Review: Red Horizons – The True Story of Nicolae & Elena Ceausescus’ Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption – by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa

I was just chatting away to Ionutz a security nurse in the local mental hospital and he’s Romanian. I passed through Bucharest a few years ago en route to Istanbul on a train journey traversing Eastern Europe. Romania seemed quite rural, poor and quite different to the Europe with which I am more acquainted. Curiosity and a quick Amazon search later and  I’ve got this rare gem of a book in my hands documenting the life of former Communist Dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena.

General Pacepa was the most high-ranking Eastern Bloc Communist official ever to defect during the Cold War so is an enigma in himself. From his final destination, in hiding in the USA, he delivered this brutal revelatory biographic diary of his life serving Romanian Communist Dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu. Ceausescu, with his equally flamboyant wife, Elena, had succeeded in setting up a hereditary Communist dictatorship in the Soviet satellite start of Romania. As a geographic outlier on the borders of the Iron Curtain with the democratic West, Ceausescu used his country’s position to ‘bridge the gap’ between East and West. He resisted domination from the Kremlin, while parading Romania as a model Communist economy that was open to doing business with the West, thus gaining favoured status as an economic trade partner with powerful Western technological superpowers such as the USA. His regime though, was very brutal and oppressive. Propaganda allowed for a portrayal of high living standards and decent human rights, but this was just a falsified portrait for Western consumption. The reality was that to the extent of comparability with the GDR East German Stasi,  Ceausescu succeeded in implementing a secret police directorate-driven paranoid surveillance state where every form of monitoring of almost the entire population in the form of bugged phone calls, informant networks, sexual blackmail, really left the Romanian people in a state of absolute totalitarianism. As head of the DIE, Romanian Foreign Intelligence, General Pacepa was an integral core potentate within the inner circle of the regime, acting pretty much as Ceausescu’s personal valet and being asked to do some pretty extreme and very weird things on behalf of the tyrannical, quite frankly insane, dictator despot and his even more eccentric excessive, out-of-control wife. I wonder about the actual bias inherent in such a task as this project due to the obvious political ramifications of such a scandalous publication. On the one hand the whistle-blower Pacepa is bound to have his own personal political agenda and let’s face it, his professional role made him very suitable for the dissemination of propaganda. Yet, on the other hand, the frank and ludicrous absurdity of the revelations about Ceausescu’s life within the text make sense as truth. Fact is often more deranged than fiction and some of these stories just lie outside the realm of the most fantasy-orientated author of fiction. Therefore I find most of what is written to be true, with a lack of other readily available information to counter the claims that have been made.

Ceausescu’s politics are pretty odd. Content with absolute power within his own communist party he is extremely ignorant and rude with regard to the advice of his ministers and even Pacepa. Power is totally concentrated at his own whim and he is left to explore his own paranoid idiosyncrasies with zero resistance. He loves getting stuck into foreign affairs and has a tendency of association with some pretty odd bedfellows: Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gadaffi, Carlos the Jackal are a few characters that appear in the book. He sees himself as a potential saviour of the Middle East and whereas he tries his best to avoid all oversight from Moscow centre, he is most capable in representing the Soviet Bloc in dealings with the West, providing a lot of really useful intelligence for the Warsaw Pact bloc. Indeed technical intelligence is a particular focus of the DIE, with a lot of Romanian espionage efforts focussed on the procuring of industrial and military technology secrets from the West that can be emulated in cheap Romanian manufactures. A lot of success is achieved in military equipment stolen from NATO such as tanks and also state of the art surveillance equipment. Ceaucescu travels a lot and his adventures in Washington on a state visit to Jimmy Carter is perhaps the highlight of the book. Ceausescu is so paranoid he will only eat his own food, prepared by his own chef with vast amounts of money spent on importing all his own food and expensive wine on any excursion at home or abroad. He is totally shocked by democratic protests in New York City against his regime and cannot seem to grasp how on earth these protests can take place. He really isn’t used to hearing dissident voices against his tyranny and it deeply traumatises him. Indeed one of his personal bugbears that runs throughout the book are the attacks made upon his rule by Radio Free Europe and he devotes a lot of time in attempting to eradicate this voice of democracy, an irritant to many Communist regimes. He is not afraid to order assassinations and the very fact he doles out work to the most notorious terrorist assassin, Carlos the Jackal, says it all. Elena’s story is one unto itself and whole book could really be devoted to her peccadillos which when it comes to diamonds and expensive Paris fashion would make even Marie-Antoinette seem normal. Pacepa is tasked with funnelling large amounts of Romanian foreign reserve into the hands of expensive boutique to stock up Elena’s extensive wardrobes. She also has a rather unhealthy fetish for watching pornographic movies, made by the security services, of illicit affairs of important Romanian government ministers, in order to create blackmail dossiers to either purge or totally control their loyalty to the dictator. The Ceausescu’s family are odd in the extreme. Preferred son, Nicu, really just an out and out drunken yob who, secure in his future inheritance is already planning ahead and Pacepa is often the mediator who has to dig him out of some pretty horrendous violent scrapes.

Unfortunately the book stops after Pacepa defects and there are a good few years of the regime left until its bitter end in 1989. It would have been nice to have seen this period documented in full also. Pacepa has a dreadful personal sacrifice to make in leaving his home nation as he cannot take his daughter with him. Ultimately we know the story of Ceausescu and his wife’s end. They were rare victims of violence in an otherwise surprisingly peaceful transition to democracy as the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s. Ceausescu and Elena were captured by an angry mob and after a brief show trial, were summarily executed by firing squad at Christmas in 1989. I think that this book would have fuelled the anger of the Romanian people towards their dictator and would have certainly served as kindling for the fire that destroyed them. Nicolae and Elena were more extreme than the most despotic Royal families of history and it is no real surprise that their lives were so brutally exterminated.   

Review: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Under the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev there was a post-Stalin easing of oppression emerging from the Kremlin and a Cold War ‘Victorian’ Ice Age thaw for writers allowed this remarkable, unique, little tale to unbelievably evade the censor and make it into the real world, even traversing the fixed barriers of the Iron Curtain. It was common, particularly during the purges of Uncle Joe, to send the masses off to gulags in Siberia. It didn’t take much of an excuse for the NKVD to send any form of dissident or suspected dissident on a long holiday to pretty much a concentration camp where forced labour and a strict military-controlled regime was used to assist in the growth and development of the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn openly admitted he had spent a long time out in the harsh icy Siberian environment, a gulag survivor, with a story to tell. ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ is the product of this internment. Although strictly a work of fiction, the book would not be possible without direct experience of life in the gulag. It’s tale which isn’t particularly long in length but in its minute detail of a day in the life of our political prisoner, Ivan, we get a real rare and accurate and quite disturbing account of the gulag, a system which was notorious in its terror propaganda value and this is a story which literally affected many many Russian citizens and their families as such vast numbers of people ended up being relocated to gulags, whether justly or more likely as innocent victims of the regime.

I read a lot of literature about sadistic internments and prison camps etc in wacky political extreme environments as I totally empathise with the stories of condemned political prisoners after my own 25 year career as an incarcerated mental patient in Wales, a prisoner of the government here in the United Kingdom. It’s dark material and often sad and disturbing but I find that I can relate a lot more in my daily life to Ivan Denisovich than I can perhaps relate to stories on the BBC News or in newspapers or chats in pub or coffee shop etc. Try a bit of gulag-living and it sure changes your outlook on life. The drudgery of Solzhenitsyn’s tale is only set over the course of a day. Most prisoners had at least ten years of day like this, some as many as 25 or more. The what, where and why you got there is immaterial really. The fact is you aren’t getting out. You are forced to live within your community and have to accept you fellow inmates and you are set against the strict discipline of quite brutal guards and are totally powerless to resist them, to think of escape or top hope for some miraculous form of justice arriving to end your misery. It’s keep your nose down, take joy in the littlest of pleasures available, don’t dream of hope, and crack on with your work. Yes, Ivan may have to stitch stale bread crusts into his dirty mattress but this treasure of nutrition will keep him alive in the dark winter days of permafrost. If one can scrounge and extra helping of watery cabbage soup through a bit of corruption and skulduggery then it is a bonus. The joy of seeing a bird or the emergence of a single sprig of a spring flower amidst the snow. Take pride in your work, work as a team, improvise and focus on anything that eases the slow, painful passing of incomprehensible time. The psychology of fellow inmates and the psychology of the omnipotent guard detail. Harsh punishments and death awaiting in every nook and cranny and corner of your existence. To survive the day is to survive the year and to survive the whole sentence.

This book is a unique story and one that must be told and it documents one of the darker elements of twentieth century history and the Cold War. It is testament to the author that it is in our hands in the West and in the modern world. Life is a struggle and sometimes in our decadent comfort we can fail to recognise that some people on this planet really do have a tough time of it and for all material niceties and life essentials we take for guaranteed it would do us no harm to learn from Ivan and to appreciate the simplest of things and joys in life and this is evolution and natural selection in its most brutal form.

Review: Red Notice – How I Became Putin’s No.1 Enemy – by Bill Browder

There is irony in this tale as Bill Browder was following in his grandfather’s footsteps in some ways but was also radically poles apart. Browder’s grandfather had stood for Presidential election in the USA on a Communist ticket. Bill Browder was drawn to business possibilities behind the Iron Curtain and in the post Cold War, post Soviet Union Russia, Browder’s Hermitage fund became the biggest foreign investor in Russia and also the fund, with at its peak over $1 billion in assets under its control, the best performing investment fund in the World. The start of his career was interesting. After good qualifications at Stanford University in the United States, Browder set himself up in the European financial capital of London, with a view to exploring trade in Eastern European markets, made possible by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Among early experience he worked for the notorious Robert Maxwell, shortly before his controversial yacht death just as a huge pension fraud Maxwell had been operating was being exposed and investigated. Despite this career blip, Browder went on to form his own fund, Hermitage Capital Management. He headed off to Moscow and with careful research began to take advantage of the huge available margins made in the wake of privatisation of former Soviet Industry. This was the age of emerging gangster oligarchs and widespread corruption. Browder, ever in a quest for justice and a moral code which rejects corruption began to flag the eyes of Russian potentates and in 2005 he was refused entry to Russia as Moscow airport and put back on the plane for repatriation in the U.K. Thus ends the high profit-yielding business honeymoon and the start of a quest to recover his money, keep his business afloat and expose the enemies and corruption that threatened his destruction. The whole saga spirals out of control and the Russian authorities launch a massively corrupt scheme involving police officers who tried stealing his businesses and ran a massive tax fraud amounting to about $230 million. The path led to the very top with Kremlin officials supporting every move against the Jewish American businessman. His Russian lawyer, an honest Russian gentleman by the name of Sergei Magnitsky becomes embroiled in situation and is thrown in jail and due to health complications, torture and refusal of necessary medical care, Magnitsky suffers a brutal early death in jail. Browder is deeply upset and affected by this and his role as venture capitalist businessman changes into human rights campaigner. Browder irks even the highest power in Russia and becomes the biggest public enemy of Vladimir Putin. The U.K. government were relatively unbothered in their assistance so Browder ends up campaigning with the US politicians and at the very highest level dealing with the likes of Senator John McCain, Senator John Kerry among other Washington players to take up the cause. Ultimately Browder flukes hi sway into getting President Obama to pass legislation called the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act which restricted and placed travel bans on all corrupt officials involved in the crimes and death of Browder’s lawyer and was part of a general move of sanctioning Russia and its excesses. In return Putin decided to punish sick Russian orphans by denying them access to adoptive American families. A bit sort of in tow with Vladimir’s current international reputation as a bit of an ogre…. The book is a whirlwind exploration of big business, exposes the realities of modern Russia and also in the wake of unbelievable corruption and human rights atrocities a sense of justice is achieved.

Review: Hidden Hand – How The Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping The World – by Clive Hamilton & Mareike Ohlberg

As a committed sinophile, this recently written book seemed a necessity. As China continues its rise to being the most dominant national force economically on the planet, it is quite difficult to obtain meaningful and relevant and unbiased factual information about its thoughts and the thoughts of its governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Aside from the political Iron Curtain, there is the language barrier. I studied Mandarin Chinese language at the Confucius Institute at Cardiff University for three years so have some basic linguistic and cultural understanding. This book is alike a definitive manual of people involved with the CCP internationally, its many umbrella organisations and its often discrete methods that it uses in order to obtain influence. I can see me often referring back to this book in the future for some of its well-researched detail. I did sometimes find a bias against the CCP and cannot see this book getting published in the mother country. Just the mention of the dreaded ‘Three T’s alone should suffice: (Tibet, Taiwan, Tianamen). The cast of international politicians linked in some way, often financially to the CCP was totally shocking. I was surprised to read of more Conservative Party involvement with China than indeed the more obvious socialist Labour Party. One thing is for sure, is that the CCP global reach is unilaterally widespread and with its full arsenal of orgs designed specifically to enhance the CCP and its broadening widescoping foreign policy it is certainly good to have this detailed out in print. I am totally blown away by the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) and see it as being the most significant international global event over the next several decades. For me, being a Confucius Institute alumnus, I loved the chapters devoted to education. I believe that it is critically important for as many people as possible to open the doors to China by learning Mandarin Chinese. It is a beautiful language that is destined to replace English as the global lingua franca of business. I have currently raised some issues with my MP Jessica Morden (Labour), MS John Griffiths (Labour) and David Davies (Conservative). Liz Truss has announced that she intends to throw the Confucius Institute system out of the U.K. and replace the mainland Chinese teachers with the overseas Taiwan education program. I think this just demonstrates Miss Truss’ clear lack of ability to guide the U.K. sensibly and would be devastating to future generations of our education system as well as crippling our economy on a global scale. I am hoping that the local democratically elected politicians that I have approached can coherently persuade Prime Minister Liz Truss to come to her senses specifically over the Confucius Institute matter. I look forward to researching some of the material I have read and let’s hope that I can somehow grasp the intricacies of Ji Xinping thought.

Review: Stasiland – Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall – by Anna Funder

The Stasi were the brutal secret police in the GDR (German Democratic Republic) or East Germany. After the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East and West Germany once again became reunited. Funder is an Australian journalist who, in this award-winning book, explores the Stasi at work and recounts through various East German subjects some of the perils of the secret state and its surveillance apparatus. Although a lot of evidence was destroyed in Stasi bureaus, due to the swift nature of the collapse of East Germany after the Berlin Wall fell, there exists a great deal of paper evidence documenting much of the Stasi’s work. For even that evidence that was shredded, there are organisations that in a jigsaw like manner, sift through shreds, recompiling documents and useful information. Often Stasi victims had their lives and their family’s lives ruined when they were labelled enemies of the State. Often confessions after torture had to be fabricated and much of the Stasi actions seems very irrational especially when we look back from a post-GDR modern world. Former East German citizens explore Stasi files for details of their lives, trying to find out exact reasons why they may have been denied employment opportunities or seeking out missing relatives. One of the most eccentric characters is famous musician, Mik Jegger’ who was oppressed and sort of disappeared when he fell foul of the Stasi authorities. Frau Paul was separated from her baby who had been undergoing medical treatment in West Germany just as the Berlin Wall sprung up. Miriam became embroiled in trouble as a teenager and made a brave attempt escape at traversing the Wall which unfortunately failed. Author Funder gets to meet many former Stasi officers who are bizarre characters, often nostalgic of their former glories and who reveal a twisted logic to their often disturbing work. From TV celebrity propagandists to stein-swigging pub locals, these Stasi men are remnants of a forgotten past.
The book is full of lovely anecdotes and shows us a side of communist life that seems so surreal in our post- Cold War modern world. Many tales are sad and dark but also enlightening from an historic perspective and as such this book is an important addition to understanding the true history of life behind the Iron Curtain.

Review: The Art Of Betrayal – Life and Death in the British Secret Service – by Gordon Corera

They say that truth is often stranger than fiction and this book that I have given a 5 star rating reads very fluently and tells the real story of British secret service agents as they engage in the art of espionage across the globe. True heroes and heroines emerge as you quickly flutter through the pages. From SIS’s early war history through to the heavy espionage focus against the Soviets during the Cold War through to the closer to present military escapades in Afghanistan and Iraq, spies are always at the centre of international events, the front line defences of any country and they are especially important to Britain with the remnants of its empire. The shocks of betrayal are often harsh and blunders in espionage can prove very costly. Although the reality is often different to the popular perception of James Bond, some of the adventures and intrigue of the real espionage world are profound tales that push the human spirit to its limits. I think that the most fascinating tale of the book, one which has haunted the halls of Whitehall and Washington to this day, is that of the Soviet super-spy Kim Philby, of the Cambridge Five. Philby rose to the highest echelons of the secret service on both sides of the Atlantic at the height of the Cold War, all the time working discreetly for the Soviet Union, attracted ideologically by Communism. His deceit actively cost the lives of many and severely disrupted many critical operations. The book details not just Philby but also the defectors coming in the other direction and there are some great depictions of the tasks performed by MI6 and MI5 operatives who had to handle these defectors and also run foreign agents behind the lines. The book leaves a hunger for further research and I shall be looking carefully at the fictitious works of Graham Greene and John Le Carré, both of whose real lives feature in this book as they were both at one time secret agents. The book to me tailed off a bit after the excitement of the Cold War and the last chapter on the political blunderings of the failed Iraq War intelligence was a trifle mundane yet overall the book lived up to all expectations and was laid out very well with a very flowing narrative.

Review: The New Cold War – by Edward Lucas

The New Cold War by Edward Lucas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a study of Russia in the post-communist era. It documents the rise of Vladimir Putin and identifies the ‘new cold war’ that envelopes Russia’s relations with the outside world. I found the book to be detailed with information and I was surprised by many of the features of the new Russia. I hadn’t realised that under Putin the Russian economy had been growing really well nor had I an appreciation of his soaring approval rating with his people. The Russian dominance of the energy market, in particular, gas, is quite daunting. I really enjoyed the chapter that focussed on the actual way this energy market is structured. The new Cold War won’t necessarily be fought in terms of military might and arms races. The Russian military strength is very dilapidated and they spend 25 times less on their military budget than the US. The new war will be fought in the markets with hard-hitting Kremlin-supported oligarch cash and the high profits from the energy market. I was surprised at the overall effect how that, since 1989, Russia has reverted back to its old Iron Curtain Soviet ways, despite me imagining that it was all freedom and capitalism there now. ‘Sovereign Democracy’ has quite different values to the political system we understand. The author has done his best in this book to explain what makes Russia tick and how we can possibly overcome a dark new era of global hostilities.

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