I read this book some time ago, and reading back my review, written so carefully to avoid spoilers, I had no idea what the ‘twist’ was at the end of it. I shouldn’t have been so delphic! Anyway, I think I must have interpreted what the film portrays as a visualization as being a fact in the book – or at least, I think it was a visualization. I found myself more worried on film to see the obvious power imbalances with this white, blonde academic luxuriating in her rent-controlled New York apartment, blithely ignoring the hispanic people who were doing their jobs, and twisting the rules about ‘service animals’ ( a term so vague that it is meaningless) to keep a dog which was far too large for an apartment.
Are there more books being published about the slide into dementia and confusion, or it just that I perceive it that way because of my own fears? Writer and academic Matthew Hooton is rather too young to be facing this situation himself, but he captures well the slipperiness of memory in this beautifully written book. If you’re looking up ‘Matthew Hooton’ to find out more about him, you’ll find that unfortunately for him, he shares his name with a former National Party politician from New Zealand. But there’s a certain irony in that because Jack, the narrator of Everything lost, Everything found also shares a name with another Jack in Henry Ford’s rubber plantation in the Brazilian Amazon, where he travelled with his parents in 1929.
There are two threads to this book. One is Jack’s memories of Fordlandia in Brazil, a cookie-cutter American suburb transplanted into the Brazilian jungle, under the control of the morality agents charged with carrying out Henry Ford’s vision for a colonial outpost to establish rubber plantations in the jungle, while gradually easing out reliance on native rubber-gatherers. The second thread is that of Jack’s life in Michigan, in what is now a deserted Ford Factory town, as his wife Gracie is sliding into dementia and a slow death with cancer.
The descriptions of the jungle are just gorgeous, and the jungle itself seems to take on a personality. But it is a malevolent personality: taking Jack’s mother’s life in a caiman attack on the river, and driving Jack’s father into his own madness in searching for his wife’s body in the jungle. A man half-dead from exposure and the jungle’s flesh-eating insects staggers into Fordlandia, and Jack himself is not sure whether it is his father or not. Young Jack himself is forced into a battle with the jungle as he and Soo, a young Korean girl who had worked in the sanatorium laundry, try to escape the morality agents who have shopped her to the Japanese.
I read this book because I had recently read Hooton’s Typhoon Kingdom (review here) and at first I was struck by the difference in setting between his earlier book and this one. But Korea (where Hooton lived and worked for some time) works its way into this book as well, when Soo explains that she is Korean royalty has escaped the Japanese in their takeover of Korea early in the 20th century. I’m not sure whether this strains credulity or not.
But there is no difficulty at all in watching the older Jack, seventy years later, defiantly trying to stay in his family home as his life revolves around visiting his wife in the nursing home. Jack’s relationship with his divorced daughter Jess is strained, and his grandson Nick is a mixture of solicitous and off-hand adolescence as he is trying to negotiate his own relationship with his father.
In fact, one of the things that really impresses me about Hooton’s writing is the way that he is able to emotionally inhabit someone that he clearly is not: a Korean comfort woman in Typhoon Kingdom and an old man here. His characters have an authenticity and layers of complexity, and their dialogue and tone is distinctive and convincing.
The two story lines become increasingly intertwined, as Jack himself becomes more addled, and as the past colonizes the present, not unlike the colonization attempt of Fordlandia. Jack’s narrative voice is comfortable and engaging, and as a reader you want things to be better for him.
I really enjoyed this book. In one of those little twists of coincidence, I read a review from 1925 of Henry Ford’s rather burnished autobiography, which was written before the establishment of Fordlandia and some of the more unsavoury aspects of Ford’s politics. Moreover, I had only recently read Hooton’s earlier Typhoid Kingdom, and so the Korean aspect was familiar to me as well. But quite apart from that, I just enjoyed the beauty of the descriptions, the poignancy of loss and grief, and the sheer humanness of it all.
My rating: 9/10
Read because: I enjoyed Typhoon Kingdom and I saw that he had a new book out
Background Briefing: Agents of Influence (ABC)Episode 3: The Man Whose Name is All Over Sydney We don’t have quite the same problem here in Melbourne but Len Ainsworth, the 101 year old King of Pokies, has had many buildings named after him. The owner of Aristocrat Leisure, he made a killing from the pokies machines in Sydney’s clubs, and then as other states introduced them as well (to our eternal shame), he made even more money. Philanthropy, yes, but at what cost?
Witness History (BBC) I love Witness History- it features interviews with people from the BBC archives who witnessed a historic event, and only goes for 9 minutes which is just enough to walk to the station, or to drop off to sleep. The Reichstag Fire on 27 February 1933, saw the building that housed the German parliament burned down. This was a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, as they were able to blame ‘the communists’. Berlin-born journalist, Sefton Delmer, told his story to the BBC World Service in 1967. His contacts with people in Berlin meant that he knew people involved with the Nazi party, and as the building burned down, he wandered around with Hitler and Goring as they ‘tut-tutted’ about the fire.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 555: 1066 Slaughter at Stamford Bridge This was in effect the last battle between the Vikings and the Saxons, with two doomed characters each representative of their cultures. Harald Hardrada was 56 years old, and although he hadn’t previously been interested in invading England, he was now because of the need for money, the desire to be the next Cnut and because he was psychologically restless and warlike. He landed with 300 longships and possibly 10,000 men north of Yorkshire, where there were many Danish connections. There he joined forces with Harold Godwinson’s own brother Tostig (boo, hiss) at the Humber. It was a hot day, and it is possible that the Norse left their armour off, because they were unaware that Godwinson had rushed from London with his army, picking up men as he went. Harald was killed at Stamford Bridge, but glowing with success, Harold Godwinson did allow his treacherous brother Tostig to return to Norway. Then blow me down, who should arrive by William of Normanby, ready for a fight!
History Extra PodcastOwain Glyndŵr:Life of the Week The blurb on the website says “Famed for his dramatic and determined revolt against English rule in the early 15th century, as well as his bold vision for an independent Wales, Owain Glyndŵr has gone down in history as a symbol of Welsh resistance and a national hero.” Well, I’d never heard of him. To be honest, I didn’t like this episode much- it assumed too much knowledge of Welsh/English history. I’m not sure if I have this right, and I don’t have enough interest to check. As Wales was a colonized region, the rich and well-connected Owain served in the English armies, then went home for about 10 years. During 1400 rebellion broke out in Wales, taking advantage of the intra-English rebellion. His lands were confiscated, then an outbreak of violence saw a Welsh victory in 1402. The first native Welsh Parliament in 100 years was held in 1404 and in 1406 Owain wrote a long treatise on the Welsh State. The Welsh had French support at first, but when the French support split, the war reverted to a Peasants Rebellion. Owain never accepted a pardon from the English for his role in the resistance, and we don’t know what happened to him.
In many ways the subtitle of this book is a better indicator of its content than its headline title. The neuroscientist and memory researcher Dr Charon Ranganath does explore the connection between the evolution of the brain and human social behaviour, but he does this mainly through an exploration of the physical structure of the brain before widening his analysis to a more sociological and legal perspective.
His book starts with the evolutionary ancient structures of the brain: the hippocampus, amygdala and the nucleus accumbens. He then goes on to look at evolutionarily-later developments like the perirhinal and prefrontal cortex and the Default Mode Network. These structural elements of the brain are bathed by neuromodulators like dopamine and noradrenaline. To be honest, I couldn’t really tell you specifically what he argued in relation to these more scientific aspects of his book (I can’t remember!) but while at times he becomes rather technical, the language and approach is fairly low-key so that you don’t feel as if you are reading a science textbook.
What interested me more was the social and behavioural aspects of memory which he also deals with. Memory has evolved to enable us to forget much of what we experience. Instead of being backward-looking, memory plays an important role in orienting us to the new and unexpected, and episodic memory helps us to predict what can happen in the future. It is episodic memory, with its placement of beginnings and endings and its tethering in a specific place and time, that declines most with age, while semantic (i.e. facts and knowledge) memory, which is transferable across contexts, remains fairly constant.
The parts that interested me most were his discussions of memory-construction. A memory is not a grab from a fixed, if sometimes inaccessible, mental film-reel, but is instead the constant retrieval and updating of a memory, with subtle alterations creeping in with every reiteration. Moreover, the story varies depending on the audience for retelling as well, as when family memories are shaped into a story with which to regale listeners. As a local historian who collects oral histories, this is a rather disconcerting thought. And more than merely disconcerting are the implications of evidence in legal cases, where long interrogations and repetitions, and in particular ‘shaping’ questioning, can embed a memory that is different from the original one. Courtroom questioning, which involves retrieval of the memory for an external audience operating on different parameters, shapes memory with sometimes dreadful consequences. It’s all very destabilizing.
I had a recent example of this. I was talking on community radio about our local historical society, and was invited to select two songs and talk about the reason for selecting them. One of them was ‘5.10 Man’ by the Masters Apprentices, which I remember for being presented as a new song by the Masters when they appeared at our school social in 1969. I decided to check the Facebook page for my school, where I knew that there had been a conversation about that social, only to find that other comments made it 1968, and the ‘new song’ being ‘Turn up Your Radio’ (which couldn’t have been right because it wasn’t released then). I found myself questioning my original memory, although self-centred to the last, I’m sticking to my 1969 5.10 Man memory.
Charan Ranganath is no Oliver Sacks. His book is based far more in the laboratory than Sacks’ work, with example after example of rather odd lab tests, often using university students, that add incrementally to the science of memory. I did find his compulsion to praise everybody that he had ever worked with rather cloying as well. He intersperses his analysis with some personal anecdotes that, while being somewhat more ‘memorable’ for me than the scientific parts, were not particularly earth-shattering in themselves, and they lacked the deep empathy of Oliver Sacks’ work. So, interesting enough in its own right, although for me the implications of his work are more thought-provoking than the actual explanation.
My rating: 7/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I read a positive review in the New Scientist.
I haven’t played Six Degrees of Separation for a while, but I’m feeling heavy and miserable with a headcold, so I’ll write this instead of racing out to weed the garden, or go for a walk, or clean the house, or something else I’d do if I had more energy.
The idea is that Kate from BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest chooses a starting book, and you then bounce off six other books that spring to mind. The starting book this month is Yael van der Wouden‘s The Safekeep. It is a truth universally acknowledged that I rarely have read the starting book, and this month is no exception. Wikipedia tells me that it is set in 1961 Netherlands, and tells the story of Isabel, a recluse living alone, who receives an unexpected guest when her brother Louis asks that his girlfriend Eva move into the home to stay with Isabel for the summer.
So, off to my six degrees.
Having not read The Safekeep, it seems as if Isabel has had this unexpected guest foisted upon her. Helen in Helen Garner’s The Spare Room hasn’t had her guest Nicola imposed on her, but she certainly feels ambivalent about this friend who comes down to Melbourne to stay with her while undergoing an unconventional treatment for cancer.
Then, there’s the foisted guest to consider. Claire Keegan’s The Foster, which I read as an essay in the New Yorker reduced me to tears. It’s about a young girl sent to live with a foster family, and it was filmed as ‘The Quiet Girl’ (my review of the film here). Keegan is masterful in the way that she can layer so much emotion and observation into a short story or novella.
So I jump from a quiet girl to The Silent Woman. Janet Malcolm’s reflection on writing the biography of Sylvia Plath in the face of the hostility of Plath’s husband the poet Ted Hughes, is a treatise on the impossibility and responsibility of biography, the role and power of gatekeepers and knowledge, the definition of character through memories, impressions, anecdote and documents.
And while we’re with silent females, how about Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. This historical fiction takes as its starting point the Siege of Troy, but it is told from the point of view of the women who are just a by-play in the battle between the Trojans and Aecheans. I must read the next book in the series which is on the TBR shelf.
You can’t get much more silent than a dead body, and in Elif Shafak’s Ten Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World the gradual shut-down of memory of Leila’s murdered body stuffed into a rubbish bin in Istanbul takes us through post-WW2 Turkey (where, as it happens the ancient city of Troy was said to be located). I loved the first 2/3 of this book, but didn’t like the last 1/3 at all.
But I have always loved the idea of Istanbul, and mourn that with increasing age and rapidly narrowing travel prospects, I’m not likely to ever visit it. I’ll have to settle with Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City instead.
So, a Six Degrees rather dominated by female writers. Despite a reputation for garrulousness, perhaps women know far more than men about silence and safekeeping?
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 261: The Tupumaros I’m doing a presentation on Jose Mujica, the recently deceased ex-president of Uruguay, who was a guerilla fighter with the Tupamaros in his youth. This episode made me realize how anglo-centric ‘The Rest is History’ is because obviously Tom and Dominic (I’m on first name basis with them now) knew little about Uruguay or the Tupamaros until they did the research for this episode. They point out that Uruguay was a small, progressive country known as the Switzerland of South America, but after WW2 the prices of wool and meat declined and inflation and unemployment rose. Raul Sendic, the founder of the Tupamaros, was the bright boy of a peasant family. In 1963 the Tupamaros began a series of bank robberies and kidnappings, most of which ended with the hostage being released after about 10 weeks, before moving on to international figures like the British ambassador and then US advisor Dan Mitrioni. This sparked off mass arrests, and they give a figure of 1 in 5 Uruguayans being arrested (a figure I haven’t found elsewhere). Democracy was suspended between 1973 and 1985 and all the Tupamaros were arrested or exiled. Jose (Pepe) Mujica was one of these prisoners, kept in a horse trough for 2 years, with no toilet, and he was driven half-mad before his release in 1985. On the day that Mujica was elected president, Uruguayans confirmed by referendum that the amnesty for both prisoners and human-rights abusers should remain. After his presidency Mujica retired in 2015 to his farm, where he grows chrysanthemums. (He died recently, hence my interest in him).
Guardian Long ReadsOperation Condor: the Cold War conspiracy that terrorized South America. This podcast by Giles Tremlett was originally broadcast in 2020. During the 1970s and 80s, eight US-backed military dictatorships jointly plotted the cross-border kidnap, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of their political opponents. Now some of the perpetrators are finally facing justice. I like Giles Tremlett, whose book Ghosts of Spain I very much enjoyed. I had heard of Operation Condor, but thought that it was a spy novel about CIA agents! Instead, it was an agreement between right-wing governments in South America to allow friendly dictatorships to cross national borders to arrest their citizens who had fled into exile. Most South American countries passed Amnesty Laws as a compromise for the return of democracy, so few court cases against human rights abuse have been mounted in South American countries (although I note that recently Sydney nanny Adriana Rivas has lost her appeal as part of avoiding extradition to Chile for her role in Pinochet’s regime). Instead, it is European courts who are opening up cases against officials in dictatorships because they are not bound by the amnesty laws. It’s an interesting and rather chilling thought that Western countries were considering getting advice from South American Operation Condor officials, in order to introduce a similar system in Europe during the IRA and the Baader-Meinhof group terrorist campaigns.
One of the very best things about belonging to a book group is when you go along, thinking that a book is a bit mediocre, and you leave having been introduced to a swathe of subtleties and themes that you just hadn’t thought of before. This is what happened with me at the Ivanhoe Reading Circles’ discussion of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover.
The Lover starts and ends with the reflections of a 70 year old woman, which was the age that Marguerite Duras was when she wrote the book. Although she later distanced herself from the book, claiming that it was a “pile of shit” that she wrote while she was drunk, it closely follows the contours of her own life and could probably best be classed as fictionalized memoir. It is set in Indo-China, then under French rule, in the late 1920s. Both the title and much of the narrative revolve around an affair she conducted with a man twelve years older than her, when she was aged only fifteen. It is a consensual relationship, although she treats her lover with a rather patronizing pity, knowing that as a Chinese man he cannot hope to marry her as a white woman. The 70 year old narrator claims that the girl (who alternates between ‘she’ and ‘I’) is no victim here; that she is hungry for the physical act and that she gains confidence and status through the affair. She does not love him, or at least she claims this, but he is humiliated by the relationship, and later confesses that he has always loved her. I found myself thinking of Nabakov’s Lolita written from Dolores’ point of view, (acknowledging that Dolores was younger, and Humbert was older), in this case without the lens of paedophilia and in this case further complicated by issues of class and colour.
The title and the reputation of the book rest on the affair, but that is only part of the story and on the second reading I found myself even more aware of the other aspects of the novel. The girl is white, her family being French in a French colony. Her mother is a widowed schoolteacher and the family is poor after her father’s death and following the disastrous financial purchase of a ‘concession’ in the rural countryside. The girl’s mother, who suffers from bouts of mental illness, is nonchalant and even complicit in her daughter’s affair with this rich Chinese older man (although twelve years is not an excessive age difference, and in France then and now the age of consent is 15). He gives her money, and the family needs it, especially as her older brother is siphoning money from his own family to feed his opium addiction. Her hatred of her older brother is sustained throughout her life, especially when her younger (but still 2 years older) brother dies.
The book is not easy to read. Many times she returns to the image of the girl on a ferry crossing the Mekong River, dressed in a faded silk dress with a belt belonging to her brother, gold lame shoes and a pink-brown fedora. This is how her lover first saw her, and this is how the 70 year old her sees herself looking back. The narrative is shattered, switching repeatedly between first and third person, interspersed with flashbacks and flashforwards. There is a flatness of tone throughout, as if the book were being narrated at a distance in a monotone.
I’m pleased that I read it a second time. I realized on second reading that the repetition and fragmentary nature of the narrative was not going to resolve itself miraculously at the end, and I slowed down to savour it more. Her affair – or whatever you would call it- as a 15 year old, her childhood in French Indo-China, her yearning to write, the paradox of ‘pleasure unto death’, memory and madness are themes that she returned to again and again in her writing. She might have decried it as a pile of shit, but it’s not.
In the Shadows of Utopia Season 2 Episode 8 Rolling Thunder in Vietnam, Clouds over Cambodia Time Period Covered 1964 – 1967. Despite LBJ’s doubts about the wisdom of escalating the war in Vietnam, it seemed to be set in stone by 1964. The Vietnam War was really the resumption of an earlier war. The Vietnam Workers Party resolved to mobilize large numbers of North Vietnamese and NLF fighters quickly in order to win a victory before the US got involved. In August 1964 the Tonkin Gulf episode was an over-reaction, but LBJ used it to justify his stance on the war and he was rewarded with an increase in popularity. Meanwhile, the Cambodian communists in Vietnam were becoming increasingly resentful, wanting to start an armed struggle back home, but discouraged by the Vietnamese because they were friendly with Sihanouk. Pol Pot found himself feeling sidelined. He visited China on the eve of the Cultural Revolution as a friend of revolution, and he liked the idea of continuous revolution, especially drawing on the rural peasantry, as put forward in the Little Red Book. But although he received the support of Chinese officials, China also did not want to encourage armed struggle as they too were friendly with Sihanouk. In 1966 Pol Pot returned to Vietnam, then on to Cambodia, but his progress home was hampered by heavy bombing. The Cambodian Communists conducted a study session in 1966 where they decided to change their name from the Cambodian Workers Party (which matched the Vietnamese Workers Party) to the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and moved their office to avoid the surveillance of the Vietnamese. Pol Pot was determined to prepare for armed struggle in the rural areas. But things were changing in South East Asia as the 1965-6 aborted Communist coup in Indonesia led to heavy repression. In Cambodia, Sihanouk was losing his magic, with the stagnant economy, disaffected youth, internal repression and border skirmishes as Thailand and the US pursued the Viet Cong into Cambodia. Conservatives were becoming disillusioned with Sikanouk’s ‘both ways’ approach that saw him rejecting the west and maintaining a relationship with North Vietnam and China. The left never like Sihanouk anyway. There was increasing resentment at Sihanouk’s involvement in film-making and acting- apparently they were bad films, focussing on the elite. In 1966 there was another election but this time Sihanouk didn’t select the candidates, leading to a new assembly that was not completely in his control. Lon Nol was chosen as Prime Minister as he was still loyal to Sihanouk and popular with the army and Buddhists. Sihanouk went off to France, but things changed in his absence.
The Human Subject (BBC)The Farmers and the Goat Testicle Transplants. In 1916 a farmer walked into a Dr John R. Brinkley’s surgery in the small town of Milford, Kansas, complaining of a ‘flat tyre’ (i.e. erectile dysfunction). The doctor suggested a transplant of goat’s testicles as the solution to his problem and Brinkley’s career as a xenotransplant surgeon took off. He had his own radio show, where he spruiked patent medicine, and unsuccessfully ran for government, claiming that the election was ‘stolen’ (sound familiar?) He was engaged in multiple court cases, and ended up losing his licence to practice and was called a quack. Interesting.
I’ve been thinking recently of public displays of grief after a leader has died. Some weeks ago, the ex-President of Uruguay Jose Mujica died, and I was struck by the spontaneous and heartfelt applause that accompanied the journey of his casket from the presidential palace to the National Assembly.
In contrast, I remembered the extravagant hysteria after the death of Kim Jong-il some thirteen years ago.
I’ve been thinking about the deaths of leaders while reading Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Death of Stalin. Fitzpatrick is an eminent Australian historian of Soviet history, but this small book is written for a general audience.
The title echoes the Armando Iannucci movie of the same name, which Fitzpatrick admires:
In his The Death of Stalin, the British film director Armando Iannucci memorably depicted the death scene as black comedy, with Stalin’s potential successors united only by ambition and relief, milling around distractedly at his deathbed. That is indeed how the main eye-witness accounts describe it, although to be sure these were eye-witnesses with their own agendas. There is black comedy in this [i.e. Fitzpatrick’s] book too, not just in connection with Stalin’s death but also with the fate of his corporeal remains (buried, dug up, reburied) and the subsequent persistent apparitions of his ghost. But not everything about Stalin’s death is comic. It had serious implications for his country and the world in the twentieth century and beyond; this book sets out to unravel them. (p.2)
Chapter 1 starts with a biographical sketch of Stalin. Under the chapter title is a police photograph of Stalin taken in the early 1900s, showing a quite handsome, chiselled young man – quite unlike the pudgy, square man he became in later life. He was involved in the Russian revolution from the start, in fact he made it back to Petrograd before Lenin did after the February Revolution of 1917. Although a member of the Politburo since its inception in August 1917, he became the quintessential backroom man, a role formalized with his appointment as general secretary of the party in April 1922. Despite Lenin adding a postscript to a document that came to be known as ‘Lenin’s Testament’, warning that Stalin’s rudeness rendered him unsuitable as party secretary, Stalin and the Central Committee saw off an opposing faction and he became leader after Lenin’s death. His ascendancy was welcomed by Western observers, who saw him as a centrist. He mounted a program of mass collectivization and industrialization guided by a Five Year Plan. By 1934 he announced a new phase of relaxation, and he introduced the new Soviet Constitution. But he changed direction again at the end of 1934 when his friend Sergei Kirov was assassinated by what turned out to be a lone-wolf actor. Mass terror was released, directed initially against members of the party itself, then to the broader population. He startled the Soviet public and the West by signing a Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in 1939, which was broken in June 1941 when Germany launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. Despite the huge cost in infrastructure, military and population loss, Stalin emerged from WW2 with enormously enhanced prestige at home and internationally. Within a few years, unfounded fears of Soviet communism (unfounded because Stalin knew that Russia was in no state to launch WW3) settled into the Cold War, fueled by mutual hostility and suspicion, but tempered by the nuclear threat and the use of proxies. By 1949 the cult of Stalin reached a peak as Stalin’s 70th birthday was celebrated.
By early 1953, Stalin would be dead. In Chapter 2 ‘Stalin’s Death’ we see Stalin as a lonely, isolated, paranoiac man who insisted on the attendance of his Politburo colleagues at film nights at the Kremlin, and crude, men-only dinners at his dacha. The day to day running of the business of government was carried out by the Politburo, with sudden interventions by Stalin, and shifts against his erstwhile colleagues. One of these initiatives was the arrest of a number of physicians from the Kremlin hospital, known as the ‘Doctors Plot’. As we know from the film ‘The Death of Stalin’, this backfired somewhat when there was no one to treat him in the dacha when he had what appeared to be a stroke. Actually, Iannucci didn’t have to embellish much in his depiction of Stalin’s death: the fear of finding him dead; him not actually being dead; sending in the housekeeper; having to find a doctor because they had all been arrested; the arrival of his daughter and drunk son. However, unlike in the film, they quickly set up an efficient government, calling themselves ‘the collective leadership’ (p. 37)- a fact that might have undermined Iannucci’s black comedy somewhat. His body lay in state in the Hall of Columns in Moscow for three days and was buried in the Mausoleum, with his name emblazoned under that of Lenin.
Chapter Three examines reactions at home, noting the recorded responses of writers and members of the public, before then moving on to the immediate, radical policy changes that were set in train. First was the announcement of a mass amnesty for non-political prisoners in the Gulag, then the withdrawal of charges against the doctors. There was a change in direction on the nationalities policy and an abrupt halt to the Stalin cult. The first six months of 1953 was described as a ‘cultural thaw’, but this was not necessarily welcomed by the Soviet public. Beria was ousted and put on trial and swiftly executed. This made it possible to put all the blame for the Stalinist terror onto Beria’s shoulders.
Reactions Abroad are dealt with in Chapter 4. The rest of the world wasn’t really sure what would happen when Stalin died. Western intelligence was at a low ebb between the end of the war and Stalin’s death, and so the West missed the signals that the ‘collective leadership’ might be willing to deal. Eisenhower appointed John Foster Dulles, one of the most virulent anti-Communists on the US political scene (p. 65). He and his brother Allen, who headed the CIA, favoured undermining the Soviet Union by making trouble in the satellite-states, rather than provoking a head-on confrontation. It was, as A.J.P. Taylor said, a turning point that failed to turn (p. 71). It was only in 1956, with Krushchev’s partial denunciation of Stalin that there was Western recognition of the thaw.
The closing Chapter 5 ‘Stalin’s Ghost’ looks at his legacy. For the first years after Stalin’s death the terror of the 1930s was the great unmentionable. This was broken in 1956 with Krushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ to the Congress in Moscow which denounced Stalin, the cult of personality and the Purges and terror under his government. Although writers embraced openness about Stalin’s reign, the reactions of ordinary people varied. Some simply did not believe it, and there was public protest in Georgia, where the speech was seen as an insult. In some of the Soviet satellites, the Soviet Thaw encouraged local Communist parties, including in Hungary, to remove unpopular Stalinist leaders and put in Communists with a reform agenda. The Soviet Thaw didn’t extend that far: Soviet tanks were sent in to Hungary, and reformer leaders were arrested. Krushchev was ousted in 1964, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and replaced by Brezhnev who oversaw a replay of Hungary 1956 in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Even though a breach opened up between Brezhnev and the intelligentsia, Stalin was not rehabilitated. That had to wait for Vladimir Putin. The book ends on a rather chilling note.
There is a lot in this small book, which is presented so clearly that it can engage readers who are not particularly familiar with Russian history. The book provides a timeline spanning 1879 to 2000, and a full ten-page ‘cast of characters’ including not only Russian political and cultural personalities, but also Mao Tse Tung (Zedong), Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. The book has endnotes, but they are not footnoted throughout the text.It is liberally illustrated, albeit in black and white (although that echoes the theme of the book quite well), and by bringing it right up to the present day and referencing the Iannucci film it has a contemporary edge. It’s a good read.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 