been discovered in archives in America. It suggests that his father was being rather economical with the truth: "If the question of my father's relationship with Reilly (a British agent sent to support counter revolution in Russia) still exercises anyone's mind in the Foreign Office, it is clear from his book Memoirs of a British Agent that once intervention in Russia had been decided on in 1918, he gave his active support to the counter-revolutionary movement".

Professor Robert Service, believes the only way to be sure of the truth would be to gain access to the rest of the files from the day. But............

More than 90 years later, the British government continues to keep many of them secret. All, in Robert Service's view, to maintain the myth that Lockhart-style plots have not - nor ever would be - considered by London, to show the British government have always been clean in its foreign dealings. He says, "The British haven't always been clean. They have been as dirty as anyone else."

For the café this is a reminder of just how important it is to remain critical at a time when present protective actions by a successor government are already moving to talk of regime change.

Document: The Lockhart Plot was broadcast on Monday 21 March at 2000 GMT on BBC Radio 4 and will be available for seven days after this worldwide on the BBC iPlayer.

Image origin………………… .post source: BBC

linked casahistoria site: Lenin's Russia

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

..

Posted on Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 08:38 AM | | Comments (0)

reviewing red moon rising

On a recent visit to the library I saw Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski on one of the shelves and decided to give it a read.

It tells the story of "Sputnik and the rivalries that ignited the Space Age". Indeed it starts well with a very atmospheric description of a V2 launch against London, and then goes on to tell the story of the early pre Sputnik US and Soviet space programmes and the internal politics that lay behind them. Centre-stage is rightly given to von Braun, ex member of Hitler's SS and Korolev, survivor of Stalin's Gulag camps (interesting that Korolev had as many failures - probably more than the US before his successful Sputnik launch) with an examination of their respective relationships with Eisenhower and Khrushchev but beyond telling the story, rather like early US attempts to get into space, it fails to really ignite.

Brzezinski is a former journalist (for the Wall Street Journal) and this reads like an extended piece of journalism - rather like a long series of articles that you might find in a weekend supplement. The US political context is more satisfactory than the Soviet. The end notes suggest that research is essentially secondary - and much of that from the internet.

An appropriate read perhaps if you are new to the period (having just seen the forthcoming movie on "Ham" the space chimp maybe) but don't look to find any novel insights or new archival research.

linked casahistoria site: The Space Race

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

..

Posted on Wednesday, February 02, 2011 at 05:18 PM | | Comments (0)

spanish airmen of the soviet gulag

Some time ago the café wrote of the book, "The Forsaken" that drew attention to the plight of US citizens who had travelled to the USSR in the 1930's to support communism only to end up as victims of Stalin's paranoia and placed in Gulags. Now from Spain's El Pais comes the story of a group of Spanish communist supporters who also travelled to the Soviet Union at the time and who ended up in Gulags at the same time.

A new book Los últimos aviadores de la República (or, The Republic's last aviators) written by Carmen Calvo Jung and published by the Spanish Defence Ministry and the Aena Foundation, describes how her father, one of those aviators, left Spain for the USSR with the thought of returning soon to go to war, but took 15 years to get back. During that time, he was shuttled to various prisons and forced labour camps, becoming, like the US citizens in "The Forsaken", one more victim of the Gulag Archipelago, the network of Soviet internment camps where anybody could end up for any reason.

Looking at newly opened archives and interviewing survivors, Calvo tells the story of how from January 1937, Spain's Republican authorities sent around 800 students (some shown in image alongside) to train as pilots in Kirovabad (now Ganja, in Azerbaijan) and Kharkov (Ukraine). The Kremlin, with support from Spanish communist leaders living in exile in the USSR, pressured 180 Spanish aviators who were still in the country at the end of the Civil War to obtain Soviet citizenship and remain where they were.

Although some joined the Red Army as pilots, by June 1941 25 pilots still continued to demand to leave the USSR. Then, following the German attack on the USSR on June 22, 1941, the 25 "rebel" pilots were sent to forced labour camps in Siberia, where they remained until 1948. José Romero Carreira was one of the few who was put on trial and convicted. The reason? His participation in a hunger strike to demand better conditions. His second "crime" was to set up a school to teach the Division members to read and write.

In 1948 the Soviet government orchestrated a phony repatriation operation from Odessa after an international campaign sponsored by the Spanish Federation of Deportees and Political Interns, but the Soviets kept pressuring the Spaniards to renounce their demands and accept Soviet nationality. Twelve refused. These 12 men returned to Spain on the Semíramis, which sailed into Barcelona in April 1954 to a triumphant welcome for 246 war prisoners also aboard.

Calvo has spent 10 years exploring 24 archives and institutions in Spain, Switzerland, France, Germany, The Netherlands and Russia, following the trail of those aviators who were trapped in the USSR and unable to return to Spain or go into exile in a third country, as they wanted. Her family connection to one of the pilots opened the doors to the personal files of the other heroes of this story. Almost no one wanted to talk, but nearly all of them put their memories down on paper.

Calvo writes: "The Republicans always held their head high. Their great lesson is that every person has to care for the others," in the El Pais article. So why were they kept there in the first place? "Because they didn't want the world to know that there were Republicans who felt uncomfortable in paradise."

Image origin…………………… ……….post source: El Pais (Googles well into English)

Linked casahistoria sites: Spanish Civil War, Stalin's Russia

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

..

 

Posted on Monday, September 20, 2010 at 11:33 AM | | Comments (0)

the world’s worst history textbooks?

With schools starting again for a new academic year in the northern hemisphere, the journal Foreign Affairs has produced an article looking at what it considers "The World's Worst Textbooks". The café has drawn attention in the past to issues with interpretations of national history and no country is immune to showing it's own history in a positive light, at least at pre grade 9 levels. Here though are a selection of what the journal considers the biggest "spinners":

(the links that are in the post are those of the original sources providing evidence for the Foreign Affairs article, which also make for worthwhile reading)

China:

  • Chinese textbooks (albeit in 2004) ignore the invasion of Tibet in 1950 and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, launched by China in response to Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia, and teach that China has only fought wars in self-defence. More significantly they also gloss over Chairman Mao's 1958 to 1961 Great Leap Forward, which resulted in mass famine and possibly 30 million deaths. Also The Chinese version of Worlds War II has it that Japan was defeated in the war because of Chinese resistance, not because of the U.S. entry into the war.

Saudi Arabia:

  • In 2006, Riyadh promised to remove "all intolerant passages," from its schoolbooks but some sources say children are still learning from texts that promote anti-Semitism and jihad. Progress is slow as the examples show. Examples: "Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than ______________ is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ____________." --from a first-grade textbook. And: "As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus" – from an eighth-grade textbook on monotheism and jurisprudence. Saudi schools in countries including the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Turkey all use similar textbooks.

USA (Texas)

  • The Texas Board of Education earned worldwide opprobrium last spring when members approved a controversial new social studies curriculum.Some of the most notable arguments were over language surrounding U.S. imperialism (now known as "expansionism") and birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger as a promoter of "eugenics,".

Russia:

  • Encouraged by Prime Minister and former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, the country's curriculum is engaging in a re-Stalinizing process called "positive history." Aleksandr Filippov, the author of a new Kremlin-approved textbook told the Times, "It is wrong to write a textbook that will fill the children who learn from it with horror and disgust about their past and their people." His book devotes 83 pages to Joseph Stalin's industrialization plans, but only one paragraph to the Great Famine of 1932 to 1933 in which millions starved as a result of deeply flawed agricultural policy. The book also minimizes the role played by the Soviet Union's allies during Word War II, saying that they "limited themselves mainly to supplying arms, materials and provisions to the USSR." Extract from A History of Russia, 1900-1945 history textbook: "[Stalin] acted entirely rationally -- as the guardian of a system, as a consistent support of reshaping the country into an industrialized state" --

Image origin…………………… ……….post source: Foreign Affairs

Linked casahistoria site: Teaching History

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

..

 

Posted on Friday, September 10, 2010 at 04:30 PM | | Comments (0)

robert service's life of trotsky

It has been a pretty hectic few weeks in the scriptorium annex of the café but daylight, not to say sunlight, is beginning to appear again so the posts will begin to appear once more with greater regularity. so let's get down to business with something quite meaty: Robert Service's biography of Trotsky which I have been reading for light relief between the exam papers.

The first thing that needs saying is that despite its 500 pages plus footnotes this is not a heavy write, full of the dialectics of marxism/leninism/trotskyism/stalinism and all the shades in between that the period produced. This will probably disappoint the theoreticans and activists of the left hoping for new insights into Trotsky. Rather it is an attempt to provide a readable account of who was undoubtedly one of the leading figures of the Russian Revolution, if not the key individual in its immediate survival. Service has produced a narrative, as it says on the tin, "a biography". No more, no less. So we get his family, early background, exile (Siberia), more exile (Britain), return in 1905, more exile (Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, USA), return in 1917 - revolution - civil war - struggle inside the post Lenin party, banishment, exile (Turkey, Norway and finally Mexico); his assassination comes abruptly and without much fanfare.

In between all this Service weaves in his relations with the other revolutionaries and builds up the character of this itinerant revolutionary amongst the key stages in his passage through life. His relations with his entrepreneurial peasant father, the emergence of his obvious gifts as orator and writer (Service compares him in this respect with Winston Churchill), his role in the party schisms before 1917 and his apparent inability to win close, trusting friends within the party as a consequence of his arrogance and perceptions of self righteousness.

He gets closest perhaps to Lenin after mid 1917. But then of course Lenin dies and the bottom falls out of Trotsky's political world. Service shows clearly the misjudgements of Trotsky in this period - again down to arrogance. Stalin is despised and fatally underated as uncouth, brutal (this from the man who showed so little compassion to opponents in the civil war - even if they were card carrying communists), a non intellectual. as a result Trotsky is forced into exile again.

In reality Trotsky is remembered for his role in a mere 7 year period, 1917-24, of Russian history. The key events of this period are told clearly - but with Trotsky as the focus: in Oct/Nov, at Brest litovsk waiting for a German revolution, criss crossing the old tsarist Empire on his battle train to win the civil war, another example of politician turned highly professional (and brutal) military commander. This tends to reduce his influence on other internal policies, giving space to Stalin and also allowing the other Bolshevik leaders to fear him as a new Bonaparte: heir to a revolution and the head of an army.

Implicit throughout the second part of the biography is a comparison with Stalin, and the question: what if Trotsky had succeeded Lenin rather than Stalin? Unfortunately, despite all Trotsky wrote so eloquently about from outside the Soviet Union there would have been little difference. Trotsky had already shown he could ignore legal niceties and be ruthless when dealing with perceived opponents. His campaigns showed he had little inclination to spare the wealthier, kulak peasants. Nor despite later protestations in exile was he a believer in proletarian democracy. In reality Stalin's 5 Year Plans drew heavily from Trotsky's post NEP ideas. As for foreign involvement Trotsky was little concerned with foreign nations where Russian (revolutionary) interests were threatened shown by his keenness to go to war with Poland. The final chapter is a little more explicit in drawing out this depressing conclusion.

Perhaps the pace of change would have been slower, but little else would have been different.

The book is easily structured for students. Clear chapters on specific periods issues lend itself easily for dipping in and out of to get info. One especially valuable chapter is on his Jewishness. It does not figure prominently according to Service but for one key aspect: he argues that Trotsky believed despite not being a practicing Jew, he would still be seen as such by a Russia that was still highly antisemitic. He could never lead Russia as he would not be respected because of his Jewish background. This prevented him placing himself in a key leadership role until it was too late.

Trotsky deserves a new biography. The worthy Isaac Deutscher bio of fifty years ago that launched the thousands of 60's and 70's radicals is in need of supplementing by a post Soviet Union approach. For the radicals this biography will unhappily remove a great deal of the gloss, but for students of today it will get rid of much of the dross (especially on the internet) that has followed in the wake of the man who more than anyone else made the Russian Revolution happen. Lenin lead the revolution, Stalin made the revolutionary state a confident superpower that controlled half of Europe. But it was Trotsky who masterminded the events of October/November and enabled it to survive its birth, but in true Soviet fashion, at considerable human cost.

 

Other reviews of the book that might interest you:



linked casahistoria site: Lenin's Russia 

 ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

..

 

 

Posted on Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 06:43 PM | | Comments (0)

lenin, born 140 years ago, now on show in kiev

It has taken 20 years but the ex soviet state is becoming confident enough about the present to acknowledge its immediate past. An exhibition timed to coincide with the 140th anniversary of the birth of Lenin, the leader of Russia's 1917 Bolshevik Revolution has opened in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine.

In Soviet times, dozens of museums were dedicated to the life of the founder of the Soviet Union. Leningrad, the cradle of the revolution now once again called St Petersburg, had 11 of them. The Lenin museum in Kiev opened in 1938, even though Lenin had never been to the Ukrainian capital.

After the fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kiev's Lenin Museum became an arts centre, called the Ukrainian House, and inherited the collection which was dismantled and packed away in storerooms. The statue of Lenin that had dominated Kiev's main square was destroyed, as were similar monuments throughout the country..

But just as in eastern Germany ten years ago, with a period of economic downturn, a wave of nostalgia has appeared as a consequence of the emotional attraction of the past for many Ukrainians. With the election of the pro Russia Viktor Yanukovych as president early this year, it was possible borrow additional items from Russia to add to the Kiev collection and put on the exhibition.

A reconstruction of Lenin's room in the Kremlin shows a table and lamp with an iconic green glass shade, leather armchairs on each side. On the table are writing materials and various souvenirs, including a bronze monkey that was a gift from the American oil tycoon Armand Hammer. Also on display are porcelain plates with the communist saying, "He who does not work does not eat" and the "kosovorotka," the long peasant shirt Lenin wore while in hiding in the months ahead of the October 1917 revolution, and a copy of the suit he was wearing when shot during a failed assassination attempt the following year.

However the museum claims its intention is not to glorify Lenin. Rather it is an attempt to explain the period to a modern audience and place the Lenin objects in a modern context. So Lenin's gloves, boots and the moth eaten socks presented by workers will be displayed alongside paintings by modern artists depicting Marilyn Monroe and a half-naked Madonna performing for the Bolsheviks in a mockery of their rule (see the exhibition poster shown alongside for a flavour perhaps?) So good to see the exhibition will also be celebrating the Bolshevik love of objectivity!

 

Image origin…………………… ……….post sources: Telegraph

Linked casahistoria site: Lenin's Russia

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

..

Posted on Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 11:06 PM | | Comments (0)

katyn – now russia remembers too

The café has written on several occasions about the friction between Russia and Poland over the Katyn massacre of more than 20,000 Polish officers, politicians and members of the intelligentsia during World War II when Poland was invaded and carved up by Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Those murdered had been taken prisoner by the USSR upon its invasion of eastern Poland.

For 50 years, the Soviet Union blamed the murder on the Nazis, who uncovered one of the mass graves in the forest of Katyn, near the city of Smolensk, in 1943. It was only in 1990 that Mikhail Gorbachev admitted Soviet responsibility. The names of 21,857 Polish citizens are listed among the victims on Soviet documents. But despite the Soviet admission, the issue has acted like an open sore on Polish-Russian relations since then. Moscow has refused to open its archives to Warsaw and Russian commentators still sometimes peddle the lie about German responsibility.

Russia does not normally commemorate the massacre so it was a significant move when Vladimir Putin's invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, to jointly mark this year's 70th anniversary. This change of emphasis had already been signalled last September when Mr Putin addressed to Poles ahead of his appearance at ceremonies to mark the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II in Gdansk. In it Mr Putin acknowledged Poles' sense of hurt over Katyn, adding the two countries should jointly remember the crime.

So as the two of them attended the memorial service together this week it was a clear sign of some reconciliation, 70 years after the events.

***** The death in Russia of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of the country's highest military and civilian leaders in a plane crash at Smolensk airport (close to the Katyn forests) en route to another, Polish-only commemoration three days later should not derail this reconciliation. Paradoxically it may enhance it. Although Lech Kaczynski was hard line in his attitude to relations with Russia, the Polish foreign minister (who was not on the crashed Tupolev) in an interview today claims that Russia has acted in an "exemplary" manner over the tragedy - even to the extent of showing Wajda's recent "Katyn" movie to help explain the background why the Polish President was in Russia. (Interestingly, in its global news reports yesterday, Russia's RT TV news was describing those murdered at Katyn as victims of "the totalitararian regimes of the time", not incorrect, but spin that would have been worthy of a Cold War Radio Moscow broadcast.....).

 

image origin

post source: BBC

  

..............................................................................................................

 

Posted on Thursday, April 08, 2010 at 07:32 PM | | Comments (0)

it’s final, the hitler remains were scattered by the soviets

Ever since publication of Trevor Ropers Last days of Hitler there has always been doubt about what finally happened to the remains. Now it would appear the mystery has been solved:

The remains of Adolf Hitler were burned in 1970 by Soviet KGB agents and thrown into a river in Germany on direct orders from the spy agency's chief.

General Vasily Khristoforov, archivist of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) -- the successor to the former Soviet Union's KGB, told Russia's Interfax news agency in an interview that previously secret documents show that KGB chief Yuri Andropov, with prior consent from the Soviet Communist Party leadership, ordered a top secret operation to destroy the remains of Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, Nazi Germany's propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels; and Goebbels' entire family. (The bodies of Hitler, Braun and the Goebbels family had been discovered by the Soviet Army in May 1945. The bodies of Goebbels and his wife were found May 2 in the garden of Nazi Germany's Reich Chancellery. The bodies of the couple's children were recovered the next day, and the corpses of Hitler and Braun were discovered May 5 in a crater from an artillery shell outside his bunker in Berlin.) As has been suspected for many years, the decision to destroy the remains of the Nazi leaders and their family members was motivated by the fears of the KGB and Soviet Communist Party leadership that Hitler's burial site could become a place of worship for supporters of fascist ideas.

The operation, code-named "The Archives," was carried out by a group of special KGB agents in Magdeburg, East Germany, where the bodies had been secretly buried February 21, 1946, on the territory of a Soviet military facility. When in March 1970, the Soviets decided to hand the garrison over to the East German civilian authorities the question of what to do with the Nazi remains became critical. As long as the burial place of the Nazi leaders was in the territory of a Soviet garrison, it could be kept secret and barred from strangers. But following a handover, this could not be guaranteed so the decision was made not to rebury Hitler's remains but to burn them.

In a style reminiscent of the Ekaterinburg disposal of the Romanovs, the remains were burnt on a bonfire outside the town of Shoenebeck, 11 kilometers away from Magdeburg, then ground into ashes, collected and thrown into the Biederitz River.

According to Khristoforov, all that now remains of Hitler's corpse are fragments of his jawbone and skull. These are kept in Russia, Hitler's jaw at the FSB archives, fragments of Hitler's skull at the State Archive. To scotch stories of remains anywhere else (of an escaped Fuhrer perhaps), the Russian general is adamant – there are no further remains anywhere.

 

 

Image origin…………………… ……….post source (and video of the skull): CNN

Linked casahistoria site: Hitler's Germany

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

..

 

Posted on Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 03:46 PM | | Comments (0)

how the soviets helped german unification by mistake

The events usually grab the headlines – the last few weeks have seen many events to highlight the collapse of the Berlin wall 20 years ago. However history is really about the reasons for such events, not just the final event itself. In that sense 20 years is a short time – analytical evidence is usually too sensitive to appear early, or to appear a all. That is why historians are able to earn a living trying to uncover such evidence and then writing about long gone events from a new angle…….

One key unanswered question about the wall has been why Kohl was able to act so confidently after its fall to unilaterally move both Germanies towards unification. The two had been occupied and divided by the Great Powers after 1945. All four, especially the USSR, still had significant forces in the Germanies. Now the US National Security Archive has produced new evidence that begins to indicate why the German Chancellor, Kohl, felt able to act on his own to undo the postwar settlement and create a united Germany.

It appears that senior Soviet officials had been sending secret messages to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl after the fall of the Berlin Wall which led directly to Kohl's famous "10 Points" speech on German unification. The NSA's forthcoming book, "Masterpieces of History," shows back-channel communication from Soviet Central Committee expert Valentin Falin (head of the International Department and former Soviet ambassador to West Germany in the 1970s), about the idea of a possible "confederation" between West Germany and the rapidly collapsing East German regime (which would allow both to continue) as a way to prop up the East by getting some equal status for the two states before the bottom fell out.

The Soviet leader Gorbachev had not been told of these communications…..

In a confusing game of diplomacy it is clear that the Soviet officials had hoped that Kohl would tell Gorbachev first about their talks when discussing his unification plans and so bring him on board. But Kohl did not realize this and thought the messages were coming from Gorbachev himself and that he was already on board.

Kohl, believing he had to act fast to take advantage of this then moved swiftly on his own plans – which had no place for a separate East. He acted so quickly the now-available documents show that Kohl did not inform either Bush, his allies, or even his own foreign minister before delivering his "10 Points" speech on German unification in the Bundestag on November 28.  

Reaction from the USSR and the western Allies was consternation and anger, but by then it was too late. 10 months later Germany was once more united.

 

Image origin…………………… ……….post sources: National Security Archive

 

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

..

Posted on Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 09:39 PM | | Comments (0)

russia still attempting to control the view of its past

History professor Mikhail Suprun was briefly arrested in the far north of Russia last month as a result of his research into the fate of ethnic Germans deported by Stalin during World War II. Suprun has been trying to follow the fate of the "Volga Germans", those thousands of ethnic Germans sent to remote areas far from the war front after Hitler attacked the USSR in 1941. Like many of the Germans who lived outside the Reich before the war, they had lived in southern Russia for generations - mostly along the River Volga (The first settled following an invitation by Catherine the Great in the 18th century). However, as ethnic Germans, it is clear Stalin could not trust them once Germany invaded the Soviet Union. (in the same way that Britain interned its German refugees, and the US its Japanese).

However, at the end of the war, unlike in Britain and the US, these Soviet internal internees were not released. It is this that Suprun has been investigating and he managed to track down the files of 5,000 deportees and had interviewed hundreds of their descendents. It is this research that led to his arrest. His research documents and PC have been seized and he has been ordered not to discuss the case.

The BBC reports though that a few days ago he described the seizure as absurd and he said it was part of a Russian government attempt to control how the history of World War II is told (or retold) as remarked on here in the past.


image origin     post source: BBC  

linked  casahistoria sites: Stalin   

................................................................................................................

Paperandcup2Click_and_visit_casahistoria_2

Posted on Friday, October 16, 2009 at 09:30 PM | | Comments (0)

the forensics of the romanov haemophilia – who was responsible?

Genetic analysis of the bones of the wife and children of the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, confirm that Tsarina Alexandra, and two of her children, Alexey and his sister Anastasia, all carried genetic mutations associated with a severe form of haemophilia - the B variant. The Tsarina carried a faulty gene linked to the production of a blood-clotting agent on one of her X chromosomes and suggesting a severe form of haemophilia. Both her children inherited the defect, meaning that Alexey was a sufferer and Anastasia a carrier of the disease.

Haemophilia lowers the level of the chemicals that cause blood to clot after injury. Haemophilia B, occurs in one in 20,000–34,000 male births. Popularly it is a cut that can prove fatal with the sufferer bleeding for days, or longer. However it is the invisible bleeding inside joints caused by bruising that is most dangerous, and which was the most serious for Alexey. This in turn led the Royal Family to employ Rasputin, a supposed faith healer, with drastic consequences for Russia.

Looking for evidence of haemophilia in the Royal DNA was a side effect of the examination of the bones' DNA by forensic scientists to establish whether they belonged to the "missing" children of Nicholas II, whose family was murdered in 1918.

So where did it come from? It would seem though that the origins of the disease did not lie in Russia but in Britain. The haemophilia gene appears to have stemmed from a spontaneous mutation carried by Queen Victoria who most likely transferred the gene mutation through two of her five daughters (Alice and Beatrice), who then passed the mutation to the royal families of Spain, Germany (The Tsarina's family. She was Victoria's grand daughter) and Russia.

Interested in finding out more detail? Go to the Post Source to read the full item.


image origin     post source: Times 

linked  casahistoria sites: Russia in 1900  

................................................................................................................

Paperandcup2Click_and_visit_casahistoria_2

Posted on Friday, October 09, 2009 at 05:49 PM | | Comments (0)

it’s non-aggression time in vienna

Is it just coincidence that in a week when eastern Europe in particular has drawn attention to the 1939 collaboration of Hitler and Stalin over the invasion of Poland and the Baltic States that a sketch has appeared purporting to show Hitler and Stalin's predecessor, Lenin playing chess together?

The image is said to have been etched in 1909 Vienna by Hitler's art teacher, Emma Lowenstramm and signed on the back by both men. At the time Hitler was a 20-year-old and Lenin - twice his age - was in exile from Russia. The house where they apparently played the game belonged to a prominent Jewish family.

The sketch and the chess set are both to be auctioned in England in Ludlow, Shropshire, on October 1. They have an estimate of $62,000 but are they the real McCoy? Lenin has a full head of hair, Hiter is very smartly dressed and looks like he did whilst imprisoned in Landsberg after the 1923 Munich Putsch...... Helen Rappaport, author of a book on Lenin has already said the etching was probably a 'glorious piece of fantasy'. The unnamed seller has compiled a 300-page document that included results of tests on the paper and the signatures to show they are genuine.

Perhaps if the sketch is studied really closely it will also show those Hitler diaries that presumably also included his intention to ally the fatherland with bolshevism…


image origin      post source: Mail 

linked casahistoria site:  Hitler   Lenin  

................................................................................................................

Paperandcup2Click_and_visit_casahistoria_2

Posted on Friday, September 04, 2009 at 09:38 AM | | Comments (0)

letters from the revolution of 1917

 Materials related to the 1917 revolutions in Russia continue to appear. The latest are a set of 60 letters from the Grand Duchess Olga to her mother and sister which reveal a desperation to discover the truth about the disappearance of her older brother, Tsar Nicholas II and his five children.

Nicholas was executed along with his wife, children, on July 17th 1918. While an announcement was made about the death of the Tsar the fate of his wife and children was not known. The Olga letters reveal the stress and tension concerning their fate.

  • February 12, 1919, Olga wrote to her sister: "Oh! Do you think it is true that all the poor relations who were imprisoned in Petersburg have been shot. We read it in the papers here. It seems so probably and yet so awfully impossible to believe and grasp."
  • July 1919: "For the last month and a half I have been getting in despair and felt they were gone and we should never see them again and pictured in my imagination all sorts of horrors about them. Again it was in the papers here they were all killed.... who is one to believe?"

On a more personal note in May Olga writes about the relative hardship she had to endure after the Oct/Nov Revolution. "Yes, my stones are all lost with the rest of the things. It seems strange I shall never see them again. I am sorry for my pearls because Papa gave them to me."

The letters also cover part of the two-year period during the First World War when Olga voluntarily served as a nurse in a military hospital.

The letters are being sold next week by the Mayfair philatelist Argyll Etkin at the Olympia International Art Fair. A reserve price of $150,000 has been put on the collection. They were discovered after the death of Olga above a Toronto coffee shop. Olga had escaped by fleeing to Denmark then to Canada. She died in a suburban Toronto apartment on Nov. 24, 1960, and is buried beneath a cross-shaped gravestone inscribed: "The Last Grand Duchess of Russia.''

Click here for the Alexandra Palace excellent site on the Letters with images of Olga compiled by Sarah Miller.

image origin          post source: Canada.com  

linked casahistoria site: Russia, 1917 

............................................................................................................

Paperandcup2Click_and_visit_casahistoria_2

Posted on Sunday, May 31, 2009 at 12:02 PM | | Comments (0)

Older »