Author: sapteuq

Dr Zhivago – Is it accurate? (3) Civil War

This is the third part of my  notes on a re-watch of David Lean’s Dr Zhivago, a 1965 historical epic about the Russian Revolution. I’m going through it with an eye to historical accuracy.

Here is part one…
And here is part two.

The first two parts have been mixed – sometimes the crew really seem to have done their homework but we’ve also seen some things changed for the sake of simplicity (fair enough), some big things changed in order to reinforce the movie’s theme (Not so fair enough), and some things changed for no apparent reason at all.

Now it’s time to get to the part that most interests me, the film’s presentation of the Civil War. Unfortunately, it’s messier than anything we’ve seen so far.

The burned village

Yuri and his family are on a train passing through the Ural Mountains when they see a burned-out village and, on rescuing a woman from the ruins, learn that the Red commander Strelnikov ordered the burning to punish the villagers, who were falsely accused of selling horses to the White Armies. There are several ways that this is implausible.

First, this is winter 1917-18 in the northern Urals. Until the Czechoslovak Revolt of May 1918 this was a peaceful region. There are no Whites here to buy horses. Maybe this could be happening at this time in the Don Country or Turkestan, ie thousands of kilometres away. But not here.
Even in the Don Country, or one of the other places where strings of battles flared up and died down at this time, we would be unlikely to see the burning of a village.

The Reds did worse things than this during the Civil War. But at this point in the movie we are only a few months out from October. The war has not begun yet, the cycles of violence have not had a few goes-around yet. And when we do see Red reprisals against a village, these would be targeted against the wealthier inhabitants.

What kind of atrocity would be plausible? A little later, food detachments descended on villages to confiscate surplus grain, and this naturally led to conflict. A scene serving the same purpose but involving some excess by a food detachment would make sense here, and the chronological fudge would be forgivable.

Strelnikov, armoured trains, Red Army

Armoured train interior. Note the machine-gun pointing out a loophole right beside Strelnikov’s desk. Neat detail.

Yuri goes for a walk while the train is stopped, and stumbles on an armoured train commanded by Strelnikov (a nom de guerre that means something like ‘shooter’). His real name is Antipov and he is Lara’s estranged husband. This is another of those scenes that gives the impression that revolutionaries were grievously offended whenever a man wrote poetry.

One of my readers, a socialist like myself, sent me this message regarding Antipov/ Strelnikov:


‘Hey interesting take on Dr Zhivago. I always assumed that Antipov was based on a crude portrayal of Trotsky ie not in bolsheviks or mensheviks, total fanatic and bordering on a latter day incel (‘the personal life in Russia is dead’ because of revolution, actually Trotsky wrote on how the revolution awakened the Russian personality [after] years of oppression) and then there’s his role in civil war later in the film.’


I replied:


‘Yes, the armoured train etc. maybe the filmmakers were going for Trotsky […] I see him more as one of these very romantic left SR types [members of the Left Socialist Revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks’ early coalition partners] who zigzags between sentimentality and ultra leftism […] He seems to me a lot like an early Red Army commander named Muraviev although important differences too.’


The first three de facto commanders of the Red Army (the above-mentioned Muraviev, then Vacietis and Kamenev) were non-Bolsheviks. Cooperation with the other parties and non-party individuals was the rule in these early days, especially with Left SRs and anarchists. That Antipov is resurfacing as a Red commander at this point makes a lot of sense.

Meanwhile his behaviour make sense for his character: his insistence on his ‘manhood’ and his apparent revolutionary ardour are a defence against the deep pain and vulnerability in him. If his private life really is dead, it haunts him. His fanaticism and cruelty would be a better fit for later in the war, but atrocities occurred this early (though not anywhere near here), often at the hands of non-party Red leaders like Antipov.

Two Red Army soldiers with pointed bogatyrka hats. All stills are from Doctor Zhivago (1965) dir. David Lean

The rest of it does not make sense. On the one hand I’m definitely glad that in the one movie about the Russian Civil War there is an impressive armoured train, staffed by Red Army soldiers in the pointy bogatyrka hats. It would be a shame if that never made it into the vivid colours of mid-century film (likewise with all the cavalry we see later, these are features of the Civil War).

But when we see the armoured train, it’s way too early! It’s the first fine spring day of 1918. It was snowing a few days ago. There are no armoured trains yet. Trotsky’s train first rode out in August 1918 and it was still just a train, no armour yet. Early armoured trains were makeshift; for example one in Turkestan was armoured with compressed bales of cotton.

What about the uniform worn by the Red Army soldiers? It had not yet even been designed. It was formally adopted around January 1919 and it was nearly a year later before most Red soldiers were wearing it.
What’s more, the Red Army itself basically didn’t exist yet. It was a couple of months old, still very small, and entirely concentrated in the west, facing the threat of a renewed war with Germany. The Red Army wasn’t in the Urals at all, anticipating no military threat there (they turned out to be very wrong!).

This isn’t just a pedantic point of chronology. The movie is missing out on the most interesting and important fact: the Red Army just didn’t have its shit together at this stage.

What you would have in this region at this time would be Red Guards. They would be enthusiastic local civilians, say, part of the workforce of a local factory or mine, or a few hundred poor peasants. If the Whites reared their head, local people would flood into the Red Guards to meet the threat. They would do silly things, like abandon the frontline to go home for a hot meal and a change of clothes. But they would not burn a local village because their own houses would be in the village.

Yuriatin

We learn that the town of Yuriatin has changed hands: ‘first the Reds, then the Whites. Now the Reds again.’ Like the pointy hats and armoured trains, this would be plausible a year later but not now. No town in the Urals fell to the Whites before the Czechoslovak Revolt of May 1918.

We also learn that there are ‘the Reds in the forest. The partisans’. That’s another example of the movie’s bad habit of mentioning things way too early just because they are going to feature later (White Guards, Bolsheviks and now Partisans). A partisan movement developed across Siberia and the Urals later, after the Whites seized control. This movement really got going after Admiral Kolchak took over all the other White factions in his coup of November 1918 and began to persecute even the moderate socialists who had supported the Whites up to this point.

So that is how the Red partisan movement got started. They have no business mooching around in the woods in early Spring 1918. Who are they partisaning against? It’s like if a movie showed us the French Resistance taking refuge in the woods months before the German invasion of France.

The boarded-up mansion

Yuri’s adopted family have a mansion out here, which the local revolutionary committee has boarded up and declared property of the people. Landlords’ houses were indeed boarded up, to stop criminals from looting the books and fine furnishings and artworks inside (A few examples are given in Eduard Dune’s memoir, Notes of a Red Guard, in the chapter titled ‘Rob the Robbers’). Later the big house might be turned into an artist’s retreat or an orphanage.

Here we get the movie’s only hints at the land revolution. The Varykino estate – the land, tools, livestock and buildings – would have been divided up between local farmers back in autumn. We get a glimpse of this when a local man addresses Yuri’s adopted father as ‘your honour.’ His very likeable response is: ‘Now, now, now. That’s all done with, you know.’

But he is not so easygoing when he sees the house boarded up. Yuri has to warn his adopted father not to tear down the boards. That would be counter-revolution, and ‘they shoot counter-revolutionaries.’ Again, a year later this would be a reasonable. At this point it’s not true and nor would he think it’s true.

Likewise, later we have several claims that deserters from the Red Army are shot. If that were true, the Reds would have run out of bullets and lost the war. They had literally millions of deserters, and the penalty was to lose pension rights on a second offense. Armed mutiny or suspected treason were treated with great harshness but desertion was treated leniently.

The Last Tsar

We can be absolutely sure that it’s still 1918 because that summer, when Yuri and his family are settled nicely in the cottage, bad news comes.

‘Not another purge?’ demands Yuri’s adopted father. This is a very strange thing to say. The first ‘purge’ of the Communist Party took place several years later and consisted of expulsions, not arrests or executions. The script is giving the impression that the Bolsheviks, by summer 1918, have already been through multiple rounds of bloody 1937-style inquisitions.

But no, the bad news is not ‘another’ purge. It’s that Soviet authorities in Yekaterinburg have killed the Tsar and his family. This places us in July 1918.

What doesn’t come across in the scenes of idyllic rural life that frame this news is that over the last three months, in the cut between this sequence and the last, the Russian Civil War has begun and escalated wildly, and the Urals are ground zero. Those Red Guards drawn from the local mine or factory would have been swept aside by professional soldiers – detachments of the Czechoslovak Legion, bands of officers and Cossacks. Those who could not escape westward to friendly territory would become partisans or be killed. The revolutionary committee down in Yuriatin who boarded up the estate are likely most of them dead. You would expect the Whites, on taking Yuriatin in June or July, to have come up to the estate of Varykino and restored to its previous owners full possession of the mansion and its lands. At the very least Yuri’s family should have some soldiers billeted on them; they are at the front line, on a piece of ground that will change hands four or five times between now and mid-1919 when Yuri is abducted by the partisans.

Idyllic scenes at Varykino

So we don’t see war when we should, and we do see it when we shouldn’t.

Incidentally, we also hear that Strelnikov has gone to Manchuria. I don’t know why would have gone there, but if he has, he’s a dead man. It’s wall-to-wall White émigrés and Allied agents in Manchuria, and the most violent and depraved White warlords control the territory between here and there.

Where are all the counter-revolutionaries?

Yuri is forced to serve as a doctor in a partisan unit for, by my reckoning, a year and a half, from summer 1919 to the winter of 1920-21. The timeline starts to make some sense. We see a charge across ice in late 1919; I’m not sure of the tactics on display here but really anything goes, because nobody really knew what they were doing in the Russian Civil War. Anyway, this might be the crossing of the Irtysh river in November. After forcing the river the Reds took Omsk, capital of  the ‘Supreme Ruler’ Admiral Kolchak. After that comes the Ice March, a long period of pursuit and mopping up. Then comes a long war against Ataman Semyonov and other warlords of the Far East, which drags on into 1922 (when the Reds take Vladivostok) and even 1923 (when the last White army is defeated). The various things we see in this sequence with the partisans could well be taking place during these lengthy, confused and far-flung campaigns.

Rapid changes of season in these scenes indicate the passage of time from mid 1919 to the winter of 1920-21 in 20 minutes of screen time (although later lines of dialogue indicate that we are still in mid-1920)

A major problem with this movie is that we don’t properly see a single White Guard in all its three hours. People opposed to the Revolution are phantoms off-screen. In this sequence, White Guards are rifle flashes in the treeline, distant fleeing figures, corpses. There is no indication of who the Whites are, what kind of threat they pose or to whom, or what they are fighting for.

The only time we see White Guards, it is a pathetic showing. They are a few dozen of what appear to be military cadets, young smooth-cheeked men in white uniforms. They are quickly mown down with machinegun fire, after which the Yuri and the Reds inspect the bodies with looks of mingled pity and disgust.

Note the irregular uniforms. There are even some sailors. This is what Antipov’s men should look like earlier in the movie, and their armoured train should be a line of bullock carts

The Red commander glares at the dead body of the White leader, a stuffy-looking officer, and growls, ‘The old bastard.’ This old-school Tsarist martinet has brought these kids on a hopeless crusade and gotten them all killed for nothing.

Presumably these are graduates of some military school set up under Kolchak. Kolchak’s officers did have a bad habit of sending raw recruits into hopeless offensives. In itself this scene is a fair comment on the White cause.

The problem is that it’s all we see. The Whites come across as small bands of foolish adventurers who don’t pose any real threat. In reality the Whites controlled three-quarters of the territory of Russia from mid-1918 to the end of 1919, and held onto sizeable chunks of it for years after. On the second anniversary of the October Revolution, their forces were simultaneously in the suburbs of Petrograd and at Orel on the road to Moscow. On two major fronts they massed over 100,000 fighters each, plus tens of thousands on most of the smaller fronts. They far outclassed the Reds in military expertise, and, thanks to the Allies, had parity or superiority in munitions and supplies. They also had the Allies themselves: several hundred thousand soldiers, sailors and pilots of the intervention. These White governments were repressive, violent and anti-Semitic. And they really had the potential to win the war.

When you know this context, it’s easier to understand why the Reds we see in the movie are a bit uptight. But it becomes less easy to understand why Razin, the partisans’ commissar, seems to think his job is to scour all of Russia punishing ‘dubious poets’ and ‘unreliable schoolmasters.’ No. That’s not the partisans’ job. Their job is to fight behind the lines of a brutal military dictatorship supported by the most powerful countries in the world.

By the way, Razin is another one to add to our collection of Reds who are offended by poetry.

Noel Willman as Razin, the partisan unit’s rather intense political commissar.
Gérard Tichy as Liberius, the commander of the partisan unit. The movie gives a general, though unsympathetic, sense of how dual command worked in the Red Army.

What is missing from this movie? There really should be a scene in which Yuri meets a plastered Cossack pogromist with earrings and a wild forelock, and a necklace made of gold teeth; or maybe a twenty-year-old who commands five thousand men, attends séances, wears the skin of a wolf, and snorts cocaine from the scalp of a murdered commissar. That would give a slightly exaggerated but reasonable impression of what the Whites were all about.

The war’s end

Yuri deserts from the partisans. He limps through a snowy landscape, pursuing huddled indistinct shapes which he imagines to be his wife and child. This captures the misery, confusion, exhaustion and dislocation of this moment in history, the winter of 1920-21. It was ‘Russia in the shadows,’ as HG Wells put it, the young Soviet Union bled white and traumatised from seven years of total war.

Yuri finds his family gone, but Lara is still around, and they shack up together. Komarovsky puts in an appearance, warning them that they are about to be arrested and shot and offering to protect them. Their ‘days are numbered.’

But why? Lara because she is the wife of Antipov/ Strelnikov, who has fallen foul of the Soviet regime for unspecified reasons; Yuri because of his ‘way of life’ – here we go again – ‘everything you say, your published writings, are flagrantly subversive.’ I thought his writings were individualistic, not subversive. And anyway, what has Yuri published in the last two years while riding around Siberia treating gunshot wounds and typhus?

By the end of the war the cycles of violence had taken many spins around and the Soviet security organs had developed harsh instincts. Since mid-1918 the Cheka and the revolutionary tribunals have shot tens of thousands of people, at a low estimate. So in one sense Yuri and Lara are right to be afraid and the film’s tone of doom and dread is not out of place.

But either Komarovsky is bullshitting them or the movie is bullshitting us. Lara has been estranged from Antipov since the outbreak of the First World War; I don’t think she would be on the radar of the authorities. And although many things have changed since early 1918 (a de facto one-party state, an all-consuming total war, years of hunger and epidemics) I feel the Soviet authorities would still really, really not care about Yuri’s poetry. He has never lifted a finger against the Soviet regime. His ‘way of life’ has consisted for the last two years of serving as ‘a good comrade [and] a good medical officer’ in a partisan unit behind enemy lines.

But Yuri and Lara believe that their heads are on the block. Lara and her two daughters, one a child and one unborn, go with Komarovsky. Yuri takes his chances with the Cheka, though they never do come for him, except in the form of Yevgraf who saves him from sleeping rough in Moscow.

Back to the framing device

Meanwhile back in the future, Yevgraf and his niece Tanya have been talking all night, piecing together the story we have just witnessed. Now they finish the last few pieces of the puzzle. They do so very well as far as story is concerned. Not so much the history. Tanya (Yuri and Lara’s daughter) was ‘Lost at the age of eight when Civil War broke out in the Far East.’ She was born in 1921, so this would be 1929 or 1930. There was a brief Sino-Soviet War in 1929, but no Far East Civil War.

Yuri’s death rings true. Many who lived intense lives during the Revolution and Civil War succumbed to illnesses in the decade after.BOf course, there were epidemics and a shortage of medical supplies. But there was also a physical and spiritual exhaustion, which is what does for Yuri in the end.

Lara, meanwhile, ‘died or vanished somewhere. In a labour camp […] A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid.’ The arrest of Lara appears to happen in the early 1930s, so before the 1936-9 terror. But it is still all too authentic. The population of prison camps run by the successors of the Cheka grew from 8,500 to two million in a few short years as the Stalin regime tightened its grip.

For all that, the film ends on an optimistic tone. Tanya plays the balalaika as her grandmother did, and her boyfriend seems kind, and rainbows grace the rushing waters by the dam.

And I’ll leave it there, at the end of the movie. I had a conclusion here but it ran on too long. I’ll finish and post that next week.

Meanwhile, if you want to read more about the Russian Civil War according to yours truly, check out my series Revolution Under Siege:

Revolution Under Siege

Dr Zhivago – is it accurate? 2: World War & October Revolution

This is Part 2 of my notes on a re-watch of David Lean’s 1965 historical epic Dr Zhivago. Part 1 is here. This post will look at how the movie presents the First World War, the Russian Revolution and post-revolution society.

1: The World War

About one hour in, the story of Dr Zhivago, which had rumbled to a halt, is jump-started again by the outbreak of the First World War. Yuri, Antipov and Lara all end up at the frontlines. We witness the army mutinies that accompanied the Revolution. Yuri and Lara fall in love but restrain themselves from actually cheating on their respective spouses.

This section begins with a voiceover from Yefgraf. It’s a very strong monologue layered over a montage which is by turns lavish and bleak, summing up Russia’s experience in World War One, from enthusiastic jingoism to horror, misery and revolt. This monologue is performed by Alec Guinness with dry understated tones betraying just an occasional hint of intense emotion. Yevgraf joins the army along with a bunch of peasant conscripts: ‘Most of them were in their first good pair of boots… By the second winter of the war, the boots had worn out. Even comrade Lenin underestimated the misery of that 1000-mile front – and our cursed capacity for suffering.’

This and all other stills are from Dr Zhivago (1966, dir. David Lean)

This monologue is so good I used it in the podcast version of Episode 1 of Revolution Under Siege. But it has some problems. Yevgraf says that he was ‘ordered to enlist’ by the Bolshevik Party at the outbreak of the war as part of an organised infiltration of the army. I’ve never come across any mention of the Bolsheviks sending agents into the army for a years-long deep undercover project. The Bolsheviks negotiated Tsarist repression by having their legal and illegal sides of the organisation, and if we assume Yevgraf is a trained agent in the illegal component, then it would be very wasteful to send him into the army like a needle in a haystack. The Bolshevik Party was very much on the back foot when war broke out. Between repression, wartime chauvinism and conscription, membership withered and activity waned.

Many working-class militants were conscripted into the army and navy, or ordered to enlist by the courts as punishment for their political activities. Some of these people resurfaced in 1917 as leaders and agitators on the frontlines or on the naval vessels. By mid-1917 the Bolshevik Party had developed a very extensive ‘Military Organisation’ of party members in the army and navy. You can see how a paranoid officer might interpret this as the army being ‘infiltrated by Bolshevik agents.’ The thing is, almost none of the members of the Military Organisation were Bolsheviks in 1914, much less full-time agents on undercover missions.

Yevgraf also describes party policy toward the war in a very strange way. Which country wins is ‘Our task was to organise defeat. That would be our victory.’ That’s a cold and perverse way of explaining an internationalist, anti-war position. Only an opponent would phrase it that way. The Bolsheviks did not ‘organise defeat’ and even in 1917 there were Bolshevik-influenced units, such as the Latvian Rifles, which fought valiantly. Here the screenplay has given us a revolutionary straw man.

What about the visuals which accompany the narration? We see a big recruitment parade, cutting to the horror of the frontlines and the violence of battle. Finally we see the soldiers clambering out of the trench and running back eastward. The imagery tells a story in a simple and very powerful way. As we see here, the Russian army had a tradition of officers dominating and abusing the rank-and-file: we see an officer brandishing his sabre and roaring at the men, ‘Come on, you bastards!’ But apart from the flagrantly abusive officer, the beards and the exotic hats, none of this World War sequence is really drawn from the specifics of the Eastern Front. It mainly draws on the Western Front, tropes familiar to British popular memory of the First World War. It’s not that what we see is wrong, so this is a missed opportunity rather than a big problem. But these images don’t draw out what was distinct about the Eastern Front, which was far more mobile than the Western.

It could be November 1916 on the Somme.

What’s with Antipov? Why is a revolutionary playing a valiant role in the imperialist war? This is authentic. The personal reason is given in Yevgraf’s remark that ‘Happy men don’t volunteer.’ The history-buff reason is that many leftists in all countries supported their own country’s war effort. It just so happened that moderate socialists in Germany saw Germany as the most progressive empire, while moderate socialists in Russia just happened to see their own country in the same way. The Bolsheviks would call Antipov a ‘defencist’ or ‘social chauvinist.’

Antipov’s glasses discarded in the midst of a disastrous infantry charge.

2: Mutiny

Next comes a vivid scene where a crowd of deserters meets a fresh and disciplined unit on the road. It’s a well-shot and dynamic scene, full of tension, as we wonder which side will win out. The deserters hold fast. They convince the new recruits to join the revolt against the war. They all proceed to shoot and bludgeon the officers and continue homeward.[i]

How authentic is this scene? Things wouldn’t have happened this quickly, and the revolting soldiers would not have been this trigger-happy. The scene errs on the side of portraying the soldiers as cruel, removing a lot of mitigating context and hesitations that would have preceded the grisly outcome. The scene is making things simple, brief and visual, but is it conveying a historical untruth? In the last analysis, no. Basically, in many cases soldiers and sailors did kill their officers.

We see a firebrand soldier named Kuril (Bernard Kay, named simply as ‘The Bolshevik’ in the credits) taking the lead and preventing the mass of deserters from disintegrating. He is the cadre in this scene, the frame that holds the revolt together, the leavening agent which causes the bread to rise (Fittingly, the same Kuril goes on to join the Red Guards in a later scene). But when Kuril appeals to the fresh unit to join the deserters, his words should be more along the lines of, ‘Let’s go home and divide up the estates of the landlords,’ and not so much baldly declaring that Russia is not his country. The latter is a curious agitational tactic and it’s surprising that it works.

3: The Revolution

I’ve already mentioned how the movie compresses fourteen months of tumultuous events into one line of dialogue (‘The Tsar has been arrested. Lenin is in Moscow! Civil War has begun!’). Soon after this Yuri receives an ‘order [from] the Provisional Government’ so we are back in real-life chronology, somewhere between February and October 1917, between the overthrow of the Tsar and the seizure of power by the Soviets.

Around this time Lara and Yuri hit it off. In the book, she is fiercely supportive of the Bolsheviks, but the movie’s Lara never breathes a syllable of approval for the revolution. This gives her a bit of a flat personality.

We cut to Moscow and see Yuri’s wife and father-in-law reading a letter from him dated July 20th. ‘Eight weeks ago!’ they say. So it must be late September 1917. There is street fighting outside their window – machineguns and artillery. ‘They’re at it again!’ rages the father-in-law. ‘I wish they’d decide, once and for all, which gang of hooligans constitutes the government of this country.’

This is frustrating! The film nearly got it right! If they had said twelve weeks instead of eight, or August 20th instead of July, that would have made sense – there was street fighting in Moscow for days following the Soviet insurrection of late October.

Back at the frontline, it’s still bright summer, though autumn should be settling in toward winter by now. An old soldier confides in Yuri: ‘There’s fighting at home… Red Guards and White Guards. This old man’s had enough.’ The first of the White armies did not begin to form until December. The term ‘White Guards’ for the counter-revolutionary counterpart of the Red Guards originated in the Moscow street fighting of late October and did not enter into common circulation until later.

The Revolution happens off-screen, and that’s fine. But the glimpses we get of it don’t need to be this muddled. It’s not that it was made simpler for dramatic effect. It’s just made a mess of, in ways that would have been pretty simple to fix.

But the movie redeems itself in little ways that show the filmmakers did their homework. Kuril the militant gets in some good and authentic lines. The befuddled old soldier asks, ‘This Lenin. Will he be the new Tsar, then?’ Kuril explodes: ‘Listen, Daddy! No more Tsars, no more masters! Only workers, in a workers’ state. How about that!’

This movie is clearly anti- the revolution but it delivers that message with certain small reservations and nuances.

4. Life under the Soviets

Kuril, departing to join the Red Guards, says to Yuri: ‘Goodbye, honoured doctor… Want some advice? … Adapt yourself.’ It’s not clear what Yuri has done to invite this veiled threat. He has been totally inoffensive from Kuril’s point of view. This is a foreshadowing of what’s going to happen when Yuri returns home to Moscow to experience life after the Revolution.

The two main features of life when Yuri returns home are (1) famine, disease and general hardship and (2) a stifling political culture in which everyone, like Kuril, seems to be offended by his existence for no apparent reason.

The Moscow neighbourhood which the film crew built specially for the movie. Partial barricades, armoured cars, Red banners and patrolling soldiers indicate that the October Revolution has just concluded.

Famine, disease and hardship

A film critic in The Guardian criticised this movie at the time for reducing the Russian Revolution to ‘a series of consumer problems.’ I suppose starving and freezing can be broadly described as consumer problems. I actually think this is a strength of the movie. Yuri’s silently-suffering wife Tanya has had to sell a clock to buy salami for a meal to welcome him home from the war. Nobody mentions it, but at one stage all the banisters disappear from the stairway of their house – fuel shortages, you see. Consumer problems were the texture of daily life during the Civil War. Dr Zhivago does a good job of showing that.

As we see here, wealthier citizens such as Yuri’s adopted family (we learn in this section of the movie that they are landlords with an estate in the Urals) had to share their homes with working-class people. Mansions and large town houses were divided up into apartments. I agree with Yuri that ‘this is a better arrangement, comrades. More just’ (even though the houses of the wealthy were often unsuitable for renovation into apartment blocks). Because what we don’t see are the absolutely horrifying slum conditions in which workers and the poor lived in Tsarist Moscow: dormitories, shared rooms, beds shared by workers on different shifts. And unfortunately, as the film critic I quoted above correctly noted, the film portrays Yuri’s new housemates as a mob of horrible ‘proles.’ No nuance or humanizing moments for these representatives of urban working-class Russia.

The World War broke the precarious supply system that had kept the cities fed and fuelled. We see the railway station thronged with people leaving Moscow, and this is sadly accurate. The population of the large cities collapsed during the Civil War, as the supply situation grew worse still – Petrograd’s population declined by over half, and Moscow was not much better off. The film is perhaps guilty of accelerating this process but the depiction is well grounded.

What’s not accurate at all is the way Yuri is scolded by the authorities for mentioning famine and disease in Moscow: ‘You’ve been listening to rumourmongers, comrade. There is no typhus in our city.’ This is nonsense. The Soviet authorities did not try to deny hunger or cover up epidemics like, as Boris Johnson would have said, ‘The mayor of Jaws’ [sic].

Tanya introduces Yuri to the new roommates and a visitor, the Soviet delegate (or People’s Commisar of Jaws) who gives Yuri a rude welcome home from the war. The delegate is played by Wolf Frees.

Below are the words of the revolutionary leader Trotsky (whose likeness we see on posters in these scenes) speaking to a public meeting in Moscow in June 1918:

I have with me some telegrams which the People’s Commissar for Food has received from small towns. There the population is, literally and in the exact meaning of the word, on the brink of complete starvation and exhaustion. […] From Sergiyev-Posad: ‘Give us bread, or we perish’ … From Bryansk, May 30: ‘There is a very high death-rate in the factories of Maltsovsk and Bryansk, especially among the children: there is hunger-typhus in the uyezd.’ […]From Pavlov-Posad, on May 21: ‘The population is starving, there is no bread, we cannot get it anywhere. From Dorogobuzh [24] on June 3: ‘Great hunger and mass sickness.’

Note not just the public acknowledgement of famine and typhus but of the most frank and harrowing reality of it. 

The new Soviet regime took public health very seriously. One White Guard who later wrote a memoir left a bleakly comical description of how he impersonated a doctor and was sent all over Siberia on a public health mission.

The posters below from Wikimedia Commons are Soviet public health warnings from this broad period.

Political Culture

The idea that hunger and disease were covered up is just one of the ways Dr Zhivago is basically wrong in how it shows the early Soviet regime. Yuri is treated in an appalling way by the authorities and the public. The local Soviet delegate yells at him, ‘Your attitude has been noted!’ What attitude? Who’s noted it? The low point is when Yuri arrives home to find his new housemates ransacking his apartment. Then he meets his half-brother Yevgraf for the first time. Instead of the pleasant reunion Yuri expects, he gets his marching orders. Yevgraf warns him that he must leave Moscow because his poetry is ‘not liked.’

‘I think the girl [Yuri’s wife Tonya] was the only one who guessed at their position,’ Yevgraf narrates, implying they could all be shot or arrested or something.

Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), scared of Yevgraf

What’s the problem with Yuri’s poetry? This is some time in the winter of 1917-18. Yuri is enthusiastic about Bolshevism and calls Yevgraf ‘my political conscience.’ The problem is that his poetry is too ‘individualistic’ and his reasons for liking Bolshevism are too subtle.

If this seems unfair and absurd, it’s because it is. People were not arrested or killed simply for writing ‘individualistic’ poetry in early Soviet Russia. This is early 1918 and the number 1 item on the Soviets’ agenda is whether and how to make peace with Germany, and the related question of how to survive if Germany attacks. The second item is securing food and fuel supplies. The third item would probably be the small forces of White Guards operating in peripheral areas, the foremost being Kornilov’s Volunteer Army in the Don and Kuban regions. Individualistic poets are not on the agenda at all. If Yuri was writing odes of praise to Kaiser Wilhelm or General Kornilov, the Soviet authorities would certainly have had a problem with that. But that isn’t it.

Yevgraf (Alec Guinness), being scary

It’s a neat dramatic moment when Yevgraf enters the room and, by a mere snap of his fingers, puts a stop to the ransacking. He exudes menace. Too much menace. I think this reaction would be plausible after September 1918, when the Soviet authorities shot several thousand hostages in Moscow alone. But this is early 1918 at the latest. The Cheka (it’s implied he is a Chekist) have not yet done anything to inspire mortal dread.

And just consider what we know about Yuri. As marks against him in the eyes of the Soviets, he is the adopted son of a landlord family, with a large house in Moscow and an estate in the Urals. But he accepts the redistribution of both properties without conplaint. He spends most of 1917 in a military unit sympathetic to the Revolution, treating the wounded, saving countless lives and earning the deep esteem of the soldiers. He comes back to Moscow and at once gets to work in the local healthcare system. He expresses support for the revolution at every opportunity.

‘Specialists’ like Yuri who were willing to work conscientiously under the new regime (doctors, engineers etc) were not scorned or abused or rejected. They were valued. Past political actions disagreeable to the new regime (which Yuri, in any case, has none of) would be overlooked. They would be given higher rations. This idea that he would face arrest or imprisonment just for writing poetry is nonsense.

The apparently healthy but idle father-in-law (Ralph Richardson), on the other hand, might find himself conscripted into a labour battalion, say, to dig trenches during the military emergency of 1919. He is not at all invested in politics of either right or left, so it’s quite unlikely that he would end up in deeper trouble than that.

I haven’t referred much to Boris Pasternak’s novel, on which this movie is based, because it was five years ago that I read it. But this point is important: in the novel there is no warning from Yevgraf, no hint that Yuri might be arrested for his poetry or for his ‘attitude.’ Yuri and his family simply leave Moscow of their own accord because of the hunger and fuel shortages, like about a million other people. The filmmakers felt the need to make this very significant and historically inauthentic change.

Chronology

When I write something like, ‘this wouldn’t have happened in February of that year, maybe in June’ readers might think I’m being pedantic. The basic sequence of events in the Russian Civil War is not widely understood so I need to pause and spell out the significance of some of the things I’m saying. If a film simplifies the timeline for the sake of making things more brisk and comprehensible, that’s good. But if the chronological mix-ups in a film erase some of the most interesting features of a historical period and present an alternative version that diverges dramatically from the evidence, that’s a big problem for me.

Winter 1917-18 was a world apart from winter 1918-19, or even summer 1918. The same rules did not apply. The Soviet regime did not spring into being as a repressive one-party state. But in response to conditions of chaos and war which escalated sharply from May 1918, it grew steadily harsher and more repressive. A film about the period should trace these developments in the same clever way that Dr Zhivago tracks fuel shortages through the unexplained disappearance of banisters. Instead the Soviet regime springs into being fully-formed, a strange composite of the revolutionary and Stalinist eras and the screenwriter’s imagination.

This was a severe time. I can think of a few scenarios where an innocent person like Yuri would fall foul of the authorities and end up getting arrested, or even in an extreme case shot. As the Civil War drags on the scenarios become more numerous and plausible. And if he got in trouble, his adopted family background would be held against him. But none of these scenarios involve individualistic poetry, or acknowledging the existence of typhus.

4. The Train

Next comes the most powerful part of the movie, for me: the epic train journey from Moscow to the Ural Mountains.

Are the conditions portrayed accurate? The crowded station, the rush for berths, the dark squalid bunks and the straw? It would be difficult to exaggerate how bad the railways were in this period.  Today this journey by rail would be one or two overnights but fuel shortages, breakdowns, harsh weather and rail traffic all meant that the gruelling 11-day journey depicted here is perfectly authentic.

What excellent worldbuilders we have in David Lean and his crew, and screenwriter Robert Bolt. How real this carriage and journey seem – yes, in the way Pauline Kael dismissed as ‘primitive’ (she said that David Lean movies are for the kind of people who are impressed because painted horses on a stage backdrop look ‘real enough to ride.’ Namely, me), but also on a human level. I’m glad they chose not to cut the moment when the anarchist convict (Klaus Kinski) stares at an old couple exchanging a moment of affection while lying on the floor of a crowded carriage. He looks absolutely desolate. I don’t know if it’s accurate or not about shovelling out the straw and sprinkling the disinfectant, about breaking the ice when you roll open the door – but I’m glad it’s in the movie. It’s good also that there are moments when they break out the accordion and do some singing and dancing.

The anarchist (Klaus Kinski)

I’ve already mentioned the anarchist who is imprisoned for forced labour on the train. I haven’t come across mentions of forced labour on the railways at all, let alone this early. I’m not sure if his reason for being here is plausible, but his character certainly is. The Soviet regime raided and cleared out numerous buildings occupied by self-described anarchists in Spring 1918, before the outbreak of Civil War. I say self-described because Soviet authorities regarded them as not proper anarchists, but as assorted bandits, adventurers and dubious characters, armed to the teeth and occupying key buildings. This happened after the train journey we see, but not much later. It’s an engaging performance by Kinski. Here is a mad and unpleasant person, but he’s also admirable and pitiable in equal measure. He might be the kind of person who would have been arrested in the raids of Spring 1918. At first he seems to be anti-authoritarian but his admiration for the Red commander Strelnikov tells us he loves violence and strongmen. It’s also a hint that he fought alongside the Red Guards prior to his imprisonment. You wonder what he did.

A detachment of Kronstadt sailors. According to his cap, the man in front served on the Aurora, the vessel which fired the signal, a blank artillery shot, to begin the assault on the Winter Palace in Petrograd during the October Revolution

There are also Kronstadt sailors on the train, on their way out to assist at the front lines. A lot of these lads would be anarchists too, not the bandity kind but the serious, political kind many of whom worked alongside and eventually joined the Bolsheviks. Kronstadt sailors played a key role in the revolution of 1917 and in this period detachments of them were indeed sent out to remote corners of Russia to bolster the Reds in this or that skirmish against counter-revolution. Though it seems strange that a load of sailors would be going thousands of kilometres inland, it’s only one of a lot of very strange things that were common occurrences during Russia’s revolutionary period.

The next post will deal with the Civil War, so the burned village and Strelnikov will have to wait.

A final word on the theme of this movie. Clearly it is anti- communist and critical of the revolution. But though this movie often straw-mans Bolsheviks, it never demonises them. It is conscientious about giving each Bolshevik at least one humanising and relatable moment.

Kuril, as I remarked, has some good strong lines. The delegate tries to stop the ransacking of Yuri’s house. Antipov is the most obnoxious but also the most vulnerable. We pretty much view Yevgraf as a teddy bear by the end of the movie. Even Razin, whom we will meet later, has a line where he reveals he once has a wife and four children. What happened to them? The grumpy new janitor of Yuri’s Moscow house gets a good line about how the building had room for thirteen families.

It is only a show of even-handedness, or maybe you could just call it one-sidedness with accompanying nuances. But it matters. After I posted last week, one of my readers sent me a message saying that ‘those scenes of the Tsarists suppressing workers revolts was, to my parents’ generation [people born before World War Two], the dawn of a realization that there mightve been a good reason for Communism in Russia….’

Dr Zhivago is going to get plenty of criticism in the next post, but let’s give it some credit. It was more balanced than a lot of the other texts and narratives that people would have encountered at the time. Maybe, considering certain books by Robert Service and Antony Beevor, and the dreadful Russian TV show about Trotsky, that’s even more so the case today.

[i] The incident in the novel on which this scene is based is longer and more involved. In both versions, a poor officer stands on a barrel to address the mutineers, only to fall victim to a slapstick accident followed by a rifle shot. In the novel this guy was a smug agent of Kerensky’s Provisional Government, and the guys who kill him are a specific hardcore bandit-like group, not the general mass of deserters.

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Dr Zhivago – is it accurate? 1: The Old Regime

From the back of a lorry, men in red armbands throw leaflets to a cheering mob of soldiers. The unit’s doctor, Yuri Andreievich Zhivago (Omar Sharif), is handed a sheet by a bewildered illiterate elder.

‘The Tsar is in prison,’ Yuri reads aloud. ‘Lenin’s in Moscow!’ He looks up and adds, ‘Civil war has started!’

Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), Kuril (Bernard Kay,  Lara (Julie Christie) and the old man (Erik Chitty). This and all other stills from Dr Zhivago, dir. David Lean, 1965

Yuri Zhivago and his unit are a little out of touch. Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II was arrested in March 1917 (Gregorian calendar), Lenin arrived in Russia in April 1917 but did not go to Moscow until early 1918, and the Russian Civil War started in May 1918. Yuri appears to be catching up on fourteen months of news. Word travelled slowly in revolutionary Russia, but not this slowly.

Most of the movie is not this bad and parts of it are pretty strong. I’m inclined to be generous to Dr Zhivago, a 1965 historical epic directed by David Lean, because the movie is generous to the viewer, serving up crowd scenes, spectacular landscapes and big, painful emotions.[i]

But this single line of dialogue is a succession of statements each of which is more jarring to my ears than the one before. It’s like someone scrolling on their phone and declaring, ‘A new coronavirus has broken out in China. American police have murdered George Floyd! Trump supporters have tried to stage an insurrection in New York!’ Note that I’ve got the city wrong and that I assume someone who’s just heard about COVID 19 somehow knows who George Floyd is.

Then again, maybe we will be watching that movie in fifty years.

The verdict of historian Jonathan Smele on Dr Zhivago is not generous: he notes that it is pretty much the only movie in English about the Russian Civil War, which is a shame because it is ‘mostly lamentable’ even though it’s ‘admirably snowy.’[ii]

Smele did not elaborate, but I’m going to,[iii] probably at length, over two or three posts.

This movie was enormously successful and popular at the time of its release. It raked in five Oscars and a ton of money. Very few English-language films have tackled the October Revolution and, aside from this and Warren Beatty’s Reds, none that I’m aware of have portrayed the Russian Civil War.[iv] So this movie, between its massive success and the lack of other films tackling the same subject matter, has had an outsized influence on how people in the English-speaking world see these events.

What follows are my notes on a re-watch of Dr Zhivago, focused on how it presents the history, sometimes comparing it to its source material (the novel of the same name by Boris Pasternak).

1: A flash-forward to… when?

Dr Zhivago starts with Yevgraf (Alec Guinness), an apparatchik in the Soviet security forces, finding his orphaned and long-lost niece and telling her the story of her long-lost parents, Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova. This frames the narrative in a neat way as Yuri and Lara are the couple who are canoodling tragically on the movie’s poster.

This framing device works… unless you’re a nerd like me, in which case it will leave you wondering when exactly this flash-forward is supposed to be happening. [v]

The engineer (I’m unable to identify the actor) and Yevgraf (Alec Guinness) reading a book of poems by Zhivago titled Lara

The niece, Tanya (Rita Tushingham), looks around twenty and we will learn she was born in 1921. Maths would suggest we’re around the years of World War Two. But clues in the scene suggest otherwise.

The overall situation (a hydroelectric dam that seems to be fully operational plus also a horde of women and girls recruited from reformatories excavating rock with their bare hands) suggests we are in the period of shock industrialisation, the Five-Year Plans. And because Tanya is definitely not fourteen or fifteen, 1937 to early 1941 is our range. Right?

Maybe not. Other cues point to the 1950s. Yuri Zhivago’s poetry is going through a period of growing popularity.

‘Everyone seems to [admire him] – now,’ says the engineer. 

Yevgraf replies acidly: ‘Well, we couldn’t admire him when we weren’t allowed to read him.’

Zhivago has been posthumously rehabilitated, meaning we are in a period of relative liberalisation. Relative prosperity, too. Referring to the era of Revolution and Civil War, Yevgraf does a ghoulish version of the Four Yorkshireman routine: ‘There were children in those days who lived off human flesh. Did you know that?’

This comparison between now and the bad old days only makes sense in the era after the death of Stalin in 1953, his denunciation in 1956, and the rehabilitation of vast numbers of people victimised by the Stalinist terror.

Only… Yevgraf’s niece is not in her mid 30s. And the dam appears to be called the Stalinskaya.

Where does that leave us?

If this scene is taking place in 1936-41, then the atmosphere is off. Soviet Union had just gone through a famine and massive campaign of repression in the early 1930s, followed by a terrible slaughter and mass imprisonment campaign that peaked in 1937. The engineer should be soiling his pants at the sight of Yevgraf, not complaining about shortages of machinery (though Tanya looks terrified at first).

Why have they made the film in this way? How serious a departure from history is it?  It’s not outrageous so much as odd. It’s just strange to hear Yevgraf talking about how back in his day, there was cannibalism and certain poets were censored. Not like the era of plenty and pluralism known to historians as [checks notes] THE GREAT TERROR.

2: Central Asia

We flash back to somewhere in Central Asia, some time in late Imperial Russia. In a powerful contrast to the red stars and industrial trappings of the framing device, we see vast mountains and plains. Through the eyes of a little boy, we see the Orthodox priests, black-garbed like a murder of crows, who are presiding over his mother’s funeral. It is a moving scene: a musical crescendo, leaves blown from trees in a sudden gust of wind, nails hammered into the coffin. The little boy is then adopted by a kind family from Moscow who were friends of his mother.

Russia had colonies in Central Asia, and many Russian settlers still have descendants today in countries such as Kazakhstan. So the trappings of the Orthodox Church imposed on a Central Asian scene grounds us in the old Russia of the Tsars, imperial and obscurantist.

The little boy who is burying his mother is of course Yuri Zhivago (in this sequence played by Tarek Sharif, son of Omar). In the novel Yuri’s half-brother Yevgraf was born of a woman native to Central Asia. The movie, without ever saying so out loud, performs an interesting reversal: Yevgraf is the European and Yuri the ‘Eurasian.’ I don’t think fidelity to history was the primary concern here – David Lean just wanted to cast Omar Sharif. But having a lead actor who is from outside Europe is a good move from the point of view of history. Every third or fourth character you run into in the Russian Civil War turns out to be an Armenian from Persia, or a Baltic German who is obsessed with Mongolia, or one way or another has some colourful and complex national identity.

3: Moscow in 1913

(CW: SA)

My nerd rage at the chronological vagueness of the flash-forward is assuaged in the next section of the movie. Dialogue in a later scene (‘I have seen you. Four years ago, Christmas Eve’) places the action in this part of the movie in the winter of 1913-14.

Yuri is now an adult, studying medicine, writing poetry and preparing to marry his adopted sister Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin, incidentally the daughter of Charlie Chaplin). But he keeps running into this girl Lara (Julie Christie), who we know thanks to the framing device will go on to be the mother of Yuri’s child.

Lara, a seventeen-year-old student, is groomed, seduced and raped by a businessman who has leverage over her family, a predatory and perspicacious old monster named Komorovsky (Rod Steiger).

Lara brings this section of the movie to a close by shooting the sexual predator. But Komorovsky survives. Lara and her revolutionary boyfriend Antipov (Tom Courtenay) get married and move away to a distant village.

To film this and later parts of the movie, the crew built a couple of blocks of Moscow in a field in Spain and buried it under fake snow. It was well worth the effort. It looks the part. We will see this neighbourhood, including the huge townhouse of Yuri’s adopted family, going through sweeping changes over the course of the film.

The protest

It is on the main street of this Spanish Moscow that we see a workers’ demonstration crushed by the forces of the Tsarist autocracy.

The corresponding scene in the novel takes place during the 1905 Revolution. Viewers might assume wrongly that this is the infamous Bloody Sunday, or even that this scene represents the entire 1905 Revolution – watching this at age 15 or 16 I vaguely thought it was, but now I know that this massacre would not even qualify as a Bloody Wednesday on the scale of Tsarist Russia. 

But the movie is not making a historical misstep here at all. Showing an event like this in 1913 makes sense. Several hundred strikers were massacred at the Lena goldfields in 1912, and in response there was a wave of strikes that only ended with the outbreak of the First World War. This would have involved protests and repression like we see here. The demonstrators perform the ‘Varshavianka’ and the ‘Internationale,’ both period-accurate. At the end of their demonstration, they march back the way they came, presumably sticking together until they reach the safety of a working-class district. But I’m not sure of the tactical rationale behind the dragoons attacking and dispersing them on their way back. I’d assume they would prefer to block the march from entering the affluent district.

It’s worth noting that we don’t see the inside of a factory, a railway yard or a slum. The focus is on how the demonstration turns Yuri’s head, sweeps him up in its romance, and how the state repression appals him. The focus throughout the movie is on how Yuri, who is part of a well-off family, reacts to the twists and turns of the revolution.

After the dragoons’ attack on the protesters

The Bolsheviks

On several occasions characters talk about the Bolsheviks. Antipov denies being a Bolshevik, but doesn’t tell us what party he’s in. ‘The Bolsheviks don’t like me and I don’t like them. They don’t know right from wrong.’

They are mentioned almost as if they were the only revolutionary party in the running. Komorovsky says to Yuri: ‘Oh, I disagree with Bolshevism. … But I can still admire Bolsheviks as men. Shall I tell you why? […] They may win.’

Before 1912, few knew who the Bolsheviks were. They were one faction of one leftist party (the Russian Social-Democratic and Labour Party). In 1912-14 the Bolsheviks grew rapidly. Antipov disliking them is a plausible glimpse of the leftist in-fighting and debates that went on. (The fact that he carries a pistol on a demonstration suggests he is a Socialist Revolutionary, a party with a terrorist legacy. I doubt he’s a Menshevik.)

Komarovsky’s remarks are not so plausible. The Bolsheviks weren’t a household name. Komorovsky would not have anticipated their victory and if he even knew who they were he wouldn’t expect Yuri to. 

I can see why they name-dropped the Bolsheviks here in spite of the above points. The screenplay is introducing little things that are going to be big later. It’s not terrible – but it is wrong.

Tsarism

‘It’s the system, Lara,’ Antipov declares at one point, apropos of nothing. ‘People will be different after the revolution.’ The audience knows instantly that Antipov’s naivety will be cruelly exposed. But to me that’s a bit crude, a bit of a straw man.

All the same, we do get a glimpse of the system. This section paints an ugly picture of late Imperial Russia. A predatory, cynical capitalist, brutal state repression, even an orthodox priest dispensing free doses of sexual hypocrisy to Lara when she goes to the church for guidance.

But we do not see the squalid living conditions of the peasants or, bar the scene where Antipov is dropping leaflets outside a factory, the working or home lives of the urban proletariat. People show a remarkable ability to write many thousands of words and make many hours of cinema about revolutions without ever mentioning little things like the land question. You know, the number one factor motivating almost every modern revolution including this one.

Until next time…

I remember seeing this movie as a teenager and being swept along by it and I can really understand how, four decades earlier, millions were really enchanted by it in cinemas. All the more reason to interrogate how it presents the history. I’m approaching it now with a more analytical eye but I still appreciate and enjoy a lot of what I see here. So far, it’s not a bad job by the standards of a historical epic set in a country that few of the cast or crew would have ever set foot in.

But as I’ve made clear, there’s a bit of ‘The Tsar has been arrested! Lenin is in Moscow!’ to come. And the further we get, the more it goes off the rails.

In the next post we’ll look at how Dr Zhivago treats the First World War and the revolutions of 1917. For good and for bad, there’s a lot to talk about.

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[i] ‘Lenin’s in Moscow’ can be shorthand for ‘Lenin has arrived in the capital city! No, not Moscow, the other capital, the one that doesn’t feature in this movie. Yes, St Petersburg.’ And ‘Civil war has started!’ is just Zhivago’s on-the-spot reaction. Some people in early 1917 characterised events the same way. But all that is a stretch. The average viewer will take it at face value.

[ii] Smele, Jonathan. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars

[iii] What are my credentials for tackling this, and why does it interest me? Over the last few years I’ve written a lot about the Russian Civil War, and you can find the full book-length project here:

Revolution Under Siege

[iv] Soviet and Russian cinema is a different story. 1934’s Chapaev spawned a whole sub-genre of Civil War movies. I should mention the HBO TV movie Stalin (1992, dir Ivan Passer) which is overambitious and rushed but which does include a handful of fairly well-written scenes dealing with the Civil War.

[v] In the novel, this framing narrative takes place on the Eastern Front of World War Two. Yuri and Lara’s daughter is a boisterous young woman serving on the frontlines.

Review: The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

The Topeka School is about a teenage boy who thinks he’s learning to be ‘a man’, when in fact he’s learning a load of rubbish that he’s going to have to unlearn. The author Ben Lerner barely fictionalises his youth in the 1990s in Topeka, Kansas. His fictionalized self, Adam Gordon, gets drunk in the basements of large but creepily identical houses with his social circle, the kids of affluent professionals who have never walked anywhere in their lives, throwing absurd gang signs at one another before a beat-down.

The story always feels focused even as the narrators (Adam, his mother and his father) range over topics as diverse as psychiatry, the Westboro Baptist Church and permanently drunk US diplomats and their families in 1950s Taiwan. These diverse component parts orbit around a sudden act of violence at one of those drunken basement parties, and around the themes it brings up.

We see brief snapshots of the life of Darren, a kid Adam’s age who appears to have a serious learning disability. Darren imagines that he has survivalist skills because he owns a knife collection and hides a stash of chocolate bars in the bushes. If he was black, Lerner reminds us, Darren would be in mortal danger from the cops, and if he were a girl, from sexual predators. On the other hand, Darren occupies a strange place in his social world and becomes semi-ironically popular with his peers. But the opening scene is a flash-forward to Darren being held in a police station after an unspecified crime, so we know things are not going to end well. In a touch I found moving, the adult Darren still drinks hot water as his preferred beverage – a habit that goes back to his childhood when his parents would be drinking coffee and he would want to join in. The hot water reminds us that he was once a cute kid with loving parents.

Adam is a debating champion. Lerner describes his competitions as a kind of bizarre ritual, ‘the white noise after the end of history.’ In fast-talking babble, teenagers in suits demonstrate by flawless logic that welfare payments will lead to overloaded court systems, which will lead to civil collapse, which will lead to nuclear holocaust – ‘almost every plan, no matter how minor, would lead to nuclear holocaust.’ For Adam, the debating has its healthy and unhealthy sides: it is at once a way to express himself artistically and a socially-acceptable way for him to be aggressive. When I did debating, ten-plus years after Adam and on the other side of the Atlantic, it was not this bad. But all I’ll say is, I ran into more than one character like Adam’s smarmy young debating coach, whose methods of argument prefigure online trolling.

But, the author reminds us, even before the 24-hour news cycle and Twitter storms, people were overloaded with disorienting babble every day. The strange ritual of the debaters is no worse than the rapid-fire ‘terms and conditions’ at the end of TV and radio ads. This is one of many political-social insights which Lerner shares with us, as he traces in the 1990s the incipient trends which are going supernova in our own time.

The central question is how a boy turns into ‘a man,’ whatever that means. Various adult men serve as role models for Adam. But then there are ‘The Men’, the adult male strangers who would ring his family’s house regularly to threaten and harass his mother, a well-known author (based on Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Anger). Adam’s obvious contempt for ‘The Men’ (his mother figures out a clever way to prank them back) does not compensate for the fact that they really scare him. Make your best attempt to psychoanalyze the strange flashback in which Adam, while still a small child, encases his penis in chewing-gum. Like a lot of other things in this deeply intriguing novel, neither he nor his parents, a poet and two shrinks, can quite figure it out.

The Topeka School, 2019, FSG Originals

Note: I wrote this review two or three years ago, then lost it in a folder and lately stumbled on it. I can report from this vantage point in time that the novel stayed fresh in my mind even though my review didn’t.

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Glasnost Pilgrims: John le Carré in the late 1980s

The most obvious fact about the stories of John le Carré is the one that goes unaddressed explicitly until The Secret Pilgrim (1990): these are stories primarily about what the British call ‘the officer class’. We do not entirely neglect the ones who are actually doing the spying (lamplighters, scalphunters, etc) and we are quite interested in the agents and assets (the Joes). But the figure around whom the typical story revolves is the British (often half-British) upper-class male intelligence officer. His job is to groom and cultivate spies, which involves exploiting the vulnerabilities of people, getting them to risk being tortured and shot, and generally treating human beings as a means to an end.

Another feature of le Carré’s work, very apparent in the 1980s, is that many of his characters are stark mad. In order to be attracted to this work, it helps if the intelligence officer is one of the psychological walking wounded, and by doing it he gets even worse. The le Carré character is not usually motivated by his political convictions but by his neuroses.

This is not as cynical as it might seem (John Le Carré is never as cynical as he might seem) because the neuroses themselves are not always entirely ignoble.

Today’s cover image: a 1988 postage stamp celebrating Perestroika (Reform) in the Soviet Union

The novels I’m about to talk about involve a new level of introspection compared to what went before. But ‘optimism’ is the other word that springs to mind. Even though it’s a weary and qualified optimism, and it turned out to be wrong, it’s still genuine and it really animates these books.

A Perfect Spy (1986)

The 1980s marked a personal milestone for le Carré: he wrote A Perfect Spy, a great semi-autobiographical novel that we can file under ‘things men do sooner than go to therapy.’ I’m not just being glib there, he pretty much admitted it in this interview. A Perfect Spy is not even a little bit optimistic, but I think that once le Carré got it out of his system he felt a lot better about everything.

A British diplomat and intelligence officer named Magnus Pym disappears. Is he in mourning for his late father, or going through a personal crisis, or defecting across the Iron Curtain? While his wife and his boss and the whole Anglo-American spook apparatus are running around trying to find him, we flash back to before his birth, to a Baptist church in rural England in the 1930s, where a teenage boy named Rick Pym is brazenly conning his entire community out of their money.

The novel really comes to life from this point on. Rick (father of the present-day missing diplomat Magnus) is a shameless cliché-spewing con artist whose act encompasses his entire being and sucks in all those around him. He is a kind of king to a nomad tribe of fellow crooks and their ‘lovelies’ who travel all around Britain blackmailing, cheating and partying. He goes to people’s deathbeds to talk them out of their life savings and leave their families with nothing; he sends his son abroad on a mission to find some chimerical treasure; he’s a black marketeer during World War Two; he runs for parliament; he aspires to stay one step ahead of his ‘temporary problems of liquidity’ and take his place among ‘the highest in the land.’

Superficially Magnus is not like Rick. On a deeper level, it’s a different story. To those who know the grown-up Magnus, he seems to be a charismatic, capable person. Like his father, lying is as easy as breathing to him. But the lie is true for him, in the moment. The flashbacks take us from Magnus’ second trimester to the present day, and from the moment he is old enough to talk we see him giving himself fully to whoever happens to be standing in front of him, whether it’s a Catholic priest, a student communist leader, an MI5 officer, a Czechoslovak spy, or a long succession of unfortunate women. Figuring out just where he is in the middle of all his bizarre words and actions is what’s so engrossing about the novel.

The first edition cover. I liked the first edition covers from the 60s and 70s, but the 80s ones are not great.

How easy it is for the morally disoriented child of the criminal underworld to find a niche in the world of espionage. How comfortable he finds it there, how much like home. Until all his mutually irreconcilable commitments begin to catch up with him.

I’m a bad liar and anyway it rarely occurs to me to lie. I have great alternative weapons in my arsenal such as fudging, saying nothing, and hiding behind irony. So outright liars are intriguing to me. Their customs and ways and motivations are to me as remote as those of ancient peoples or uncontacted indigenous tribes. Though he’s strange, Magnus is also sympathetic. Our sympathy comes from understanding the gap between his public persona and what a deeply vulnerable person he is inside.

I think I was supposed to disapprove mightily of his great transgression of British patriotism but it seemed to me no worse than anything else anyone else does in any le Carré novel. I thought he was a much better human being than his father. I felt let down by the ending, but I can’t see where else it could have gone. This is a powerful story, better than anything else of le Carré’s that I’ve read.

The Russia House (1989)

Barley Blair is a good man with a straightforward, wholesome psychology. How did he find his way into a le Carré novel? Ah – maybe he’s another innocent who’s about to be chewed up and spat out by the spook world. Then again, maybe not; could go either way. Which is what kept me reading to the end.

Blair runs a small publishing company that he inherited from his father. The father was a pre-1956 communist, but of this Blair only inherited an affection for all things Russian. Well, most things Russian; not the secret police or the nuclear missiles. The new period of glasnost and perestroika – reform and openness – under Gorbachev has allowed Blair to visit book fairs in Moscow and make friends in Soviet literary circles. When he gets drunk after a visit to Boris Pasternak’s dacha, an intense (and also drunk) Russian man approaches him with an enigmatic request.

The meaning of this encounter only becomes clear much later. Katya, a young single mother who works in Soviet publishing, gives Blair a strange manuscript which he takes home. It turns out to be full of secrets about Soviet superweapons. Not the kind of secrets you might usually find in a spy thriller, such as how terrifying the Soviet nuclear arsenal is, but secrets about how useless their targeting systems are, how badly the tests are going. Strangely enough, when Blair brings the information to the western spy agencies, they seem a lot more threatened to find out their enemy has feet of clay.  

The dissident rocket scientist sees himself as a doomed revolutionary. He meets Blair on the grounds of the Smolny Institute in St Petersburg, a suggestion, backed up by dialogue cues, that in their mission he hopes to channel the spirit of the October Revolution. 

The Russia House has a lot of the staples of le Carré – dismal office politics that are somehow compelling, hypocrisy, tension, danger and darkness. But it stands out. The main character is a white male Briton, but he’s not an intelligence officer. He’s a poor ‘Joe.’ Most importantly, it is not about exploring this man’s neurosis. Blair is not a saint, but his motivations are straightforward and good: he wants his country to have a friendly partnership with the Soviet Union, to which end he wants to expose how fake the threat of nuclear war is; and meanwhile he is falling in love with Katya. This is a book about following a decent character who’s taken on himself a dangerous mission, and watching how he holds up under terrible pressure.

Soviet Russia has been this shadowy threat for decades in le Carré’s writing. Finally he takes us there in this book. What’s it like? There is a memorable scene set in a dysfunctional hospital; we see through Katya’s eyes a culture of informal and unedifying trade in goods and favours; fear of surveillance and arrest hangs over our characters. Blair secretly thinks Pasternak was over-praised and he is beginning to doubt that the great dissident writers he has been seeking actually exist. A complex and human Soviet Union emerges from this book.

The Secret Pilgrim (1990)

When I read the blurb of The Secret Pilgrim I thought it sounded self-indulgent and inessential, so I didn’t bother to read it for years. That was a mistake, because once I started it I was gripped, and flew through it.

The novel begins in the then-present day, with the end of the Cold War. Our old friend George Smiley has retired for real this time (I promise) and has been absent from le Carré novels for over a decade. (In A Perfect Spy and The Russia House there is not so much as a reference to him or, as far as I can make out, to anyone mentioned in his previous stories). But he returns to give a talk to a class graduating from some kind of spy school. The narrator is their teacher Ned, an aging former intelligence officer (and a secondary character from The Russia House – so there it is) whose career spanned the Cold War. Smiley’s talk turns into a very late night of slightly boozy reminiscences and reflections.

Smiley will say something like, ‘But of course, one mustn’t think we spies are in the business of protecting the country. The basic immorality of what we do is an acid gnawing at our souls and at the heart of democracy.’ At which point Ned will describe Smiley looking apologetically into his glass of brandy before adding, ‘But of course, as long as human nature is what it is, we must always have spies. To deal with situations like…’ He will glance at Ned – ‘…that business in Cluj-Napoca in 1976.’

At this point, narrator Ned will cut in. ‘But I hardly heard what he said. I was already back in Cluj, and I was staring into Elena’s eyes. To this day I don’t know whether she betrayed us, or we her. I suppose it hardly matters…’

There will follow a self-contained novella, fifty or a hundred pages long, describing some tragicomic bungle or ambiguous triumph. There are nine or ten of these episodes all told, spanning a period from the 1960s to the 90s, each one a cracking read in its own right, but each one adding a little to the portrait of Ned himself, and each one addressing itself to the question of Ned’s own journey in life, his search for a sense of purpose. The cause which seemed purposeful and defined at the dawn of the Cold War has by the 1980s dropped him into a reeling, disorientating world where he is surrounded by mental illness.

The framing narrative with Smiley is very strong too. I’ve poked fun, but Smiley’s reflections make for very good reading. And for the Smileyologists out there, Ned’s little episodes feature many characters from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – Esterhase, Haydon, etc.

Some episodes are more serious, some less so. There is a heartwarming story about a strange favour Smiley did for someone back in the day, and an absolutely harrowing account of an ex-priest and child abuser who spied for Nixon’s bombing campaigns against Cambodian villages, then got tortured by the Khmer Rouge. My favourites are some of the lower-stakes stories. There is one about a con artist from the Eastern Bloc who convinces the west that he is a patriot and martyr.

I must mention that there is a run-in with a character named Britta, who is eerily similar to her namesake in the sitcom Community (2009-2015). Is this where they got the name? Dan Harmon doesn’t seem like a John le Carré guy. I never felt this way about Britta in Community, but this Britta really is the worst. OK, second-worst after the Cambodia guy.

The second-last episode shows Ned interviewing Frewin, an eccentric civil servant who has been anonymously denounced as a spy. Despite Frewin’s extravagant delusions, he is astute enough to see that he and the spiritually lost Ned have a lot in common, such as a growing disgust with capitalism, the very system Ned set out to defend all those years ago. The final episode hammers the point home. Ned meets a posh and utterly amoral arms dealer. Ned has to ask himself whether this evil man represents everything he has spent his life protecting. Smiley in his after-dinner remarks takes up this theme as well – for example he suggests that the new recruits should spy on the Ozone Layer.

The Night Manager (1993)

Honourable mention here for The Night Manager, which I did not finish. This one is about a hotel worker who sets out on a mission to take down an evil arms dealer. I found the opening compelling and wanted to see how it would all turn out, but the main character set about making a ‘legend’ for himself (ie, living out a fake life to create a verifiable cover story), and he took too long at it.

Conclusion

Communism is defeated, le Carré suggests, so now it’s time to turn our fire on the excesses of capitalism: on environmental destruction, labour exploitation, imperialism and war profiteering. He didn’t want to destroy capitalism (more’s the pity), just tame its excesses. His hope that people in Europe and North America would take on capitalism en masse anticipated the anti-globalisation movements and the Occupy protests. But like his hopes for Russia, his vision of a kinder and fairer capitalism has definitely not been realised.

Le Carré took his own advice, even if too few others did. In his last few books he took on capitalism and empire with increasing sharpness. That’s what I’m going to write about in the next post.  

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Meta: it’s ‘practically impossible’ to make AI tools unless you let us steal

Facebook and Instagram have put forward a rationale for the plagiarism they are doing in order to develop AI tools.

From theGuardian.co.uk: ‘According to Meta’s defence, there is “no economically feasible mechanism” for AI developers to obtain licensed copies of the “astonishingly large volume” of books needed to train AI.’

Well, if there’s no feasible way to do it, then just don’t steal the books. You can just not do it.

‘Meta “would have to initiate individualised negotiations with millions of authors”…’

That sounds very difficult. It also sounds like Meta’s problem, not ours. So again, how about, don’t do it?

It continues:

‘…a process which “would be onerous for even a few authors; it is practically impossible for hundreds of thousands or millions.”’

They are complaining that unless governments just give them permission to steal it all, it’s ‘practically impossible.’ Word of advice: if the thing you want to do is incompatible with paying authors for using their work for your profits, then it’s a bad thing and it should be practically impossible.

A Perfect Nemesis: John le Carré in the 1970s

When you get familiar with 1970s John le Carré, you start to realise (and you don’t mind) that many of his novels fall into a comfortable pattern. It goes like this: Smiley (usually it’s Smiley) goes to a place and talks to a person, and the person is compelled to reveal some of the mystery; Smiley goes to another place and talks to another person, and some more of the mystery is revealed, from another angle so that these revelations only barely overlap with those of the last interview; Smiley goes to another place… and so on. Generally the person reveals to Smiley more than they wished, without Smiley resorting to torture or even threats. You begin to realise that the spy story is only a narrative vehicle to bring us to these places and to meet these people. The real story is the unique personality of Connie Sachs and the eccentric shabbiness of her home, or the paranoia of a mercenary pilot hiding in the Southeast Asian jungle, or the domestic life and peculiar speech patterns of an Estonian émigré activist, or the physical and mental scars which a teacher living in his caravan is barely able to hide.

Ostensibly Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People are a trilogy about an epic duel between two spymasters: the ‘flabby liberal’ Smiley, redeeming a western world that surely doesn’t deserve him, and the ‘fanatic’ Karla, Smiley’s perfect foil, the dark lord of Moscow Centre. Actually le Carré does not milk this set-up. Like the xenomorph in Alien, Karla looms large but we barely see him and we do not hear him speak. If le Carré had tried to deliver on this set-up, the battle of the great arch-spooks, he would have faltered. Moral certainty is not what fuels his stories. This loose trilogy ends up being something quite different from what we might expect.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)

Book covers have changed since the 1960s, haven’t they?

In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley and his allies are outside the Circus, waging a secret war against its leadership. The story opens with Smiley in the wilderness and his ally Control fallen from power and deceased. The old guard have been ousted by a clique of four senior spies. Smiley is summoned back from retirement and told that one of the four is a Soviet undercover agent, and he is tasked with discovering which one.

Compared to those tight thrillers of the 1960s, this one is deeper and wider. The places to which we follow Smiley and the people he meets tell a story of their own, not a spy story, but one of cowardly and foolish apparatchiks pursuing their own prestige at the expense of the organisation. The traitor in the leadership is only a part of a broader context where those around him are willing to buy what he’s selling and not look too closely. This corrupt operation is called Witchcraft, and that’s fitting because like the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the enemy agent works to ‘win us with honest trifles and betray us in deepest consequence.’ Our apparatchiks hope that the honest trifles will impress the Americans. Meanwhile their real operations are being foiled, their real networks broken up, their real agents and officers eliminated.

Still from the movie Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011, dir Tomas Alfredson). I love this adaptation of the novel. They found ways to tell a very talky, indoorsy story in a powerful visual way. I especially love the focus on analogue and janky 1970s technology. My only nit-pick is that it’s bad that, like the BBC in the previous TV adaptation, they cast as George Smiley a guy who isn’t stout at all.

So why should I personally care if there’s a Soviet mole in British intelligence? That sounds like their problem. Smiley bypasses my cynicism. I care about this bad institution because he cares about it. He is faithful to an unfaithful wife and to a ruling class whose bankruptcy is known to few better than him. He is broad-minded, melancholy and conscientious. His lack of cynicism must not be mistaken for innocence. No criticism I could make of the institution and the cause that he serves (MI6 and liberal-democratic capitalism) would really shake him, or cause him to hate me.

When I read this: c 2013

Locations: England, Hong Kong, Czechoslovakia

Why read it? George Smiley takes down a traitor in the very highest ranks of the Circus, in the process waging a secret struggle against its leadership.  

Memorable moments: There are parts with action and danger, but the most memorable are the most understated: the encounters between a young schoolboy and the wounded Jim Prideaux, a victim of the traitor.

The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

The Honourable Schoolboy is a radical departure for a le Carré book. Most of his novels are heavy on office politics and upper-class angst and light on exciting adventures in the field. If an agent leaves Britain at all, he will go to nowhere that wasn’t once ruled by a Habsburg or a Hohenzollern. Smiley is either retired or in a humble position.

But in The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley is now unchallenged in the top job in the Circus, with his allies in the top positions around him. He sends an agent abroad – for once, not to Mitteleuropa but to Southeast Asia. What follows, over a long page-count, is a panorama of violent conflict and imperial collapse in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, plus intelligence skullduggery in and around Hong Kong.

Don’t worry: as well as dull fare such as car bombs and peasant revolutions, we have plenty of exciting office politics. The Honourable Schoolboy has the distinction of being the only novel where Smiley occupies the top job in the Circus, and we get to see how him and his allies run things.

It’s a gripping and exciting read that I flew through in spite of its length. Unfortunately I remember it far less well than others I read around that time.

Again from the 2011 Alfredson movie. Esterhase, Haydon, Alleline, Control, Smiley and Bland in their soundproof room on the Fifth Floor. In The Honourable Schoolboy, most of this lot are in the doghouse. The main character is Jerry Westerby, played by Stephen Graham in the 2011 movie.

When I read this: c 2014

Locations: England, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, China

Why read it? A more action-oriented and exotic take on le Carré’s formula. The only novel where Smiley controls the Circus.

Memorable moments: Connie Sachs at the top table formerly occupied by Alleline, Haydon and co. being her eccentric self, complete with a dog which, because she is a communist train-spotter, she has named Trot.

Smiley’s People (1979)

This novel opens with Smiley once more on the outside, once more abandoned by his wife, and this time drunk and more depressed than usual. He is called back in to investigate the murder of an Estonian émigré general, and he discovers that the murder is linked to an intrigue which might be exploited to bring about the downfall and defection of his arch-enemy Karla.

The is classic le Carré and classic Smiley: we follow his waddling progress through interview after interview, distinct character after distinct character, the parts building up to our understanding of the whole. The promise of a final reckoning with Karla keeps us turning the pages, and the texture and humanity of le Carré’s world rewards us for doing so. If you’re here for the rankings, take note: this is my favourite of these three novels.

The basic moral conflict doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny, though. Smiley has to defeat Karla by using his own methods against him – how tragic. Only he doesn’t, does he? We don’t see Smiley pulling out anyone’s fingernails. Karla’s agents do terrible things in this novel but the worst thing Smiley does is a little blackmail. Using Karla’s love for his daughter against him doesn’t seem that bad, actually, because the daughter is not harmed in any way.

This ties into what I had to say about the 1960s le Carré books: the moral equivalence between East and West, sometimes hinted at, is never confirmed and often denied.

From the opening credits of the BBC adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (John Irvin, 1979)

When I read this: c 2022

Locations: England, Germany, Switzerland

Why read it? The final reckoning between Smiley and Karla. Smiley himself goes overseas on a dangerous mission to trap the Soviet spymaster.

Memorable moments: The climax of the operation revolves around a scene in which Smiley and co corner a Soviet diplomat, Grigoriev, and convince him to hand over the information crucial to trapping Karla.

In the previous post I talked about James Bond. Comparisons between Smiley and Bond decline in relevance past a certain point because Ian Fleming abandoned the Cold War pretty early in the series, and the movies abandoned it even earlier. Before the 1960s are out, Bond is doing collabs with his Soviet counterparts to take down the international crime agency Spectre.

Le Carré and his Circus stuck grimly with the Cold War right to the end. But they moved with the times. Le Carré’s novels from the 1980s are, I’ve come to think, his best. The Gorbachev period brings out more moral uncertainty and soul-searching than ever before. Next post I’ll talk about three of these brilliant Glasnost-era books.

Then again, season 2 of Andor is coming. If I have things to say about that, I’ll have to clear the decks here and return to le Carré in a few weeks.

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Dubious Crusades: John le Carré in the 1960s

David Cornwell began writing fiction (under the pen name John le Carré) while working as a British intelligence officer in Central Europe in the middle of the century. Talking to Channel 4 in later life, he said that during this espionage work he was never himself in any danger. The interviewer asked a good follow-up question: whether he had ever placed anyone else in danger. Le Carré replied, with a stony expression, that he would rather not say. The camera lingered on his face and we could read there what we read in his books: the troubled conscience of a spook.
I have surprised myself by reading an unlucky number of the novels in which this man wrestled with his conscience. That is, half of the 26 novels he published in about 60 years. Some of these I’ve read, others I’ve had read to me by the excellent Michael Jayston thanks to Borrowbox and public libraries. If those thirteen novels skew toward his best works, and I think they do, then I’m in a pretty good position to give some recommendations. Over this and the next few posts I’m going to give my short review of each one.
I’ve tagged this post ‘What are the best John le Carré books.’ But my regular readers may have noticed that I don’t go in for scoring books out of 100, or even ten or five, and I’m not keen on rating them like athletes. It would take me twenty seconds to tell you the five le Carré novels that, right this minute, I imperfectly remember liking best, according to my tastes and opinions at the time I read them, for what that’s worth. But these are all very good books. It would be more purposeful to write a little about each one and what I thought about it. At the end of each post I’ll offer some gestures toward rankings and recommendations. If you want to know which le Carré book to read, and if you’re going to take my word for it, take a few thousand words while you’re at it.

Call for the Dead (1961)

Original cover. Note that Mr le Carré is still a ‘crime novelist.’

Le Carré’s first novel was a murder mystery and not really an espionage novel. But Call for the Dead introduces his most well-known character, George Smiley, a quiet and retiring senior spook (literally – like Iron Man, he retires at the end of every novel only to show up again in the next). We begin by learning that his beautiful wife has run off with a race-car driver, and by seeing his stoicism in the face of this betrayal. Smiley’s humility conceals his sharp mind and dogged will. As the novel opens, he has been running security checks on a civil servant named Fennon, only for that Fennon to turn up dead, apparently by suicide. Smiley is not fooled – Smiley alone is not fooled – and he starts unravelling a case that involves East German spies. It is a short, sharp story that’s well-paced and populated by compelling characters.

Many features that will become familiar in le Carré’s world here resolve themselves out of the mid-century murk for the first time.
Communism appears as an illiberal, violent and underhanded force. But it’s not some cosmic evil from outside space and time. Of our three characters who are (or used to be) communist, all have good motives. The civil servant Fennon took part in hunger marches with Welsh miners; his wife Elsa is a holocaust survivor who is enraged to see former Nazis creep back into power in West Germany; Frey is a dedicated anti-fascist who used to be an agent of Smiley’s during the war. Smiley doesn’t hate his adversaries. Rather, he feels a pained and partial self-recognition when they reveal themselves. Smiley sees more of himself in them than he sees in his own pompous and parochial superiors.
How is it different from later le Carré? There is no real critique of Britain’s intelligence services, no forays beyond the Iron Curtain. All in all, we are in cosier territory here.


When I read this: c 2023
Locations: London
Why read it? John le Carré’s first novel; George Smiley’s first appearance; an accomplished thriller.
Memorable moments: When Smiley arrives home to find an East German spy opening the door for him, only quick thinking and a cool head save his life.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)


The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was written when the Berlin Wall had just been built, and it captured the zeitgeist powerfully, going on to wild commercial success.
Alec Leamas is a burned-out, hard-drinking spy whose agents have all been exterminated by East German intelligence. He returns to London where Control (leader of the intelligence agency known as ‘The Circus’) enlists Leamas for one last solo mission. While Call for the Dead was a traditional murder mystery, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has a brow-furrowing plot revolving around spy agencies bluffing, double-bluffing and triple-bluffing each other. As the novel goes on it gets more claustrophobic and paranoid.
It’s not a spoiler to say that Leamas has been lied to by Control (and by Smiley, who puts in a few appearances). The villain Mundt returns from Call for the Dead, and Fiedler, a principled and well-intentioned Jewish communist working for the Stasi, channels familiar energies (perhaps an echo of Frey, though to a more tragic end here). Towards the end Control’s real agenda is revealed as devastating and ruthless. If you ever catch yourself feeling too warm and fuzzy about George Smiley, remember what he did to Alec Leamas and Liz Gold.
Gold is a young woman Alec Leamas meets when he’s busy building his legend prior to his final mission (A ‘legend’ in this context is a kind of espionage method acting – the cover story which a spy not only concocts but lives and documents in order to fool the other side.) Soon Leamas learns something surprising about his girlfriend.
She tentatively begins to explain ‘I believe in history…’ and he bursts out laughing. ‘You’re not a bloody communist, are you?’ She has no idea her boyfriend is a wounded cold warrior, so she’s a bit confused at his amusement, but she’s relieved that her political affiliation doesn’t scare him off.
That’s a good moment, with irony flying in all directions, but I think le Carré’s depiction of Liz is patronising overall, and it’s a weakness of the novel. I get that she’s supposed to be the innocent in all this, but she’s way too innocent. She actually dislikes everything about being in the Communist Party apart from the peace marches. Her party comrade is simultaneously a gay man (portrayed without sympathy), and a lech toward her. She tolerates all this and more for reasons that are not clear. A more streetwise Liz would have been just as sympathetic but more believable – someone who, like Leamas, has made ethical trade-offs to pursue what she believes is right.

When I read this: c 2011
Locations: East Germany, London
Why read it? The novel that made John Le Carré’s name and launched his career; his first spy novel proper, introducing his dark and morally dubious portrayal of the world of espionage
Memorable moments: The story begins and ends with desperate people making a break for it at the Berlin Wall – whose construction was recent news at the time this book was published

The Looking Glass War (1965)

The Looking Glass War is a brutally unglamorous story. It revolves around The Department, a distinct intelligence organisation overshadowed by George Smiley’s ‘Circus.’ The Department has been reduced to a small staff without much funding, with its Director Leclerc wallowing in a perverse nostalgia for the days of World War Two, when he used to regularly send young men to their deaths. When an East German defector brings hints of a missile build-up, Leclerc embarks on an escalating series of risky operations to verify the data. Our main characters fear an imminent re-run of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but beneath their fear they really want to believe it’s true. Because, what a coup for The Department! They feel they deserve this. For most of the book we don’t know if we’re in the midst of a cock-up or a conspiracy.
At the climax, we follow an agent on a quixotic mission beyond the Iron Curtain. But mostly the conflict is office politics, the cause is nostalgia and bureaucratic prestige, and the subterfuge is inter-agency rather than international. For example, the Department has to borrow radios from the Circus, without letting them know anything about the intel they have or the operation they are planning. If the Circus get wind of it, they will take over. Le Carré is good at making office politics compelling, at describing one self-important bureaucrat witheringly through the eyes of another equally self-important bureaucrat. He appears to loathe the upper tiers of British society, but he speaks effortlessly in their voice.

The most memorable character besides Lelclerc does not fit into the familiar British-officer-class mould at all. This is Fred Leiser, a Polish immigrant who played a heroic role behind enemy lines for The Department during World War Two. Leiser has no stake in the intelligence world anymore; he has settled into civilian life. But the Department convince him to come back and risk his life on a mission into East Germany. I was pretty horrified at how this poor guy is groomed and flattered and tricked. At the same time Leiser is a strong-willed, rather arrogant character who actively chooses to do this, and for all the wrong reasons. Le Carré had evidently learned how to portray a guileless innocent.

And if we’re going to talk about themes that will be big later making their first appearance here, consider The Department as a metaphor for post-imperial Britain. In later novels we see The Circus itself in the same position as The Department, with the CIA as the bigger counterpart from whom it is trying to secure resources, but also to keep its petty secrets and barren intrigues.


When I read this: c 2023
Locations: Finland, West Germany, East Germany, London
Why read it? A more tragicomic take on the dark underworld of intelligence; all the troubling morality of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold but with murkier stakes.
Memorable moments: We are subjected to a scene of haunting dismalness when Avery visits the flat of his colleague who has died mysteriously while on a mission; later, we have the humorous tension between Fred Leiser and the sergeant who is training him.

Honourable mention here for A Small Town in Germany (1968), which I tackled in 2011 or so but didn’t get far into. It concerns a fictional and (then) near-future student movement in Germany which espouses an inchoate mishmash of left and right politics. I think I was put off by the author’s dismissal of the student radicals. I remain curious and might tackle it again.

Featured image: detail from ‘Three Faces of Europe’, 2 January 1950 https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/vault/1950/01/19500102/38/1550.jpg Author: Chapin, Robert M.

Summing up… (and my favourite of these three novels)

The basic pitch of early le Carré was that he was selling a more unvarnished truth about intelligence – Forget James Bond, he seemed to say, this is the real deal; none of that moral complacency, none of those innocent assumptions about right and wrong. In its place the vision offered by early le Carré is that the West is benevolent and the East is malevolent, but that in the struggle the West has regrettably lost sight of its principles, and in terms of methods the two sides are equally devious and cruel.

Except not really, because in le Carré novels we see the Stalinists doing much worse things than we see the imperialists doing. Even leaving that aside, though, isn’t that vision complacent in its own way? The idea of Britain and the United States as basically benevolent and good forces in the world, in contrast to the wicked Soviets, is not really compatible with my own understanding of the broader history. I know what the Soviets did in Hungary. But men of Leamas, Smiley and Guillam’s vintage ran gulag archipelagos in Malaysia and Kenya. The Soviets imposed dictatorships in Eastern Europe, and the capitalist countries imposed their own on their side of the Iron Curtain, for example in Greece. The Stalinist states were certainly cruder in their repressive methods than, say, the British state when operating on British soil upon white British subjects. But the Soviet bloc was basically conservative and defensive, not expansionist or aggressive. So the reality is murkier still than we see in early le Carré.

The paranoid multi-layered duel of deception in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is very powerful. But of these three novels, I most admire The Looking Glass War. Its tragicomedy and its basic theme of utter delusion ring truer to me given the above points.

Le Carré’s novels of the 1960s were tight and focused. They were thrillers in cheap covers that I imagine you could carry in your jacket and read on the London Underground. In the 1970s, which I’ll look at next week, Smiley’s chilly and foggy world expands to an epic scale. These early novels have plenty of tension, humanity and power, but they are apprentice pieces by comparison with what is to come.

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Can a machine write a story?

Last month OpenAI boss Sam Altman announced that his company had created an AI tool that could write a short story. You know the most depressing thing about this news? Sam Altman did not wake up one morning and, just on a whim, ask his software to write a story. His company worked really hard to get it to write a short story. No doubt some tech worker missed a kid’s birthday, maybe even birth, in order to work long hours on it. They plagiarized and polluted for it. Getting an AI that could write a short story was something they had to pursue.

Here’s the thing: even if it was easy and cheap and green, why would anyone want a machine that can write a short story? Is there a shortage of people who can write stories? Is writing stories a chore, like washing clothes or cutting grass? Are people crying out for relief from the burden of being creative?

I made it clear enough last week that I think this Gen AI thing does have limited uses (“a moderate productivity booster in certain situations”, as my commenter, The Director from MilitaryRealism.blog summed it up). I’m not qualified in any very technical fields like engineering, logistics or programming, but I’ll add that I can see potential uses that could be important.

Writing is more my area; I have an English degree and I’ve worked in teaching and libraries. So I don’t hesitate to say that short fiction is a glaring example of something that’s not a useful application of Gen AI by any measure.

Full disclosure, I haven’t read the AI-written short story. I read a lot, but I don’t happen to have a Gen-AI-short-story-shaped gap in my reading.

To illustrate this post, more cringe-inducing AI imagery from social media pages purporting to be about history and mythology

It’s not inevitable

The Guardian got some writers to react to the short story written by the machine. Most of the reactions ranged between ‘Wow, this is actually pretty good’ and ‘I fear for my livelihood.’ Kamila Shamsie pointed out that GenAI will reproduce and reinforce all the biases, all the racism and sexism etc, in its ‘training materials.’ For Nick Harkaway, the story is an ‘elegant emptiness’ and being moved by it is like a bird falling in love with its reflection in a window. He emphasises that ‘none of this will just happen. These are policy choices, and the end result will be the result of a conscious decision.’

That’s what the hype-mongers want us to forget, isn’t it?

The future promised by Gen AI is one where nobody is paid to do anything creative or educational; instead, computer programmes owned and controlled by a few billionaires create flat, uncanny versions of what humans used to create. For some reason we are all supposed to be excited about this. But whether you feel excitement or dread, either way you are making the mistake of treating the whole thing as inevitable and natural.

Actually, there are humans making decisions and investments at every link in the chain here. And some, like CD Projekt Red, are making decisions unfavourable to the spread of AI in creative industries.

I don’t think AI is going to put writers out of a job. The vast majority of us are already out of a job. Tech bros claiming to have made a programme that can do what we do, and expecting us to be pleased about it, is just the latest in a long line of insults, and far from the worst.

I say ‘far from the worst’ because I don’t think these AI tools are about to revolutionise the publishing industry, any more than they have revolutionised any of the other things they were supposed to revolutionise. It will mess with a lot of people’s livelihoods and it will muddy things up for a while. But it will not be a game-changer. The wave may leave behind puddles but it will recede. So I don’t believe the tech bros’ dystopia will happen.

GenAI will probably carve out and retain certain niches, for better or for worse, in the publishing industry. But a machine can’t actually write a story. There’s a few basic category errors at work here.

Another one found in the wild. See if you can spot the warrior who has jumped 200 metres into the air.

Why can’t a machine write a story?

First, the ‘AI’ that exists today is not some sentient machine-mind (‘alternative intelligence,’ in the disappointing words of Jeanette Winterson). Maybe some day we will have that, and our android cousins will write their cyber-Iliads, which will be very cool. I’ll be the first in line. But that’s a whole different thing. I saw someone in a comment section gushing that ‘we have taught sand to dream.’ But what we have now is just glorified predictive text. Whether in written or visual or musical form, it just shows you the lowest common denominator of what’s already out there in the culture.

Second, writing is about expressing your feelings and communicating your thoughts and experiences. A computer doesn’t have these things. It can imitate the way humans express them, provided a bunch of rich people decide to devote stupendous sums of wealth to making it do so. But again it’s not the same thing.

What if the computer’s imitation gets so good we can’t tell the difference? And aren’t some human writers also basically hacks, unoriginal, etc?

First, every writer does not have to be Arundhati Roy for the point to stand that a computer can’t be Arundhati Roy. Stories are rooted in material reality and our experiences of it. No training materials or prompts can produce something like The God of Small Things, which is viscerally a story of its time and place.

Or imagine if The Grapes of Wrath had been written using pre-existing ‘training materials.’ It would have portrayed the Dust Bowl refugees as incendiary vagrant criminals and the cops as brave defenders of civilisation.

Even if the imitation seems to be perfect and seamless, the above points will tell. Stories are not pure exercises in form. They are about things. The most important ones are about things nobody has written about before. Even science fiction and fantasy stories are about themes and feelings that really exist.

Instead of Steinbeck’s wonderful and evocative descriptions of the human impact of the Dust Bowl, we would get ‘Chapter 2. The Dust Bowl took place in the 1930s and was caused by a number of factors. First…’ Front cover image from 1939. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Folktroubadour

AI in Gaming

I first became familiar with the phrase ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in relation to games. AI is what tells the mercenaries in Far Cry to search the jungle for you systematically when you hide. It’s what tells the hostile army in a Total War game to oppose your cavalry with spears. AI is what’s breaking down when your little villager takes a shortcut past ten enemy catapults, or when a Nazi stands out in the middle of a Norman field waiting for you to shoot him.

You’d think GenAI would have massive applications in gaming. But so far it’s been a real damp squib in that sector.

Recently PCGamer reported on a wild example. Basically, Microsoft made a demo based on a game called Quake 2 using Gen AI. The project used three megawatts of energy – the output of tens of thousands of solar panels. All that, for what? An incoherent, uncanny experience that looked vaguely like Quake 2 and that gave players motion sickness. For context, Quake 2 (that is, a version of Quake 2 that is the full game and that actually works and doesn’t make you nauseous) was made over 25 years ago by a team of just 13 people.

Something to think about: if they had managed to remake a part of the game exactly as it was with AI, that would have been hailed as a triumph. But… Then we’d just have a game level that already exists.

How do I explain this for people unfamiliar with games?

Imagine if I rewrote one chapter of Killing Floor by Lee Child, and presented it here on The 1919 Review expecting your adulation. But in my rewrite, the names of the characters change every other paragraph, and the font somehow gives the reader a headache. I rewrote it by listing every time a particular word is used then arranging the words according to arcane predictive rules. And, somehow, it took the entire output of a nuclear plant just to power the special laptop I used to do this.

Screenshot from Deus Ex (2000), which predicted this like it predicted everything else. Ion Storm & Eidos Interactive

That’s the essence of the Quake 2 situation, as best I can explain it using books as a comparison, but to be fair (and as I’ve made clear above), GenAI has actually produced more polished results when it’s confined to text.

In both cases the same questions arise: what is the purpose of this? How can the results (good or bad or just trifling) possibly justify the expense and the effort and the pollution? Why are we all expected to indulge Big Tech even when the project into which they are pouring so much wealth is largely unnecessary where it is not actually harmful?

GenAI is in many ways like crypto: the tech bros have invented a new toy and they demand that everyone takes their toy seriously. They demand that we sacrifice the future of the planet in order to sustain their toy. This toy is at the heart of an investor frenzy. They promise that when their toy has taken over the world, it will right all the wrongs it has done along the way (crypto, we were told, will actually save energy by putting all the banks out of business, thus reducing their emissions to zero; in the same way, we are told that AI will actually come up with clever ways to save energy.)

In other ways GenAI is not like crypto. It actually has utility, even if you agree with me that this utility cannot on balance be justified. It can be a lot of fun. It can make it easier to write emails. Its potential in technical fields is an open question.

But it has no utility in writing stories or developing videogames. It’s actually difficult to wrap your head around how stupidly wasteful and contrived such projects are. Even if that wasn’t the case, and even if the results were decent, it’s not worth one single artist losing their livelihood.

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2 years on, has the “AI Revolution” changed your life?

‘It’s going to change everything,’ people said, and even though they said it more often with dread than with excitement, it appeared they accepted it as inevitable.

When Generative AI became headline news a little over two years ago with the launch in late 2022 of ChatGPT, it was not simply oversold. It was hyped to within an inch of its life. Two years on, it has not revolutionized the way I work or live – thankfully. I’ve read about some ways that it’s useful and a lot of ways that it’s making the world a worse place. But in this post I want to pause and give you a full catalogue of how Generative AI has actually affected my life, as a snapshot of where the AI Revolution stands from the point of view of one individual in April 2025.

Of Bots and Men

At work I use a program called Canva and in early 2023 it drew my attention to its AI image generator, which I had a great time playing around with for a while. ‘Of Mice and Men but Lenny and George are Robots’, ‘World War Two in space’ and ‘alien spaceship in County Westmeath’ were all fun. People look doughy and uncanny, and machines look like they were drawn by someone even less mechanically literate than me, and the whole thing looks like the first three results in a Google Image search have been mashed together indiscriminately. It looks as uncreative and unimaginative as it is. But it’s fun, and I could plausibly claim that it was work; I wasn’t messing around on the job, I was upskilling to rise to the occasion of the AI Revolution. It is fortunate that I had that excuse in my back pocket, because all my colleagues could see ‘battle of Stalingrad with lasers’, ‘atom bomb on Dublin’ and other brainsick adolescent creations whenever they looked at the drafts folder. All in all, I can vouch for Generative AI as a fun toy.


As an aside, in the two years since, it’s possible this tool has gotten worse. In 2023 it gave me photorealistic rusty hobo robots in a Steinbeckian dust bowl scene; today it gave me cute robot mice.

And here’s another time AI impacted my life: I wrote about it here.

Who prompts the prompters?

Gen AI is all about writing prompts. But two years on it feels like we humans are the ones being prompted. Tech companies are nagging us to use the AI tools they’ve spent so much money on, usually in contexts where I don’t want or need to. If I tap my phone screen the wrong way, it invites me to use AI tools to help me do internet searches. No thanks, I’m fine. Right now as I write this, over on the margin of this computer screen, WordPress is inviting me to use AI to generate a title, featured image and feedback for this post. The good people at WordPress don’t appear to understand that I’m writing because I enjoy writing.

Ned Beauman, in his 2022 novel Venemous Lumpsucker, was referring to this kind of thing when he wrote about an ‘almost libidinal desire to relinquish autonomy.’

My wife uses AI at work, for actual work. She uses it to write formal emails, and I’ve seen the results, and I think that’s a great use for these AI tools. I understand that there are other things like this, where AI can do boring jobs quickly. So as well as being a fun toy, it help you write the kind of letters there are already templates for online.

Tsunami of Slop

In fairness to Generative AI, it has significantly changed social media, in that it’s polluted my feeds with stupid, tasteless, uncanny or offensive imagery, sometimes accompanied by text riddled with inaccuracies and written in AI’s characteristic style of pseudo-intelligent noncommittal blandness. As far as I can see, two particular online constituencies have seized on Generative AI. The first group is anti-refugee protesters, who make hideous posters for their events and fake photographs to rile people up. The second group is Facebook pages about history and archaeology. They illustrate their chatbot-written posts with, say, a picture purporting to show Brian Boru at the Battle of Clontarf – but Clontarf has been transformed from flat coastal fields to high foggy crags, and Brian Boru looks exactly like the Witcher. Or a Viking ship landing on the Irish coast – in the shadow of a ruined Norman castle that couldn’t have been built, let alone fallen into ruin, for another 400 years.
One image I saw in my news feed claimed to be of Dublin. The buildings and quays looked Dublinesque, but they were all in the wrong place. Now what I think is that the image was designed to provoke me into pointing out in the comments that, say, Grattan Bridge was missing, or that Bono’s hotel is upside-down. I resisted the urge but I could see that thousands of people had already commented. There is probably a whole category of AI post now that’s just correction bait. Again, AI is prompting us now, not the other way around.

It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a good way to maximise engagement – far more effective than, for example, posting something funny or good or clever. 

While all this social media stuff is ugly and tacky, it’s at least interesting, in a Black Mirror kind of way. And image generators can be fun, and it’s nice to have software that can write the less enjoyable type of email. That’s it, really.

Maybe my experience is typical of a sizeable layer of people, maybe not. But if we make a rough balance sheet of the AI Revolution based on my experience, then it definitely wasn’t worth burning all those fossil fuels for.

Tune in next week for my thoughts on the question, ‘Can a machine write a story?’ And to finish off this post, here’s a small sample of the tsunami of slop that’s come down my news feed these last two years. 

’til next week, Happy Birthday Solider.

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