The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev

More books on espionage? Just the one left for the moment — this one’s nonfiction, at least.

Shortly after I’d first read Miranda Carter’s excellent biography of Anthony Blunt, I decided it would be a good time to return to this book, which I’d started several times but hadn’t managed to finish. I assumed that my sluggish reading pace came because I simply wasn’t devoting proper attention to it to make the reading experience worthwhile. So when I picked it up again at a point when I had more time, I ended up re-evaluating my initial reaction to the book — albeit not necessarily in the book’s favour.

The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev

Having returned to this book, I concluded that my lack of interest seems to spring from the book’s rather misleading subtitle. The Crown Jewels seems to me to be less about the actual secrets found in the archives than about the people who put those secrets there in the first place. Unfortunately, the writing style of the book doesn’t make this different topic nearly as interesting as it could be.

The Crown Jewels seems to hint that the book will be about the specific kinds of secrets passed to Soviet intelligence by various British spies and Soviet agents over the years. There are certainly enough British intelligence secrets present in the pages, but the presentation of the material is done in an awkward, jerky style that buries the secrets themselves in a hodgepodge of confusing and ill-defined codenames and often goes off on any number of tangents. Specific events of spying and theft, some were quite crucial to the expansion of the Soviet network in Britain, are picked up and dropped into the text and never really explained. Perhaps the authors presume that the reader already has some background knowledge of the history of Soviet espionage in Britain. I understood a good deal more of this book’s material on Anthony Blunt because I’d read Carter’s biography, but if I had tried to pull the information from West and Tsarev’s book and then apply it to the biography then I’d be very confused indeed. I do know that Carter consulted The Crown Jewels in the writing of the Blunt biography, and yet I have a feeling that the consultation was more for fact-checking and date-confirming purposes than for any other reason.

The best sections of this book include archival materials from formerly unaccessible KGB files — the documents are found in the appendices and block-quoted in the text itself. In my opinion, if this book was about two hundred pages longer, then it could be a remarkably impressive study of Soviet espionage in Britain from Bolshevik days until about 1960. As it is, the book reads as if it has been pared down by an overly ruthless editorial process and some less-than-careful revisions on the part of the authors. Much of the tasty meat of the spy game has been removed, leaving a jumbled heap of the bare bones of names and dates that don’t truly satisfy. A pity, really — it’s plain that there’s quite a lot of interesting information out there for those who are interested in the history of Soviet espionage in the United Kingdom.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People by John le Carré

I was going to post these three books in separate reviews, but putting them all together feels like a neater package. I have several other John le Carré book reviews in the queue, so I’ll likely be posting them fairly soon.

On a side note — one thing I’ve always noticed when reading John le Carré’s books is that I often feel as if I happened to be reading a book in translation. There’s a certain carefulness to his word choice, a very deliberate precision that I don’t often detect in books that haven’t been translated from another language. I still don’t quite know what to make of that sensation, but it’s one of the reasons why I truly enjoy reading the le Carré canon.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief….’

Although the title of this book comes from the words of a children’s counting rhyme, John le Carré places these simple words at the heart of a darkly sinister tale of high Cold War espionage. The book opens in an already tense atmosphere, an unsettled time for those who work in and for British Intelligence. The high-profile failure (and subsequent exposure) of an important operation in Czechoslovakia has led to a massive shake-up in the service, and those who have managed to keep their jobs want nothing more than to put the failure behind them. But one of the most senior Intelligence officers, who had lost his place and was forced into ‘early retirement’, believes that there is something far more sinister behind the operation gone wrong. George Smiley, the officer in question, believes that there is a traitor concealed somewhere in the highest levels of the service — a Soviet mole who bears the ultimate responsibility for countless betrayed agents and blown operations. Since he has nothing left to lose, Smiley decides to use all of his old contacts and intelligence tricks to unearth the mole…and in the process, he must confront past mistakes and interrogate old rivals and friends, all the while aware that one of those friends might be the traitor he intends to destroy.

John le Carré’s world is really a classic image of the old-school spy novel: more tame than Ian Fleming, more down-to-earth than Tom Clancy, but gripping nonetheless. He deals in all in shades and variations of grey, from the grey skies of London to the grey buildings in Cambridge Circus (the home base of the British Intelligence network) to the grey areas of morality where his characters always seem to dwell. George Smiley, though fantastically clever, is a rather faded character — as if years and years of working on Her Majesty’s Secret Service had washed all the colour out of him. The story is crafted carefully enough to make the reader second-guess most every first impression of the characters as the tale spins itself out and the story become more intricate. The story has a resolution, not a happy ending, but then again a happy ending would likely feel somewhat out of place in le Carré’s world.

The Honourable Schoolboy

In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, George Smiley manages to discover the identity of the Soviet mole who had infiltrated the highest echelons of British intelligence — and also finds out that the man in question had been sleeping with his (Smiley’s, that is) wife. So The Honourable Schoolboy opens onto the essential wreckage of Smiley’s personal and professional life. But Smiley is determined to clear up the mess that has landed in his lap, and so he sets out on the track of his oldest enemy — Karla, his counterpart in Soviet intelligence. His weapon of choice in this round is the Honourable Jerry Westerby, a brilliant but erratic agent who is set on Karla’s trail through Hong Kong and Cambodia against the backdrop of the end of American involvement in Vietnam. By the end of the novel, it might seem as if Smiley and the reader are no closer to Karla than they were before, but the stage is set for the final showdown in the final book of the trilogy.

The Honourable Schoolboy is another of Le Carré’s terrifically convoluted tales of Cold War espionage. The action keeps flashing back and forth from Smiley, stuck in London and trying to hold the fort against the criticisms and attacks from Whitehall and the American ‘cousins’, to Westerby, running all over the Far East and delving deep into the urban jungle of colonial Hong Kong. And whereas Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy introduces the reader to George’s Smiley’s secret world, it’s in The Honourable Schoolboy where the deeper contradictions of that world begin to show. One of Smiley’s colleagues reflects on the strain of intelligence work and how it is clearly beginning to affect his superior’s view of the world:

…one of two things will happen to George. He’ll cease to care, or the paradox will kill him. If he ceases to care, he’ll be half the operator he is. If he doesn’t, that little chest will blow up from the struggle of trying to find the explanation for what we do.

And while in some respects it’s apparent that this book is the second of a planned trilogy, a bit of a stop-gap between Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People, it is still a cracking good read in its own right.

Smiley’s People

Smiley’s People was initially published in 1980, and in some ways it definitely reads like a lament for the ‘good old days’ (such as they were) of the Cold War. George Smiley, the hero (or at least the protagonist) of the previous two books, is still bogged down in the bureaucratic war that the intelligence services are always fighting with Whitehall. Most of his old colleagues have faded away, and his purpose is becoming more and more difficult to justify to himself. And when one of his ‘people’, an elderly exile from a country now behind the Iron Curtain, is found murdered in a manner that unmistakeably points in the direction of Moscow Centre and Karla, Smiley must pick up the chase again and track his quarry to ground. In doing so, though, he cannot help but reflect the far simpler and more straightforward past — a past that, like Smiley and his people, is on the point of becoming irrelevant.

The final book of the Smiley trilogy is a good deal bleaker than the first two, which is saying quite a bit for Le Carré’s style of writing and the nature of the story itself. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that this really is the final chase — and Smiley himself is aware that if he succeeds in catching his nemesis, he will only do so by exhausting his own ability to function in the secret world to which he has devoted his life. In his old age, Smiley finds himself questioning the very methods he has to use to track Karla. If he uses Karla’s methods, the same methods he has simultaneously admired and deplored for so long, can he really savour the final victory if and when it comes?

In the conclusion to the Smiley trilogy, Le Carré proves once again that he is a master of classic espionage fiction. His world isn’t flashy and seductive or gung-ho and full of technology. It’s a world that is worn at the edges, tired but serviceable and yet certain to vanish the next time some high-flying civil servant takes it into his head to ‘re-evaluate’ or ‘prioritise’. Le Carré knew it well enough at one point, and in this particular book he gives it something approaching a Viking funeral — dignified, certainly, but not quite so pleasant to watch.

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 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.

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.

Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati

A little less than a year ago, I attended a talk organised by the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The subject of that talk was a recently published book about the October-November 1956 Hungarian crisis, where the Soviet Union sent troops into Hungary to crush an escalating series of protests by anti-government and anti-Soviet demonstrators. I picked up a copy of the book when I was there, and the review came surprisingly easily for a book on a subject that’s not really in my area of expertise.

Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati

The violence and brutality of the Soviet action in crushing the 1956 Hungarian rebellion shook the faith of many left-leaning individuals outside of Soviet bloc — but at the same time, Soviet action also punctured the lofty rhetoric of ‘rollback’ and ‘liberation’ that American political leaders had favoured when speaking of Western policy towards the Soviet satellites. With the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolt occurring this past year, historians have been looking back at this major incident in the early Cold War in an attempt to figure out what happened to make things go so wrong so quickly. And Charles Gati’s point in his new book is essentially this: in Hungary in the autumn of 1956, everyone screwed up — everyone.

Attempting to summarise the full course of events in October 1956 is a bit beyond me, so I’ll do my best to summarise why things went so catastrophically wrong. There were many illusions in Hungary in late 1956. Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy, the only Hungarian politician who had any real credibility with the people, was under the impression that he could keep hold of the situation even when his version of reformed communism was overtaken by events. The Hungarian demonstrators were under the impression that they could expel Soviet forces from Hungary all in one go — dreams further promoted by irresponsible agit-prop from Hungarian-language broadcasters at Radio Free Europe — and were also under the impression that the Western democracies would not let the Soviet Union get away with murder. The Soviet leadership in Moscow had been feeding their Hungarian comrades mixed messages for ages, but they were under fewer illusions than the other players involved. The only decisive message left for them to send was the one that involved tanks. And in America, President Eisenhower was facing re-election plus troubles in the Suez plus a complete lack of any actual military/intelligence plans to support an anti-Soviet revolution in Central Europe. American illusions that anti-Communist rhetoric would be sufficient to keep the Soviets out of Hungary were quickly destroyed. By the time the smoke cleared and all the illusions vanished, a new Soviet-backed Hungarian government had suppressed all political opposition and reasserted control over the country. Time magazine might have made the Hungarian revolutionary its ‘Man of the Year’ in 1957, but by then the revolutionaries were dead, imprisoned, or in exile. And Imre Nagy, who had fled to the Yugoslavian Embassy in search of sanctuary, would later be tricked out of hiding to face a secret trial and the hangman’s noose.

Failed Illusions is quite a solid history book. Granted, it isn’t always easy to keep the names of the historical figures straight even if you’re familiar with them from other sources, and I would have greatly appreciated a dramatis personae either at the front or the back of the book for quick reference and reminder. But even though Gati writes with the passion of one who is personally involved in the history being written (he had witnessed the turmoil as a young reporter in Budapest and was one of over two hundred thousand Hungarians to flee the country in 1956-57), he is able to keep the standard romanticised account of the rebellion at arm’s length. He examines the crisis from four different perspectives — the Hungarian government, the Hungarian people, the Soviet leaders and the American politicians and broadcasters — and manages to blend the perspectives together while still preserving the distinct motives and reasons behind the differing actions. It might not be the ‘definitive’ history of the failed revolution in Hungary, but the information Gati provides and the wealth of resources he refers to have laid out more than enough for future scholars of this time period to be getting on with.

Rulers and Victims: Russians in the Soviet Union by Geoffrey Hosking

When I studied modern Russian history during my undergraduate days, the professor assigned a hefty book by Geoffrey Hosking as the class’s general text. I found it to be quite well-written and a very good general history book all round, so when I heard that Hosking had written a new book about Russian history I thought it worth purchasing. The title alone was enough to intrigue me, because it touched on a thought that I’d had but never truly examined during some of my Cold War history classes: To what extent were ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’ truly interchangeable terms?

Rulers and Victims: Russians in the Soviet Union by Geoffrey Hosking

To the outside (read: Western) world, the Soviet Union and Russia were the same thing, QED. But the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in a sense precisely that — a union of republics, most of which did not actually have a majority of native Russians as a proportion of their populations. It was true that natives of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) had certain advantages that other citizens of the USSR did not. People outside the RSFSR tended to send their children to Russian-language schools to ensure that the children would stand a better chance of finding good jobs or getting higher education. Even quite a few Russians believed that Russia was and had to be the dominant partner, the strong force that had driven back the Nazis and liberated the European continent from the grip of fascism. And yet this sense of mastery went hand-in-hand with a sense of victimisation and near-helplessness — the unpopularity of Russia and Russians in the non-RSFSR republics only increased with each passing year as the republics chafed under the rule from Moscow. Just before the latent conflict between Russians and non-Russians came to a head in the last days of the Cold War, Russian writer Valentin Rasputin lashed out in response to the anger of non-Russian critics during a meeting of the Congress of People’s Deputies in May 1989:

Perhaps it is Russia that should secede from the Union, since you accuse her of all your misfortunes and since our backwardness and awkwardness obstruct your progressive aspirations?…We could then pronounce the word ‘Russian’ without fear of being rebuked for nationalism, we could talk openly about our national idenitity. We could set up at last our own Academy of Sciences….Believe me, we’re fed up with being scapegoats, with being mocked and spat upon.

Russians in the Soviet Union were in an odd predicament: they were both rulers and victims. And Rulers and Victims sets out to pick apart this strange juxtaposition of sentiments, looking at precisely where the splits occurred — and describing how the tensions between Russian mastery and Russian victimhood eventually struck the fatal blow for Soviet Communism and the USSR in the years between 1989 and 1991. Soviet leaders knew full well that Russian nationalism — in other words, the Russian people asserting an identity that distinctly separated Russia from the Soviet Union — was the biggest internal threat that the USSR could face. And while quite a lot of work has been done on the status of Ukranians or Balts or native inhabitants of the Muslim SSRs (the Central Asian republics, nowadays) in the Soviet Union as a whole, Rulers and Victims focuses specifically on the Russian identity separate from the Soviet identity that was supposed to replace it.

To be best enjoyed, Hosking’s book does require some background knowledge of twentieth-century Russian history. It won’t do much good without a general sense of why this topic is often overlooked in terms of nationality studies. The book charts the ways in which the Soviet system attempted to suppress or take over Russian national identity, from severely curtailing the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church to attempting to mush Imperial Russian and Soviet history together into some great grand unified theory of the traditional underpinnings of Soviet power. I do wish Hosking had devoted a little more space to Russian nationalism’s significant contribution the end of the Soviet Union (in the person of Boris Yeltsin, for one, or at least how he used Russian nationalism to further his political ends). The ending felt a little bit rushed in contrast to the rest of the book’s sedate pace. But I’m always fond of a book that gives me a new way of looking at history that is less ‘revisionist’ (if we are to consider it a dirty word) than it is a slight shift in perspective. If Hosking writes another book on Russian history in the near future, I’d definitely be interested in reading it.