A review of Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow (Crown, 2023)
You may have heard of Father Coughlin, the pro-Nazi Catholic priest whose radio broadcasts went out to tens of millions of Americans in the 1930s. You may have read in Jacobin that Philip Johnson, one of the most successful architects of the 20th Century United States, spent the pre-World War Two years promoting fascism in the USA and trying to keep the country out of the war. You may have heard of the Silver Shirts, the US equivalent of Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts. You may have known that the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh was pro-Hitler and led an organisation called America First.
I’d heard of the above, but most of my understanding of fascism in the pre-war US came from alternative history fiction: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth and K is for Killing by Daniel Easterman.
But Rachel Maddow’s 2023 book Prequel opened my eyes to much crazier stuff. I remember that at one point in Easterman’s novel we encounter a federal employee whose job it is to figure out legal loopholes so that mass internment and concentration camps don’t break US laws. Well, it turns out the Nazis actually sent legal experts over to the US to study how the Jim Crow laws worked, so that they could bring in similar racist laws back in Germany. It’s a reminder that the USA was already a bizarre race-obsessed oppressive dystopia.
I didn’t know that at least 24 elected members of the US Congress abused their free mail privileges to send out millions of copies of pro-Nazi speeches bearing their own signatures but written by Nazi agents. I hadn’t heard of General George Van Horn Moseley. I didn’t know that in California a coalition of fascist and far-right groups planned a mass lynching of famous Jewish people from Hollywood, to be followed by a spree of random gun and gas attacks on Jewish homes. This Helter Skelter-like plan was supposed to trigger a race war. I didn’t know that Coughlin followers in New York organised militias, armed with weapons stolen from the National Guard by sympathetic military officers.
Maddow also tells the stories of various private citizens who campaigned to expose and thwart the Nazis: the LA private investigator Leon Lewis, the assistant Attorney General O. John Rogge (After the war, he tried to reveal to the public the extent of Nazi penetration into the US; he was fired and his report quashed) and a cast of other brave individuals.
But they are merely individuals. An important episode in the fight against fascism in the US in the 1930s was the counter-protest at the America First rally in Madison Square Garden. But Maddow dismisses this protest in one passing sentence. The only mentions of the labour movement, as far as I can recall, are negative. She correctly emphasises that the US Communist Party was by no means the seditious threat it was portrayed as. But the role of communists, socialists and trade unions in opposing fascism is skated over entirely. Pelley and the Silver Shirts were based in Minneapolis – but Maddow does not look at the labour movement and the socialist left in that city, which confronted and organised against the Silver Shirts.
The focus is instead on the judicial system journalists, Hollywood, etc. To be fair, Maddow does not neglect to show how the state, from beat cops to the Attorney General, enabled the fascist agitation.
Maddow’s style is very engaging. She brings a laugh-out-loud quality to some of the farcical scenes from the Dies Committee. She does not write coyly or piously or with any false neutrality. That gives the narrative plenty of energy but it has overheads. I’m not from the United States and I found the self-righteous nationalism a bit weird (And I’m sure there are plenty of people from the US who would find it equally weird). For example, on page 195 we are supposed to be shocked at a politician refusing to show sufficient uncritical jingoism in the context of the First World War. The First.
I know of Maddow only by reputation as a liberal national security hawk who was very into the Trump-Russia stuff. This story, as the title implies, is supposed to be taken as a parallel to more recent events. And the strange constellation of far right thugs we see here do offer many parallels to the MAGA right today.
In spite of my criticisms I read through this book quickly and with great interest. Many parts of it were truly fascinating and horrifying. Not only does it recover a hidden history, it invites us to ponder alternative – and far worse – ways things could have turned out.
It’s New Year’s Eve so I want to thank all my readers. It’s been a fantastic year for the blog and I have big plans for 2024.
Happy holidays/Christmas and new year to my readers. In terms of views and visitors, 2023 was a big jump from the previous two years. Here were the five most popular posts of the year.
Coming in at first place is Mikhail Sholokhov’s epic novel of Cossacks, romance and revolution. Somebody somewhere must have shared this prominently, because even though I wrote it a good year or two ago it keeps coming in as the most popular post, week on week, month on month. One of these readers contacted me; he is the namesake of one of the characters and some of his ancestors were involved in the Russian Revolution.
Sticking with the Russian and Soviet themes, Trotsky takes second place. I originally wrote this post long before I started the 1919 Review so it’s gratifying to see it still gets a lot of attention. Russian state TV made a ridiculous TV drama series about Trotsky to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Here I break down the follies of the first episode.
Cover art from From Sláine: Demon Killer, written by Pat Mills and drawn by Dermot Power, Greg Staples, Glenn Fabry and David Lloyd.
Taking the bronze medal, something a bit less serious and not Soviet-related. At once musclebound and middle-brow, Sláine from 2000AD comics is something rich and strange. Sláine is an axe-wielding adventurer who hails from a fictional past, a setting which draws heavily on Irish and Celtic myth and history. He has gone through many incarnations since his creation in at the dawn of the heavy metal and punk eras. I shared these in 2000AD fan pages on social media, and I get a regular stream of referrals from a Polish comic books forum.
I’m glad this one made the top five, as it’s the one I put the most work into. Here the views are distributed between many posts (25 and counting) so it’s difficult to get a full picture. But the main archive page on its own got enough hits to make the cut. Two individual posts (‘The Pogroms of 1919‘ and ‘Red Cavalry‘) did make the top ten.
It was fascinating to re-read this book having, since my last reading of it, actually studied the history on which it is based. In this four-part series I did a close and critical reading of this grim and fascinating novel, starting with the assertion that no, contrary to the widespread claim, Nineteen Eighty-Four has not happened anywhere, ever.
Thanks to all my readers. Thanks especially to those who have spread the word. Here’s to an even bigger and better 2024.
This is a review of the 2023 Netflix movie Leave the World Behind (dir. Sam Esmail). Rather than review it myself, I have delegated the job to a time-traveler from the early Soviet Union. If he does a good job, I will delegate other reviews in the future to other time travelers – 7th-century monks figuring out crime thrillers, eighteenth-century rakes getting teary-eyed over Pixar cartoons, 24th-century asteroid-croppers watching rom coms...
I have spent only a few days in the 21st Century. I have barely ventured outside, as I find this world disorienting and distressing. My host suggested watching a film set in this current century to help orientate me. So I watched the most prominently-advertised film on his home cinema screen: Leave the World Behind.
In this film a family of the intelligentsia leaves the capital for a few days to rent a dacha in the countryside. But their social order begins collapsing around their ears. First, communications and transport are cut. Next, the country is flooded with disorienting enemy propaganda. Last, civil war breaks out. The same thing happened to us in 1918 only, as with everything in Russia, it took longer. They are under attack from an unknown enemy – and speaking from my own bitter experience, it’s probably the Czechoslovak Legion in league with the Cossacks, backed by the Anglo-French imperialist bandits.
The owner of the dacha flees from a calamity in the city along with his daughter, and they arrive at the dacha seeking shelter. He is bourgeois, and he is the owner of the house, but he is also a member of an oppressed nationality. So the mother of the intelligentsia family treats him with chauvinistic suspicion and contempt.
So far, the film presents a situation I can easily comprehend. The characters, too, were familiar types to me.
The father has a fine head of greying hair and a small beard. He is professor, and he looks not unlike some of my own old professors. I recognised him at once as a Narodnik, as he is generous and feckless, democratic in his opinions but not always democratic in his instincts. As the film went on I was again and again confirmed in my impression.
They have a young daughter who is obsessed with fictional works composed several decades before she was born. Naturally, I am unfamiliar with the works in question (Friends and The West Wing), but I felt sympathy with this character as I spent much of my youth engrossed in Turgenev and Tolstoy.
The intellectual family also have a son, a worthless fellow who is cruel to his sister. Late in the film, his teeth fall out of his head. It appears to be a side-effect of some epidemic – again, this to me is very familiar. So the boy and the two men go to a local kulak, who has been hoarding medical supplies. But in this crisis the rural population has turned inward, and the wealthier peasants are solely concerned with individual property and family. The kulak refuses to accept their worthless paper money, and threatens them with a rifle. I could have warned them this would happen.
The bourgeois draws a pistol, intending to expropriate the kulak’s medical supplies by force, but the intellectual becomes histrionic, bares his chest to both firearms, and throws himself on the kulak’s mercy.
The wily peasant relents and accepts the paper money, saying that a ‘barter system’ is acceptable to him.
There was much I did not understand in this film, but I gave a hearty and appreciative laugh when the intellectual salvaged a little of his dignity by correcting the kulak: ‘Well, I gave you money, so it’s not really barter.’
Stripped of their collectivity, these individuals and family groups still respond to their class instincts but lack any actual power. They flounder and tread water. They are saved only by a happy accident; the local landlord has abandoned his mansion, taking his family and all his servants with him, leaving a well-appointed cellar stocked with supplies and cultural riches, which the intelligent young girl finds. The only danger is that the adults will find the nobleman’s wine cellar and drink themselves into oblivion.
They will take refuge from the coming civil war in a nobleman’s cellar. Well and good for them. But what about the fate of their nation and people? To this they appear completely indifferent.
To myself, a man out of time, much was strange, much was familiar. These people of 2023 have screens instead of newspapers; that much is easy enough to grasp. The only printed material in the film is a leaflet in Arabic dropped by some Basmachi aviator. People still smoke, but their pipes are made of metal. With regard to motor cars, it appears the rabid anti-Semite and union-buster Ford has been long since put out of business by Monsieur Tesla’s company.
My host expected me to be awed by the technology. But I expected more from the 21st Century than handheld screens and motor cars which drive themselves (very poorly). At one point wee see that there is a tattered-looking American flag on the moon. That’s it! Only a flag. The relations between men and women appear to be less unequal than in my own time, but aside from that I was, I confess, disappointed by how readily I felt I could comprehend the social relations on screen.
This post tells how the White Guards fled South Russia in a state of complete chaos, but survived and established a new base in Crimea. This is Series 4, part 3 of Revolution Under Siege, an account of the Russian Civil War.
A Red soldier named Eduard Dune was captured during Denikin’s advance on Moscow. Among other terrible ordeals in captivity, he succumbed to typhus. Thirst and headaches gave way to two long comas; the second time, he woke up in the war-scarred city of Tsaritsyn, far away from where he’d passed out, and was soon loaded on a train bound for Novorossiysk. There he slowly recovered in an infirmary near the Black Sea port city, and as his faculties returned, he got active in underground work.
There were partisans in the hills near town, and he stole medical supplies from the infirmary and passed them to these ‘Green’ guerrillas. This close to the port of Novorossiysk, the supplies sent by the British government were piled up.
There was so much in storage that food supplies were lying under the open sky, and still the English continued to send more in ship after ship. Now that the White Army had their backs to the sea, the English had begun to supply all that had been promised when the army had stood near Moscow. The prisoners’ infirmary now enjoyed bed linens and other English hospital linen. In our storeroom lay trunks packed with English food products, including cocoa and dried vegetables. There was more than our cook could cope with.
There was a sand spit within sight of the infirmary where the Whites regularly took people for executions. The patients kept watch on this spot, collected intel and helped escapees. Dune and his fellow captive invalids stole papers from comatose typhus-inflicted Whites and supplied them to Red and Green agents in the city. They had a workshop on hospital grounds where they turned out false documents.
Novorossisyk had already been the site of things so strange and terrible they are difficult to visualise; way back in the fourth episode of this series, we followed the Bolshevik sailor Raskolnikov on his mission to scuttle the Black Sea Fleet. Very soon after that, the port fell to the Whites. Now, less than two years later, it was to witness one of the most surreal and pitiful scenes of the war.
Russian Civil War pictorial map number 7, ‘Liquidation of Iudenich and Denikin.’ The White Guards (coloured green) are pursued southward. Trace the Red arrows across the Don River, over the Kuban steppe, and down the Black Sea coast. Note also in the map two things we’re not going to deal with in much detail here: the final victory in North Russia and the rise of Soviet power around Baku, Azerbaijan.
Rostov
Meanwhile the war was raging on, the Whites falling back, the Reds surging southward: in January Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd) saw its last battle of the Civil War when it fell to the Reds. But when the Whites reached their old base area of the Don and Kuban Countries, they rallied. The river Don, as if it was in sympathy, froze to let the Whites retreat across it, then thawed before the Reds could. Alongside this military recovery, the White civilian government, such as it was, promised reforms and tried to juice up some popular support. The Red Army hit the moat of the Don in disarray from its long advance, overstretched and agitated with internal disputes.
The Whites recaptured Rostov-on-Don on February 20th. But the Reds were by this time over the worst of their confusion, and it was the Whites’ turn to have some internal disputes. Denikin had made concessions to the Kuban Cossacks – not enough to stop them deserting, but enough to enrage the White officers. ‘What are we?’ they demanded. ‘Cannon fodder for the defence of the hated separatists?’
The First Red Cavalry Army (which by this time boasted 16,000 riders, 238 machine-guns, nineteen artillery pieces and eight armoured trains) crossed the Don and threatened the rear of Rostov; there was nothing for it but to abandon the town and fall back to Ekaterinodar (the city outside which a shell had killed the Whites’ chief inspirer Kornilov two years earlier) and then, after a short hopeless struggle, on to Novorossiysk.[1]
One of many grim chapters in Beevor’s recent book deals with the entry of the Reds into Ekaterinodar. He describes the summary murder of men falsely identified as officers, Kalmyks being massacred for no apparent reason, and dead White Guards being mounted on a locomotive as trophies. Beevor appears to be repeating contemporary rumours which his source’s author heard second-hand, which is consistent with some of my criticisms of the book. [2] But even allowing for exaggeration and rumour-mongering, such excesses probably did form a part of the picture of the Red Army’s advance in some areas.
1st Red Cavalry Army
The cover image is a detail from this 1921 Soviet poster. Of the text, all I can tell you is that the heading means a frontline soldier. Thankfully the images are self-explanatory.
Novorossisk
The resumption of Red advance translated into rumours heard by Dune in the Novorossiysk infirmary: ‘The Whites had won victories with the aid of their cavalry, but ever since Trotsky had said, “Proletarians, to horse!” we too fielded a cavalry, and ours beat the Cossacks all hollow. The Red cavalry had captured all the English tanks.’
This was confirmed by what Dune could see with his own eyes; White Guard Russia was visibly shrinking and contracting around him. First, discipline grew lax, and he could get out into the city on errands. Once there he saw the streets fill up with a strange juxtaposition of affluence and squalor: cartloads of expensive household goods, and huge numbers of typhus-stricken refugees. White officers began taking entire battalions to join the Greens. Back at the infirmary, White Army supplies were stolen wholesale now instead of retail.
Moving away and up the chain of command from the humble soldier Dune, the British General Bridges was disgusted: ‘the whole affair was a degrading spectacle of unnecessary panic and disorder, and I urged the government by cable to dissociate themselves from the White Russians who had no prospects and little fight left in them.’ But Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War and Air, overruled him. So the British remained and took responsibility for the evacuation of White officers and their wives and children. [3]
Suddenly the British project of pumping in great quantities of supplies and war materiel had to go into reverse: now the British were evacuating White officers and their families, and anyone else who could be crammed on board. At the quays, crowds pressed against the British Army cordon and the ships heaved with people. A tank drove slowly over a row of thirteen British aeroplanes, turning them to matchwood so that the Reds couldn’t use them. Then, of course, the tank itself was abandoned. Other engines of war littered the sea floor where they had been dumped. Tearful Cossacks shot their horses.
The other White naval evacuations were disasters, but Novorossiysk was the worst. [4] It was so bad, Denikin resolved to resign as soon as it was all over. The misery, destruction and desperation were extraordinary:
…the waterfront was black with people, begging to be allowed on board the ships… Conditions were appalling. The refugees were still starving and the sick and the dead lay where they had collapsed. Masses of them even tried to rush the evacuation office and British troops had to disperse them at bayonet point. Women were offering jewels, everything they possessed – even themselves – for the chance of a passage. But they hadn’t the ghost of a chance. The rule was only the White troops, their dependants and the families of men who had worked with the British were allowed on board. [5]
Above: the chaos at Novorossiysk.
The 2nd Royal Scots Fusiliers acted as a rear guard, supported by a naval bombardment (one of the ships firing was the Waldeck-Rousseau, which had mutinied the year before). On March 27th the Red Army arrived, lobbing shells after the fleeing ships. By then, 34,000 had been evacuated (A disproportionate number were Volunteers, which suggests the Don Cossacks got shafted).
The Reds found on the quays an indescribable landscape of dead horses and destroyed equipment – but also heaps of intact supplies, such as one million pairs of socks. General Bridges had not been permitted to abandon the Whites, but he had left food and clothing to try to alleviate the suffering of ordinary people in war-torn South Russia. The Reds captured 22,000 White Guards in the town, and 60,000 later surrendered further down the coast at Sochi.
Other Whites fled into the Kuban steppe, where they waged a guerrilla war. As for the Green armies, at the moment of victory they suffered a split between the pro-Communist elements and the various other forces who were in the mix, and soon dissolved. [6]
London
Meanwhile in London, time of death was called on the White cause. Field Marshal Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: ‘so ends in practical disaster another of Winston’s attempts. Antwerp, Dardannelles, Denikin. His judgement is always at fault.’
Several days later he wrote: ‘cabinet at 6pm. We decided, Curzon leading, finally to tell Denikin to wind up affairs and come to terms with the Soviet government. Great joy. Winston fortunately absent.’ [7]
It was neither the first nor the last time the British had decided to withdraw from the Russian Civil War. They were sick of being on the sidelines of the bloody mess, acting as referee and sponsor, and occasionally stepping onto the pitch to play midfield, only to be frustrated again and again by the unexpected strength of the opposition and the shocking failures of their own side. In spite of all this, British intervention continued while the Whites made another throw of the dice. The fact that some tens of thousands of White Guards had escaped in one piece, plus an accident of geography and miitary fortune, gave the Whites an opportunity.
During the chaotic White retreat across Ukraine, one White officer had fought his way through Makhno’s anarchists to reach Crimea. There he held the Perekop Isthmus, the narrow strip of land connecting Crimea to the mainland. This officer, who had entered Ukraine as one of Shkuro’s notorious ‘White Wolves,’ bore the evocative name Slashchev.
Because of Slashchev’s feat the Whites held onto Crimea, an area 27,000 square kilometres in size, or one-third the size of Ireland. The Reds had no fleet on the Black Sea and the Allies had, so Crimea was a natural fortress as well as a base area of manageable size and with a population of over a million. That’s where the British fleet obligingly left those 35,000 evacuated White Guards. We have the strange picture of masses of hardened veterans disembarking at seaside resort towns.
Crimea
The first item on the agenda was leadership. At a Council of War in April, power passed from Denikin to his rival and critic, the ‘Black Baron’ Wrangel. The military chieftains objected on principle to electing Wrangel. To be clear, they did not object to Wrangel himself, only to the idea of electing a leader. So they insisted Denikin appoint him. After the galling experience of handing power to his rival, Denikin had nothing left to do but depart for Constantinople on a British destroyer, never to return. [8]
Above: photographs and a poster depicting Wrangel
Wrangel was not a graduate of Bykhov prison-monastery or a survivor of the Kuban Ice March, not at all one of the original Kornilov club. But with his height and striking features, he looked the part more than any other major White leader; Soviet cartoons and posters got great mileage out of him.
But there was still a line of continuity going all the way back to those origins as ‘the saga of the Volunteer Army continued in the Crimea.’ The elite ‘colourful units’ that were named after Markov, Alexeev, Kornilov and the others still existed as I Corps. [9] Like his predecessors, Wrangel called himself ‘Ruler’ and his army the ‘Russian Army.’
One of the themes that keeps popping up in this series is the role of the individual in history. Wrangel is a striking case study, because under him a new and distinct White Guard regime emerged in Crimea. Whereas Denikin’s regime was overstretched, ragged and undisciplined, Wrangel’s was every bit as lean and severe as he was.
In contrast to the previous White regimes, there was a functioning government and strict discipline. Reds who deserted were given a fair hearing. Looters were shot. Wrangel’s government would even pass a law redistributing landlords’ holdings to peasants – yes, the Whites were finally ready to cut their losses on that one, and the irony is that Wrangel, unlike Denikin, was actually of the land-owning nobility. His regime also made overtures to Tatars and Ukrainians, and cooperated with the Poles.
(L) Wrangel inspecting White pilots, and (R) his functioning government
Was this all down to Wrangel’s personality?
Perhaps not so much. Actually, the Baron had been a champion of the conservatives within the White movement against the more ‘liberal’ Denikin. Wrangel spoke of the need ‘to make leftist policies with rightist hands’ and pronounced a policy of ‘With the Devil, but for Russia and against the Bolsheviks.’ [10] Every living White Guard, one assumes, had learned extremely harsh lessons in 1919. Popular opinion and practical common sense would have favoured this new approach.
Above, images of Wrangel from the Soviet point of view. ‘Three grenadiers’ labelled Iudenich, Denikin and Wrangel; Wrangel as Khan of the Crimea; and ‘The Tsarist gendarme, Baron Wrangel’
What made this approach possible was the fact that an overwhelming mass of White Guards were now concentrated in a stable, small, self-contained base area. Just as one example of how Crimea insulated the Whites from the chaos that had messed things up before, the Cossacks could no longer do the old loot-and-desert routine. They didn’t have horses anymore, let alone horses that could swim across the Black Sea. The character of the new regime had more to do with the new base than with any other factor. But it is one of those interesting moments when so many things, right down to the physical appearance of the leader, produce the same impression: this was a White army, but leaner and smarter, confronting Moscow with a new type of challenge.
[1] Mawdsley, pp 302-309. Special thanks are due to Mawdsley, on whose book I relied heavily for this post. Dune, 180-198
[2] Beevor, pp 431-2
[3] Kinvig, p 311
[4] Smele,p 140
[5] Kinvig, p 309
[6] Smele, p 140. Dune, p 211. On the Greens, see the notes from Diane Koenker and SE Smith in Dune’s memoirs, p 187
[7] Kinvig, p 312
[8] Mawdsley, p 309
[9] Mawdsley, p 364
[10] Ibid, p 363
The new texture behind the ‘Revolution Under Siege’ text is from the Wikimedia Commons image ‘Rust and dirt’ by Roger McLassus. Not that anyone is eagle-eyed enough to notice, but it is important to credit people
In this post we trace the collapse of White Siberia in late 1919 and early 1920. This is Series 4, Part 2 of Revolution Under Siege, an account of the Russian Civil War .
Become a paying supporter to get access
Access to this article is limited to paying supporters. If you already subscribe by email, thank you. But if you want to become a paying supporter, please hit ‘Subscribe’ below.
Give me less than the price of a coffee, and you can access everything on this blog for one year.
This short post expands on ‘The Pogroms of 1919,‘ making a few points about the relevance to modern politics. Because, as Immortal Technique said, ‘the past refuses to rest in its shallow grave.’
Avenger Street, which bears the name of Shalom Schwartzbard, is less than 35 kilometres from the Gaza Strip, and a short car journey from Ofakim, site of a battle during the October 7th 2023 Hamas raid. It’s remarkable that two significant places in Schwartzbard’s story, Ukraine and Palestine, are sites of conflict at the time of writing. But it has been the Israeli military response, its mass killing of tens of thousands of civilians, its bloody violation of hospitals, schools, ambulances, border crossings and refugee camps, that most reminded me of the genocide of 1919. I thought of Schwartzbard and his fifteen murdered relatives when I read of Abdel Kareem Rayan, a young man in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza who showed journalists a list of 15 family members who were killed in Israeli airstrikes, and Dana Abuqamar, a student activist in Manchester who says 15 of her relatives were killed when a missile hit their residential building. Unfortunately there are many more such examples.
In September 2023 the Canadian parliament gave two standing ovations for Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian by birth described by the Canadian house speaker as a ‘war hero’ who fought against Russia during World War Two. The 98-year-old Hunka was indeed a veteran – of the Waffen-SS, a notorious military organisation which fought Hitler’s genocidal war. There was an apology and even a resignation, but any adult should have known who fought against ‘Russia’ in World War Two.
The incident in the Canadian parliament reflects a thorny problem for ideological supporters of the United States, NATO, Israel and their allies in Eastern Europe. Ideologues must compose a historical narrative which is acceptable to Jewish Israelis but also to people in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States who, for whatever reason, want to rehabilitate collaborators and pogromists as ‘national heroes.’
In discussions about the several thousand collaborators the Nazis managed to recruit in Ukraine, we see scant mention of the far greater number of Ukrainians who fought in the Red Army against the Nazis.
Also ignored are the pogroms of 1918-1919. There is at least some critical discussion about the prevalence of Nazi iconography in the Ukrainian military. Invocations of the Rada and Petliura in modern Ukraine come in for less discussion in the West because very few people know who they were.
The pogroms serve as a reminder that until recently western leaders did not give a damn about either Ukrainians or Jews. For example, in the Russian Civil War, they kept on funding and supporting pogromists who called Ukraine ‘Little Russia’ long after it became obvious they were a lost cause.
Modern Russia, too, has consigned the pogroms of 1919 to oblivion. Putin spoke to a crowd of thousands at the re-interment of General Denikin in a place of honour in Moscow in 2005.
In 1919 and in the 1940s, the Jews were an unarmed captive population. In 1919 armed gangs would come to town and reign supreme for days or longer. In the 1940s the German military machine was bent on mass extermination. In the Middle East today, the Palestinians are the ones who are captive and vulnerable to unrestrained violence, in this case of settler pogromists and the Israeli army, armed to the teeth by the US. The Palestinians are the ones subjected to dehumanising language and narratives, caricatured, confined, treated with contempt and paranoia.
If you ask me, the 21st-century pogromists are the settlers who have killed hundreds in the West Bank since October 7th. The anti-Semitic threat comes from the growing far right in Europe and North America – not from supporters of basic human rights of Palestinians. Another worrying conclusion you can draw from the points above is that NATO interests now cut against a sincere reckoning with the history of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, and provide an opening for attempts to rewrite history, to trivialise the Holocaust, to blame the victims.
The killing and abduction of hundreds of Israeli civilians on October 7th was both cruel and strategically irresponsible. But here again we run into the double standards that are deployed to justify pogroms and genocide. For my arguments in favour of the dignity and humanity of Palestinians to receive a fair hearing, I am expected to include a caveat and a condemnation. But the ‘right to self-defence’ of Israel is invoked by world leaders without any conditionality whatsoever. The humanity of Israelis is – rightly – taken as read. The authoritarian and genocidal character of the government they elected does not diminish their humanity. The thousand atrocities committed by their military does not make civilians fair game. If the humanity of Palestinians were taken as read in the same way, the war would end tomorrow. And I don’t just mean the current onslaught on Gaza, I mean the whole ethnic cleansing project going back to the Nakba.
Those who have read a bit of history, for example on the pogroms of 1919, who have gotten a sense of how people are dehumanised as part of the groundwork for horrific atrocities, should have seen clearly years ago what was being done to the Palestinians, how the whole world was being primed for the slaughter that is now taking place.
This post is about the anti-Semitic massacres carried out by the White Armies and the Ukrainian Rada forces during the Russian Civil War. It is the first part of the fourth series of Revolution Under Siege, my account of the Russian Civil War.
The Russian Civil War sent fragments spinning in random directions, to lodge in unexpected places. Years later, a piece of shrapnel from the war hit the ground with lethal effect in Paris. On May 26th 1926 Shalom Schwartzbard, a refugee from Ukraine, approached a man on Rue Racine, drew a revolver and shot him multiple times.
‘When I saw him fall,’ said Schwartzbard later, ‘I knew that he had received five bullets. Then I emptied my revolver [into the body].’
He handed his revolver to a police officer and, in case there was any doubt, confessed on the spot: ‘I have killed a great assassin.’
More details filtered out to a shocked public. Schwartzbard had fought for the French Army in World War One. After the Russian Civil War, he had returned to his home country of Ukraine to discover that fifteen members of his immediate family had been murdered in a wave of anti-Semitic violence. The man murdered on that Paris street was Symon Petliura, the Ukrainian nationalist leader whose forces were responsible.
Shalom Schwartzbard
It is perhaps fitting that this blood was spilled on a French street. The French government was one of those which had by turns supported and spurned Petliura and his movement. France also supported other factions whose forces carried out pogroms, such as the White Armies and the Polish government.
Schwartzbard’s murder trial turned into a kind of tribunal about the pogroms of 1919. France itself was no stranger to anti-Semitism – this was only twenty years after Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an innocent Jewish officer in the French army, was branded as a spy. But such a horrific picture emerged of the 1919 pogroms that the French jury acquitted Schwartzbard in spite of his obvious guilt.
The carnage of 1919 has its echoes in the warzones of today. There is a street in Kyiv, Ukraine named after Petliura. And in Beersheba in southern Israel we can find Avenger Street, subtitled Shalom Schwartzbard Street. [i]
This chapter will attempt to trace that fragment back to its source, examining the storm of pogrom violence which raged across the former Russian Empire.
The Schwartzbard Trial
The White Pogroms
In 1919 the White armies of General Denikin marched on Moscow. Killings of Jews often followed the conquest of a town or the capture of a Red unit. This was the first time that districts where Jews lived in large numbers fell under the control of the White Armies, leading to a wave of pogroms in August and September. They ‘combined “normal” undisciplined looting with ideological anti-Semitism.’[ii]
One Red unit retreating from the Don Country fell into the hands of a partisan ‘Green’ band of Cossacks. At first the Cossacks only killed those who tried to escape, and mainly concerned themselves with robbing from or bartering with their captives. When an officer of the advancing Whites appeared, however, these ‘Greens’ joined the Whites instantly, and lined the prisoners up for inspection.
Eduard Dune remembered the massacre which followed:
Many of the Cossacks had drunk more wine than they should have, but even the [White] commandant, who was sober, took us in with a vacant, sarcastic glance. He began his tour of the ranks without a single word; he would stop silently, look us over, and move on. […]
“Yid?” he asked Aronshtam, the brother of the brigade commissar.
“I am a Jew!” he replied.
“Two steps forward. Right face-run!”
Aronshtam turned to the right, but he didn’t run. He moved forward a step and looked back. The officer wasn’t looking at him, he was going on to the next man.
The Cossacks maliciously cried, “Run, you mangy sheep!”
But he didn’t know where to run, there was a half circle of Cossacks in front of him, Cossacks with rifles pointed. He approached almost to their muzzles, and then fell backward from a shot at point-blank range.
Stunned by the image of Aronshtam’s death, I tried not to look at the next shootings of “Yids,” which included Russians as well as Jews. [iii]
The White officer wanted to single out and murder Jewish people – or sometimes merely those he suspected of being Jewish. And the Cossacks were willing participants. Why?
The officer and the Cossacks grew up in Tsarist Russia, where Jews were openly persecuted. The Tsar’s secret police wrote and published the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a book which purported to disclose the details of an alleged Jewish plot for world domination. Laws discriminated against them, and state-sponsored mobs from time to time waged brutal campaigns of arson, robbery, rape, assault and murder against them. These campaigns were known as pogroms. Naturally, this ethos of persecution permeated the upper classes and the army and seeped out through the whole society.
Beevor gives the impression that the Revolution, by empowering workers and poor people, thereby opened the floodgates for anti-Semitic violence. This stands reality on its head. Those who hated the Revolution shamelessly used anti-Semitism as a weapon against it. The Protocols circulated widely in the ranks of the White Armies; ‘Jew’ and ‘communist’ were practically synonyms in their propaganda; and they also published another forgery, the ‘Zunder Document,’ which was supposedly found on the body of a Red commissar – ‘evidence’ that the whole Revolution was a Jewish conspiracy.[iv] Famous White propaganda posters such as ‘Victims of the International’ and ‘Witness the Freedom in Sovdepiya’ were weighed down with anti-Semitic caricatures and tropes.
There was a spectrum of anti-Semitic delirium. On the extreme end was Baron Ungern-Sternberg, who believed he had a sixth sense which could identify Jews and who had an elaborate occult mythology to justify his desire to murder them all. On the more pragmatic end, White generals such as Budberg were not so unhinged. Still anti-Semitic assumptions were so much a part of their make-up that they took for granted the idea that ‘the Jews’ were behind the Revolution.[v]
In the early 20th Century, Jews were widely blamed for all the evils of life under capitalism and, conveniently, also for the revolutionary movements which developed in response to these evils. They were all-purpose scapegoats for modernity. For the reactionary officer who didn’t want to remove his head from the sand, it was far easier and more comforting to blame the Jews than to accept that the revolution was a mass movement with deep roots in Russian society.
The Soviet military commissar Trotsky was himself from a Jewish background, from a farm in South-West Ukraine. He answered the question of why Jews made up a ‘fairly high’ proportion of the Red leadership, although ‘far from constituting such a big percentage of the total as is maintained in White-Guard reports, leaflets and newspapers.’ He also noted that White officers not only hated the Jews, but imagined them to have superior talents.
Anti-semitism means not only hatred of the Jews but also cowardice in relation to them. Cowardice has big eyes, and it endows its enemy with extraordinary qualities which are not at all inherent in him. The socio-legal conditions of life of the Jews are quite sufficient to account for their role in the revolutionary movement. But it has certainly not been proved, nor can it be proved, that Jews are more talented than Great Russians or Ukrainians.[vi]
Jules Grandjean, an image of the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903
Denikin apparently issued several edicts against anti-Semitism. But they were ignored, and he didn’t try to enforce them.
The British chief rabbi counted ‘no less than 150 pogroms carried out by Denikin’s army,’ and the Red Cross reported that the ‘Retirement of Soviet troops signified for the territory left behind the beginning of a period of pogroms with all their horrors.’
Winston Churchill, the foremost advocate of intervention in Britain, was under pressure from his liberal coalition partners. Lloyd George urged him: ‘I wish you would make some enquiries about this treatment of the Jews by your friends.’
So Churchill made a half-hearted attempt to get Denikin to stop his men slaughtering Jewish people; ‘the Jews were powerful in England, he declared.’ Historian Clifford Kinvig remarks: ‘not the most altruistic expression of concern, it must be said.’
But General Denikin would not oblige. In fact, he formally refused to declare Jews equal before the law.[vii]
By mid-November 1919 Denikin’s advance had reached its limit. The retreat was orderly at first. But after the fall of Kharkiv to the Reds, panic set in. Baron Wrangel launched a tirade against Denikin. Denikin responded by accusing Wrangel of plotting a coup. Wrangel was fired and packed off to Constantinople. The Whites gave up most of Ukraine without offering resistance (a key exception was Crimea, which will be very important later). In Odessa another evacuation of White sympathisers took place, this one even more chaotic than the last. ‘Ships slowly listed under the weight of people clinging to the deckrails and scrambling aboard.’ The revolts in Denikin’s rear gathered pace.[viii]
The British general Holman spent the months of retreat jumping in aeroplanes to personally fly bombing missions against the advancing Reds. It must have been dispiriting that the flights kept getting shorter. Even after retreating to Ekaterinodar, his refrain did not change: ‘let’s take an aeroplane and a tank and bomb the blighters.’
General ‘bomb the blighters’ Holman, according to another officer, ‘is obsessed by the idea of wiping out the Jews everywhere and can talk of little else.’ He even asked a military chaplain why the Anglican church ‘did not start a crusade against them.’ Another Englishman, Commander Goldsmith, is quoted as saying that ‘a Russian Jew is quite the most loathsome type of humanity.’ [ix]
When so many powerful people in the Allied camp were themselves Anti-Semitic, it’s no wonder the Allies continued to support the Whites even though they murdered Jews.
The retreat saw a terrible wave of pogroms. The White Guards would sing: ‘Black Hussars! Save our Russia, beat the Jews. For they are the commissars!’ And they were as good as their word, once again inflicting terror on the Ukrainian towns and villages.
Kolchak’s forces in Siberia did not enter Jewish-majority areas, but still made their violent prejudices known, especially during retreats. They had killed 2,200 Jewish people in a pogrom just before they pulled out of Yekaterinburg on July 15th. Dragomirov, the White general presiding in Kyiv, allowed his forces to torment the Jews of that city for six days. [x]
‘Victims of the International’ – containing anti-Semitic elements such as racist caricatures, blood libel, and accusations of treachery (‘thirty pieces of silver’)‘Witness the freedom in Sovdepiya’ – another anti-Semitic fever dream. In this and in the previous poster, Chinese people and sailors feature prominently
Pogroms in Ukraine
From February 1917 through 1918, attacks on Jews throughout the former Tsarist empire were in general sporadic and small in scale. Nor did Petliura’s forces begin the massacres when they first took over large parts of Ukraine in late 1918. It was when the Petliura forces were defeated by the Red Army at the very end of 1918 and the start of 1919 and fled westward in demoralised fragments that they began attacking Jewish communities. These attacks carried on through 1919. The horrific atrocities of Ataman Grigoriev (See Chapter 17) constituted a major escalation.
The first large-scale pogroms were carried out by retreating Ukrainian Rada soldiers on December 31st 1918. The Proskurov Pogrom of February 1919 provides a vivid example of what a pogrom looked like. Rada forces under Ivan Samosenko entered the town of Proskurov (now Khmelnytskyi) and, under the slogan ‘Kill the Jews, and Save the Ukraine’, murdered 1,500 Jewish men, women and children in three or four hours, using sabres and bayonets. The pogrom was supposedly a reprisal for a failed Soviet uprising in the town.
Another hard-hit area was Chernobyl, where gangs under a warlord named Struck raided towns and boarded steam ships on the river Dnipro in order to carry out murders.
In the Brusilov/ Khodorkov area in mid-June 1919, 13-year-old Jack Adelman was woken in the middle of the night by gunfire. People he refers to as ‘bandits’ had seized the town.
My mother, sister and I quickly dressed and ran. My grandparents refused to leave. We joined hundreds of other Jews who quickly left town and walked or ran into the countryside. It soon got light and we saw several armed men on horseback come closer and closer. When they reached us, they ordered us back and lined us up near a sugar factory on the outskirts of the town. They separated the men from the women and children. I was thirteen years old, but very small and was left with the women and children. The men were driven back into town and locked up in a synagogue. This and adjacent buildings were set on fire. The men perished in the fire. One person survived. He was thirteen years old, but tall for his age. I never found out how he managed to survive.
The whole town burned down. Many people were killed, and more were wounded. One aunt of mine was badly wounded and died a few days later. Two of her daughters were wounded by swords but survived. I saw a teacher of mine sitting in the ditch off the road. I realized he was shot and killed while trying to hide in that ditch. I never really learned how many people died in this pogrom.
Around noon the bandits left after the entire town was destroyed. We headed toward the nearest railroad station, about twenty miles from our town. We finally came to Kiev a day or two later and there learned that my aunt was dead.
The dates suggest that the bandits were part of the Grigoriev revolt.
‘The Ukraine Terror and the Jewish Peril,’ a contemporary pamphlet, contains numerous other graphic and disturbing accounts. Often the ordeal was drawn out over several days and involved a steady one-sided escalation – from robbery, the levying of collective ‘contributions,’ public humiliation and sexual assault to massacre. The survivors might again be extorted for ‘contributions.’[xi]
Pogroms were able to happen because the pogromists had the monopoly or near-monopoly on armed force. The pogromists had all the rifles, grenades, bayonets and sabres, and the victims were a helpless captive population.
Issachar Ber Rybak, The Small Town After the Pogrom, 1917
Why Ukraine?
Jews made up 9% of Ukraine’s population. Because of historic persecution, they were concentrated in the cities and many were merchants and professionals. The natural antagonism between the farmer and the merchant was supplemented by national tensions and religious bigotry. Where the White officer assumed that Jews were traitors to Russia, Ukrainian nationalists tended to see them as agents of Russian imperialism. The Jews were general purpose, one-size-fits-all scapegoats.
Carr writes: ‘According to a Jewish writer, a member of the Rada called anti-Semitism at this time [1918] “our principal trump.”’ This suggests that at least some Ukrainian Nationalist leaders were happy to make political capital by fuelling anti-Jewish hatred.
Some historians defend Petliura today. His regime made some ‘efforts towards combating anti-Semitism within its lands’ and it is argued that he was ‘not culpable for events that were beyond the control of a weak and besieged government in a chaotic land.’ This is not a bad argument, but it must be extended to nearly all factions in the conflict. [xii]
Injured survivors of pogroms, 1919
A 2013 article from the Times of Israel follows a descendant of Shalom Schwartzbard who is not sure who to believe – her relatives for whom Petliura was a villain or modern Ukrainian scholars who are trying to rehabilitate him.
“Petliura was not anti-Jewish — but as a leader, he was responsible,” said [Anatoly] Podolsky, [Director of the Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies] who cited recent research into a pogrom in Proskurov in February 1919 in which 1,500 Jews were killed. One of Petliura’s military chiefs was the pogrom’s leader; Petliura ordered him executed, Podolsky said. [xiii]
Israel and Ukraine today are members of the same broad US-led coalition. Attempts to reappraise the history and rehabilitate Petliura align with modern political agendas. But they obviously clash with other modern political agendas, namely the United States’ arming of Israel. We can resolve this clash by pointing out that, whatever they may say today, very few politicians in Western Europe or North America in 1919 cared about either Ukrainians or Jews.
There is more ambiguity about the role of the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno. There are claims that he engaged in pogroms, though Makhno himself made a strong rebuttal.[xiv] Polish forces also carried out pogroms and, during the 1920 war with the Soviet Union, interned Jews en masse and discharged them from the army. There were also instances of Red units carrying out pogroms, especially in 1920 with Budennyi’s Red Cavalry in Poland but also earlier: in the pamphlet ‘The Ukraine Terror,’ we learn of bloody incidents in Rossava, February 11th to 15th 1919, and a couple of months later in Vasilkov. This was in a context where Red forces were newly mobilising in Ukraine and were still plagued by ‘partisanism’ and indiscipline.
The difference is that the Black and Red armies both ruthlessly punished those of their own soldiers who carried out pogroms, and this resulted in a much lower incidence. White officers responsible for pogroms were almost never punished.
Illustration of a pogrom in Lviv in 1914
Once again, destruction in Lviv, after a pogrom in November 1918.
Who were the worst offenders when it came to pogroms, the Ukrainain Rada or the White Armies?
Kinvig says it was Denikin and the Whites (p 232): ‘many, no doubt, [were killed] by partisan forces and bandit groups, but the majority, it seems, by Denikin’s armies’); Smele says it was probably Petliura and the Rada. ‘Most of these pogroms – and certainly the most brutal and extensive – occurred during the rule in those regions of the Directory of the UNR [the Rada] in 1918-19.’ (p 161)
Most pogroms were carried out by soldiers – soldiers who had received their training in the openly anti-Semitic institution that was the army of the Tsar. 15 million men passed through this army during World War One, and went on to fight for all sides in the Civil War. So whether it manifested in the White or in the Ukrainian Rada armies, or even amid the Reds or Anarchists, hatred of Jews was a legacy of Tsarist Russia. That said, the Red Army suppressed that legacy while the White Armies basked in it.
Conclusion
There were 1,500 pogroms in 1,300 localities across Ukraine and Galicia in 1918-1919. In all, somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 lost their lives with another 200,000 ‘casualties and mutilations’ and millions forced into exile. Thousands were sexually assaulted and that some who served ‘in the local Soviets were even boiled alive (‘communist soup’).’ [xv]
If we compare these pogroms with the Holocaust twenty years later, we see some disturbing parallels. The two atrocities happened in the same regions and were visited on the same communities. There is a certain overlap between the White Guard, Baltic German and nationalist movements in Eastern Europe in 1918-19 and the Nazis and collaborators in the same region in World War Two. The White movement functioned as a greenhouse in which anti-Semitic ideas flourished which would later be employed by the Nazis.
On the other hand, the Holocaust killed millions whereas the victims in 1919 numbered in the low hundreds of thousands. The Holocaust was carried out not by locals (notwithstanding the participation of some) but by an occupying imperial power, Nazi Germany. Finally, the genocide of 1919 was carried out with primitive methods (often, literally, with fire and the sword) while the genocide of the 1940s was carried out with a developed industrial apparatus of death factories.
The pogroms of 1919 were certainly the worst massacre of Jews in modern times excluding the Holocaust, and they had both immediate and long-lasting impacts. The historian Budnitskii, quoted in Smele’s book (162), writes that ‘The experience of Civil War showed the majority of the Jewish population of the country that it could only feel secure under Soviet power,’ and in the 1920s Soviet Jews showed a very accelerated rate of assimilation. On the other side, the pogroms rebounded upon their perpetrators, causing moral rot and civil chaos within the White camp and hastening its defeat.
Spinning off from my recent post on Age of Empires 2, here are my musings on what way I think the ‘ages’ should have worked in that game.
The earliest ‘ages’ would be nomadic and clan societies.
Nomadic
AoE2 could use a nomadic ‘age’ – in which, for example, the Mongols could exist on the move across the game map with their herds of sheep. Transitioning to a settled feudal existence would bring both benefits (such as the ability to build better fortifications and more diverse units) and costs (such as the decline in skill of horse archer units as the generation of former nomads is succeeded by their children, who are more familiar with stately pleasure domes). This ‘age’ would be available to any faction willing to pick up sticks. But it would be the default for the Mongols, the Seljuk Turks and others. The loading bar from Nomadic to sedentary could be triggered once you have built a couple of permanent structures, could be accelerated by building more, could be reversed by their destruction.
Clan
This is a relatively egalitarian clan society whose economy is based around common ownership, whose mode of warfare revolves around raiding. The ‘villagers’ could double as decent skirmisher units to represent the clan levy, alongside normal but basic military units. (Instead we have ‘The Dark Age,’ something which is neither here nor there: people who have farms but nonetheless live in tents, whose armed forces are guys with clubs.) The loading bar which brings this ‘age’ to an end could be triggered by the building of a certain number of military buildings and units – which brings about the development of a special military class.
Feudal
The consolidation of power by the feudal nobility could be the basis for a proper ‘Feudal Age’ – now we have mounted and armoured knights, motte and bailey castles, manors as the basic agricultural building. There would be no need for a ‘Castle Age;’ Feudalism would have enough mileage to encompass that. For example, upgrading the motte and bailey to a stone castle. The benefits include a free military unit for every manor you build; but the cost is, you lose the clan levy and reduce the ‘villagers’ to the feeble non-military units we are familiar with.
Renaissance
The next shift in ages could be triggered by buildings such as the Market – heavy use of markets and trade usher in the Renaissance. The traders could increase resource production at the cost of taking some of it out of the player’s control, making it subject to hoarding and market crashes.
Centralised Empire
We could also have an ‘age’ characterised by a strong emperor, centralised authority and an efficient civil service, as we see in medieval China. This social order could be difficult to achieve but versatile and robust.
I like this general idea because rather than ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ ages we have social orders each of which come with their own costs and benefits. Yes, some social orders allow for more efficient resource-gathering and production. But each, played right, can work on its own terms. And each has considerable mileage within its own limits, reducing further the incentive to change. We also move beyond both national stereotypes (Rise of Nations) and the reductive ‘balanced’ approach of making all factions identical. We have minor or cosmetic differences between factions, but the real difference is between social orders.
Around the start of this millennium, the adults were worried about how Grand Theft Auto would turn my generation into serial killers. The ultra-violence of GTA was probably too outrageous and obvious to have much effect. Meanwhile, far less controversial games were warping the way we thought about the world. Today I’m going to take a critical look at a classic that is still widely-played today: Age of Empires 2. AoE2 is a strategy game from 1999 that purports to be set in the Middle Ages. But it gives a totally wrong impression of how the Middle Ages worked.
What’s my angle here? Do I think Age of Empires and Command and Conquer should have been banned? No, the world would be a less fun place without them. But all the ink spilled condemning GTA would have been better spent making an informed, sympathetic criticism of a game like AoE2. People who liked and enjoyed the game, but also had read a few books about the actual Middle Ages, should have had a platform to tell us what it got wrong.
Strengths
First, the strengths of AoE2. You don’t need me to tell you it’s a satisfying and addictive game. Take that as read. As for how it depicts the Middle Ages, there are good points. The campaigns strike a balance between compelling narrative, satisfying challenges and historical fidelity. The William Wallace campaign is a perfectly-ramped-up tutorial with a good story, and to this day ‘Falkirk’ and ‘Stirling’ are taking up space in my memory banks. Also, there are paragraphs of proper historical information on offer, if you care to pause the game and do some reading.
The gameplay itself has its strengths. It conveys one important lesson about history: before you can put armies in the field, you need to have a lot of people working hard producing stuff. And unlike in C&C where there’s one all-purpose resource (ore or tiberium), AoE and AOE2 demand that you build a relatively complex and diverse economy. Twenty minutes into a game, you have built a busy little town: your villagers are mining, farming, hunting and gathering, slaughtering sheep, cutting down trees; little boats are bringing in nets full of fish to your docks; little carts and trade cogs are moving between settlements. It’s diverse and interdependent, and as you play, human activity gradually consumes the forests and the wildlife, and the grass is turned into neat rows of crops. It’s not just satisfying to play and nice to look at; this basic rhythm of gameplay is authentic.
Genocide
So here are my criticisms of AoE2 from a historical perspective. I’m not going to talk about how the Elite Long Swordsman has the wrong type of sword or the Frankish blacksmith model is inaccurate. I am going to talk about its overall concept of society and warfare in the Middle Ages, and how it gave a whole generation fundamentally the wrong idea.
AoE2 still depends on the C&C formula in its basic structure: build a base, build an army, destroy the enemy. That’s OK in a game where you play as a military commander and your task is to destroy a military base. But in the AoE variant, you are not destroying a military base. You are destroying a whole society. You have to exterminate the ‘enemy.’ You have to level his city and his infrastructure. Not take it over – demolish it.
I won’t labour this point as it was expressed well in this post from acoup.blog. But while the grown-ups were worried about us jacking a car and doing hit and runs, we were meanwhile playing a supposedly more wholesome and educational game, in which we were required to do genocide. And 100% anachronistic and unnecessary genocide, at that. The fact that so many who grew up playing AoE have stood by while their countries killed vast numbers of people with bombs and guns has broader roots than one videogame, of course. But games like this are part of the tapestry.
The intro video is clever. The game of chess is a nod to the fact that we are playing a game. Blunting the edge of many of the criticisms I will make here, the video suggests that like chess, the game you are about to play is only supposed to be an approximation of real life.
Society
Let’s return to that pretty medieval town you have built. How many farms have you got? Five, six, seven? And how many other buildings have you got – a monastery, a barracks, a castle, a market, a blacksmith, a stable, an archery range, a town centre…? You’ve got at least as many other building types as you have farms. You might easily have twice as many.
Throughout most of human history, and certainly in the Middle Ages in Europe, the overwhelming mass of the population worked in agriculture. In AoE2, the heavy toil which defined the lives of 95% of the population is represented by five villagers hoeing little plots of land. The farms, little patches on the margins of the base, are like gardening allotments on the edge of a housing estate.
Why does this matter? Because a lot of guys are walking around out there with the vague idea that if they had lived back in the middle ages they would have been knights. White people are actually the worst offenders with the ‘We used to be kings’ meme. In reality, most of us don’t have to go back as far as the Middle Ages to discover that our direct ancestors were super-exploited peasants with no freedom. It took the labour of a whole village to arm and mount a single knight. Again, AoE2 is only one artefact of the culture that produces these wrong ideas, but it is under-examined.
Sometimes you can see how shallowly the C&C formula is buried. Your attractive medieval settlement can stand in for a military camp, a city or an entire civilisation, depending on the scenario. But it is what it is: a base. Likewise the game treats the player as a commander in a modern military, with life-and-death control over the entire faction.
As soon as you read any real medieval history, it becomes clear how absurd this is. Medieval history is mostly about the church revolting against the king and/or the secular nobles, the nobles revolting against the king or feuding with one another, the peasants revolting against the nobility, and the town people revolting against all of the above. AoE2 is about players (human or AI) who have absolute control over an entire society, waging war on another equally monolithic society.
A real medieval polity was not united but feudal. A king had to negotiate through layers of autonomous lords and knights to get anything done. Its settlement pattern was very much dispersed, not nucleated like the AoE/C&C base. A ‘knight’ was not just a cavalry fighter who was good against archers and weak against pikes. For your medieval ancestor, the knight was the equivalent of your mayor, your boss in work, a military officer, and a made guy in the mafia.
There is a ‘Feudal Age’ in AoE2. But the game does not simulate feudalism – it simulates a caricature of a totalitarian communist state.
For those who haven’t played it, this is what actual gameplay looks like.
Ages
Speaking of ‘ages’ – in AoE2, the player progresses through four: the Dark Age, the Feudal Age, the Castle Age and the Imperial Age. Each age unlocks new buildings, units, technologies, etc. But these ages do not correspond to anything in real life. In the first AoE they roughly did. But not here. The game covers the period from around 500CE to around 1500CE. The ‘Dark Age’ does not correspond even roughly to 500-750, nor the ‘Feudal Age’ to 750-1000, etc. There is too little in the early ages by way of buildings, tech and unit types, then all of a sudden too much in the later ages. No, the Catholic church was not ‘unlocked’ a hundred or two hundred years after the First Crusade. Stuff from the ‘Castle Age’ was 100% around throughout this whole millennium.
All in all, the game does a particularly poor job of depicting the early Middle Ages. A battle in the ‘Dark Age’ is limited to guys with clubs hitting each other. But there was a bit more than that going on during the age of Al-Andalus, the Merovingians and the Tang Dynasty.
In the real middle ages, The Catholic Church pretty much had a monopoly on literacy, education, social services and bureaucracy across most of Europe for most of a millennium. In AoE2, the clergy don’t show up until the third ‘age’ of four.
The Marxist idea of a mode of production offers a better template for social development than the idea of a linear progression of ‘ages.’ (Here, I went off on a tangent proposing how this could actually work in a game, but to spare the reader I have moved it to an appendix which I will post next week.)
All I’ll say now is, instead of different ages, I wish we could see different social orders. Returning to the Marxist criterion: sure, the mercantilist and feudal social orders have a greater productivity of labour than the nomadic society or the trans-egalitarian clan society. But depending on the situation, the former were still capable of losing wars to the latter.
Factions
In a way, there’s a refreshing universality in AoE2, an ethos of common humanity. Beneath the different models, every faction is essentially the same (barring a special unit which is often only unlocked late in the game – the Vikings only get Berserkers after, historically, the Norse and Danes had long since settled down and ceased to Vike). It is really laudable, too, that AoE2 even before the recent DLCs had a more diverse roster of factions and cultures than most of the Total War series. This balance and symmetry is also good for playability.
It’s certainly less problematic than the approach of Rise of Nations (2004), which presented a roster of ‘Nations’ such as the British, the Japanese and the Bantu, each of which had the same essential features from the Stone Age right through to the Information Age (‘The Russians have the power of the motherland, giving them plus 3 attrition damage…’) Though I should mention that I’ve spent many enjoyable hours on Rise of Nations, including recently.
The Middle Ages saw clashes not just of class or religion or people, but of different types of society, as we can see when the Anglo-Normans confronted the Irish (check out my series Celtic Communism), or when the Norse and the Danes came to Britain.
Warfare
This brings us to the nature of warfare in the Middle Ages. Here AoE2 not only does a bad job of being historically accurate – it’s an area which I’ve always found weak in terms of gameplay.
Consider the historical battles which occur in the campaigns – the aforementioned Falkirk and Stirling, or the Battle of Hastings in the expansion pack. In real life, these were distinct battles that happened in specific places. In AoE2, they are about building a base, gradually wearing down the enemy bases, then finally destroying them. Actual battles rarely happen in AoE2. Every war is a war of attrition.
Here’s something I noticed at the moment I decided to abandon the hitherto-promising Bari campaign in one of the recent DLCs: AoE2 is supposed to be set in the Middle Ages, but actually what it simulates is closer to 20th Century warfare. In some scenarios you have limited forces and have to use them cleverly; that’s both better fun and more accurate. But in most scenarios, and in the vanilla game, your task is to churn out soldiers and rush them to the front, where each wave will gain a little ground before its complete destruction. Tactics are rudimentary.
That is why a scenario like Vinlandsaga works so well: AoE2 is better at simulating a drawn-out process of development, exploration, conquest and settlement than at simulating an individual battle. But even in Vinlandsaga, you somehow find yourself besieging and demolishing stone castles in the early Middle Ages in Greenland.
The violent part of the game is actually not much fun. Since tactics barely matter and there are no set-piece field battles, winning a war is reduced to producing soldiers in greater diversity and quantity than the enemy. You spend a fortune on them only to watch them, usually, die for minimal gains. It’s not very satisfying.
Conclusion
Like a lot of people, there are large chunks of human history that first entered my ken through the medium of videogames. This stuff is really influential on how millions of people think about the past. So there needs to be a culture of friendly historical critiques. I’ll still play a historically inaccurate but fun game over one that’s more accurate but less fun – I’ve spent a lot more time playing Creative Assembly games than Paradox games. Fair enough if developers generally allow gameplay to trump authenticity. But let’s be aware of the choices they have made.
Instead of such a culture of friendly criticism, I think strategy videogames have functioned as a transmission belt for a mechanistic and essentialist understanding of societies, nations and conflict. For example, I once came across a Youtube video which justified the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas with reference to their ‘spawn points’ and ‘tech tree’ – evidently a conscious shorthand, but un-ironic. The idea of societies composed of antagonistic classes is quite incomprehensible to people brought up to assume that each given faction or nation was a monolithic and totalitarian entity.
I’ve read more than one recent novel with a pre-modern setting in which the characters use terms like ‘subconscious’ (coined by Freud in the 1890s, right?) ‘genocide’, (coined in 1947) and ‘the military.’ It’s that last one that concerns us here. AoE2 is part of a culture that reifies the state, that tells us that the standing army and the modern nation have always existed. But the real Middle Ages were much stranger and much more interesting.
After I finished Demon Copperhead I read a couple of reviews and had a strange moment. Just for an instant, I felt surprised that this reviewer in the Guardian also knew Demon. I had approached the novel as an Award-Winning Book That People Should Read; then I started it and I was in Demon’s world, and prestigious literary awards were the last thing on my mind. When I finished it – or maybe emerged from it – a part of me was surprised to remember that it was a book after all.
Demon’s voice
The feature of the book which best explains this is there right from the start: the narrative voice.
The narrator and main character is Damon Fields, who has a nickname, like everyone on his home turf of Lee County, Virginia. He is dubbed Demon Copperhead – the echoes of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens are there if you want them, but you can enjoy this book all on its own. The book follows Demon from birth through his first two decades in this world. His community is shambling through a half-life of mass unemployment; his young single mother struggles with addiction; the opioid epidemic hits like a war when he is around 10 to 15 years old.
The great strength of this book is the gloss of humour that comes with having Demon as a narrator. When I say that it’s easy to read despite the heavy themes, maybe readers will think that means the book takes a flippant or mocking approach. But it’s compassionate and humane all the way through. When I say that Demon interrogates head-on the issue of how the media portray ‘hillbillies’ and ‘rednecks,’ you might think the narrative is weighed down with lectures. It has didactic parts, but they don’t weigh down the story at all. They drive it on. Real people lecture, and lectures can be compelling.
I don’t have personal experience of the setting or of most of the heavy themes in this book. I assume Kingsolver must know the locale and its people – it rings true. But it’s about a kid growing up at the same time as I was. From the tone of the narrative voice to the pop culture references, and even the particular flavour of juvenile humour, Barbara Kingsolver got Demon right. He seems like some kid I might have known growing up.
The literal voice of Charlie Thurston was strong in the audiobook. Again, I just can’t comment on the accuracy of the accent, but the performance was more than good enough. If I ever hear that voice on another book, or on TV, my first reaction will be, ‘Hey, that’s Demon.’
The lush landscape of Lee County, Virginia
Characters
Demon usually has at least a medium-sized list of things going on in his life, pulling him this way and that. He also has a satisfyingly large cast of characters coming and going. They are all well-developed so that I never had moments of ‘Who’s he again?’ You know you are dealing with good writing when you find yourself a little excited to see two characters together for the first time. ‘Huh,’ I said to myself, ‘so young Maggot and Swapout are doing break-ins together,’ or ‘Well, wouldn’t you know it, U-Haul and McCobb are in on the same pyramid scheme.’ On the other hand you feel genuinely relieved and pleased to see, for example, Tommy Waddles doing well in life.
In its world, ‘doing well’ is relative. When the adolescent Demon is sent to work at a dump beside a meth lab, it’s a great improvement in his fortunes because the owner of the adjacent garage lets him eat free hot dogs whenever he likes. Relief washes over you. Come to think of it, relief is the main feeling I associate with this book.
This book has great villains. It’s fair to say that U-Haul’s characterization lacks subtlety – he’s just a grotesque person. The McCobbs are a terrible foster family, in all kinds of fascinating ways, but they are not monsters. In a different and even worse foster home, Demon runs into an older boy known as Fast Forward. Fast Forward gets the younger boys to line up like soldiers for inspection each night. He shakes them down for money and snacks. He makes them take the fall for his mistakes. But he also gives them flattering nicknames, an identity, a sense of purpose and dignity in this hellhole. This is the source of his power, and that power makes him scary.
Then we have a moderate-sized pantheon of adults who just let Demon down. There’s those who, to paraphrase Demon, can’t see any more in young men like him than what can be wrung out of them by the end of the week on the battlefield, the farm field or the football field. Then there’s those who, out of misguided ‘tough love’ or in the heat of an argument, cut off support to young people just when they need them most of all. Then there’s the one who let Demon into his home, but also let in the monstrous U-Haul.
Then there are the social workers – the one who stays in the job but just doesn’t care, and the one who cares in her naïve way but quits the job as soon as she can. Demon understands why one doesn’t care, and the other quits – they get paid very poorly. Their work is a life-or-death question for him, but it is simply not valued by the state.
On the summit we have a cast of characters who are just solid gold, such as Angus/Agnes, a couple of teachers, June Peggott, and in his more limited sphere, Mr Dick.
Addiction
Kingsolver gets past the bullshit of judging addicts for their ‘personal choices’ to show why people fall into drug abuse. ‘This was done to you,’ June Peggott insists.
There is a moment early-ish in Demon Copperhead when Fast Forward throws a ‘pharm party’ for Demon and the other foster boys. They sit around on the floor eating hash brownies and taking pills. This should be an ominous moment – Demon’s first introduction to something that will later cause him a lot of suffering. But it isn’t. In this filthy and cheerless house, the boys are regarded as farm labour and nothing more. They are insulted and sometimes beaten, and not provided with clothes or proper meals. When it enters the story, the ‘pharm party’ does not present itself as something immediately dangerous. It’s a respite. The story tells us to face it: there’s nothing better on offer from their fosterer or from the Department of Social Services. Drug abuse is not the worst thing happening in this house. It doesn’t even rank in the top ten worst things.
But of course it is the beginning of something very bad. Later, when Demon is a teenager and is doing better, an injury puts him out of action and a doctor puts him on oxycontin. By now the opioid epidemic is raging. He descends into addiction – not all at once, and not putting everything else on hold. Life goes on around the addiction, but we see how it creeps in. His first experience with drugs was intimately bound up with his relationship with Fast Forward, and as he grows up relationships continue to be central to addiction. When Demon describes an incident of falling off the wagon as an act of love, and when he tells us that addiction is not for the lazy, we see what he means. We are dismayed to see him ruining his life, but his actions make sense in the situation he’s in. Sometimes his actions are even perversely admirable.
Devil’s Bathtub, in Scott County, Virginia
Dickensian
Several times, Demon descends into the depths of hell – in his lone quest to find his dad’s family; his forays to Atlanta and Richmond; and his fateful hike to the place known as Devil’s Bathtub.
But hell isn’t where Demon ends up. Plenty of other elements are in the mix: Demon’s artistic talents, plus a budding consciousness about the history of his area – the Whisky Wars, the Battle of Blair Mountain, the tension between urban and rural. As the story goes on, Demon learns how much the odds were stacked against him before he was even born. In a previous generation, his people organised in unions and took on the mining companies. Today they are cannon fodder for the drug companies. ‘This was done to you.’ These things come together organically in the final part of the novel.
Where does Charles Dickens come into it? No Dickens narrator ever talked like Demon, and I don’t think Dickens ever wrote much about sex or drugs. But like those narrators, Demon is incisive and funny, and he talks about the neglect and abuse of children, and tells stories of the lumpen adventures of orphans. He builds a world of scarcity and callousness so that the acts of generosity and friendship can stand out bright and clear. Also bright and clear is the impression that, in most essentials, nothing has changed in the intervening miles and years between David Copperfield and Demon Copperhead. The author’s decision to write the latter as a tribute to the former is not a gimmick; it carries real meaning. Capitalism means constant disorienting change but the underlying callousness stays the same, and we can recognise it in the 19th Century and in the 21st.
The 1919 Review 