Rear Vision (ABC)2014 and Ukraine’s relationship with Russia. This is a replay of an episode from 2014, just as Russia had invaded Crimea. It all seems rather prophetic now. Ukraine was the largest republic of the former USSR, and it withdrew from USSR in 1991. With hindsight, they were dudded by the Bucharest Memorandum of 1994 whereby they gave up their nuclear arms for a security ‘assurance’ – not a guarantee- of territorial integrity from their guarantors including Russia (something that Bill Clinton now regrets). In the wake of huge inflation and very low wages, the Orange Revolution took place in 2004 ending with the election of Viktor Yushchenko. At the time of recording (2014) Crimea had just been invaded by Russia. Crimea had been settled with many Russians who had been encouraged to move there by Stalin, but many of the original Tartars had since returned, and in 2014 comprised about 35% of the Crimean population. Interesting, in he light of current events.
In the Shadows of UtopiaEpisode 11 Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution I listened to this just after reading Linda Jaivn’s book Bombard the Headquarters (my review here), and this makes a really good companion listen. In fact, well done young Lachlan, because this episode hangs together really well. He points out that the Cultural Revolution, as well as changing China, also acted as a test of loyalty of Mao’s officials. He draws some parallels with different phases of the French Revolution, and sees the dispersal of young people into the provinces as a way of reining the revolution back in. He reminds us of the Sino/Soviet conflicts, and suggests that China’s rapprochement with the US was an example of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ in action.
99% InvisibleAll About That Bass I’ve started playing bass ukulele- yes, there is such a thing- so this episode really interested me. It’s about the Roland 808 drum machine, which apparently is ubiquitous- even (drummer) Phil Collins used one on ‘One More Night’. When the Roland 808 was released in 1980 it cost $1200 (about $4600 in today’s currency), and was intended to replace drummers. It was when they realized that they could use the ‘decay’ function to replicate the bass and kick drum sound that the Roland 808 gave the bass the prominence that it now has in hip-hop and R&B.
The Human Subject(BBC)The Boy with an Ice Pick in His Brain. Actually, despite all the warnings about gruesome details that preface this episode, I didn’t find it particularly disturbing. It’s about Dr Walter Freeman, who championed the lobotomy process throughout the US, even by psychiatrists whose surgical skills must be questionable. The Boy with the Ice Pick in his brain was 12 year old Howard Dully whose step-mother arranged to have a lobotomy for ‘childhood schizophrenia’ (which sounded just like 12 year old cussedness to me). It was Freeman who operated on Rosemary Kennedy as a 23 year old, who never recovered from the surgery.
Since the Orange One has launched his mayhem on the world – did this second presidency really only start in January?- China and Xi Jinping are presenting themselves as a calm, considered and stable presence on the world stage in comparison. It’s a seductive thought, but after reading this small book, I came away convinced that there is a fundamental difference between China and Western democracies in terms of both means and ends that we ignore at our peril.
Many historians mark 16 May 1966 as the start of the Cultural Revolution, when Jiang Quing (Mao’s fourth wife) and Mao circulated a document amongst the Party members which warned of ‘counter-revolutionary revisionists’ who had infiltrated the Party, the government, the army and cultural circles. This document was only made public a year later, but it was popularized in August 1966 by “Bombard the Headquarters”, a short text in written by Mao Zedong himself and published widely. It was a call to the students, who were already confronting their teachers and university lecturers, exhorting them that ‘to rebel is justified’. Yet the headquarters he was urging them to target were the headquarters of his government; of his party. Within three months there would be 15 to 20 million Red Guards, some already in university, others as young as ten. They were urged to ‘smash the Four Olds (old ideas, culture customs and habits) to make was for the creation of a new revolutionary culture. Mao did not explicitly call for the formation of the Red Guards, but he harnessed them as an alternative source of power to the government and, at first, beyond the control of the army until it also joined in the Cultural Revolution in January of 1967.
With Khruschev’s denunciation of the cult of Stalin, Mao felt that Russia had betrayed the revolution and that China needed to return to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even though 1966 is seen by many as the starting point, Mao had been moving towards this point for several years, moving against the deputy mayor of Beijing and historian Wu Han, removing the People’s Liberation Army chief of staff and premier Luo Ruiquing, and splitting with the Japanese Communist Party because it failed to call out Soviet revisionism.
Some of his party colleagues, most especially Liu Shaoqui, Deng Xioping and Zhou Enlai, held qualms about Mao’s call for continuous revolution led by the Red Army. And well they might have, because quite a few of Mao’s judgment calls – The Great Leap Forward and the Hundred Flowers Campaign- brought unseen (to him) consequences, and the schemes ended up being abandoned. But despite any reservations his colleagues may have held, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution went forward, with the Red Guards murdering 1800 people in Beijing alone in Red August 1966. The Red Guards were joined by the workers in late 1966, and the Army in January 1967.
At a dinner to celebrate Mao’s 73rd birthday on 26 December 1966, he proposed a toast to “all-out civil war and next year’s victory”. He got his civil war. Children denounced parents; both the Red and the conventional army split into factions. The targets of the Cultural Revolution were the Five Bad Categories- landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and ‘rightists’. Temples, churches and mosques were trashed; libraries set alight, hair salons and dressmakers’ shops attacked, and even the skeletons of a Wanli emperor and his two empresses were attacked and burned. The verb ‘to struggle’ came to have a new meaning as ‘enemies’ were “struggled” into the airplane position, forced to bend at the waist at 90 degrees with their arms straight behind, with heavy placards hung around their necks and hefty dunce caps on their heads. Teachers, academics, musicians, writers, local officials were all ‘struggled’, with day-long interrogations that ended with instructions to return the next day for more after being allowed to go home overnight. No wonder so many people committed suicide.
By September 1968, the civil war was declared over, with ‘the whole nation turning Red’. However, with the deteriorating economic situation, and with a perception that people living in the cities were not pulling their weight, Mao decided that ‘educated youth’ needed to receive re-education by the poor and middle-class peasantry (p. 68). In 1969 as many as 2.6 million ‘educated youth’ -including present-day president Xi Jinping- left the cities for the country side. Some did not have to go too far from home, but others were exiled to the brutal winters of the Great Northeast Wilderness, or the tropical jungles of Yunnan in the south-west. Some villagers were ambivalent about these ‘soft’ teenagers, although they welcomed the goods and knowledge that they brought with them. The young people were often shocked by the poverty and deprivation in the villages, which contrasted starkly with the propaganda of the happy prosperous countryside they had accepted.
The Cultural Revolution had morphed in its shape, with the 9th Party congress declaring that the Cultural Revolution was over in April1969, and Mao criticizing his wife Jiang Quing and her radical associates in the ‘Gang of Four’ in May 1975. The outside world was changing too. A border war with USSR in March 1969 provoked fears of nuclear war, and the United Nations recognized the People’s Republic of China over Taiwan. President Nixon visited China in February 1972 (Australia’s Gough Whitlam, then opposition leader, had visited in July 1971) and Mao died in September 1976, eight months after the death of Zhou Enlai. In 1981 the Party declared that the Cultural Revolution had been a mistake, and that Mao had been misled by ‘counter-revolutionary cliques’. All at the cost of at least 4.2 million people being detained and investigated, and 1.7 million killed. Some 71,200 families were destroyed entirely. It has been estimated that more people were killed in the Cultural Revolution than the total number of British, American and French soldiers and citizens killed in World War II (p. 106)
The Cultural Revolution may seem an event of the 20th century it’s not that far away. Xi Jinping and his family were caught up in the Cultural Revolution, and tales of him toiling alongside the peasants in the countryside is part of his own political mythology. We here in the West are well aware of the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989, but there is no discussion of them in China. When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, discussion of the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and the resulting famine, were all increasingly censored. Xi Jinping abolished the two-term limit to presidential office in 2018, making it possible for him to be President for life. New generations of nationalist fanatics have arisen, likened (for good or bad) to the Red Guards.
This is only a short book, running to just 107 pages of text. In its formatting and intent, it is of a pair with Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Death of Stalin (reviewed here), and both books deal with hinge-points that, although taking place some 50 years ago, resonate today with even more depth. As with Fitzpatrick’s book, Bombard the Headquarters opens with a timeline and a cast of characters, but I found the brevity of Jaivin’s character list made it harder to establish the various protagonists in my mind, exacerbated further by unfamiliar names. What I really did like was the way that she interwove the stories and experiences of individuals alongside the ‘massed’ nature of this revolution. When we see the huge crowds of people in Tiananmen Square, and the chilling precision of the Chinese army at the parades that dictators are so fond of, it is hard to find the individual, but she has worked hard to keep our attention on the people who lived through, suffered, and did not always survive such a huge experiment in social engineering.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: Review copy from Black Inc. books, with thanks.
7.a.m. (Guardian) The Road to Yoorook is the first of a two-part series that was released at the same time as the Yoorook final report was handed to the Victorian government. The Yoorook truth-telling commission is the first one held in Australia. Although the indigenous population in Victoria is not large now compared with other states, prior to colonization Victoria was one of the most heavily populated areas of Australia , largely because of climate, geography and the abundance of food. It was also the home of many of the Aboriginal organizations of the 1970s, including the Aboriginal Legal Service, the Aboriginal Health Service. The First Peoples Assembly called for a truth-telling commission that had all the power of a royal commission, but at first – pathetically- they had trouble finding premises in which to hold the commission, and it took a directions hearing to get government compliance in making a building available. Part 2: The Truth Has Been Told has the stories of First Nations elders whose loved ones were stolen, and the changing policy settings that had such effects on their lives. It goes through the commission process, with the Premier and the Police Commissioner being called before it. Given the political climate of the present day, it is unlikely that we will see anything like it again.
In The Shadows of Utopia Season 2 Episode 10 The Cambodian Civil War Begins Part 1 deals with 1967. The foreword to the episode starts with the man we now know as Duch, who was at the time was a quietly-spoken communist teacher- we will meet him later, I’m sure. By this time, there was a contradiction between Sihanouk’s external and internal politics. Internally, he was veering between the left and right. At the end of 1966 he went to Paris for ‘health reasons’, leaving his Prime Minister Lon Nol in charge. In January and February 1967 riots broke out in Battambang, where the government cracked down on the black market sale of rice to Vietnam. Battambang had been the site of anti-French protest in the past, and it was close to the Thai border. Two-thirds of the rice harvest was being passed to the black market, and Lon Nol forced the sale of the rice to the government, at a low price. By April 2 1967 the resulting Samlaut uprising had morphed into a peasant revolt, which was quickly and violently suppressed. There were only a few hundred fighters, and they had some village support but they faced the superior technology of the army and betrayal by village vigilantes. This was the start of a new era of violence in an independent Cambodia. Historians are divided over the actual influence of the Communist Party of Kampuchea on the Samlaut uprising, but certainly the CPK decided on a nation-wide uprising at the start of 1968, against the disapproval of the Vietnamese communist party.
But Sihanouk couldn’t pretend now that unrest was all external. Sihanouk had dealt with the North Vietnamese, with the support of Russia and China. Internally, he wanted to eradicate the CPK, but he went for the wrong Marxists, and ended up pursuing all of the old Paris-based leadership. This led to false rumours that three of these leaders -Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim – had been murdered, and when the three re-appeared later, they were called the Three Ghosts.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 556: 1066 The Battle of Hastings One of the first books that my parents bought for me specifically, on request, was the poetry book 1066 and all that. I was in grade 5 in primary school, but thinking back, it seems odd that we would have learned about the Battle of Hastings. Who knows. The Battle of Hastings took place on 14th October 1066, just three weeks after Harold Godwinson had seen off Harald Hadrada. William of Normanby had horses, where the English had shields, although given that it was an all-day battle, probably the horses weren’t that important anyway. Many of the myths about the Battle of Hastings are questionable. Was Harold really shot through the eye? The Bayeux Tapestry shows two figures identified as Harold, and it was reworked in the 19th century anyway? There’s an alternative scenario, identified in the account written closest to events, that says that he was butchered by four men including William the Conquerer.
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.
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.
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.
Background Briefing (ABC)Agents of Influence Ep. 2 The Billionaire’s New Sport I’d never heard of Len Blavatnik, but apparently he’s the new head of Foxtel and the owner of Warner Music. Is he the person I have to blame for taking AFL off free-to-air on Saturday night? He is one of the oligarchs (although he does not like that term) who made his money through the carve up of Russian state enterprises after the fall of Communism, and somehow he seems to have escaped Western sanctions. He has since distanced himself from Russia, and is strongly pro-Israel and pro-Netanyahu. Yuck.
The Rest is History Episode 554: 1066 The Shadows of War After our little excursion with Harald Hardrader, we head back to 1066 again with three warlords: the Viking Harald, the French Duke of Normanby and the Anglo-Saxon Harold Godwinson. Edward the Confessor died on 5 January 1066 and the Bishops met to choose the next king (which surprised me because I thought that the English crown was hereditary, but it wasn’t. Although family had a good head start). There were quite a few contenders to choose from: 1 Harald Hardrada who had a slight claim, and no one wanted the Vikings 2. Sven, who was King Knut (Canute)’s nephew. Another Viking. 3. William the Duke of Normanby who had been promised the throne of England 4. another descendant of Alfred the Great 5. Edward the Exile in Hungary who arrived back in England in 1057. 5. Thirteen-year old Edgar. 6. Harold Godwinson. The Bishops went for Harold Godwinson, well aware that this would prompt an invasion, and so they crowned him the very next day. Meanwhile Tostig, Harold’s brother was stewing away in exile and he invaded but was not successful. Thanks to feudalism, Harold could command 90% of English men, but he was facing Norman technology and confidence, sharpened by religious reform under hardline Catholic reformer Hildebrand (who was later to become Pope Gregory VII). When bad winds arrived, threatening to delay William of Normanby’s troops, Harold decided to stand down his army which was a big mistake because who should arrive but brother Tostig and Harald Hardrada!
Half Life BBCEpisode 7 The City Forgets Happy to distance himself from his great-grandfather’s half-truths, Joe turns to his great-grandfather Siegfried’s sister Elizabeth who redeemed the family somewhat by establishing a nursery and orphanage for Jewish children in Munich. Once the Nazis came to power, Elizabeth herself escaped to Tel Aviv, and there she read about the gradual deportation, in several tranches, of all the children in her orphanage. In the concentration camps they were gassed by the same chemicals that Joe’s great-grandfather had produced. Episode 8 A Fracture Joe returns to Germany, where eventually a memorial to the Dersim massacre is unveiled, something that would not be possible in Turkey, where all mention of the massacre is suppressed. Kurdish activists are trying to get the German government to take responsibility because the chemicals were manufactured there (which is a bit of a long stretch, I reckon, and they’re probably only pursuing it because the Turkish government won’t admit it). I’m getting a bit sick of Joe making it all about him. It’s about time this series finished.
The Human Subject (BBC) The Woman Who Resisted Mind Control Hiding in plain sight was a renowned psychiatrist, working at the Allan Institute under the aegis of McGill University. As a 16 year old in 1958 Lana Ponting was taken to the Allan Institute where Dr Ewan Cameron subjected her, and other patients, to a regime of LSD, shock therapy at 20-40 times the usual voltage and ‘depatterning’ and ‘positive affirmation’ to wipe clean their memories. It left her unable to form coherent memories, and she even forgot that she had had a child in the hospital who was adopted out. Dr Cameron’s methods soon attracted the attention of the CIA and their mind control efforts. And it all looked so respectable and upfront.
The Rest is HistoryEp 522 The Last Viking: Harald Hardrada Tom Holland was driving the previous four episodes about the lead-up to 1066 (having written Millenium ), but in this episode Dominic takes the reins, having himself written The Fury of the Vikings as part of his Adventures In Time series for children. To be honest, I had never heard of Harald Hardrada and I still don’t know what the connection with 1066 is. I guess I’ll have to wait for the next episode. From the shownotes:
In the 1066 game of thrones for the crown of England, the most extraordinary of the three contenders is arguably Harald Hardrada: viking warrior, daring explorer, emperor’s bodyguard, serpent slayer, alleged lover to an empress, King of Norway, and legend of Norse mythology. How did this titan of a man come to cross the North Sea with his army, and take on Harold Godwinson, in the titanic showdown of Stamford Bridge? His story before this point is so colourful that it may be one the most exciting lives in all history. Fighting from the age of twelve, Harald was born to a petty regional king of Norway, in a Scandinavia of competing religions and kingships. As a teenager, he would then join his fearsome brother Olaf, the man who united Norway but later fell foul of King Cnut, and subsequently sailed the seas and mysterious waterways of Russia, in a mighty battle to take back Norway. Their defeat was terrible and absolute, leaving the young Harald wounded and on the run. A journey of horrors and hardship would then lead him at last to the awe inspiring city of Kyiv, where he would serve as mercenary for the Grand Prince. But still hungry for wealth and glory he then travelled on to the most remarkable city in the world: Constantinople, where his life would take an even more dramatic turn
Half Life (BBC)Episode 3 Lost From 1935 onwards, Ammendorf, south of Berlin was the main manufacturing industry town for mustard gas. It was not used during WE2, but was instead stockpiled and burned after the war, leading to environmental contamination. Our narrator Joe intended to apologize for his great-grandfather’s role in manufacturing chemicals, but it took him some time to find the opportunity to do so. In 1935 the family left for Ankara, so his grandfather no longer oversaw the factory, even though he continued to receive half-pay from the company. In Episode 4 Young Republic Joe travels to Ankara Turkey, where he believed that his grandfather had worked distributing gas masks for a company now known as MKE that still makes gas marks. . Ataturk’s modernization movement welcomed Jewish intellectuals, and Hitler was friendly towards Ataturk. Joe’s grandfather was in fact working at the chemical factory beside the gasmask factory, and he smoothed the way for the Turkish purchase of German chemicals which were used in the 1938 Dersim massacre of 13,000 Kurds (maybe 3 or 4 times more).
In the Shadows of UtopiaSeason 2 Episode 7 A Khmer Rouge Ideology and Sihanouk’s Dark Side returns us to Cambodia after our little foray into Vietnam for three episodes. Covering the period 1963 to 1965, we start with the Cambodia communists in very different roles. Some, like Khieu Samphan who had been educated in Paris, were incorporated into Sihanouk’s government, which although including some anti-Sihanouk figures like Samphan, in reality acted as the pro-Sihanouk party. Others, like the Cambodian-born and bred Nuon Chea continued to act in the shadows, creating a spider’s web of decentralized communist links. Then there was Pol Pot, who left Cambodia for the border regions of Vietnam, where they found themselves being treated as junior partners by the Vietnamese communists.
Although Khmer Rouge ideology wanted to get rid of Buddhism, it also incorporated Buddhist grammar and principles like renunciation and detachment to give Cambodian (Kampuchean) communism a different nature to Confucian-influenced communism.
Meanwhile, Sihanouk was gradually moving away from the United States, culminating in nationalisation of the banks and import/export channels, and refusing US aid. He signed an agreement with North Vietnam to allow arms through the port at Sihanoukville, and eventually in 1965 he severed ties with the United States completely.
Half Life (BBC) Episode 1: Daughter of Radium Writer Joe Dunthorne had grown up on stories of his family’s dramatic escape from Germany in 1936 to England. He had listened to his grandmother’s stories about her father, scientist Siegfried, whose early experiments in using radium in commercial domestic products as a whitening agent led to his grandmother brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste. However, when Joe decided to actually sit down and read his great-grandfather’s memoirs, which at 2000 pages had daunted most of the family, he found near the end of the document a confession from his great-grandfather had he had been involved in research that led to the chemical weapons and agents used by the Nazis.
In Episode 2 The Quiet Town by the River Joe travels to Oranienburg, a city that was heavily bombed by the Allies in WW2 because it was the centre of chemical weapons, poisonous gas and uranium research. His great-grandfather worked in the Auergesellschaft factory. The bombing turned Oranienburg into a moonscape, but the soil still contains chemicals and unexploded ordnance.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 