Review: The Origins of Totalitariansm – by Hannah Arendt

This book is quite old, first published in 1951, it dates from a period when the totalitarian reality of Hitler and Stalin were very much fresh in the mind. Hannah Arendt was a German Jew and this work is both philosophical, enlightening and gives a valuable educated insight into the dark political reality of totalitarianism. It’s a relatively modern political phenomenon and the in depth analysis of the German Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler in addition to the Communist Soviet regime under Josef Stalin demonstrates how totalitarianism can come from the political extreme of either side of the left-right axis of politics.

The first part of the book looks at the origins of anti-semitism. This was a focus of the rise of the totalitarianist states under both Hitler and Stalin, with both leaders showing similar anti-Jew tendencies, Hitler going to the extreme measures of the Holocauust which killed 6 million Jews during World War 2 and indeed his whole philiosophy, rooted in Mein Kempf was aimed at the total destruction of the Jewish Race. Arendt as a Jew   does not give a based one way account of anti-semitism. It is such a controversial thing, a bête-noire to this day with the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot just recent examples of modern British politicians flagged for it. Arendt, surprisingly, gives a 50-50 reasoned account of its origins, blaming not just the extreme racist political drives to promote it, but looking at the Jews themselves and allocating some of the blame for anti-semitism with them. The failure to adapt to mainstream societies and to remain a state within a state and also very markedly she decries the role of court Jew that was so prominent in European aristocratic circles to have been a major factor in provoking the anger of the likes of Hitler who in Mein Kampf made a targeted attack on the Jews of Vienna.  

The second part of the book looks at Imperialism and the rise of nationalism in the European Nation States and a general shift in politics. This paves the way for the later emergence of Hitler and Stalin to live out the realities of the inevitable totalitarian extremism that all along was at the end of the pathway that was being carefully paved out for them to step into.

On to Part 3 where we have a detailed analysis of both Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Communist Soviet Union with Stalin as dictator. Totalitarianism transcends the mere extreme Fascist politics of other dictators that one might have thought would enter into the category. General Franco or Benito Mussolini were fascists aligned with the far right Nazis but there whole societies still maintained certain elements of democracy and therefore they do not slip into the category of totalitarianIsm proper. Also, Post Revolution Russia, under Lenin, was not as extreme and centred around a one man dictatorship that the extremes of Josef Stalin brought to the table in the Kremlin.

The characteristics of totalitarianism involve a deep web of deceit and propaganda and the truth is constantly subject to change. Control by the State of every aspect of the individual in private, public life is total. Any form of dissidence meets with the most brutal of punishment. All is at the whim of the absolute leader without whom the whole of the state and society cannot survive. It’s extreme insanity and it seems unbelievable how it manifested into reality but the truth is there for all to see in the history books. Indeed one could argue that since Arendt we have seen more totalitarianism in the Communist China and North Korea, one could argue that Boris Johnson’ Britain has many totalitarian characteristics.

The ultimate tool of the totalitarian dictators was the concentration camps under Hitler and the Gulag under Stalin. These are discussed and are obviously horrific. Also, both dictators weren’t averse top meting out capital punishment to any sign of internal or external enemies. Purges and liquidations feature as a core part of totalitarian societies.

Orwell has been one of the most significant authors to have famously demonstrated totalitarianism. The likes of “Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ are cornerstones of modern  literature. But they are works of fiction. What Arendt achieves is an academic study of the realities of totalitarianism as it has manifested in recent twentieth century history. She looks at the facts on the ground, the reality, rather than a dystopia from the imagination. The stark reality of totalitarianism is far worse than any  author can imagine.

I’ve had a 26 year war against the British State, being a victim of the Mental Health Act 1983 and a revolving door patient within State Psychiatric hospitals with the local NHS being totally backed up by an excessively violent local police force. I feel that none of my democratic rights have been upheld. For years I have wondered about whether or not a text exists that can explain the deep feelings that I have, knowing the extreme feeling of injustice, absolute helplessness and an often invasive imprisonment in horrific surroundings. Having discovered Arendt, I have now found this book – she puts into words that which I have experienced and her shocking academic study of totalitarianism is indeed a factual reality in the U.K. even if it is well hidden and may seem like a delusional claim.

“Their real secret, the concentration camps, those laboratories in the experiment of total domination, is shielded by the totalitarian regimes from the eyes of their own people as well as from all others.

            For a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes. ‘Normal men don’t know that everything is possible’, refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the face of the monstruous, just as the mass men did not trust theirs in the face of a normal reality in which no place was left for them. The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far forward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the normal world. This common-sense disinclination to believe the monstruous is constantly strengthened by the totalitarian ruler himself, who makes sure that no reliable statistics, no controllable facts and figures are ever published, so that there are only subjective, uncontrollable, and unreliable reports about the places of the living dead.” (Arendt, H. 1951:571-2)

This book is genuinely one of the best literary works that I have ever studied and I will refer back to it. It is a dark subject but equally an important one and it is an important work and should be read widely as it provides the necessary warnings about the dangers that extreme politics can produce in our world.

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: War and Peace – by Leo Tolstoy

‘War and Peace’ needs no introduction. It holds its place in the minds of contemporary society as a literary classic. One cannot pick up a newspaper article on great books without a passing mention of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Like other classical works such as the Bible, I think that their obvious fame means and their influence on society and heir survival into modern times means that at the very least if you happen to pick up and read one of these rare works you will rarely face disappointment. Indeed, without further ado, I confess that ‘War and Peace’ is one of the very best books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Critics compare it to Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey. I’d say it outflanks them. Firstly, it is a marathon read. If you’re looking on Amazon for value for money on pence per word you can’t go far wrong with Tolstoy. For about £9 you get 1400 pages. But don’t get fooled into thinking the epic will keep you going for months on end as the pages turn fast. The story is quite entrancing and addictive. I suppose one of the beauties of writing such a huge tome for an author, is that it gives you a big canvas on which to develop your story fully and also to really define your novel’s characters. ‘War and Peace, covers a timespan of about 20 years at the start of the nineteenth century, a time when enlightenment thinking and imperial nationalism had produced great changes across all of European society, including Russia. The French Revolution spread like a virus with its new emancipation ideas and politics was actively changing the shape of entire societies. Of course the guillotines of post 1789 France soon gave way to the ‘little Corsican’ to emerge and of course our hero / antihero ‘old Boney” Napoleon Bonaparte himself does play a leading role in the book. The main war is Napoleon’s initial successful attack on mother Russia followed by his ultimate failure to seize power and the retreat of his army and destruction of the Grande Armée as it backed out of a burning Moscow and headed back down through the harsh winter roads leading back to Europe where virtually his entire corps perished, famously eating their horses to dodge starvation. Of course, closer to our own times a future diminutive European dictator, Adolf Hitler, failed to learn from the mistake of Napoleon and didn’t even make it to Moscow getting his whole World War 2 campaign totally written off by the Red Army following the counterpoint of the battle of Stalingrad which swung Nazi victory away from the latest grandiose empire-builder, daring to challenge the might of the Rus Steppes. Napoleon’s enemy is Tsar Alexander I and it is warming to see the love of the Tsar demonstrated by his people, the army and the characters at peace. These were pre-Leninist times for an aristocratic Russia, still with serfs, a society directed towards the salons of Paris for its artistic and cultural influence, yet close enough to the European mainstream to be sucking in some of the candidness of enlightenment authors such as Voltaire or Rousseau with their revolutionary ideologies that would reshape modern man’s destiny. We are in an age of excitement, an age of hope, a changing world, a globalised society. Tolstoy, a novelist with direct experience of conflict, being a veteran of the Crimean War, was very eccentric in his real life, seeing much of the excesses of society, living both as a hedonist and a monk. He was a gambling philanderer, but also a loyal Russian subject with obvious amazing talent for observation and writing. Undoubtedly ‘War and Peace’ is a masterpiece and is cited as the pinnacle of Russian literary culture. Its beauty, perhaps, is in its uniqueness. The critics had no idea how to categorise it. It is such an original, creative masterpiece. Is it history, is it fiction, is it romance, is it war? Is it philosophy? The answer is that it is all. A variety of all ingredients chucked deep in with the rest of the Borsch in the pot and delivered in a unravelling exciting journey alternating between the peaceful salons of St Petersburg and the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino. In researching the novel, Tolstoy actually visited several battle sites just to be fully consistent in his given detail – indeed the accuracy of the book’s battle scenes has been highly lauded by military historians.
The characters (and there are over 500 throughout the book) are centred around three main aristocratic families: Thee Bezukhovs, The Bolkonskys and the Rostovs. Count Pierre Bezukhov, a wild young man, accidentally inherits a fortune and his quest for morality and happiness is an inward journey in many ways despite the outward appearance of such material wealth. Prince Andrei Nikolayovich Bolkonsky is the real military hero of the novel and fares the best out of the central characters in the fight against Napoleon. He also manages to land the love of the most delicate and fragrant female character the dainty, youthful Natalya Rostov, although her romantic life is quite meandering throughout her courting adventures. Andrei has a sister Maria and her fraught relationship with her father’s growingly irrational discipline is an interesting familial relationship. Nikolai Rostov is a hussar in the war and although perhaps not reaching the ranking heights of Prince Andrei with his more diplomatic movements in high military circles, he is yet a formidable warrior in touch with the rank and file soldiers of the Tsar.It is Nikolai Rostov’s officer friend and comrade, Denisov who steals the show for me and is my favourite character in the novel. His speech impediment, so faithfully portrayed by the English translators gives his often haphazard movements throughput the novel a genuine comedy value and to me he is the warmest and most interesting of the stars of the show. The journey moves through family life and the early scenes include salons and ballrooms where conversation and polite society in the drawing rooms of Moscow and St Petersburg reflect upon all of society’s concerns. There isa genuine nostalgia for times gone by and to see Russian high society in full flow is a forgotten world now. Oligarchs way have been the bastard children of the collapse of the Soviet Union but they are no replacement for the aristocracy who with all wealth and down to every element of the bourgeoisie, from Count to Kulak, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin et al, destroyed these societal elements completely with the Bolshevik communist revolution. The later years of Soviet Russia I think make Tolstoy even more important as an historical work in that he genuinely, even if working primarily with historical characters, captures the mood and feelings of a society in mutatis.
There is genuine love and romance and the female characters hold their own. I’m not so soppy myself and prefer the war stuff like any good redblooded bloke but it’s hard not to notice the sweet feminine grace and womanly charm of some wonderful women who do seduce and distract the gaze of our male protagonists.
Tolstoy has it all and ‘War and Peace’ is a wonderful experience from which everyone should benefit at some stage in their life. Dostoyevsky used to be my favourite Russian author but I think Tolstoy now trumps him and I’m in a mad panic to see just how many words per pence Anna Karenina contains so I can drain my piggy bank from some of my shiny rubles.

Review: Memoirs – by Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the most influential and critical figures of the twentieth century. When I was growing up in the 1980s he was part os a set of international world leaders that seemingly had much more influence over people than the political leaders of today. Gorbachev was the last leader of he Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. He presided over the final years of the Cold War and witnessed its thaw. He was a key advocate of détente and disarmament and sought rapprochement with the West. He brought, along with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterand a reduction of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) through disarmament of nuclear weapons stockpiles and a lessening of military friction between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. These are his political memoirs and they offer a true insight into a very powerful global leader who played a significant role in world affairs at the end of the century, presiding over such key events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev had humble roots as a tractor and combine harvester driver in the Stavropol region of rural Russia. He joined the Communist Party early and was fortunate enough to go to university in Moscow from where his active role in politics flourished. He would be elected Chairman of the Communist Party in 1985 replacing a series of elderly, embedded Soviet leaders. He offered the leadership and nomenclatura a new dynamism and vitality. Living standards were low in the USSR and Gorbachev sought o revolutionise Soviet communist politics and regenerate benefits for all. His key policies for which he is most remembered are Perestroika and Glasnost. Perestroika was a realignment and a modernisation of economic policies, introducing more economic freedoms, less State control and an opening of international trade, ultimately with the USSR becoming part of the global economic system. With Conservatives who clung to Stalinesque control of the State his Perestroika was an anathema. It proved popular and gave Gorbachev international prestige though and improved foreign relations. Glasnost was an opening up of politics and accountability to the people. It again proved unpopular with the forces on the right of the Party. He headed the Politburo where the key leadership of the Soviet Union ruled the nation. From the start though, he had enemies within and ultimately these conspiratorial plots against him grew and grew until the final death throes of the entire Union. His ultimate nemesis proved to be Boris Yeltsin the future democratic President of an independent Russia. Yeltsin’s self-serving, backstabbing Machiavellian manoeuvring ultimately destroyed much of Gorbachev’s legacy. With the context of today’s Russian war in Ukraine I did gleam some interesting information about a political fact that I was unaware of. Crimea has a native Crimean Tatar population and during Gorbachev’s presidency there was friction between Crimea and its control by Ukrainian officials. The native population preferred to identify itself as part of Russia and therefore these facts lend credibility to Vladimir Putin’s annexation based on historic feelings about the region. As the story progresses you get an overall feeling of the train derailing as political tensions intensify. The independence of the Baltic States from Soviet Rule is the beginning of the end and encourages the nationalist sentiments of Yeltsin’s Russia and other key Soviet republics as Belorussia and Ukraine. Gorbachev shares a loving relationship with his wife Raisa and his family and their very lives are threatened by an attempted coup where he is locked in his dacha with all communications cut off and the target of a criminal attempt to subvert the rule of the USSR. After the coup, things never fully recovered and ultimately in 1991 he was forced to resign as President and this brought to en end the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev’s main legacy was to the World. In the West he was viewed with much affection and was seen as someone who they could do business with yet he is often remembered inside the Soviet Union as a failure. I think that long term in historical memory his true status will be felt with the benefit of hindsight. There is much glamour in the international jet-setting of world summits, especially with Reagan and it was interesting reading about his encounter’s with the United Kingdom Prime Minister Thatcher.
I think that in reading this book I have gained a much greater insight into the true mechanisations of Communist rule inside the Soviet Union and although Gorbachev sadly died only a short while ago, I felt that in completing the study of his memoirs it has significant relevance in understanding the Russia of today and what led to the global situation which we currently witness in Putin’s Russia.

Review: Memoirs of a Revolutionary – by Victor Serge

This is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read, a first witness account of some of the most important world events of the first half of the twentieth century, a rich period for revolutionary events and the author, Victor Serge, a Belgian born Russian, is perfectly poised to give detailed personal encounters with many of the key protagonists. Serge is a revolutionary, who participates in the Russian Revolution from 1919 as a core Bolshevik. He meets and works with Lenin and Trotsky and his European roots make him critical to the emerging infrastructure of Soviet Russia. Serge writes often with a critical frankness of the core movements of which he is part, a fact that later endangers him as (correctly identified by the author) the Revolution seeps into Totalitarianism, culminating in the great Stalinist Purges of the 1930s. Initially the book flirts with the rising tide of working class socialism in Western Europe. Paris is a hotbed for leading international figures of the Left. Later, in Barcelona, Serge makes key contacts that will come into fruition for his analyses of the Spanish Civil War. From there he embarks for his never seen before motherland (his family were anti-Tsarist exiles). The post 1917 revolution is enduring its honeymoon, yet the whole survival of the Bolsheviks comes within a blink of an eye as the Civil War almost leads to their destruction in Petrograd as the Whites make gains. Serge, as he moves up the ranks, rapidly becomes disillusioned with the turn that the Revolution is taking. He warns against the Cheka and GPU. He is a peaceful man and holds onto the non-violent tenets of socialism. Later, when the party splits – Serge is a key figure in the alliance against the Party Centre and Politburo, which culminates in his expulsion from the Party and exile in Orenburg. His suffering in prison shows how lucky he was to retain his life, in a period where the executioner’s bullet was only ever a step away and was freely used. Serge’s fame as an author, especially in France, managed, through international outcry, to keep him and his young family away from the true harshness of life as an exile and ultimately secured his freedom back to Western Europe. The outbreak of world war was predicted by this great political visionary. His tracts against Stalinism often made him an enemy of his comrades and left him few publishing opportunities during his lifetime. As Nazi Germany ultimately rose up and invaded France, Serge fled Paris for one final time and luckily managed to secure a final exit from the continent as he became a war refugee in Mexico where he ultimately died peacefully a couple of years after the cessation of hostilities. I love this book for its detailed insight. The frankness of the author is inviting and his ideology and awareness are truly inspiring on both a political and personal level. For any student of world history in the twentieth century this book is a must read and for any aspiring revolutionaries I cannot think of a better book to read (with the possible exception of the Guevarist diaries) in order to quench your revolutionary zeal.

Review: Marxism and the French Left – by Tony Judt

This is an in depth study of socialism in France. The book is broken up into a series of long chapters, each covering a critical period of the political left in France. The emergence of working class political culture in the nineteenth century is explored and we see the development of trade unionism and the creation of socialist parties. The development of the social party, the SFIO is looked at in detail, prior to its rise to power under Blum. We then see the decline in the power of the socialists as they concede proletariat votes to the PCF, communists. The chapter on the French communists looks at the theorists who were so successful at internationalising the ideas and images of French Marxism. Sartre among the most famous, also there is a detailed study of Althusser, who unlike many of the French Marxist writers – was also an actual member of the PCF. The tailing off off Communist popularity as it clung hopelessly to the vestiges of Stalinism, leads to the book’s final chapter, where the rise of the socialists yet again, culminates in the ascendancy of Mitterand at the 1981 French general elections where the socialists swept surprisingly into power. this victory is compared with the Revolution of 1791 and the Paris Commune of 1871 in terms of its relevance to leftist politics in France. I found this book to be very detailed and some chapters were a bit tricky in terms of ideas and specialist vocabulary – but the book, read for a History of French Labour course at Cardiff University – has certainly enlightened me on certain aspects of French working class politics and I feel that the knowledge imparted has been vital.

Review: Voices from S-21 – Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison – by David Chandler

Tuol Sleng or S-21 was the secret prison of the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Comrade Duch and his workers put to death in S-21 over 14000 enemies of the State. These enemies of the party centre were treated like they were subhuman and animals and eventually all prisoners were ‘smashed to bits’ or annihilated. Like the horrors of the Nazi death camps, the Stalinist Soviet Purges or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot spared no sympathy for those that stood in his way. Once transferred to S-21, a prisoner could expect to have to fully denounce any fellow conspirators and confess totally to either real crimes or most often perceived imaginary ones. The use of torture was inevitable and screams from the prisoners kept neighbours in Phnom Penh up all night. Documentation for S-21 was immense and workers had to detail every confession and their actions to appease the Party Centre bosses and give the detainment and ultimate executions a quasi-legal framework. The author does a very thorough study of that evidence that is recovered and has interviewed the few survivors that escaped after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Chandler attempts to explain the inhumanity. His obvious sympathy for the victims extends into attempts to understand the mindset of the guards. The psychological insights are profound and this most disturbing case study serves as a warning to our race over any future mistakes that can be made when places like S-21 spring up and crimes against humanity are perpetuated. This dark tale of horror is a compelling read and I have given it a five star rating.

Review: Winter Is Coming – Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped – by Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion, is clearly an intelligent man. Having retired from the game he has entered the world of politics and is a key human rights activist. The book explores his frustrations with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. It is a study of Putin and the way in which he has eroded the democratic institutions bought about by Perestroika and the fall of communism in the Soviet Union. Kasparov tried to align a coalition of democratic oppositionists within Russia yet the force of the state and its poor human rights record left Kasparov no alternative but to fight as an exile from New York City. It is clear from the book that his chess success has made him different to the average Russian. His priveleged life as a global Soviet citizen has perhaps led him further to embrace Yeltsin’s opening up of Russia. I think he hearkens for a Western style democracy within Russia but perhaps Russia itself is not suited to such political freedoms and requires a degree of autocracy for it to effectively function on the international stage. Although I can identify many of the problems posed by Putin, I feel that he has successfully restored a great deal of lost power to Russia and will perhaps be remembered in posterity as a key figure in Russian history. Although he may be a dictator, he is no Stalin and his absolute rule has still brought about many benefits to the Russian State. Can the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine be equated to Hitler’s pre WW2 actions in Czechoslovakia and Poland? Kasparov sets out a case of why the appeasing Western democratic leaders have failed the Russian people in standing up to Putin and he spells out the dangers of the régime, crying out for help. I enjoyed the tactical surprises and clear prose of hearing one of the world’s great mind’s thinking process at work as I traversed the book although I feel that perhaps it is a little unfair on its target and fails to recognise some of the intricacies of superpower politics. It will be interesting to see where Kasparov takes his future life as indeed will it be interesting to see where exactly Putin steers Russia.

Review: The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 by Antony Beevor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a definitive history of the Spanish Civil War. The book has been regarded by the Spanish themselves as one of the best-researched volumes on this dark period of turmoil in their country’s history. The breakdown of democracy saw the split of the nation and a leftist democratically elected government was forced to deal with the rise of a militaristic fascist rising headed by Franco. The precursor to World War 2, this civil war attracted the interests of the rising Fascist movement across Europe with the Caudillo’s forces being supplemented and supported by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. They got to test out their modern weaponry in the field of action and a lack of international support for the actual government left them with little alternative but to rely on the Soviet Union for their support. This led to the republicans being over-reliant on the Spanish communists who struggled to take over and erode democracy from their own angle, constantly infighting and vying for strength with the other elements of the Spanish left; the Anarchists and the POUM. This history details how all the events unfolded and describes how each of the key battles was won and lost. There was a ferociousness during this conflict which only civil wars attract. The horrors of modern war truly unfolded disasters such as Guernica only emphasised how critical air support had become. The German Condor Legion and their Meschersmitts, backed up by Italian Fiats, consistently demolished the Republican resistance and paved the way for an overall Nationalist victory. Poor military judgement, combined with Stalinist purges of even the more successful Russian generals, left the Republicans constantly making errors in their military tactics. The lack of proper international support (with the exception of the volunteer International Brigades), in particular from Britain led to the inevitable crushing of the elected government and their forces. Appeasement was in the air as Western politicians tried to avoid the inevitable European conflict that was brewing and the Spanish were sacrificed. It was a war of experimentation which left the Spanish people at the mercy of the violent forces which dominated the time. Franco consolidated his own power well and was relentless and unforgiving, not accepting any olive branch of peace when offered and pursuing an ultimate military victory so he could proceed to rebuild his country in his own image. The book is highly detailed and covers every angle well, though I would have perhaps wanted a more lengthy conclusion to discuss more of what happened in the post-conflict period. I look forward to tracking down some of the author’s other work, in particular, his account of the battle of Stalingrad which was often mentioned in this most excellent history of the Spanish Civil War.

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Review: Animal Farm

Animal Farm by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This short book is regarded as one of Orwell’s key classics. It was written at a time when criticism of the USSR in Britain was not encouraged as they were critical wartime allies. Orwell got through the net and his revolutionary animals at ‘Animal Farm’ are his way of assessing Stalin’s Russia. From initial success in their revolution to overthrow the humans, the animals build up their community with new laws, a utopia is created, where they are free from their former masters. Through the subsequent rise of a dictator, the dissemination of propaganda, the purges, wars and rewriting of the laws, we see a community rise and fall to a point where the ruling pigs more or less merge with the humans they superseded. Animal Farm contains some great characters which one gets attached to. The revolution can be seen through varies eyes, from the bleating sheep to hardworking horses, from the rats to cunning pigs. If one has an awareness of the development of the communist Soviet Union, you can see how Orwell has built his tale. Even without any knowledge of the Russian Revolution, the book can be taken as a story in itself, without the subtlety of underlining politics, the book is a quaint tale of a fantastical overthrow of the rulers of the farm and how a new life of self-governance is created. I enjoy reading George Orwell and Animal Farm is a thoroughly decent book. Recommended.

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