Books I have been reading

Tags

Family, life, Russia, Stalin, USA, USSR

Well it is  time for another instalment about books I am reading. The latest is the new Biography written by fellow Montrealer Rosemary Sullivan, winner of several prestigious literary awards, on the life of Svetlana Iosifovna Stalina (1926-2011) know later in life by the family name of her late mother, Alliluyeva and when she became an American citizen as Lana Peters. The book is entitled Stalin’s Daughter.

She had brothers, one, Yakov Dzhugashvili (1907-1943) died at Sachsenhausen during the Second World War in a POW camp for famous prisoners. He was the first born son of Stalin and his first wife. Yakov spoke more Georgian than Russian and it is said that Stalin did not like him much. Her other brother was Vasili Stalin (1921-1962) Lieutenant General in the Soviet Air Force, a drunk who died of acute alcoholism. She also had another brother  by adoption Artyom Fyodorovich Sergeyev ( 1921-2008) the adopted son of Joseph Stalin. He became a major general in the Soviet military. Sergeyev’s biological father, Fyodor Sergeyev, a close friend of Stalin, died in a train crash in 1921.

Svetlana had a strange and sad life, she was known in Soviet Elite Circles as the Princess of the Kremlin. When her mother Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva committed suicide by gunshot at the age of 31 after a party in the Kremlin in 1932, Svetlana was a child of 6 yrs old. Her world went from a carefree childhood to one of harrowing unexplained events punctuated by the disappearance of uncles and aunts and other relatives. Svetlana was physically isolated within the Kremlin and saw her father only occasionally and being followed and guarded by the Secret Police. Because of her isolation she was unaware of the cruelty of her father’s regime. Only at the age of 11 she noticed that schoolmates also disappeared or heard of their parents being arrested by the Secret Police. Later at the age of 14 while learning English and having access to American and British magazine she discovered by accident an article claiming that her mother had shot herself and not died of acute appendicitis as claimed in Official Soviet version of her death. This caused her severe emotional distress. At the age of 16 she started to understand that those who had disappeared in her family had been shot on her father’s orders because he blamed them for his wife’s suicide instead of looking at his own sordid behaviour.

Stalin was cruel, vindictive, a misogynist  and distrusted everyone, always seeing conspiracies against him, always testing people, one wrong word could be a death sentence. Svetlana became afraid and careful of what she said around her father when she saw him. He in turn could be nasty, as he had been with his late wife, full of put downs and negative criticism.

The book also gives us a description of how the elite who all lived together in the old Imperial Senate building of the Kremlin, lived on a daily basis. Children had governesses, tutors, private health care and the best of everything. Wives of party officials and the family members of Stalin had access to all manners of foreign luxury goods, even in times of famine everywhere in the Soviet Union, they had access to the best food and wines. Their lives where like that of the Bourgeoisie before the Revolution.  There was also the Datcha’s ( luxury homes) outside Moscow and other old Tsarist Palaces in the Crimea on the Black Sea. Chauffeured limousine, private trains and planes. Still her life was restricted to Moscow and the surrounding countryside. She would not visit Leningrad (St-Petersburg) until adulthood after her father’s death.

A series of fresh crisis erupted with the death of her father in March 1953, the power struggle and the physical elimination of people like Lavrenti Beria who was the head of the Secret Service and managed the million of executions of so called enemies of the people. Svetlana finds herself in a difficult situation, the Central committee declares that as the daughter of the late Stalin, she is State Property and her life is managed by the new leadership. She withdraws from public view and in March 1956 with the widespread publication of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev speech on Stalin’s crimes, she no longer dares go out in public, so afraid of the people’s loathing. She decides to change her name to her late’s mother family name, but this creates more problems for her. This is how kafkaesque the world of the Soviet Union was.

The book goes through her marriages both in the USSR and in the USA where she became an American citizen. Her famous defection in 1967 to the USA while in India to bury her husband Brajesh Singh. The publication of her first book Twenty letters to a Friend. Her 3 children, Joseph (1945-2008) Katya (1950) and Olga Peters (1971), two who are still alive live in Russia and in the USA. Olga does not speak Russian and was born in California.

Svetlana died in 2011 age 85 of cancer in Wisconsin, she also had a home in Portland. She never found peace nor did she ever get away from the ghost of her father or be reconcile with the death of her mother and became estranged from her children Josef and Katya, only Olga the American born daughter grew close to her. You feel sorry for Svetlana who like all children do not chose her parents and the accident of birth which haunted her life.

Svetlana Alliluyeva Stalina

One more case

Tags

brown rat, Canada., PEI, Stalin, USSR

Well we have been lucky here on PEI. For the last 6 days there were no new cases of the virus, today one appeared in a man in his 30’s who just returned from International travel to give us a total of 3 cases. It is more than clear now that none of the restrictions will be lifted in Canada before at least August. So this could be a long haul and our economy will be impacted by all the restrictions. However the Government of Canada and our Prime Minister have come to the rescue in a big way financially to help Canadians in general. The programs, there are several, are generous, given that Canadians in general have a major personal debt problem and many have mortgages they cannot pay unless they are fully employed, I can see a lot of personal bankruptcies that will push people into permanent poverty. This is not news really since for the last 30 years personal debt has been a big problem for many with too much easy credit and a public ignorant of how personal finances work. An extremely sad situation for many, it could bring a lot of social instability, if we are not careful. In the 1930’s when the great depression struck, Canadians lived mostly on farms and in small rural settlements. Life was simple, many went to a public bath once a week, entertainment was limited. It was not the consumer society of today, far from it. People could make due with little, you made your own food at home, you only bought what was essential and necessary or made without if you could not afford it. My mother use to tell me that getting an orange as a gift at Christmas was a big treat. Other gifts were books and clothing. I can understand how the economic downturn we are living now could create mental health problems for many.

With the city so quiet and deserted, this afternoon I had a shock when getting out of the house to walk Nora, I see across the street this big brown rat walking along on the sidewalk. It was a Norwegian rat, I know them by sight because when I lived in Mexico City you would see them on the street quite often. My concern was Nora and if she saw it would go into killing mode and do her high pitch howling. Now this is a nocturnal creature I wonder if maybe because the city is so quiet we are going to start seeing more creatures coming out here and there. We also live near the river and wharfs which is a natural habitat for these rats. I would prefer seeing urban Foxes instead.

I have decided not to change my winter tires for my summer ones just right now and wait instead another few weeks before going to the garage. I am just concerned with the danger contamination of the car if 3 guys work on it and the clean up job wiping down everything. It can wait I don’t drive the car anyways and it is parked.

I just bought a book on Svetlana Alliluyeva who died in 2011 in Wisconsin while visiting her daughter Olga who is an American citizen. She had the most fascinating life and one filled with sadness, turmoil, death and disappearances. She was well educated and spoke 4 languages. An interview by the BBC done in 1982 in London is very interesting. I had read the biography of her father Josef Stalin and found it harrowing. I also saw the movie Death of Stalin, which is not a comedy but shows the absurdity of the Soviet Regime. She said that all her life she was hostage of her father’s name. I am fascinated by this historical period and by the people who lived in the entourage of Stalin.

We are running out of things to do. We will have to be more creative.

The future is History

Tags

Alt-Right, China, history, Masha Gessen, Putin, Russia, Trump, USA, USSR

A strange title for a book, The Future is History, remember in 1989 we were told that history had ended because the Cold War had ended and Communism was defeated. Rather naive to believe that then, it was merely a re-ordering of politics. In this book, the author attracts our attention to her thesis or her reality that Russian history today is a simple repetition of what happened in the XXth Century Soviet Union with a hiatus between 1989-1999.

This is the latest book I am reading, the author Masha Gessen, a Russian citizen, journalist and author, born in Moscow in 1967 and living now in New York City.

In The Future is History Masha Gessen follows the lives of four Russians, born as the Soviet Union crumbled, at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children or grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own – as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths not only against the machinations of the regime that would seek to crush them all (censorship, intimidation, violence) but also against the war it waged on understanding itself, ensuring the unobstructed emergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state under Vladimir Putin.

She makes the distinction in her book between Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism, the two words are different in political terms.  The first is about the rule of one person through personal authority (dictatorship) but devoid of ideology, i.e. Chile under Pinochet, Spain under Franco, Greece under the Colonels, Germany under Hitler, the dictator rules using terror and violence on the masses to enforce compliance. In the case of the Nazi dictatorship, Gessen explains that Nazism was not so much an ideology it was terror used to silence anyone opposing the regime, a regime which borrowed its ideas from the writings of the dictator like the one on racial superiority but overall maintained itself in power by terror and nothing else.  Where Totalitarianism is dominated by Ideology, the Bolcheviks and Lenin used terror but justified it with the ideology of class warfare as described by Karl Marx an ideology which proclaimed world revolution by the workers against other classes. The Communist party then constantly tweaked the ideology to maintain itself in power.  Stalin and Mao proclaimed the exclusive authority of the Communist Party as the only correct ideological source for their society. Stalin then tried to impose this model on other countries after 1945 in Eastern Europe and Mao did the same in Asia in Tibet, Cambodia, Mongolia, North Korea etc. it continues today in China.  Gessen tells us in her book that since 1999 under Putin, Russia is returning to the good old ways of the Soviet Union but under a new guise. It would be too crude now to reimpose a Soviet model, so Putin instead has married the nostalgia for the Czarist regime, the Supremacy of the Orthodox Church with the Totalitarian ideal of the Soviet regime which gives stability Russians crave. Giving us a new Czar Putin who unites factions within his authority and glorifies the exceptional nature of Russia in an ideology of nationalism which echoes the old glories of Imperial Russia. What Gessen is also showing us is how Russia never was a democracy and had no democratic institutions, the Russian knew Imperial orthodoxy under an absolute ruler with the Russian Orthodox Church as co-ruler then they simply moved into a new system aping the old with the Bolchevik and then Communism.

It’s a fascinating book, a great read and explains a lot about Russia and Putin today. With the gradual withdrawal of the USA from the World stage, an inept President who is too intellectually lazy to understand how the USA is simply being eclipsed, Russia is stepping into the void like China is doing and they are not losing time.

But Gessen in her book also shows us the danger of a population who is willing to give up on a more inclusive open form of society and government for the security of stability at all cost. In a way she is saying that we in the West are also at risk. Countries like Poland and Hungary are falling back into the old ways. The rise of the Alt-Right and Christian-Conservative movements in the USA with a President who shows openly his contempt for the Constitution puts the USA on a similar path. A good read and one that makes you think about what is going on around us.

 

Love this book

Tags

autobiography, Cold war, John LeCarré, MI5 MI6, The pigeon tunnel, UK, USSR

I am just finishing The Pigeon tunnel; stories from my life by John LeCarré, published in 2016.

The Pigeon tunnel is LeCarré’s autobiography, he was being interviewed on the CBC, Writers and Company by Eleanor Wachtel last week and spoke about it. She reminded him that in 2013 he had said this was is last interview and here he was giving another one to her.

LeCarré is his nom de plume, his real name is David John Moore Cornwell, he was born in 1931 in Poole, Dorset, UK. He served in the Security Service MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service MI6 between 1958-1964. He has published numerous books, many have been made into movies, etc. In 1964 LeCarré left the service to work full-time as a novelist, his intelligence-officer career at an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents’ covers to the KGB by Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent (one of the Cambridge Five).

Kim Philby, now that was a name I heard repeatedly during my time in the Canadian Foreign Service. We were made aware of the deviousness of the USSR during the Cold War and how we always had to be on our guard. Philby died some years ago, he did a lot of harm to the intelligence community and is seen in Russia today as a National Hero for his service to the USSR.

I come late to the books of LeCarré during my career everyone was reading them. I only read one book of his some 15 years ago and nothing since, not because his books are not good, no they are very good read. I was just reading other authors and not in the intelligence novel genre.

I love The Pigeon tunnel, a real page turner of an autobiography about his life from childhood to adulthood, about his father Ronnie who was quite the charmer and con artist always one step ahead of the Law, his mother Olive and his brother Tony. LeCarré also has step-siblings. He was married twice and has four sons all did very well for themselves.

I think I love this book, because for me it brought back a lot of memories of events and people, some of whom I met and knew. It was a fascinating world. His novels on the other hand are works of fiction, his characters are modelled on real people but the rest is all made up, of course his previous career in MI6 helped with the inspiration, though it is fiction sometimes it is close to the truth. LeCarré in his autobiography does explain that in his novels he is to this day bound by his Oath of Secrecy, as we all are not to reveal what we saw or know, let the politicians blab.

I now want to read his latest novel A legacy of Spies published recently. It tells the story of retired spies who 30 years after the events are called back by a new generation to explain why they did this or that, the young generation does not understand nor know what happened then. We do live in the PC age, Canada is a good example not a month goes by now that the Trudeau government thinks it has to apologize for the past, sometime very distant.

 

 

SUNFLOWER Season.

Tags

Apple cake, Chappell, Isaac Smith, Methodist, Paella, Paula Red, PEI, Rocky Point, Sputnik, USSR

Now in mid-September we are in Sunflower season, they are everywhere, such happy flowers. In Spring we have the tulips of Vanco Farms owned by the VanNieuwenhuyzen and Tjepkema Family and in the Fall we have the Sunflowers. There is a large Dutch Community on the Island and most are involved in agriculture, they call PEI the Garden Province.

This month of course is PEI Corn and Brocoli month, Corn sells for 0.40 cents and brocoli for $1. a head, never seen such low prices before. Potatoes are in and you can buy 10lbs for $2. we also have quite a variety of potatoes, we do produce 25% of the National output in Canada.

This little house is a few steps away from our place, built around 1840, the owners decided to re-shingle it this summer, the old blue coloured shingles are coming off and the new natural coloured ones are going on, you only need to do this work every 90 years, not bad really.

 

Here it is now in the background with the late afternoon setting Sun.

The tourists are all gone now, only passengers from Cruise ships are seen on Tuesday and Wednesday, otherwise the city is nice and quiet, the last cruise ship is on 28 October.

This is an art installation in front of the Art Gallery of the Confederation Centre. Yes car meets crashing Sputnik returning to Earth. It has attracted quite a bit of interests from the Police and the public, it seems no one remembers Sputnik, ah for the good old days of the USSR.

This is the view as you arrive at the house on Rocky Point of our dear friends D.A.S. and P.S. A beautiful property overlooking the Strait of Northumberland, the band of land on the other side is Point Prim where the lighthouse is located. The house is on a cliff built of wood taken from the Old Railway station in Charlottetown. It is isolated and very quiet, it is a pleasure to be invited.

This was our dinner a wonderful Paella made by P.S. such talent, the food is always wonderful.

For dessert a Dacquoise, it was very good with eatable flowers from the Garden.

This week very sad news, our favorite and old standby LOCAL 343 went out of business without notice after 2 years. Always a nice place for lunch, dinner or a drink. We are going to miss it.

A month ago we went to a lecture on Isaac Smith who arrived in Charlottetown from England 200 years ago this month. He lived at 100 Prince Street with his brother, the house still stands and he was influenced by Benjamin Chappell a Methodist preacher who lived just next door to our house on Prince street, that house is long gone and has been replaced by a modern replica which is now a radio station. Our own home built in 1840 and completely renovated in 2011 stands where the Post Office use to be. In 1817 Charlottetown was a very scruffy town with very few buildings and mostly mud streets and tree stumps everywhere. The Governor in those days lived at Port La-Joye or Fort Amherst where the ruins stand on Rocky Point.

This plaque to Chappell stands in the entrance of Trinity United Church on Prince street, the current building was built in 1863 but the former Methodist Chapel stood on that site. Isaac Smith was greatly influenced by Chappell and became a Methodist Missionary later in life. Smith of famous for the many buildings he built in Charlottetown, Point Prim Lighthouse, Province House (Legislative building of PEI) and Fanningbank the Official Residence of the Lieutenant Governor of PEI. Smith left PEI never to return 2 weeks after completing the construction of Province House, it is said that he was angry with local politicians who pressured him to change his design of Province House. Smith moved to Nova Scotia and preached there until his death.

So the apples are coming in and I bought 3 lbs of Paula Red, it is an apple that has a reddish flesh colour. The results this Apple cake made by W.J.H. my own little baker at home.

 

Comments I receive

Tags

4th Symphony, Shostakovich, Stalin, USSR

Just yesterday I published a post on a book I read on the life of Stalin the Soviet Dictator. A horrific picture of how one man and his cronies can destroy a country and its people in the name of some illusion called Bolshevism. Just a few hours later another blogger Susan S. Prufrockdilemma.wordpress.com published a very good post on the Russian Composer Dimitri Shostakovich who died in 1975 and lived through the Stalinist dictatorship and managed barely to survive the purges. Stalin played cat and mouse with him, harassing and belittling the great composer. In 1936 at the height of the purges when millions were shot or disappeared on Stalin’s orders, Shostakovich was on tender hooks, he too could be arrested and shot. He composed at that time his 4th symphony, when I listen to it I think of a spiral taking you down and down. This was his way of resisting Stalin, he will go on writing many other symphonies, he is one of my favourite composers. Stalin did not always like what he wrote but Shostakovich manage to survive, a miracle in itself.

I believe that it is important not to forget what happened in the 20th century, the great dictators, the various political regimes either Fascist or Communist, the two world wars, the Cold War, Nuclear Arms race, we inherited all that and the World should remember. It is also important to understand those events not just in passing.

So my review of the book on Stalin got a comment from someone who thought I should read more light stuff like Barbara Cartland. I was a little surprised by the comment.  Am sure it was all meant in good fun. Light reading is just not my style.

 

 

 

 

Books I am reading

Tags

Beria, France, Louis XVI, Russia, Stalin, Stefan Zweig, USSR

Well I am finishing the great big book on Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a lesson on why the Soviet Union collapse, it was doomed from the beginning. I remember a professor in one of my Political Science classes in University telling us that when Karl Marx wrote his book Das Kapital, he was thinking of industrial Germany not agricultural Russia. What has been depicted in movies and books as a glorious revolution by the people was in fact what we see today in Syria with ISIS. The government of the Tsar collapsed in 1917 when Nicholas II abdicates, the country is at war with Germany and all authority disappears. A group of adventurers styling themselves as revolutionaries “Bolsheviks” take over by simply killing anyone who might have been connected with the Tsarists regime. Russia then falls into a long 10 year Civil War which ends in 1928, after all opponents have been summarily shot, Lenin has died of cancer and Stalin grabs all the power for himself by shooting is old comrades and will launch purges against all manner of imaginary enemies, no one is safe, including his own family and the family of those comrades who managed not to be purged. Stalin’s wife who suffers from mental illness, shoots herself because she cannot live with this monster,  his reaction is How could she do this to me, he then proceeds to kill family members who he thinks conspired against him. Millions will die this way in an unending blood bath which will last until 1939.

So how or who is running the country, the industries, the army etc. well no one really, Stalin appoints incompetent people most of whom cannot read nor write but are Commissars in charge of everything and their first job is to shoot any worker or manager who does not produce ridiculous quotas of goods no one wants nor could use because the production is so shoddy. Famine ensues and millions die in vast areas of Russia.

As the war in Europe approaches, Stalin makes a secret pact with Hitler to divide Europe and the World. Stalin is secretly hoping that the Nazis will destroy the capitalists in France and England and will not attack Russia. He will make a more public pact to divide the world in 1945 in Yalta with Truman and Churchill, the beginning of the Cold War. Poland is sacrificed in the deal and 10% of its population will be killed, the country divided and disappear, the ultimate plan was to kill all the Poles, Stalin and Hitler hated them.

The same applies for Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.   Finland manages to save parts of its territory after a ferocious battle against the Soviets. Because of the purges of Stalin, the Soviet Army has no Senior officers in command, no modern armament, Stalin is still in favour of a 19th century style army with horses and old cannons, unable to understand that Germany has modern weapons and no one uses cavalry anymore and certainly not against tanks and machine guns. The Soviets have no planes, while Germany has a modern air fleet. The few planes Russia has are so poorly built that they are described as flying coffins. Again Stalin does not want to hear about it, his battle is against his own family, relatives and anyone he thinks might oppose him, a death sentence for many. When Hitler finally attacks Russia in 1941, in the first 48 hours despite the quickly advancing German army and aerial bombardments of cities, pleading by army officers like Zhukov to do something, Stalin refuses to believe the war is on, he thinks it is only a provocation by a lone German General, Hitler his friend would never do that to him. It is all conspirators around him who created this mess, he cannot be responsible for this disaster.

At the time of the pact with Nazi Germany, Stalin to please Hitler and later after 1945 for various reasons will purge (kill) all the Jews from the Soviet government, all of whom are committed Bolsheviks from 1905. They form a majority of all senior comrades in most government departments and in diplomacy. His henchmen is Lavrenti Beria who will outlive Stalin by one year and he himself will be arrested and shot by the new Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev in 1953. The master executioner was the peasant Vasily Blokhin who was in charge of all high profile execution and torture, he killed thousands and had a special squad to ensure efficiency in mass murders, he will commit suicide in 1955 after being disgraced by the new Soviet Leader.

So this is Josef V.Stalin, a Georgian peasant, who came from a dysfunctional family, poorly educated, suffering from various mental problems, his a reign of crimes, depravity and massacres against his own people, there was no communist ideal, no program, no policies, just a lot of purges of people to ensure that no one would ever topple him. Millions died at the hands of his secret police. If the purges stopped once Stalin died, the idea of a Soviet Union was forever doomed, no one, not Khrushchev, not Leonid Bhreznev, no one was able to reform the government and make social progress. Until it finally collapsed in 1989. In other words 72 years of utter misery and mismanagement, so much for the glorious revolution of the people. Problem is no one bothered to invite the people to their own revolution.

The book is well researched but after a while the reader is nauseated with the utter cruelty and nonsense of such a regime which brought nothing to Russia.

The other book I finished reading was the biography of Queen Marie-Antoinette by Stefan Zweig, a very detailed work, giving us a graphic picture, one I had not encountered before of the last 15 years of the Ancient Regime, the story of a monumental failure of the State, of an incompetent King Louis XVI and a Queen Marie-Antoinette who was unable to understand her role being a selfish, spoiled woman and the dangers around her despite many warnings. Missed opportunities at many crucial moments in history. The old Monarchy is swept away by a Bourgeois uprising again done in the name of the people and arranged or staged managed by the brother of the King, the Duke of Provence and his cousin Duke of Orleans, the problem is they (the people) are not aware of it. Only to be replaced by an Imperial regime under Napoleon I and a restoration of the same old monarchy in 1814. A Republican regime is only born in France in 1871, some 82 years later.

I am now going to read another of Stefan Zweig’s books The World of Yesterday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Books I am reading

Tags

Bolchevism, Fallada, Germany, Lenin, Nazism, Russia, Soviet, Stalin, terror, USSR, WWII

Recently I started two books, one was given to me by someone who came in for an interview at the Museum it is entitled Alone in Berlin, by German writer Hans Fallada (nom de plume) whose real name was Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen (1893-1947). He was the greatest writer of the XXth century. Fallada suggests that morality under the Nazi Dictatorship was not measured by the size of the struggle; it mattered only that one did not capitulate…the very act of writing Alone in Berlin – to say nothing of the stunning political clout of the novel itself – implies that for Fallada, the artist’s true role under fascism was chiefly one of bearing witness.

The story starts in an apartment building in central Berlin where several families live. All have different economic conditions, a retired senior Judge, an old Jewess, a worker and his wife, a Nazi party family with sons in the SS, a shifty alcoholic and his prostitute wife and their 5 kids. Tragedy strikes when the worker Quangel and his wife learn by official letter of the death of their son Otto, a soldier in the German Army invading France, this death will make of them resisters, the book is dark and full of anguish and fear. The Quangel write postcards denouncing the Fuhrer and leave them around Berlin. The Gestapo and the SS embark on a hunt to find whoever is responsible and it is a game of Cat and Mouse. The reader understands that many Germans resisted the Nazi, hated them but given the politics of fear and the Police State with the constant threat of the Concentration Camp for anyone resisting or criticizing the Fuhrer, people kept their heads low. Fallada who lived through it all also explains how the Nazi regime financed itself through extortion of the public in general and Party members.

Primo Levi called this book ”the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis. I have read other books about German resistance and living conditions during the Nazi dictatorship, it has been 75 years now and more biographies and diaries are coming out, it was not a black and white picture many shades of grey and complex reality. The picture is one of a society in turmoil and we have to ask ourselves what would we do if we lived in such atmosphere where the police can arbitrarily arrest you, beat you up, kill you or send you to a concentration camp. Where the wrong word can mean a death sentence, where no one can be trusted, where no one will be foolish enough to come to your defence.

A few years ago I read two biographies entitled Purgatory of Fools and Berlin Diaries 1940-45, it was the stories of two sisters of Russian-German origin, Marie Princess Vassilchikov and Tatiana Princess Metternich. Both worked at the German Foreign Ministry as secretaries and were implicated in the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944. They miraculously survived the war. However they do give a gripping account of the horrors under the Nazis.

The other book is about Joseph Stalin, who was not Russian but Georgian who becomes  the all powerful dictator of Soviet Russia under the Bolcheviks. Entitled Stalin, the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It gives a psychological picture of the man and his family and entourage. It also re-establishes in reality what actually happened from 1917 onwards, removing all the romantic nonsense about the Revolution or that it was done for the people. What we see is how the people, the peasants, millions of people were starved, put to death, a country destroyed by fanaticism similar to what we see with the Taliban today. It was not the overthrow of the Tsar or the old Aristocratic Regime that was achieved, since the regime stop to exist in February 1917 by the sudden abdication of Nicholas II forced out by his cousins, a surprise to all including the Bolcheviks. No it was the fanatical pursuit of an inhumane ideology ”Bolchevism” to create the new man, a robot  basically who only thought in terms of means of production, devoid of any human feelings described as Bourgeois sentimentality.

The author Montefiore gives us a detailed psychological portrait of the people in Stalin’s entourage, few actual Russians, many were Jews who occupied top positions around him, their families, the children, their lack of education, their poverty and in the case of the Jewish colleagues the oppression they felt in Russian society. Even after the so called Revolution, Bolchevik Jews could not be promoted to senior positions because they were considered non-Russian, though non-Jews like the Armenians, Ukrainians, Abkazians, our other Ethnic groups could. Stalin will eventually get rid of all of them in his purges.

Montefiore did meticulous research much through interviews of the children now aged, and newly opened Kremlin State Archives , diaries and personal journals of who they were. We see Lenin the petit bourgeois, from a small noble family whose father was a Tsarist bureaucrat, Lenin who was absolutely convinced that in 1919 the world was going to fall into an orgy of blood and revolution, who believed that the people were with him, totally delusional. When he realized that nothing of the sort was happening, he turned to absolute violence against the very people he claimed to be wanting to free. As he said quote Change will come through total terror. Something Mao in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia years later will copy.

Trotsky the Jewish intellectual despised by all for his grandeur and aloofness, forced into exile and later assassinated in Mexico City on Stalin’s orders.

Stalin the Georgian street urchin, low birth and next to no education raised in a violent family background dominated by superstition and blood feud typical of the Mountains he came from, ready to kill for any reason. Stalin’s second wife Nadya, an unstable self-centred egoistical schizophrenic who after a party in 1932 will go to her bedroom in the Kremlin palace and shoot herself. Followed by the horrible vengeance of Stalin on his own family and all his close friends who he will blame for her death. Stalin himself is paranoid and violent, though highly intelligent and manipulative, always suspicious and ready to believe in conspiracy against him. A man who has no scrupules about exterminating, his own word, millions of innocent people simply because they do not fit into Bolchevik ideology. The mass starvation in the Ukraine where 10 million peasant died to satisfy the Five Year Plan for grain export to the rest of the Soviet Empire. The life of luxury on special trains taking the entourage and their families on vacation in the Crimea or to Sochi, the lavish banquets and constant drinking binges while the whole country is in flames gripped by a Civil War and then the purges 1936 of entire families, the old revolutionaries Stalin came to despise and fear, they knew too much. What the author shows us is that the entourage of Stalin who were rough necks of low birth and little education enabled him to become the Boss. He dominated them with his quick grasp of events. But also Stalin’s children how they did not fare very well, his first son Yakov from his first marriage, died during the Second World War a prisoner of the Germans in 1943, Stalin refused to save him for political reasons. He second son Vasily who will become a general in the Soviet Air Force drank himself to death unable to cope with such a father. Svetlana his daughter will fare a little better, but just, she will escape to the West and finally return to Russia to a life of oblivion, the crimes of her dead father followed her everywhere. The only one who appears to have done relatively well is Artyom his adoptive son who became a general and wrote two books about his adoptive father Stalin. He died in Moscow in 1981.

Lenin and others had no plan for the new promised Proletarian society, Bolchevism led to a dead end and Communism and Karl Marx mere shiny objects of little meaning used to retain absolute power over the masses. Stalin with the help of people like Beria, Molotov and others developed a State Secret Police to maintain a system of constant terror, creating the infamous Gulag. Even during the Second World War which again caught the Bolcheviks by surprised, so certain they were of their pact with Hitler to divide the world, Stalin would spy on his own troops at the Front and shoot here and there soldiers on the mere suspicion that they might not be faithful to him. He signed order 270 condemning as traitor any Soviet soldier who surrendered to the enemy or was made a POW.  Some 28 years in power and the total destruction of a society is the legacy of Stalin and his henchmen.

Stalin lived like a Tsar using Palaces and Dachas surrounding himself and his cronies with opulent luxury while the people had nothing. A sad commentary on a revolution that was not and almost 70 years of rule by one ideology. It explains a lot about Russia today and the many problems it faces. If you love history this is a great book.