Bobby Fischer Goes to War by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

After reading about the arrest of Garry Kasparov at a protest rally in Moscow, I was reminded of this review that I’ve been meaning to post for some time now. Chess-related, understandably.

Bobby Fischer Goes to War by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

David Edmonds and John Eidinow co-authored Wittgenstein’s Poker, an analytical study of an altercation between the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper (allegedly involving the brandishing of a fireplace poker). As might be gathered from this book’s title, Bobby Fischer Goes to War is about more than just a single incident — it’s the story of the 1972 World Chess Championship match played in Reykjavik, Iceland, between reigning chess champion Boris Spassky (of the Soviet Union) and challenger Bobby Fischer (of the United States). At the time, and even into the present day, the championship was touted as yet another Cold War confrontation between the US and the USSR, the plucky young American wunderkind standing up to the Soviet chess machine. Edmonds and Eidinow do their best to pick apart that Cold War myth by setting out the history of the players, the modern chess tournament system, and a near play-by-play account of the match itself.

Edmonds and Eidinow also do a marvellous job at explaining chess in terms that even non-chess players can understand. But the chess comes almost secondary to their description of the events surrounding the match itself, particularly the insane antics of Bobby Fischer. Some accounts of the match claim that Fischer’s constantly changing demands and prolonged temper tantrums over nearly every single aspect of the tournament were in reality a carefully planned psychological attack on Spassky…but reading Edmonds and Eidinow’s account, there seems to be very little question that Fischer’s behaviour was unsporting, uncivilised and just plain bizarre. Complaints about the lighting and the presence of television cameras seem understandable, but when Fischer refused to use the handcrafted marble chessboard made expressly for the match because he claimed that minute imperfections in the stone would distract him during match-play, it is difficult to feel anything but sympathy for anyone who had to spend more than five minutes in Fischer’s presence. Spassky definitely comes out as an unfortunate victim in Bobby Fischer Goes to War, conducting himself with good grace as best as he could — and then returning to the Soviet Union to face an official enquiry as to why he had lost to the brash young American.

My copy of Bobby Fischer Goes to War is subtitled ‘How a Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine’. The subtitle might better read ‘How a Deranged American Star Bullied His Way to Victory’. The book is definitely a gripping account, thoroughly entertaining and well-paced. I certainly came away knowing more about chess and chess play than I ever thought I could learn from 300-odd pages. The book could be made into a fantastic feature film — and if it ever is, I will definitely be there on opening night.

The First Guide to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union by Avram Shifrin

I was looking for a suitable book to post to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the October Revolution, but it seems that I’ve already gone through and posted most of my previously written USSR-related book reviews…except for this one. And since I don’t have my copy of my perennial favourite title, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, with me at the moment, this book is the next obvious candidate.

A bit of backstory on how I acquired it: When one of my undergraduate history professors retired, he invited those of us who were taking his class on modern Russian history to come to his office and take anything we wanted off his bookshelves. He’d already gone through and cleared out all the books he had room for and wanted to keep, and he figured that it would be a lot easier for his students to clear off the shelves for him before he took the rest of the books to be recycled or donated….and no, I didn’t actually trample anyone in my haste to get to his office once the lecture had ended. That said, one of the books I made off with was this one.

The First Guide to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union by Avram Shifrin

As the title says, it’s a guidebook, first published by a Soviet dissident in the early 1980s. And by a guidebook, I mean that it gives general (and sometimes quite specific) locations of Soviet prisons and labour camps, the remaining substance of the gulag, broken down by area and region and type of prison. The guidebook even goes so far as to mention the type of labour that is done or thought to be done at each prison, whether in heavy industry or manufacturing…or the ’special’ camps where prisoners worked to mine radioactive materials (without adequate shielding) or performed tasks that can only be described as murderous (such as cleaning the nozzles on nuclear submarines). Also included in the guidebook are the location of politico-psychiatric facilities where prisoners were often held, generally with no attempt made to separate political prisoners from the actually insane. And since the book is written and edited by a man who spent several years in the prison camp system, based on research he compiled with others who had fallen foul of the Soviet justice system, there’s an authenticity to it that has to be seen to be fully understood.

This book is almost certainly out of print, and probably only available in used bookshops if anywhere. I only managed to get my hands on a copy by chance. But it’s absolutely chilling to read, because it shows the depth and breadth of the prison camp system in the USSR years after Stalin’s death. When you look at the book and think that every little dot on the map represents anywhere from two dozen to several hundred human lives, many imprisoned for their dissenting opinions or even their well-meaning attempts to reform their political system…well, it wasn’t so long ago, historically speaking. Shifrin’s guidebook manages to bring home the reality of the gulag in a way that few purely academic texts can hope to emulate.

The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government by David Leigh

I’ve acquired a copy of the BBC2 television programme The Plot Against Harold Wilson, in which journalists Roger Courtiour and Barrie Penrose described how Wilson contacted them in the late 1970s to give them information about various plots against him during his premiership. It seems as good a time as any to post this little review.

The Wilson Plot: How the Spycatchers and Their American Allies Tried to Overthrow the British Government by David Leigh

Generally, I am not one for books on conspiracy theories. Most of the time they smack of lone individuals sitting in darkened rooms, meticulously crafting cunning hats out of aluminium foil ‘just in case’. And at times, The Wilson Plot veers into this realm — the full name of the book is overly dramatic, to say the least. But Observer journalist David Leigh’s account, published in 1988 the wake of the debacle over former MI5 officer Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, adds quite a lot of damning evidence to corroborate one of Wright’s more controversial claims: that certain well-placed members of the British (and American) secret services believed that Prime Minister Harold Wilson was an agent of the Soviet Union. Leigh sets out to prove that Wilson was not and could not have been on the Soviet payroll, and at the same time does his best to expose much of the darker side of Cold War espionage…including the often vicious ‘dirty tricks’ carried out against Wilson and many others who were unfortunate enough to fall foul of the Anglo-American ’spycatchers’.

First and foremost, ‘overthrow’ is not the right word at all in this context. British Intelligence’s intereference with Harold Wilson was not some kind of Mossadeq Lite or Nasser Mark II. Granted, some of the same ideas and thought trends that contributed to suspicions surrounding Wilson had roots in the same anti-Communist mania that powered both of the abovementioned incidents. There was a similar streak of paranoia involved as well — most notably concerning the unexpected death of the right-leaning Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, which some of the more obsessed chose to regard as a KGB-backed assassination that would allow Wilson to succeed to the Labour leadership and thence to the premiership. But none of the plots and plans that Leigh recounts come close to government-toppling. Most never got farther than sordid whispering campaigns, usually hinting that Wilson had been compromised in some nebulous sexual escapade involving either his political advisor Marcia Williams or Cabinet Minister Barbara Castle. The intelligence services’ fascination with sex and its use as a weapon is certainly nothing new, and in the political context it certainly comes across as the product of a number of people with more time on their hands than they really ought to have had.

What is disturbing, in Leigh’s account, are the power games that were rife within MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War — and the near-complete lack of accountability for the resulting damage and repercussions. The defections of Kim Philby and Guy Burgess led to more than a few in-house mole hunts that slandered reputations and destroyed careers. MI5’s decades-long cover-up of Sir Anthony Blunt’s war-time espionage appears to have played a key role in the 1967 suicide of Labour politician Bernard Floud. The testimony of rather suspect defectors like Anatoliy Golitsyn, amongst others, caused Anglo-American as well as inter-departmental strife. The people crafting the cunning aluminium foil hats in those days were wielding an unpleasantly large amount of power to make other people’s lives miserable. The Wilson Plot may be over the top and unnecessarily dramatic at times, but I think that Leigh’s underlying message cannot be overstated: There are those in the intelligence services whose view of the world is (to be frank) utterly divorced from reality, and if there is no sense of accountability for their actions then it is hardly surprising if innocent people are caught in the crossfire.

The War That Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 1985-1991 by David Pryce-Jones

Lest anyone think that I only review books that I enjoyed reading….

The War That Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 1985-1991 by David Pryce-Jones

The War That Never Was first came out in 1995, when a book of this nature was more in the line of ‘current events’ than ‘history’. At that point in time, there were quite a lot of people around who were very willing to talk about the part they had played in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Editor and author David Pryce-Jones travelled around the former Soviet Union and its constituent republics, collecting interviews with politicians, bureaucrats, former dissidents, and political commentators who had been in at the end of things, as it were. Through these interviews, Pryce-Jones is attempting to piece together the greater puzzle of how one of the world’s two superpowers simply fell apart in the space of less than a decade.

I wish I had more to say about the book, but to be perfectly truthful I found it incredibly difficult to get through it past the first few chapters. My difficulties started off with bits of Pryce-Jones’ running commentary that made me raise an eyebrow. Take, for instance, this passage:

President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher were unusual among world leaders in their genuine detestation of communism. It was a question of right and wrong. Moral outlook of the sort troubled neither post-war French Presidents nor German Chancellors.

In my opinion, I would say that it’s remarkably easy to make moral judgments when you’re not facing either immediate internal (French) or external (German) pressure from native communist movements — and that Reagan and Thatcher seemed to have few moral qualms about supporting some other regimes that may not have been communist but were certainly nowhere near democratic. I could keep quoting passages in a similarly conservative vein, ones where that damn the Helsinki Accords or snipe at George H.W. Bush for not being more aggressive to act in support of the nationalist movements in the Baltic countries. In essence, Pryce-Jones seems to think that if the Soviet Union was on its last legs by the late 1980s, the West would’ve been better off getting out the knives and finishing the job with more than a bit of relish. By the time I was halfway through the book, I was more than tempted to get out some knives of my own to hack and slash my way to the end.

I did finish this book, but it’s no longer on my bookshelf. I’ve no problem with debating the different choices that might have been made by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and others — but Pryce-Jones seemed to keep repeating a few pet ideas and picking only the interviews to support his views. It might be moderately useful to read The War That Never Was as a representation of a particular kind of ideological mindset that shouldn’t be ignored outright, but I can’t imagine rereading except to pull quotations from it. And as far as that goes, I simply ended up copying out the quotes that I thought I might find useful and consigning this polemic masquerading as history to a used book store.

1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America by Andreas Killen

Sometimes I come across books with attractive and interesting titles that just don’t seem to pan out to my liking. Here’s a review of one of them.

1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America by Andreas Killen

It’s a mildly redundant cliche to talk about any year as an ‘eventful year’, but 1973 had its fair share of noteworthy events, particularly for Americans. From the Roe vs Wade decision (22 January) to the release of the film Deep Throat (ruled ‘irredemably obscene’ by a New York judge on 1 March), and from the start of the televised Watergate hearings (17 May) to the first shots of the Yom Kippur War (6 October) and the subsequent oil embargo by the OPEC members of the Middle East, 1973 was by any account a year of social and political upheaval. The sights and sounds of that year continue to haunt the American consciousness into the present day — President Richard Nixon’s insistence that he wasn’t a crook, prisoners of war returning from Vietnam, even a controversial new ‘reality TV’ show (An American Family, broadcast on PBS). Add to those events the well-publicised increase in the number of religious cults and airplane hijackings, which would culminate a year later in the iconic figure of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in the fatigues of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and it might not seem so strange that 1973 was also the year in which The Exorcist made film-going audiences sick in theatres across the country. But why was 1973 so seemingly crazy a year?

Andreas Killen takes the title of his book from a review that rock critic Lester Bangs wrote about the Rolling Stones’ album Goat’s Head Soup, in which Bangs essentially said that the Stones had reduced themselves (or been reduced by their long period of rock-stardom) to a band that was merely going through the motions. But Killen uses ‘nervous breakdown’ in another context to points out what he sees as a number of neurotic undercurrents in American society, revealing a country still shaken by the redefinition of the social landscape that happened in the 1960s. If America as a country really was having a nervous breakdown in 1973, what were the causes? Killen points to a belief that American youth were under assault from corrupting moral influences in films and television, with cults and communes as particular symptoms of their fragile grip on reality. Connected to this is a deep sense of paranoia, exemplified by Richard Nixon’s audio tapes but covering a wide range of fears about America’s position in the world and a powerful feeling of self-doubt — a feeling that would continue to have repercussions on American politics and culture through the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t enjoy 1973 Nervous Breakdown. Other reviews I’ve read have pointed out that trying to shove the ‘end of the 1960s’ into one single year forced Killen to jam together a number of narrative threads in a way that didn’t do proper justice to any of them. But what bothered me most about the book is the fact that Killen’s analysis seemed to just skim the surface of the year and the time period as a whole. It’s terribly U.S.-centric, which might not seem that big of a flaw in a book about post-1960s America — but to me, that line of thought just seems to reinforce why the book didn’t satisfy. There’s very little sense of a deeper connection to other things that were happening in the world, other trends and and other events that had more of an impact on America in the 1970s than Killen describes in the pages of the book. The general destabilisation of American society that led to many of the events in the 1970s was not purely the result of various social changes and political happenings at home. While Killen did a fairly good job of highlighting many of the symptoms of the 1973 nervous breakdown, in my mind he fell more than a little bit short of diagnosing the causes. For all of the talk about how the culture wars of the 1970s are still being fought today, it’s a shame that a book that tries to explain the ‘why’ leaves out more than a few key contributing factors along the way.

The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War by Peter Hennessy

Yesterday, if I remember correctly, was the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik and the true start of the space race. I don’t happen to have any books that are particularly science-centric, but I’ve been meaning to post this review for a while now — and it takes the whole civil defence perspective of the time period into account.

The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War by Peter Hennessy

Peter Hennessy has combed through and analysed a slew of recently declassified documents that centre on the British government’s plans for what would have happen if World War III actually had come to pass during the Cold War. This topic is always a tricky one for historians to tackle, because too many viewings of Dr Strangelove tend to burn a misleading image in the mind: balding men in suits and cigar-chomping generals sitting round a table in the War Room, looking at the Big Board and listening to some scientist with a German accent talk about ‘mineshaft gaps’ and ‘ten women to every man’. The Secret State manages to present the kinds of stories that keep Strangelove in mind, but also manages to keep the nonsatirical and pathetically human element in mind. The stomach wrenches at the mental image of some unfortunate soul who had joined the Civil Service during the war trying to come to terms with the very real possibility that he might have to leave his family behind to face nuclear annihilation while he followed the Prime Minister into the Cabinet bunker tucked deep in the Cotswolds.

The Secret State touches upon a number of fascinating subjects in its 250-odd pages. The Cabinet reaction to the growing atomic rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union is engrossing, particularly the famous statement by Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in 1946 that Britain could not fall behind in the acquisition and development of nuclear weapons: ‘We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’ Hennessy also includes several copies of actual Civil Service documents about planning for nuclear attack, and a series of photographs of his visit to the real Cold War bunker in the Cotswolds — including a picture of himself going through the turnstile leading down to the shelters. (The plan to evacuate the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet to the bunker was at one point codenamed ‘TURNSTILE’.) The anecdote that got a bitter laugh out of me was the proposed plan to save the Queen from the nuclear devastation by putting her on the royal yacht and having it set out to sea until it was safe for her to return…presumably to what was left of her shattered country.

I’m always fond of Hennessy’s writing, and The Secret State is no exception. Much of the writing that’s out there on Cold War civil defence history tends to be very U.S.-centric, so it’s a welcome treat to have a well-researched, thoroughly enjoyable, and often thought-provoking account of the various plans in place to keep the government running if the missiles started flying.

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control by John Marks

I first picked up this book after taking a class on the culture of the Cold War, which also had a film component. The Manchurian Candidate was one of the films featured and discussed in the class, and I happen to be working on a review of a more recent book about The Manchurian Candidate for a film studies journal. Perhaps posting this review will give me the impetus I need to finish the last 500 words of the other book review?

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control by John Marks

If you’ve never seen The Manchurian Candidate, a brief summary will suffice. The original 1962 film version stars Laurence Harvey as the ‘Manchurian candidate’ — Sergeant Raymond Shaw, an American soldier who was captured while serving in Korea and brainwashed by the Communists to become the perfect assassin. Under the influence of hypnosis, he would take orders to kill people and then would have no memory of who gave those orders or what those orders were. Angela Lansbury also stars in a chilling role as the soldier’s manipulative mother, the wife of a Joseph McCarthy-type senator who is running for the vice-presidency but is greedy for higher office. The film seems a little on the campy side if you try to treat it as a straight-up espionage thriller, but it’s a fascinating film to watch from the perspective of a Cold War historian.

John Marks’ book draws on the image of the ‘Manchurian candidate’ as an appropriate description of an often-ignored aspect of Cold War history in America. The Central Intelligence Agency apparently spent much of the 1950s and 1960s trying to determine if such a scenario was possible — if a man could actually be brainwashed to become a ‘Manchurian candidate’ who could be programmed to kill, or if certain combinations of drugs could be used as ‘truth drugs’ or other useful chemical weapons in the intelligence officer’s arsenal. Marks shares stories of how CIA researchers experimented on each other with mind-altering drugs like LSD, even to the point of slipping chemicals in each other’s coffee or cigarettes and waiting to see what kind of reaction the drugs would produce. Researchers and field agents went to disturbing lengths in their attempts to produce some sort of truth serum or indeed any substance that would dramatically change an individual’s behaviour.

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate also postulates an intriguing theory about the CIA’s influence on the growth of the drug counterculture in America in the 1960s. Vaguely, the theory is that the CIA latched onto Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical firm that had first synthesised LSD, because the drug’s potential use for intelligence activities was of great interest to behavioural researchers. So in order to test the properties of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, the CIA distributed LSD prototypes and synthetic chemicals to scientists and research professors at major universities, who passed it on to graduate students and student volunteers, who then passed it on to undergraduate students, who brought it into the mainstream of college life…and so on. With teachers influencing their students and upperclassmen doing the same to underclassmen, the drug spread around the country — but someone had to influence the teachers first. By this theory, the CIA was at the top of the LSD distribution system and of the ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ counterculture of the 1960s.

Even if you’re willing to dismiss Marks’ theory as conspiracy claptrap, his book nonetheless provides a different perspective on the darker side of American espionage during the Cold War. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate is sometimes funny and sometimes unsettling, but it’s certainly informative.

In Confidence by Anatoly Dobrynin

Politicians’ memoirs usually aren’t the easiest books to carry around and read. They’re often only available in heavy and bulky hardback editions, and they tend to require a more consistent focus than some other history books — not the sort of thing you can put down and pick up again at random. But occasionally there are memoirs that I’d be more than willing to lug around, and today’s review happens to focus on one of them.

In Confidence by Anatoly Dobrynin

Anatoly Dobrynin, born in 1919, served as Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1986 — which I believe makes him the longest-serving ambassador in Russian history. In those twenty-four years, he went through the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (and Kissinger), Ford (and Kissinger), Carter, and Reagan administrations…and on the other side, the Krushchev, Brezhnev (and Kosygin), Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev years. Ambassador Dobrynin outlasted any number of lesser diplomats, and his unbroken record of service and his status as an outsider makes him an interesting choice to report on the history of US/Soviet relations during the tempestuous years of the Cold War.

And report he does. At nearly 700 pages long, In Confidence covers Dobrynin’s entire career. He began, interestingly enough, as an engineer who had never considered himself to be a political person. He was selected for the diplomatic corps during World War II almost against his will, and spent a good deal of time studying American history and working in Moscow before he was sent to the embassy in Washington DC as a foreign affairs attache in the early 1950s. By 1962, he had risen to become ambassador, and his long career as the Soviet government’s representative in America began.

Dobrynin’s memoirs are probably not a good starting point for anyone who isn’t at least familiar with basic Cold War history, particularly the Ford and Carter years where American foreign policy tended to be muddled and contradictory. But there is a wealth of information about how Soviet leaders viewed their American counterparts, much of which comes from Dobrynin’s firsthand experiences and conversations; he spoke fairly fluent English, so on many occasions he was the only translator during talks between Soviet and American higher-ups. Dobrynin’s impressions of different political figures and their attitudes toward US/Soviet relations are rather fascinating — he’s not kind to Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford, for example, and even though he does seem to respect Henry Kissinger’s attempts at detente he quietly slams Kissinger for being inconsistent on how detente was put into practice. One remarkable passage that sticks out in my memory was Dobrynin’s account of Richard Nixon’s final days in office before the resignation…and how Leonid Brezhnev sent Nixon a personal message of support, saying that even though he did not fully understand the nature of the domestic political problems that Nixon was facing, he believed that Nixon’s attempts to improve US/Soviet relations were what his country would truly remember from his presidency. I actually got a little choked up at that part — the thought that possibly the only kind words Nixon had during his final days as President came from the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union appeals to my sense of bittersweet irony. And Dobrynin manages to capture this incident and many more without being too quick to blame one side or the other for the policy failures and setbacks.

In Confidence, like many political memoirs worth reading, is not the kind of book that can be read straight through in one sitting. But it’s a refreshing perspective on a strange and often nerve-wracking era in history, and Dobrynin is articulate and possessed of a dry wit that crackles through the pages and makes his anecdotes all the more intriguing.

Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter

I wrote this review quite a while ago, more than three years ago by now. It definitely needed a good bit of editing before I felt comfortable posting it here, which I suppose shows that I’ve made some improvement in my reviewing style since I first started writing reviews of books I’d recently read.

Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter

The World War II Cambridge spy ring is an intriguing subject for espionage historians, and a subject on which a great deal of variable quality material has been written. When you think about it, it’s not surprising that the whole set-up of the ring is perfect fodder for an espionage buff. A group of middle- and upper-middle class young men with leftist leanings, who had attended Cambridge University, had jobs in British intelligence services during the war, used their positions to send a torrent of intelligence information to the Soviet Union, and were not discovered until after the war’s end — really, they were the Soviets’ proverbial ace in the hole for almost a decade. In fact, they were so good at passing information that at times the KGB thought they were a clever counterintelligence plot to feed false information to the informal Soviet network in Britain. Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean were the first to escape Britain for the USSR, having fled in 1951 just before they could be rounded up. Harold ‘Kim’ Philby worked his way even higher in the intelligence hierarcy than Burgess or MacLean, and by the time he managed to defect he’d been responsible for revealing any number of confidential secrets to the Soviet Union. At the time of Philby’s defection, there were speculations about a ‘fourth man’ in this spy ring, but it wasn’t until 1979 that a name was truly confirmed. The ‘fourth man’ was Sir Anthony Blunt.

Blunt’s exposure came as shock to the Establishment, particularly the art world, because he was not only a respected art critic and historian, but he had been the director of the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art for almost three decades and had even been given a knighthood for his service to the Crown’s collection of artwork. But Blunt had confessed his spying career in the mid-1960s, shortly after Philby’s defection, and it remained an official secret until his secret was revealed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher shortly after she took office. When the news came to light, a whole host of inquiries were made into his life and conduct — particularly the open secret of his homosexuality.

That bit of history aside, Miranda Carter’s book about Blunt and his ‘lives’ is positively stunning. It’s incredibly comprehensive, delving all the way down to his childhood and pre-Cambridge school days to find hints of what shaped Blunt’s character in his youth. And she treats Blunt’s art career with as much depth and detail as she does his espionage work; this isn’t a book that tries to turn Blunt and the others into dashing Ian Fleming characters or sinister John le Carré types. It’s not an openly sympathetic portrayal, but it does try to open up possible explanations for his motives and the reasoning behind why he chose to work for the NKVD during wartime. Carter makes much of the fact that Blunt was an emotionally compartmentalised type of person, who not only strove to keep different aspects of his life and his emotions under tight control but who also seemed to take pleasure in doing so — and this might have fuelled his fascination with his secret lives. Espionage relies so heavily on human psychology that understanding Blunt’s character is key to understand why he did what he did…and why he wanted out, at the end.

(One thing that bothered me a little about this book (and perhaps it’s just an odd reaction of mine rather than anything the writer consciously happened to do) was that Carter tended to link espionage and homosexuality in a way that made spying sound rather like a sexually transmitted disease, or the unfortunate consequence of a one-night stand. As if saying that So-and-so slept with Guy Burgess, and soon enough he came down with a nasty case of passing confidential MI5 files to the Soviets. But I digress.)

I really can’t do this book justice in a single review — it’s far too complex and twisting to really summarise here. It’s also about 500 pages long, and not the kind of thing you can sit down and read straight through. But for all its density, it’s extremely filling and satisfying, and Miranda Carter is able to give Blunt a sound biography that neither tries to apologise for his actions nor attempts to paint him as an evil communist mastermind.

Gulag by Anne Applebaum

This particular book won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back, which in itself isn’t always enough to make me stop and stare at a book but when combined with the subject matter was enough to make me break my No New Books rule when I happened upon it in the bookstore. And I have to say I’m thankful I did break the rule — Gulag both fascinating and horrifying at the same time, and could not be written more clearly and concisely (the latter being two significant criteria in my assessment of any history book, prize-winning or not).

Gulag by Anne Applebaum

The word gulag is one of those Soviet acronyms that became a word of its own, like Cheka (the predecessor of the NKVD/KGB) or SMERSH (Soviet counter-intelligence during WWII). ‘Gulag’ comes from Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or ‘Main Camp Administration’ — its original meaning only encompassed the actual organ of government that adminstered the camps as a part of the Soviet state. Over time, Applebaum explains, gulag became the general slang term for any prison or labour camp that was part of the system of Soviet corrective labour colonies, including the camps meant for women and children. As the word came into more common use over the years, gulag finally became the term used to refer to the entire Soviet prison system, particularly the aspects of the system which dealt with the sentencing of political prisoners.

In her book, Applebaum traces the origins of the camp system back to the prisons used by the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police, through the early Bolshevik years, into the waves of terror and purges that characterised Stalin’s time, and all the way up to the collapse of the USSR and the end of the gulag as it was known in Soviet times. Along the way, she draws on a huge body of primary and secondary sources, mainly memoirs of those who had survived their time in the camps, as well as interviews with camp survivors, several camp administrators, and those who had lost family to the camps. She explores every aspect of camp life, from the feeding and housing of prisoners and the system of prisoner ‘informers’ to the actual socioeconomic impact that prison camps had on regions of the USSR. The result is a book that reads like a relaxed and friendly history lecture, almost like a story in some ways, and yet manages to convey a very real sense of the terror and suffering inflicted on well over two million individuals by the Soviet Union’s system of ‘justice’.

To go into more detail would be beyond the scope of what’s intended to be a basic review, but two things stand out in my mind. Applebaum never fails to point out how cautious one has to be in dealing with any numerical figures from the Soviet Union. She cites her sources well, but in doing so she deliberately highlights the discrepancies and the problems involved in trying to compare official figures and other amateur estimates. In a way, this careful citation actually keeps the book from being bogged down in nonsensical numbers. (A minor quibble on this point — I did wish at times that she’d give some equivalents for certain numbers. What’s the approximate size of 500 grams of bread, for example? If I want to have some idea of what 500 grams of bread meant to a prisoner in a camp, a visual equivalent would have helped me imagine it in terms of what fits into my hands.) And in addition, Applebaum stresses the importance of learning about the gulag not because of some vague notions that we are doomed to repeat the history we don’t learn about, but rather because without some knowledge of the gulag and the entire system of Soviet-era justice, we have no way of properly understanding the reasons why the gulag and the memory of the gulag still affects Russian and Eastern European society today.