In a vast hive-city on a distant world, an alarm sounds. It blares all throughout the city, and we see in rapid succession the reactions of a miner beneath the alien soil, a housewife at a market, a soldier on the walls, a factory foreman, a ruthless trader and a young noblewoman. In this way, the first few pages of Necropolis by Dan Abnett give us a sweeping but economical cross-section of the city of Vervunhive in the moment when its tens of millions of inhabitants receive the first sign of the unimaginable destruction that is coming.
A vast Chaos-corrupted army descends on Vervunhive, and over the following days and weeks the poor souls we’ve just been introduced to are put through hell. One is killed in the first savage bombardment; another develops from his pre-war existence to heroic status as a resistance fighter; another endangers the defense of the city in the interests of war profiteering. Meanwhile all around them, the city collapses by degrees into a ruin and, as the novel’s title suggests, there is a whole lot of mortality.
Friendly forces arrive from offworld to help defend the city, including the Tanith First Regiment led by the heroic Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt. This is the third novel starring Gaunt and his Ghosts, a regiment of scrappy light infantry fighters from a world lost to Chaos. First and Only and Ghostmaker flesh out the regiment’s characters in a way that Necropolis is too busy to do. But Necropolis is still bigger and better, and it can be read on its own. And, like most Black Library novels, it can be enjoyed as a military sci-fi epic, without any knowledge of the tabletop wargame hobby on which it is based.
Still, it has some of the familiar features of those other stories: Gaunt’s most difficult battles are against cynical, cruel and complacent people on his own side; the Tanith Ghosts are underestimated by snobbish other regiments recruited from wealthier and, well, not-dead planets; in spite of all this, Gaunt and the Ghosts save the day and win their internal and external battles. If more high-ranking servants of the Imperium of Man were like Comissar Gaunt, maybe it wouldn’t be such a dystopian nightmare of a society – which makes it kind of tragic that he serves it.
Unlike the previous novels, Necropolis has a fairly reasonable gender balance, because of the focus on various women from Vervunhive and the role they play in the resistance, often in the face of condescension from some of the less sympathetic Tanith Ghosts. Another departure from its predecessors is that it focuses on a single momentous battle, the Stalingrad of the Sabbat Worlds crusade, and tells the story from start to finish. For the first time, we see Gaunt commanding at a strategic level. Himself and Dan Abnett both are working with a bigger canvas, after finding their feet with two simpler novels, and that’s awesome.
We see refugees overrunning the police cordons that stand between them and safety, occupying factories and warehouses without permission, and organizing themselves into work teams. We see miners and women from textile mills, many of them permanently deafened from shellfire, forming guerrilla units behind enemy lines on their own initiative. These sub-plots are compassionate stories about the most downtrodden imperial subjects claiming some agency in terrible conditions. These stories also give an impression of Vervunhive as a place with lots of people and moving parts. It is a living, breathing place – for now.
Toby Longworth is great
I listened to this novel as an audiobook. I rarely re-read a book and it is rarer still with audiobooks; there are only two I’ve ever taken the time to give a re-listen, and Necropolis is one of them. Toby Longworth reads all the Gaunt’s Ghosts audiobooks, and he is just fantastic to listen to. He gets the tone of the ‘grim, dark future’ just right. I usually hate it when readers put on lots of elaborate accents, but Longworth gets away with it. Like the dwarves in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, the Tanith Ghosts have an array of regional British and Irish accents, suggesting that their world of agriculture and forestry was home to a range of cultures, but not a particularly wide or exotic one. In Ghostmaker and Honour Guard, Longworth does a perfect impression of Alec Guinness for a couple of senior characters in Gaunt’s flashbacks. The officer class, you see. The regiment’s chief medical officer Dorden has a dreadful Irish accent, but somehow Longworth’s performance is still good, and I still believe him as a character. The very likeable Colonel Corbec has an Irish accent too, and his one is much better.
Why did I like this book, and who would not like it?
I was a Warhammer hobbyist for a few years around age 11-16, and Imperial Guard were my second choice after Orks. Hence the appeal of this book to me, even twenty years removed from the life of drybrushing, gluing and rolling meteor showers of dice. I’ve also always had a fascination with all things military, and with alien worlds and future civilisations, and with various episodes of human history that resonate in the visuals and language of Warhammer. But it’s not just the future or the past. For me, horror is catharsis. Appalling death and destruction, at a safely fantastical or science-fictional remove, and contained within the frame of a story, eases the mental pain one feels at the real horrors of the world.
There are parallels, there is applicability – but there is also the safe distance of several hundred lightyears and thirty-eight millennia. Without getting too dramatic (here I wisely deleted 500 words where I got too dramatic), fiction, including genre fiction based on an elaborate game involving toy soldiers, gives us a space to feel things safely. There is, however, the overhead cost that we risk fetishizing death and destruction. In our culture and in individual people, it becomes hard to tell where this search for catharsis ends and the simple glorification of war begins.
Abnett is prolific, and he might not even remember writing this quarter-century-old novel. But I hope he knows he did a skillful and spirited job here of depicting war: gore-splattered, dynamic, technical, kinetic, but at the same time sensitive to human suffering.
But to people who do not like to read about gore, cathartic destruction, war stuff, intense human suffering on an epic scale, or fantastical future settings, I’ll level with you: Necropolis is probably not your cup of tea.
The section on Commissars from the Warhammer 40,000 3rd Edition Imperial Guard codex (1999), contemporary with Necropolis. Images and text belong to Games Workshop ltd
Necropolis should be on TV
I wrote in my most recent post that I was going to suggest a Black Library novel that ‘they’ should base the planned Warhammer 40K TV series on. ‘They’ being, I suppose, Henry Cavill and Amazon. Since these personages are not to my knowledge regular readers of The 1919 Review, it should be clear to the reader that the thoughts I am sharing are just a fun exercise. The corporate entertainment industry are gonna do what they’re gonna do. That’s bleak, but the alternative, that they would try to triangulate between posters, vloggers and maybe even bloggers and make a pathetic effort to please the most hyper-engaged people on the internet, would be pretty bad as well. So let us write and read this free of any illusion that we have any control over the outcome. This is not intense fandom. This is just fun and chill.
These caveats made, here’s why ‘they’ should make a Warhammer TV series based on Necropolis. Even though, to be clear, they will probably make eight dismal hours of 300 with boltguns.
Gaunt is the archetypal TV male lead character: stern, compassionate, imperfect but always fundamentally right, beset by challenges from people of lesser stature. He is Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights, but instead of American Football it’s purging the heretic. He’s Edward James Olmos in Battlestar Galactica, only younger and more athletic: from time to time he revs up his chainsword and wades into a melée, chopping off limbs right and left. Walter White, Tony Soprano, forget about your petty rackets: the dubious cause which Gaunt serves makes him a classic TV antihero.
I noted above that Necropolis has a fair balance of men and women as characters, which would be a big advantage over a lot of other Black Library novels.
(Honourable mention here for Sandy Mitchell’s Ciaphas Cain novels, which have some ingredients of a good TV show – except that Commissar Cain’s narrative voice is so crucial to the irony at the heart of these stories.)
I also remarked that Necropolis is focused on a single location, which allows not just for savings on sets, props, costumes and effects, but for the kind of rich and dense environmental storytelling and set design that this kind of project absolutely needs. Necropolis gives us a cross-section of Imperial society, as opposed to a glimpse of the frontlines in various warzones. What better introduction to the grim darkness of the far future?
In Necropolis the Tanith are backed up by a heavy tank regiment, the Narmenians, who storm in to save the day at a crucial moment. For TV, I say, replace these guys with a hundred Space Marines. First, because the audience wants to see Space Marines. There can, and must, be Adeptus Astartes. Second, because they would serve the same purpose – as the heavy forces which wade in and make a right mess of the enemy. They would make a heavier visual impact than tanks, while probably being cheaper to put on the screen.
All in all, Necropolis is just a cracking good story, a simple situation and idea brilliantly executed. For a TV audience it would be a fantastic introduction to the 41st millennium.
Warhammer 40,000 has surged in popularity in the 2020s. It has broken into the United States, and there has been a new proliferation of videogame adaptations. A couple of years ago Amazon bought the rights to make a TV show set in the grim, dark future in which this tabletop wargame is set, which has led to speculation and discussion about what such a show would look like. I decided to share my thoughts, and they ended up being a meditation on the unique appeal of this hobby and setting.
Don’t make it about the Space Marines…
We do not know if the Warhammer 40,000 TV series will actually be made. But I have a dreadful premonition that if it is made it will turn out to be mostly lads in power armour doing stilted dialogue in front of fuzzy CGI landscapes.
The Space Marines are good for miniature wargaming: chunky, iconic and with cool abilities. But I can’t imagine them making up a good cast of characters on TV. If the camera has to linger on them for longer than a few minutes they will get really boring, really fast.
By definition they are all ultra-zealous supersoldiers, and I don’t see much dramatic potential there without really stretching the bounds of the setting. I fear the screenwriters will stretch it and break it, resorting to the war movie clichés, and there will be a streetwise city Space Marine and a naive farm-boy Space Marine, a Space Marine who is a petty thief and pedlar, a fat clumsy Space Marine, a nerd Space Marine, a Space Marine who shows people a picture of his girlfriend back home, etc. There might be room, maybe, for one religious Space Marine. Stock characters are not necessarily a bad thing in general, but they won’t work as Space Marines.
Three Space Marine scouts. These are metal miniatures from the 2000s painted by yours truly back in those days.
The other problem with the Adeptus Astartes is that they would cost an absolute bomb to put on the screen. How are they going to lumber around on set with any comfort or dignity in all that massive armour? If it’s light enough for them to wear, the weight of it won’t sit right, won’t look good; if it’s heavy enough to look convincing the actors just won’t be able to do it. CGI will have a lot of sins to cover up, and there goes your budget.
So who should the TV show be about? Easy: the Astra Militarum, aka Imperial Guard, because they are relatable and human but exist on a sliding scale of weirdness. They can be stock war movie characters, or they can be the Death Korps of Krieg, or anything in between. The writers have more freedom. Costumes and kit would be much cheaper: extras could be army reservists from whatever country they film in, maybe even, if we are really short of funds, wearing their actual uniforms, decorated of course with plenty of skulls and aquilas. They are canonically multi-racial and multi-gendered, so you could cast these characters pretty much any way.
The Tau would be another faction that could be interesting to show. Avatar shows that it can work when you base a story around blue and heavily made-up and CGI’d aliens who are still humanoid and relatively sympathetic. Some similar points apply to the Aeldari. But the Astra Militarum would be so much more straightforward.
…but have Space Marines in it
But the Adeptus Astartes are iconic. They have to be in the show, or people will feel cheated. Here’s an easy solution: include them. Have a squad or a company of them, and make them secondary characters. We see them for 5-10 minutes in each episode, and in the finale they stomp in and help turn the tide. The less we see of them, the cooler they will be. Also, if they are not the main characters, you can make them as weird and fanatical as they should be. You can also spend plenty of money to get them right, because you would make savings based on their limited screen time.
Tell a (relatively) small story
Warhammer 40,000 is a famously baroque and extravagant setting. Aside from half a dozen human factions, we have Chaos, Aeldari, Drukhari, Orks, Tau, Necrons, Tyranids and Leagues of Votann. At that, I’ve probably missed a few. Each faction has its strengths and weaknesses and its aesthetic. Then within each faction, we have numerous sub-factions (Goffs, Bad Moons, etc for the Orks; Aeldari Craftworlds, cults of Chaos). And each sub-faction has its strengths and weaknesses, aesthetic, etc too. Even after all that, there are more than enough lacunas in the lore for players to make up their own craftworld, Space Marines chapter, Astra Militarum regiment, etc. Each faction has dozens of troop and vehicle types, each with its own set of stats and rules and its own intricate resin miniature; the hobbyist glues each miniature together from parts and then paints it according to their own creative vision.
Another of my old miniatures that I was able to find. An Imperial soldier has just hijacked a bike from an Ork. This hobby is all too expensive and time-consuming for me now, so I haven’t painted an Ork for nearly 20 years. I still buy the odd copy of White Dwarf magazine and read Black Library novels. And I still appreciate the continuum from the smallest resin hip-flask to the galaxy-spanning civilisation.
I think it’s the medium of the tabletop wargame that gives it the freedom to get so weird and wide-ranging. Novels have to be focused on character and plot, TV shows more so, movies most of all. You might see elaborate worldbuilding in, say, a very long series consisting of very long books (George RR Martin), an open-world videogame (Fallout: New Vegas) or in a sprawling comic that runs for decades (Marvel, DC). But a tabletop wargame is even more freed from the constraints of character, plot and narrative focus.
A novelist has to think about how to work in some backstory or try to make the exposition more interesting. Warhammer hobbyists are happy to buy army books in which (alongside rules, tips, artwork, etc) platefuls of backstory and exposition are served up without any attempt at “working them in subtly.” It’s open-ended; it’s better if it doesn’t go anywhere. No hero is going to come along and fix this horrifying future. The point is that the setting is suitable to have a battle in.
What does all this mean for a TV show? Pitfalls. The writers will have to convey a sense of that breadth and depth while also telling a cohesive story. A lot of Black Library material is sprawling and epic in a way that would not translate to the small screen. There are over fifty books in the Horus Heresy series! So I hope they don’t try to tell *the* story of Warhammer 40k, with the Emperor and the primarchs as characters. The fall of Cadia would be another dangerous one to try. These kinds of stories would cost too much, and be too solemn and gargantuan to give new audiences a point of entry.
The featured image is an equally solemn and gargantuan statue of a Space Marine at Warhammer World. By Julie Gibbons, via Wikipedia Commons
Think smaller. Stick to one planet, or even one city or one battlefield. ‘Thinking small’ in the context of 40k could still encompass a gigantic city with lots of ecclesiastical mega-architecture, or an arsenal-moon with a gun cannon bigger than Australia. A hive city would allow for a good mix of studio interiors and miniature or CGI exteriors.
I was not a great painter, and as a commander I had a terrible habit of getting all my soldiers killed. But what I really loved was converting, ie, gluing miniatures together in interesting ways that, while lore-friendly, were not anticipated by the designers.
Here are ideas of the kind I think could work:
Inquisitors investigate a Genestealer cult. A full-scale Genestealer rebellion breaks out later in the season. After the Imperium forces win in the final episode, we strike a fatalistic note with the discovery of an approaching Tyranid hive fleet, of which our Genestealer cult was just a forward outpost.
A group of civilians and assorted imperial soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines by a sudden enemy advance and fight a partisan war.
Imperium and Eldar/ Tau/ Votann forces are forced to bury the hatchet and ally against a Chaos onslaught that threatens them all. The grim, dark, fatalistic note could sound when it ends with the trial and execution of our main character on charges of working too closely with xenos.
Use what you’ve got
A simple story set in a limited location allows for the more full building of a world. In a film like Children of Men, the most important things accumulate in the background or in brief glimpses. The visual and auditory richness of that movie shows what could be possible in a 40k series.
It is already such a visually rich world. A TV show would have an absolute wealth of material to draw on. No need to reinvent the wheel in terms of costumes, decor, set design, etc. Give us half-robotic flying cherubs and guys with pipes sticking out of their faces. Give us flying buttresses and computer terminals set into ornate pulpits, and skulls everywhere.
Get it right
I talked earlier about how 40K is open-ended, that there’s no real need for narrative focus as far as the tabletop wargame is concerned. But it would be a big mistake to think this means it’s shapeless or meaningless. What 40K does have is a distinct aesthetic and tone (maximalist, gothic, totalitarian, grotesque, with a hint of satire), plus rules that are (of necessity) pedantically exact. This provides a backbone to the sprawling lore. Its not that there’s ‘no point’ to the lore or backstory or that it ‘goes nowhere.’ If I’m building an army of Chaos Marines who worship the plague god Nurgle, I’m going to assemble them so as they look diseased and paint them in sickly greens. If I have an army of Orks I know they are very poor shots with ranged weapons but strong in hand-to-hand; my tactical challenge is to get them to close in on the enemy fast. Good thing I have some Stormboyz, ie, Orks with rockets on their backs.
So the lore is not arbitrary or pointless. It gives purpose to the hobbyist and clear rules to the gamer.
My Imperial Guard officer holds a holy book which I think I borrowed from an Inquisitor kit. Back then they were Imperial Guard, now they are called Astra Militarum. Most of my knowledge is from that earlier iteration of the game.
A TV show would have to get such details right. There is room for great variation in the 40k Galaxy, but if we see Orks who are crap at close quarters combat, or Nurgle Marines with a general air of good health, that will be a problem.
Imperial Guard sniper, adapted from plastic Cadian kit and metal Catachan heavy weapon loader, if memory serves
Another pitfall would be if the story and setting are played straight. The Imperium of man is a monstrous society, combining the 17th Century wars of religion with the height of Stalinism. Please understand before you begin that a Space Marine is not a US Marine in space. He is what it would look like if Buzz Lightyear joined ISIS.
We identify with the Imperium because we see in it something of ourselves, even though that something is a savage caricature of human history’s most repressive and fanatical tendencies.
And in turn, isn’t Chaos just a caricature of the Imperium? Maybe if imperial citizens weren’t primed and traumatized their whole lives by the grotesque imperial cults, they wouldn’t find the Chaos gods so appealing. If life wasn’t so miserable in the Imperium, maybe its people wouldn’t regularly see guys who look like Mad Max villains crossed with actual maggots and say, “Where do I sign up?”
A vein of fatalistic humour should run through this grim, dark story. For tone, think along the lines of Paul Verhoeven, Mortal Engines, Judge Dredd and Fallout (well, West Coast Fallout, not East Coast Fallout, which is an instructive example of inappropriately playing it straight). It’s not Star Wars. And on the other extreme, we don’t want ten hours of 300 with boltguns.
Another small conversion. An Imperial Guard soldier covers his airways while purging heretics with flamer.
A related idea: what if the series was a straight adaptation of an existing Black Library novel? I actually have a specific one in mind. But I’ll leave that for another post. Stay tuned. Meanwhile share your own thoughts in the comments. What faction should a TV show focus on? Is there any book you’d like to see adapted? Can you see a way small-screen Space Marines could work?
Bring the House Down has a killer set-up, a ‘WTF’ moment that grabs the reader. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival an earnest young woman, Hayley Sinclair, performs a solo spoken-word show about the climate crisis. Theatre critic Alex Lyons writes a gratuitously cruel one-star review within a few minutes of walking out of the show, sends it to his editor – then goes to a bar and meets the performer whose work he has just savaged. Alex and Hayley go back to his place, but he has meanwhile neglected to tell her that he attended her show, or that he has just humiliated her in a major national newspaper and probably crushed her dreams forever. Don’t worry, she finds out the next day when she looks at the morning paper in his flat. Her revenge is swift, merciless and very public.
After this explosive set-up the pace settles down but never slackens. What really makes this story is its narrator Sophie, Alex’s colleague, who is understated, cautious and quietly troubled in contrast to the outspoken and self-righteous confidence we see from other characters. She gives us a rounded view of Alex, which is not necessarily to say she makes him any more sympathetic. Nobody knows his bad sides better than she does by the end of the book, but she is disinclined to give him the kind of one-star review he freely dispenses. Her voice carries us through the novel with a tone of awkward discomfort mounting to a sense of personal crisis.
At one stage Sophie has to review a twelve-hour long historical drama (titled An Uncivil Peace) whose events she can’t follow and whose characters she can’t tell apart. But she gives it five stars and a gushing review (‘…blistering…’), because she feels that a lot of people put a lot of effort into it. Later, in a different mood, she attends a play about refugees staged and set inside a shipping container. The clever staging gimmick and the important topic fail to distract her from the clichéd dialogue, bad plot, and the offensive nature of a bunch of mostly white students portraying refugees. After scrupling and hesitating, she gives it a brutally honest review and a single solitary star. Soon after, she passes a poster advertising An Uncivil Peace which proudly boasts her five-star rating. She hurries past it, cringing.
The ratings she gave these two texts were pretty much arbitrary, related more to what was going on in her head at the time than to experience or quality. The one-star review was at least honest.
From Wikipedia Commons, a scene from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2009 or 2010
I was interested in how this novel explored criticism. I review stuff here on this blog, but you’ll notice I don’t give out ratings. If people want to know if they should watch some movie or read some book, I say: read what I’ve written about it; get a sense of what it’s like; get a sense from my words of what I, the critic, am like. You should be able to triangulate from that if a book is worth your time and money.
For example, how about this book? It doesn’t have orcs, spaceships or Bolsheviks in it, and yet I read it cover-to-cover and have nothing bad and plenty good to say about it. If you’ve been in Edinburgh during the Fringe, which I have, it probably helps. If you’re interested in art, journalism and the creative process, and like the narrator you are thirty-four and a parent of small kids, that will help too.
This book explores what is problematically called “cancel culture” and lets us make up our own minds about the characters. Victims who call out shitty behaviour are usually portrayed in the media as a mindless puritanical mob but this novel is generous and understanding, while allowing us to decide for ourselves how much of the reaction is going too far or missing the point.
Of course we need criticism that’s useful and not just PR; people have taken time off work and spent money to go to the Fringe, and they need to know if a performance is worth their while. But Bring the House Down makes you think about how critics who are in steady jobs are at a massive advantage in relation to artists, almost none of whom are making any money. The critic is in a reserved, defensive posture and the artist is making themselves vulnerable. No, that’s not fair.
Notice as well how our narrator Sophie becomes Alex’s only confidante. When he’s ostracized as a result of his fucking over women, he selects the nearest woman to be his emotional support. It seems perfectly natural to both of them.
See? I wrote some sentences and paragraphs that took you a few minutes to read. Wasn’t that more useful than the fake objectivity of a star rating?
And should you accept my judgement? Who am I? I wrote thousands of words about how much I love Tiberian Sun. I wrote a good review of Rebel Moon and I stand over it. I’m not pretending to be the fount of universal good taste and wisdom. I’m just telling you what I thought and how I felt. My liking something might be a sign that you won’t like it – but that’s also useful for you.
I would say to critics, if you have to rate texts, get granular and let us see under the hood – the way blogger vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com does. He breaks it down into categories like adrenaline, likeability and emotion, and explains every step of the assessment process, finally sorting his reviews into a hierarchy that ranges from ‘Brilliant’ through ‘Outstanding,’ ‘Good,’ ‘Not Bad,’ ‘Bad, but with redeeming features’ and ‘Just plain bad,’ to ‘Eye-gougingly, excrecently terrible.’
Even this kind of rating is not for me. In my opinion, the Vacuous Wastrel got jaded and overly-critical a little way into his Terry Pratchett read-through (although I love Pratchett, I would certainly get jaded if I was reading a heap of his books back-to-back). But it’s a lot better than giving us five points on a scale and leaving it at that. His judgements are transparent and useful and generally fair.
Maybe a certain text just isn’t for you, and your one- or two-star review will stop someone who it is for from experiencing it. Maybe you were having a bad day and weren’t receptive. Maybe you were twenty-five and loved it, but would have hated it an thirty-four, or vice versa. Maybe you’ll feel one way in the hour after seeing it, and another way a month later.
The other thing about my criticism is that I write when I have something to say, not necessarily when I love or hate something. I loved season 2 of Andor and took notes on it. But I never used those notes. That’s not a negative judgement on the best TV show I’ve seen in years.
These have been some of the meditations that Bring the HouseDown inspired and provoked in me. In light of them, you will easily understand why I don’t assign a star rating.
Today happens to be the anniversary of nothing. At least in relation to this blog. But a few things are happening that I want to pause and acknowledge.
First, I expect the next two weeks to witness the birth of my third child. I composed the early posts in my head while rocking my eldest son, then a baby, to sleep. I would re-listen to Russia in Revolution by SA Smith while walking him around the house in a sling, pausing long enough to scribble notes for the blog, but not long enough to wake him. I mentioned the birth of my second son here two and a half years ago. While raising my wonderful boys, I have been tending this little blog on the side through the same period.
If you want to start some creative project like this but you think maybe you’re too busy, well, I’ve been busy and still got this done.
I’m grateful that each year thousands of people, spread across every continent on the planet, have been reading my words. Today marks my annual visitor count overtopping those of any previous year, with two and a half months left to go.
Today’s featured image is a wonderful piece of slop I found in the wild. An ad on a WordPress blog, no less. The man in the cloak, it would appear, got into Harvard by surrendering his sanity to an eldritch horrorfrom abhorrent regions beyond space and time. Or maybe the eldritch horror represents Harvard.
Seeing where my readers are coming from is always fascinating. When the great Bob Dylan forum expectingrain.com brought a windfall of traffic my way, I noticed a wave of Germans and a wave of US Americans checking in 6-8 hours apart. The Irish are usually the biggest contingent but this year they are a modest third behind the US and Canada. The blog is in the English language so it’s no surprise that the UK and Australia make up the next largest parts of the readership.
But in the last 6 and especially the last 3 weeks something very interesting has happened: a massive spike in visitors from China. They are the fifth-largest national grouping among my readers this year, and the largest this month and last month. These readers do not seem to be looking at my few posts about China (William Hinton and Cixin Liu) any more than any other nationality.
It’s possible that the stats WordPress gives me are warped by strange internet anomalies beyond lay understanding. Maybe there are different rules in different jurisdictions for WordPress to read someone’s IP address; maybe minor tweaks to regulations in certain countries can produce an engagement mirage… I don’t know. But I really like the idea that I’m being read and shared by hundreds of people in China. I like it a lot more than I expected it.
The numbers are good and getting better, even though my regular readers will have noticed I’m not posting as much. Gradually in the last six months, after four years of weekly posts without fail, I have dropped down to, in effect, monthly posts. It’s going to stay that way for a while, not least because there’s a new baby on the way. One way or the other I feel it’s a necessary change of gears. But The 1919 Review has never gone dormant and I don’t foresee that it will. Readers, sharers, subscribers, paying supporters: thank you.
At 18 I visited China during an ambitious bit of backpacking. One day a Chinese woman working in a hostel held up a banknote with Mao’s likeness on it and assured my companions that if you placed your finger on his chest you could feel his heart beating. My friends reported this to me and I reacted with scorn. You see, I had read Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and John Halliday (not even all of it), and I knew everything. I could not explain by what mechanism Mao had managed personally to kill seventy million people, but I did not doubt that he had pulled it off, and that anyone who admired him for any reason was deluded, maybe even dangerous.
In fact I didn’t know all that much and I still don’t. But in the intervening years I’ve come to learn bits and pieces more.
We didn’t learn anything at all about China in school but we did learn about the Russian and French revolutions. The focus was on political leaders and the struggles between them. In real life, the social changes experienced by the masses were the central questions in the revolution, but they were an afterthought in the education system and on the history shelves of bookshops.
This western discourse might stop only long enough to note that the ‘ordinary person’ suffered before the revolution but, it is asserted, suffered worse after. So I knew about the nonsense with the sparrows and the backyard pig iron forges long before I knew about the greatest social change which the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions had in common: the land revolution.
Probably the most important development in global history in the Twentieth Century was the transfer of land from a small class of landlords to the majority, to the peasant farming population. This was not communism or socialism, just democracy. But in the last century, it mostly happened in communist-ruled countries such as the People’s Republic of China, although it was and is proverbially not a democratic state in the sense of electing the leaders, the right to free political activity, etc.
They didn’t teach me about this in school, or in the history book reviews in the Sunday papers, or in Mao: The Unknown Story. I’ve picked it up elsewhere, most of all in a book I’m currently reading called Fanshen by William Hinton.
This is the copy I own. This post’s cover image is from a different edition, courtesy of Wikipedia.
About the book
William Hinton is from the United States and he was in China in the late 1940s. He went to a village called Zhangzhuangcun[i] in Shanxi Province where, with the help of a translator, he took down a massive heap of notes recording the experiences of local peasants during the prior few years of war and revolution.
Hinton came back to the United States, whose government confiscated his notes and kept them under lock and key for the better part of two decades. They figured that reading about the lived experiences of Chinese farmers would be extremely dangerous for the health and safety of US citizens. Hinton finally got his notes back and wrote and published Fanshen in the mid-1960s.[ii]
I’ve always been a bit confused as to what a ‘village’ is supposed to be, and Fanshen has added to my confusion, because Zhangzhuangcun was not an expanse of fields and scattered houses, or a built-up crossroads, but a dense collection of buildings, in and around which lived roughly a thousand people, surrounded by farmland. Early on we get a beautiful description of the place before we zoom in on the absolute misery in which so many of its people lived.
A handful of families around the village own most of the land and keep the rest in debt slavery and servitude. These landlords bring in rents and harvests, build big houses, buy more land, lend at extortionate rates, swindle their illiterate tenants and debtors, and buy the children of people they have reduced to absolute desperation. What do the landlords do with the proceeds of all this exploitation? Send their children to college; buy more land, make more loans; distil alcohol; buy silver and bury it in the ground.
But the social life of the village is complex and has many layers and moving parts. This is a big book because Hinton doesn’t try to con us with an overly-simple story. For example, the way these landlords live, I wouldn’t call it luxury. They lived on dirt floors. What they had was power over others.
Soldiers were occasionally present in town (harassing women, drinking) but mostly the landlords kept control through informal means. Religion and the supernatural feature heavily. There is the Confucian society, the Buddhist temple and the Catholic church. Each one is employed as a racket by the ruling layer in the village. But they also have plenty of sincere believers including many who take part in the revolution. The Catholics themselves enlist to challenge the parish priest.
One of the book’s very nice maps.
There is also, unrelated to landlordism but symbolic of it, a clay statue who must be appeased with sacrifices so that he will not inflict an illness on the villagers. I think it’s scrofula. During the revolution, some folks pluck up the courage to overthrow and destroy this deity. When no illness comes to afflict the iconoclasts, the villagers learn that the god has no power after all.
Other forces in the mix are bandits, the Nationalists, the Communists, and the Japanese and their local puppets. Hinton shows what each of these forces meant in the context of ordinary people’s lives and paints a picture that feels rich and alive. From the day the Japanese and the puppets are driven from the village, the land revolution proceeds: first as a reprisal against collaborators, then as a campaign against the most abusive of the landlords, then against the landlords and rich peasants generally. The picture is not rose-tinted: Hinton tells us how several landlords or their family members or allies were killed or tortured, sometimes in the pursuit of buried treasure that did not exist.
Land Revolution
The book is fundamentally about land revolution. We’re talking about the redistribution of the property of around 5 percent for the benefit of the rest. Objections to wealth redistribution are well-known: this would only be an ‘equal sharing-out of misery’; socialism fails when you ‘run out of other people’s money’; and people will have ‘no incentive to work.’
Having debated these things so many times it’s refreshing to see them answered on the comprehensible and relatable scale of one village.
‘Equal sharing-out of misery’
It turns out that, yes, sharing out the luxuries and household goods of the rich does benefit the community as a whole. Witness the memorable scene in Fanshen in which a strange kind of market takes place. All the confiscated goods of the landlords are laid out in the temple square, and the villagers come in groups, starting with the poorest, each to pick out one item.
An even nicer map. “Long Bow” village (Hinton’s nickname for Zhangzhuancun and its environs.
In the months and years of the revolution, a lot of other things get shared out or made collective property: the buried silver; the landlords’ open or covert control over religious and public institutions.
But the most important part is the sharing-out of the land, livestock, implements – the means of creating wealth. This is the real game-changer. This is fanshen – a phrase which Hinton explains as meaning something like ‘to turn over.’ For the Chinese farmer in the 1940s, eking out a miserable precarious existence through ceaseless toil while enriching a landlord, fanshen meant taking over a proportionate share of the landlord’s property and beginning to live with dignity and independence. In the background is the China-wide process of fanshen. This entity called the Border Region government will develop into the People’s Republic of China; the Eighth Route Army, which is idolised by poor peasants, will become the People’s Liberation Army.
‘Running out of other people’s money’
The windfalls from sharing out the landlords’ property were so intoxicating that the local activists tried to cast the net wider and ever-wider, usually in direct defiance of orders from the communist-led government, shaking down more and more of their well-to-do neighbours. This led to some violent abuses and excesses. The diminishing returns were apparent. In this sense, there’s a kernel of truth in the idea that socialism (or in this case democracy) works until you ‘run out of other people’s money.’ Of course, the villagers were reclaiming rent extorted and conned from them so it was their own wealth – but it was indeed finite, it could ‘run out.’ This was a secondary problem. The activists simply accepted that redistribution was as complete as it was ever going to be, and corrected their course.
‘No incentive to work’
Wealth came from other sources. There was a new and impressive movement of cooperatives. More importantly,contrary to the idea that sharing destroys the ‘incentive to work,’ the farmers now had more land and implements and were freed from debts and rents, so they were willing and able to work harder and produce more.
Those whose wealth had been taken from them did indeed lose an incentive to work, and this was an economic problem, but again, it was one of secondary importance. For the majority of people, obviously, the land revolution meant a tremendous new incentive to work.
Soldiers of the Eighth Route Army during the Second World War
Conclusion
All these questions are played out in Fanshen in a compelling drama with a huge cast of characters. It throws a new light on other things I knew about. The ritual denunciations during the Cultural Revolution were self-conscious re-enactments by students of the revolution the previous generation made. But it’s much more sympathetic to read about a bunch of peasants finally ganging up on their landlord and denouncing him for starving their children than it is to read about a bunch of students, twenty years later, doing the same thing to a professor because he’s allegedly a ‘capitalist roader.’ The thing is, I was acquainted with the grotesque student re-enactment many years before I read about the dramatic village meetings they were trying to emulate. Completing this circle adds pathos to both.
I’m about half-way through the book and may follow this up with further notes as it enlightens me further.
I’m still not a fan of Mao Zedong for a variety of reasons to do with his disinterest in democratic rights, his treatment of his political rivals from the 1930s on and his calamitous mistakes with regard to the ‘Great Leap Forward’ and the later Cultural Revolution. So I’m not here to make you Mao-pilled. But for people in North America or Europe to understand and respect people from China, it’s important to understand the reasons why Mao, the PLA and the CCP have been held in such high regard for so long.
Going back to that woman in the hostel who said you could feel Chairman Mao’s heart beating in the paper of a banknote. I don’t know, but maybe her grandparents went through this fanshen, a process they associated, reasonably, with the man whose face was on that banknote. This doesn’t mean I can’t criticise him but it does mean I should try to understand where she was coming from. Maybe lots of Chinese people would also find that kind of thing very embarrassing. But my scorn was not authentically my own.
[i] In an uncharacteristic bit of pandering to the western reader, he takes the liberty of calling the village ‘Long Bow’ though he admits this is not a translation of its name. So why call it that..?
[ii] The edition I have is from the 1990s, withdrawn library stock that I found in a second-hand bookshop.
Introducing a wailing Youtube therapist, my AI girlfriend and the serious social problem of bus theft.
People have been talking about this for a while but 2025 has been the first year that it really sank in for me: computers and the internet are getting worse, and you…
Hang on. What’s this now? I can’t see the words I’m typing. There’s a big charcoal-coloured box blocking my word processor.
I know I’m offline. I don’t want to see ‘my feed’, I want to see the words I’m writing.
It won’t go away. Does it go away when I click? No. Do I just have to wait?
I’ve figured out that mashing my keyboard keys makes it go away. But the point is, I don’t want to see ‘my feed’ when I’m trying to write. It’s very distra…
UFO CRASH-LANDS IN POLISH FIELD
KATE MIDDLETON’S HAIR IS A DIFFERENT COLOUR
BRUCE WILLIS HAS DEMENTIA
I’M 42 AND ONLY ATTRACTED TO MARRIED MEN
7 SIGNS THAT SOMEBODY LIKES YOU ACCORDING TO PSYCHOLOGIST
FLIGHT ATTENDANT WARNS PASSENGERS: THIS IS THE SEAT YOU SHOULD NEVER SIT IN
10 ACTORS WHO HAVE AGED TERRIBLY
6 THINGS YOU HAVE TO KNOW BEFORE YOU BUY SOLAR PANELS IN IRELAND
THESE 5 FOODS WILL KILL YOU INSTANTLY
Oh look, I’m online now. And ‘my feed’ has popped up again. Ugh. It’s a load of clickbait… Wait. Bruce Willis? No, poor guy…
Shit. What was I going to write again?
I guess I was going to talk about how the internet is shit, how we are descending further every day into the Interslop. And I was going to illustrate it with some screenshots.
Like this one. More AI slop from ‘history’ pages. Yes, that man has horns. And the text whitewashes what was probably mass sexual slavery. And AI layers this earth-toned grit all over everything that just makes it all the more creepy and uncanny.
But it’s not just AI. And not everything has gritty dirt tones. Now when I want to open a PDF document on my phone, I have to sit through a video ad that usually looks something like this:
Jesus. Hasn’t the internet gotten really tacky? Just vulgar. And when it’s not tacky, it’s weird.
For example: If I’m listening to something on Youtube these days, I get sudden interruptions from a man’s voice wailing at me. And before I show you the screenshots I want you to read the words he wails. Please keep in mind that these words below are sung as if they are song lyrics, in a way that’s anguished, high-pitched, melodramatic and breathless:
…procrastination is a trauma response, not laziness… warning signs of dopamine-chasing behaviour in men… how hypersexuality and procrastination are interconnected…
So many questions. First, is this really happening, or am I hallucinating? Well, I took some screenshots so I know it’s real. Next question: why is this apparition saying this to me? Why does the algorithm think I want this? Who thought it would be good to put these words to music? I don’t leave it play til the end because it’s too unsettling, so I don’t even know what it’s an ad for. But it appears to be for some mental health or counselling app. Let that sink in: this is supposed to be good for mental health!
While we’re on the subject of ‘why did Youtube think I wanted to see this’ – introducing my new AI girlfriend:
Well. She seems nice.
Youtube also thinks I want to see an ad for a new AI programme that can create songs.
If it’s ‘very scary’, why is she smiling? Even the most pro-AI people appear not to be sure how they are supposed to feel about it.
In other internet news, Facebook now has ad breaks, which I like because it encourages me not to be on Facebook. It’s a little speed-bump on the mindless scrolling. But like everything, Facebook also now has prompts to use AI at every turn.
So you don’t have to write Facebook comments anymore. You can just sit back and let the bot answer on your behalf. But, well, there never was any obligation to write Facebook comments. If you don’t like doing it, you could just not do it. So who is this for?
But bless you, chatbot. You’re here to reassure me if I get frightened about bus theft:
‘Is bus robbery common?’!! It’s good that on top of reading my friends’ funny posts, I get to read AI’s unintentionally funny attempts to assert its relevance.
And if we didn’t have AI, we wouldn’t be able to create awesome, educational, valuable stuff like this:
If you asked me, ‘Who are the Irish?’ the simplest and most straightforward answer would indeed be: ‘Niall of the Nine Hostages, Brian Boru, Bring Boru, Saint Patrick, Newfoundland, Buenos Aires, Newfoundland.’ Well done, chatbot You’ve named two Irish people, one typo, one Welsh person, and some place names in the Americas.
Is ‘Bring Boru’ distinct from ‘Brian Boru?’ He would seem to be, because they have different stone busts. FYI, in case you thought these were real stone busts done by 11th-century Irish masons, no, no they are not, they were just made up by the chatbot.
This preoccupation with nationalities and haplogroups points to another feature that is emerging as the Internet descends into the Interslop. Like so much of the internet in general and AI slop in particular (for example, the creepy horned Aryan Icelandic family), there’s a just-about deniable racialist edge to it.
Being on the Interslop is a strange experience that’s hard to put into words. The closest I can manage is this: it’s like looking at the ads page of an old-time newspaper full of quack remedies and crackpot inventions, but with bizarre, apparently meaningless letters and numbers scrawled on the paper, as if in cipher, filling every margin. While you are reading, the village idiots of a dozen villages you will never visit are yelling in your ear. Meanwhile you are experiencing intervals of auditory and visual hallucinations. But you can screenshot and preserve these hallucinations and pore over them.
You might say it serves us right for putting 40-60% of all social interaction on platforms run for profit by the weirdest and most hubristic North Americans. But we didn’t really get to make a rational choice about it. There was no big vote in 2009-2010; everyone who was twenty just went on Facebook because that’s where everybody else was, and stayed there so they could keep up with their friends who moved to Australia. Youtube was good because it was where all the videos were. If social media had been basically a schizophrenia simulator at the beginning, I doubt it would have taken off. But now that the ascendancy of the big platforms has choked all the competition, they can show their true face, and get as messy and nakedly profit-driven as they want. I’m still going to share this on Facebook. What else am I going to do?
Of course, I know the real reason why the therapy ads were wailing in my ear about procrastination and hypersexuality. It’s not that anyone thought it would be a good idea. Nobody had to think it was a good idea. The people paying to run these ads are rewarded for quantity, not quality. And quantity is no longer an obstacle. In the time it took me to write this post, I could have pumped out many Gigabytes of eerie slop with minimal effort, and I would have got a hundred times more engagement. So why do I bother writing? Well. We were pretty innocent fifteen years ago. If we thought maybe privately-owned, profit-driven tech and social media monopolies might be a bad thing, we couldn’t yet put into words why. But we have no excuse now. Now we know what the online world starts looking like when you base everything on the pursuit of ‘engagement’ for its own sake.
I’m folding my promised conclusion on Dr Zhivago into this broader post on history in movies, dealing with it along with Kingdom of Heaven, Platoon and A Complete Unknown.
There was a game called Commandos 2 (Pyro Studios, 2001), a stealth adventure set in the Second World War. The game’s own manual contained a long bullet-point list of its own inaccuracies, ranging from ‘the bridge on the River Kwai was made of metal, and it was never blown up’ to ‘there are no penguins at the North Pole.’ It has stuck in my mind because I’ve never seen anything like it since, not in movies or games or TV shows, though now and then the afterword of a novel will include one or two confessions. But what an excellent idea: for a text to own its inaccuracies, to be deliberate about them, to signal, “What you are about to experience is part fantasy.” It takes a lot of confidence and maturity for the authors to risk undermining their own authority like this.
I wonder why this isn’t standard practise, why no government has obliged producers of historical movies to release an ‘accuracy statement’ for me to pore over. Maybe the answer is that a lot of history is open to debate, so these statements would open a can of worms. In a recent series I asked of the 1965 epic movie Dr Zhivago, ‘is it accurate?’ I couldn’t answer that question without getting into my own opinions and understanding of the era.
It’s not as simple as asking ‘Did what happens in X movie actually happen?’ The answer is going to be ‘mostly, no.’ But here are some questions to which we can give more interesting answers: ‘What is this movie saying about history?’ ‘How well is it getting this message across?’ and ‘Is that message accurate and fair?’
From Dr Zhivago (1965, dir David Lean)
Dr Zhivago
Let’s ask these questions of Dr Zhivago.
Parts of it are very good – individual monologues, scenes and images convey significant historical events in a dramatic, emotional, visual way. For example, I like how the Moscow street changes over the course of the movie. I mentioned Yevgraf’s monologue. It’s good that we have armoured trains, even though they are in the wrong place and time. This film gives us a strong sense of place, especially in the haunting train journey sequence. It is lavish in supplying the sets, crowds and explosions that give a sense of mass participation in events, of sharp conflict. Its slow pace and the care it takes to root us in its spaces are refreshing in the context of a lot of today’s cinema, with its short scenes and rapid cuts (see Oppenheimer, which I’ll mention later too).
I think that historical movies have their value even when they are inaccurate. They furnish the public with reference points (oh yeah, Roosevelt, the president from Pearl Harbor), and even when these reference points are good only as punch bags for criticism (Gladiator makes a mess of Roman-era battles, but here’s what they really looked like) they are performing some service in that at least. If scholars of history don’t criticize these movies, especially movies we like, we are missing an opportunity to teach. So even as I criticize Doctor Zhivago I cut it plenty of slack. Compared to a lot of other movies that bill themselves as historical, it’s solid enough.
The screenwriter, Robert Bolt, was a former communist who maintained links with the British communist party until 1968. I think this helps explain a lot about the movie: the way it humanises the revolutionaries, the care and feeling in the writing. Maybe this script represents Bolt, through the avatar of Yuri, getting over (or at least coming to new terms with) his love affair with October (Ten years later he wrote a two-act play about Lenin which I am curious to read).
The film appears to advance a thesis about the Russian Revolution: that while it was a natural response to Tsarist tyranny and war, it was itself tyrannical and violent – worse, that the Revolution represented the antithesis to individuality. I don’t agree with this view (you can find a lot of my own views here) but I assume you didn’t ask; the interesting question is whether the movie adds up to a good argument for this view.
Partisans in the forest, from Dr Zhivago
The Squid Game Baby Civil War
I don’t think it does. The movie’s message impressed me more when I knew less about the real history. I’ve already noted how many times Yuri is confronted by a mean Bolshevik or Bolshevik-adjacent person who is contemptuous of his poetry. In these conversations (first with Kuril, then Yevgraf, then Antipov, Razin and finally Komarovsky) the movie’s case is stated explicitly: that Yuri himself, his private life and his creative output are not compatible with the revolution. The movie is here overplaying its hand because Yuri is actually an understated, inoffensive, decent person, not a wild man or a troublemaker. So what people say about him does not accord with what we see. The theme has to be stated so bluntly in dialogue, again and again, because we don’t see it organically.
The movie presents the Revolution and its supporters generally in a negative light. To do so it too often it relies on exaggerations or inventions, or a collapsing of the timeline that goes beyond reasonable limits. This is a common failing in historical movies: the writer (who is working to industry deadlines and specifications) puts in what they assume was there and what the producers and audience expect to be there. So within weeks of the October Revolution we see a poet exiled for ‘individualism.’ A few weeks later we have villages burned by an army which wasn’t there as a punishment for aiding another army which also wasn’t there.
As regards the Civil War, we get some striking images but little sense of the whole to which they belong. The war enters and exits the stage according to the needs of the narrative, not according to its own logic. This reminds me of something more recent: in the third season of Squid Game we have a miraculous baby who never cries or needs to be fed, or even opens its eyes; its function is to be cute and vulnerable, to add tension to the bloody contest. The Civil War as presented by Dr Zhivago is like the baby in Squid Game. The war adds tension, and we are periodically reminded that it’s there (even before it’s there) but when it isn’t immediately needed, it is docile.
The movie as a historic event
A movie is a big undertaking and, more so than a book, its production and reception constitute historical events in themselves, and you have to be clear on whether you’re talking about the movie as a movie or the movie as an event. Let’s illustrate what I mean by straying over that line in relation to Dr Zhivago. Here I’m far more critical.
What was courage on the part of Boris Pasternak – writing a novel about Russia’s revolutionary years that dissented from the enshrined narrative – is on the part of western filmmakers not courage but complacency, because they are promoting a narrative that’s not at all controversial in their own part of the world. Pasternak doesn’t need to remind his Soviet readers that the Whites were powerful and reactionary, that the Reds brought about popular reforms, or that intervention happened; Soviet readers have heard all that a hundred times before. But Dr Zhivago’s cinema audience in the west is unaware of these parts of the context. And the movie goes further: it treats the revolutionaries with far less sympathy than the novel and makes key changes, such as Yuri being exiled from Moscow and Lara being anti- instead of pro-Bolshevik.
The Russian Civil War, like Dr Zhivago, was an international affair. This film was a US-Italian co-production with an English director and writer, filmed in Spain, Finland and Canada. Why is that important? Because the United States, Italy, Britain and Canada all intervened in the Russian Civil War, all kept it going long after it should have settled down; because the White Finns committed a terrible slaughter against the Red Finns in 1918; and because Franco, a fascist dictator who killed several hundred thousand people with the explicit purpose of preventing an October Revolution in Spain, was still in power when this movie was made there. The apparent complacency of the western filmmakers is really something worse: they are throwing stones in glasshouses.
I don’t think you have to be from a group (say, the Russian people) to write about that group. But if you put yourself in this position, you do have a lot more work to do to get it right. This movie wasn’t made with such an understanding. Few movies were in 1965.
You could argue that Bolt as a former communist is in some way a member of the tribe he depicts. He has, I guess, some kind of vulnerability here. It does come across in the writing and to some degree mitigates the complacency, the obliviousness, that I’m complaining about.
Kingdom of Heaven
Scholars of history still only know about a few topics. For example, I thought Oppenheimer (2024) was very good but I wouldn’t be much help to someone who wanted to know if it was accurate.
Kingdom of Heaven (2005, dir Ridley Scott) is a good historical movie, as far as I can tell (I can’t remember what’s in the Director’s Cut and what isn’t). In the broad brush-strokes of the story it tells, it corresponds to the books I’ve read on the Crusades and some scenes follow the primary accounts very closely, such as the scene where Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) offers a refreshing drink before personally executing Reynald de Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson). Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom) is changed from an older, well-established power-broker in the Crusader States to a newly-arrived and penitent young knight who has an affair with the king’s sister. This change is so obvious, and at the same time historically inessential, that there is no concealment going on there, no sense of dishonesty.
There is a good example of where it simplifies history within reasonable limits: when Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187 he enslaved that part of the population which was not ransomed in a complex process; Kingdom of Heaven does not get into the weeds but presents the essential point, that Saladin spared the population from a massacre and most of them walked away with their freedom and all with their lives.
But there are individual lines that are pretty ridiculous. David Thewlis’ character says, ‘I don’t place much stock in religion.’ Dude, you’re a Knight Hospitaller in the 12th Century. You’re half-monk, half-knight and the only reason you live in this part of the world is because the Bible happened there. All your stock is in religion. Also, he’s not a merchant so I feel ‘stock’ is an ill-fitting metaphor.
Let’s consider the theme and this movie as an event. Kingdom of Heaven, considered as a statement on the War on Terror, is interesting. Robert Fisk reported on a screening in Lebanon where the crowd performed a spontaneous standing ovation following a scene where Saladin reverently places upright a crucifix which fell over during the siege of Jerusalem. I don’t know if this Lebanese audience was mostly Muslim or mostly Christian, but either way the reception is moving.
I read the film as liberal imperialist (we can all get along within the status quo), and personally I’m anti-imperialist (we can’t get along so long as the colonisers remain in charge of this land). But the film makes its case well. It presents two political tendencies within the Crusader States that really did exist. The faction around Balian had a more diplomatic and pluralist vision for the future of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, as opposed to Reynald and Guy who were aggressive and chauvinist. The parallel it suggests with the liberal and conservative wings of the pro-war coalition in the US in the 2000s is reasonable. There’s a lot of invention here, but in a medieval setting where we have scant records this is necessary. Screenwriter William Monaghan did a good job.
Charlie Sheen as Taylor in Platoon (1986, dir. Oliver Stone)
Platoon (1986) is an interesting one. I’ve read a few memoirs of US soldiers in Vietnam (If I diein a combat zone by Tim O’Brien and Chickenhawk by Robert Mason) and this movie is really true to those firsthand accounts. Director Oliver Stone was, of course, basing the story on his own experiences. It’s a highly authentic reflection of the experiences of US soldiers in the Vietnam War.
That’s the problem, too. How fair a reflection of the real history is it if we get a lot of movies from the US side and almost none showing the Vietnamese side? Millions of Vietnamese died compared to 58,000 US personnel; the Vietnamese still have landmines and the effects of Agent Orange. There’s just no comparison. The Vietnamese are not really humanised in most of these movies either.
Credit here to Oliver Stone, who gave a Vietnamese perspective in other movies he made. Further, he had a valuable story to tell in Platoon, and someone else couldn’t have told it and he couldn’t have told some other story in the same way. He does put Vietnamese people front and centre in the terrifying scene in the village, where we come within a hair’s breadth of something like the My Lai massacre.
But the issue stands. There are a lot of great movies about the Vietnam War but this is a hard limit to how great they can be as historical movies given this major problem.
A Complete Unknown
I have some thoughts on the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (2024, dir. James Mangold) that are relevant here.
This is another topic I’ve read about, and in my judgement A Complete Unknown is a very fine example of how to condense the messiness of recorded history (or in this case biography) into a dramatic and entertaining story. Dylan (Timothé Chalamet) gets a ‘composite girlfriend,’ Sylvie (Elle Fanning), who is mostly Suze Rotolo but also not; like with Balian, the movie is changing something without trying to fool us. The theme is well-grounded in real history and it lands powerfully. Dylan, like most of his generation, entered into the struggle for a better world but ultimately walked away. Those who tried to badger him into staying there against his will come across badly, but it’s left open for the viewer to make up their own mind what they think about Dylan.
I was mildly disappointed that we didn’t get to see Phil Ochs (except indirectly, when Joan Baez sings a cover of his song ‘There but for Fortune.’) We see a lot of Pete Seeger and a good bit of Johnny Cash and a couple of glimpses of Dave Van Ronk. If you ask me, Phil Ochs has far more business being in this movie than Johnny Cash does. He would be a powerful foil to Dylan, but I suppose that function in the story is carried out more than adequately by Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.
So Phil Ochs should be there, but the movie is busy enough as it is. The movie has simplified things within reasonable margins. *Huffs* I guess.
The above points suggest a few rules for historical movies, some positive, some negative:
If you find a good dramatic scene in the primary sources, absolutely use it (Saladin killing Reynald, Bob Dylan visiting Woody Guthrie).
If you want to change things, be obvious about it (Orlando Bloom, Suze Rotolo).
Simplify events within reasonable limits (Jerusalem 1187).
Ask if the world needs to hear this story (again) or if there’s a more valuable angle you can take.
You can tell other people’s stories, but only if you do the homework.
You probably shouldn’t make a moral judgement on a nationality which had basically no input in the production – but if you must, then find a way to make yourself and your audience vulnerable.
You can do parallels with today, if they actually fit and you do the work to show how they fit.
Your movie benefits from using a historical setting, but you have to pay the overheads. For example, if you want to have knights in your movie, don’t let any of them say ‘I don’t place much stock in religion.’
If you have to exaggerate and invent to make the theme land, you’d want to ask yourself if the theme is valid.
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.
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.
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 sameclever 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.
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 allother 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.
[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.
[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:
[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.
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.
The 1919 Review 
