[This was originally filed under the title December 20th: ‘Let me feckin’ clarify: no!’ The quote was from a placard I saw and photographed on the day. When you are involved in a movement, the date of the next big protest takes on a temporary but great significance. Hence the date sufficed here for a title. The movement against Water Charges in Ireland in 2014-2016 was an extremely important fightback against austerity.
[This piece of partisan journalism was vindicated by subsequent events. Though this was the last of the big Dublin protests, those who thought up clever ways to dismiss it at the time were wrong. Pro-establishment figures insisted that concessions by the government had split off a mythical ‘middle Ireland’ from the movement. But the charge was boycotted en masse through 2015, forcing its abolition in early 2016. The more critical points I make here about the leadership of Right2Water also anticipate how the movement first became inactive then ebbed away after the victory, without transferring the energy it had harnessed into a left political challenge.]
Merrion Square West, behind the Dáil, was filled with people. The closer you got to the stage, the thicker the bodies were pressed. To get around the corner to the other side of the square meant squeezing through a very slow human traffic jam. After trying, mainly to get a look at what kind of crowd was on Merrion Square South, I changed lanes and turned back. In front of me was a sea of people and a rich array of flags and placards.
A guy later described to me how he stood in front of the stage and rang his friend, who was down near Trinity. Neither one, from where they stood, could see any end of the crowds. Many people stuck down on Nassau Street couldn’t even get to Merrion Square.
The Guards and the media said that there were 30,000 people out on December 10th. We need to bury that myth quickly and securely. To be sure, 30,000 is a huge number of protestors. The student protest in 2010 was 30-40,000, and the one in 2011 was 20,000. Both were gigantic, awe-inspiring turnouts.
But there is absolutely no way that December 10th saw any fewer than 50,000, and to hear that there were 100,000 out would not surprise me at all. In other words December 10th was at the same point on the Richter Scale of protest as the historic October 11th and November 1st days that shook the government into making big concessions, cutting the water tax and delaying the bills.
The size of the demo is an extremely important question. The government’s U-turn was supposed to have satisfied everyone and ended the upheaval. December 10th proves that that has not happened. People realise that if we start paying, then the bills will sooner or later be hiked up and privatisation will be only a matter of time.
So what were the Guards and the media at, saying there were only 30,000 there? It’s obvious: trying to spread the impression that the government’s u-turn has worked and that the protest movement has been whittled down. “The middle ground lost interest after our colossal u-turn,” as one Labour member put it.
Another coping mechanism for the establishment is to claim that the crowd on December 10th, big and all as it was, doesn’t really “count” because apparently it was mostly composed of Sinn Féin supporters and socialists. “There is a lot of Sinn Féin and hard left branding,” one Fine Gael member pretended to observe.
I say pretended because I saw the demo with my own eyes and I know that’s nonsense. The “______ Says No” contingents were more numerous than Sinn Féin, the Socialist Party or People Before Profit. Most placards were home-made and improvised with clever (or weird) individual messages. The photos I took completely bear this out. But the Irish Times tells us that “[The] View from the stage was dominated by SF flags, socialist groups and unions.” Unless there was a huge concentration of such flags just in front of the stage, this is fiction.
In any case, what are they saying? That Sinn Féin and the left can summon tens of thousands onto the streets at will whenever they want to have a “counterfeit” protest? Were these tens of thousands of people present at the last demonstrations (which the journalist Fiach Kelly has forgotten the dates of) or were those demonstrations composed only of “real”, “ordinary”, “reasonable” people? Surely if SF, the Socialist Party and PBP can now count their active members and close supporters in the tens of thousands, then that deserves to be a headline all on its own?
This “supporters” myth, the legend of the counterfeit protest, is beneath contempt in terms of self-delusion. Maybe Fiach Kelly wants to believe it himself or maybe he spent more time behind Garda lines with coalition hacks than he did looking at the protest he was supposed to be reporting on.
It was an awesome turnout, the mood was brilliant and the people marching were not all Shinners and lefties who sprang out of the ground. But the mood on the ground was not really matched from the stage.
Place yourself in the scene. We all gather at 1pm, all fired up and anxious to hear some politics; at the highest pitch of enthusiasm Brendan Ogle, who is MCing, tells us a band is going to play. The band is OK, but we’re not here for a concert. And you can see people start to move in the first twenty seconds after the first note is played. In the crowd of tens of thousands, hundreds are moving away from the stage. Lines of people are trickling away. And you think: why the hell did they put on a band? Why do they always do this?
A bit of music and poetry and spoken-word art can be good on a protest. But there was far too much of it, and sometimes it didn’t even seem to be political. Every time the music or the poetry started up, lines of people trickling back down to Nassau Street would appear amid the crowd. People went down to O’Connell Bridge to block traffic or to Kildare Street to have an aul push-and-shove with the cops.
Speakers had come all the way from Detroit and from Greece to speak. By the time they got up there, 4 or 5pm, only 30% of the crowd was left, at the very most. This was still a sizeable crowd, but it was a sad remnant of the surging throng that had been there earlier. What a sickening waste. Next time, Right2Water need to front-load the politics and keep the poetry and songs for later on, or maybe for a short interlude in the middle of the speeches.
The second point of criticism: when are Right2Water, Brendan Ogle and People Before Profit going to cop on and start talking about non-payment? Is the alliance with Sinn Féin more important than the key tactic that can bring down the water charges? Non-payment should be front-and-centre. We need to maximise the numbers who don’t pay. That is the key struggle right now.
[Author’s note, May 2023: I wrote this piece nearly ten years ago on my old blog. Looking back, I’m happy with how I put my finger on how some shockingly crappy writing found its way into massive TV shows and movies of the time.
[In paticular I anticipated thewell-deserved Sherlock backlash…]
I’ve just watched the first two seasons of the BBC’s very enjoyable modern take on Sherlock Holmes. Moriarty, the villain (Andrew Scott), was admirably written and acted, with his posh Irish accent, his “absolute psycho” character (writer Stephen Moffat) and his insatiable mania.
But there was a problem. This was a problem with the whole conception of the character and the mysteries he sits at the centre of. I first recognised this problem when Moriarty did something that has become compulsory for every 21st-century villain: the Joker in The Dark Knight, Bane in its sequel, Loki in Avengers, the baddie Silva in Skyfall…
He deliberately got himself captured so as to engineer a fiendishly complex, far-fetched escape, all for some negligible purpose that was clearly not worth the risk or the trouble.
Then I started to think about this a little more. The 19th-century Professor Moriarty went after Sherlock Holmes because the great detective was threatening to uncover his secret criminal organisation. The 21st-century Moriarty went after Sherlock Holmes for his own amusement.
It’s effective and scary, once in a while, to see a villain who is motivated only by some inner sadistic drive, who is a psychopath, whose powers of planning and organisation are almost supernatural. Now, I’m not a massive watcher of films and TV shows, but I think I can discern a trend towards this kind of villain becoming the rule, not the exception.
It’s a shame, because Scott, Moffat and Gatiss’ Moriarty is so brilliantly acted and written. But his underlying motivation and nature is becoming a cliché. His prototype, to my mind, is Heath ledger’s equally brilliant performance as the Joker. The only explanation of his desires and motives is that he is like a “dog chasing cars”. He does it all for fun. He’s evil because he’s evil. Holmes and Moriarty have more or less the same conversation as the Joker and Batman: “You complete me.” says the Joker. “Without me, you’re nothing,” says Moriarty.
This is interesting the first time, but boring when it becomes a rule. Rather than being real characters, formed by and a part of the world around them, the villain becomes an essential, cosmic, metaphysical force of evil. Instead of applying a Sherlock-Holmes-like brain to the problem of understanding this villain, we are asked to bow down before a profane mystery that is beyond the grasp of our feeble human minds.
It’s pre-enlightenment stuff. Good versus Evil. Eternal battle between irreducible forces. Fair enough in The Lord of the Rings, which you know is set in a fantasy world. Not fair enough in a “gritty, realistic, modern” reboot of Batman or of James Bond. It fits in even worse in Sherlock Holmes, which is supposed to be all about the application of scientific thought to apparently baffling crimes. “I have been tempted to look into the problems furnished by nature,” says Sherlock Holmes in “The Last Problem”, “Rather than those more superficial ones for which our artificial state of society is responsible.”
And don’t get me started on the crimes themselves. Villains these days have thinly-disguised supernatural powers. The Joker can manufacture huge numbers of bombs secretly, then go on a rampage setting them off in all manner of bizarre places he could not possibly have planted them. He even times his one-liners precisely to the moment before the explosion. He times his bank robberies perfectly to coincide with the line of yellow school buses.
The absurd far-fetchedness of Silva’s plan in Skyfall is perfectly summed up half-way through this video and in this older post. It’s just stupid and impossible. The precision and logistical effort required would strain the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet, and the rewards are so trifling for this huge effort.
Of course, if the villain’s motivations need not be explained, then why should we think we have a right to understand his logistics? Cosmic forces of evil go hand-in-hand with supernatural powers.
Batman Begins impressed me because there was an internal consistency to it all, everything was explained within the rules of the game, no logistical leaps were made, and everyone’s motivations were made clear. Not bad for a superhero movie. Bane was a much better villain than the Joker as well, but again at the start of the film we were subjected to effectively supernatural powers and a pointless get-captured-and-escape stunt.
When the villain can do anything, there is no awe, surprise or dramatic tension. Internal consistency breaks down, and nothing is beyond possibility. When the villain can do anything, what stops him killing the hero? Screenwriters have solved this problem in a very unsatisfying way: often, the hero is cornered and defeated and the villain could kill them, but chooses not to, just to play some complicated and far-fetched game for their own satisfaction. The characters’ motivations can be twisted any way that suits the writers. A real conflict does not take place. Anything goes.
Is this all down to laziness? Like when Charles Dickens had a character die due to “spontaneous combustion” in Bleak House? I think it’s partly down to laziness. But only partly.
There’s no simple explanation but if you forced me to advance a theory, I’d say that villains with supernatural powers and/or no motivation beyond a desire to do evil reflect the stories we are told in the media.
George W Bush at one point stood up and said of Al-Quaida, “They hate freedom. They love terror.” The dead, bloodied face of Gaddafi was on every front page, as was Bin Laden’s. Remember the capture of Saddam Hussein and his dental exam? It has now become acceptable to be horrifically racist against people from North Korea, just because of the crimes of their government, crimes which some government allied to the US would get away with. Mass shootings in the US are written off as being due to insanity and evil, when actually there’s a lot more going on.
More shockingly, the 2011 riots in the UK were publicly blamed by the Prime Minister himself on “gang culture”. Idealistic explanations are preferred to material ones: young men not rooted firmly in the holy and sacred institution of the traditional family listened to too much hip-hop and got ideas. People who move country to flee violence or to find a job are presented as scroungers, or worse, as an invading army. Tube workers, air traffic controllers and waste collectors apparently go on strike because they’re greedy.
In the media, “enemies” of every kind have become cruder caricatures than the crudest Hollywood villains. It’s no surprise that even accomplished screenwriters have taken the liberty of making their villains cruder still.
We are dealing with a middle-class culture and media that has lost its patience with the demands of science. Sociological explanation is out of fashion. Attempts at linking outrages to the society that produced them are shouted down with utmost impatience as so much naive whingeing and dodging of personal responsibility.
But making these kinds of dumb, individual explanations for terrible events is dodging the responsibility of using your brain. The purpose of the decline of the villain in fiction is to shield writers and viewers from a world that is difficult to understand without asking questions that are considered radical, and to explain the problems of that world by reference to embodiments of absolute evil. It’s unsatisfying as entertainment, unless the satisfaction you’re looking for is nothing more than a confirmation of lazy prejudices, and freedom from the responsibility of using your brain.
[Author’s note, May 2023: One question remains. Has this trend continued? Well, Sherlock got worse, to the point where the shortcomings which earlier seasons had got away with became glaring. I haven’t watched the last two James Bond movies, the last two Batmen (Affleck, Pattinson) or (at a rough estimate) the last 15 Marvel movies. So I can’tmake direct comparisons.
[There will always be badly-written villains but in the last 5 years we’ve had damn good ones in Andor, Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and even a cartoon with an absurd premise like Enter the Spidey-Verse. Overall, I think the worst of this trend has receded into the past. Fingers crossed. The more common problem today is Black Panther syndrome: villains are given 100% sympathetic goals but then shown pursuing those goals with pointlessly evil methods.]
Morning folks. I’ve just gone uploaded a fully-voiced and updated version of ‘Czech Revolt in the East’ to podcast platforms and Youtube. Links below.
I’m very excited to announce that my second son is due to be born any day now. Instead of writing new posts, I’m going to be republishing here some of the best and most popular material from my old blog. There is some great material there which I will be excited to bring to a new audience here.
This is an appendix to my series of posts looking at the plausibility of Orwell’s Oceania and the merits of the novel it features in, 1984. Here is a timeline I worked out for Orwell’s invented world, based on clues and cues in the novel itself.
‘a long interval of peace in [Winston Smith’s] childhood’
An atomic strike near London, early 1950s
c. 1950-1952
Surprise air raid alarm in London; this is likely a surprise attack by Eastasia, probably with atomic bombs
From this date, world war is continuous
1950s: Atomic warfare causes huge destruction. Hundreds of cities, mostly in North America, European Russia and Western Europe destroyed (the only named city is Colchester)
By ‘the middle of the twentieth century’, Russia absorbs Europe, USA absorbs British Empire.
1950s:
In England, an underground struggle by socialist revolutionaries, a revolution and a civil war
Street fighting in London for several months
‘one of the first great purges’
1954:
Disappearance of Winston’s father
c. 1955-57:
A time of air raids and civil conflicts, of political youth gangs wearing shirts of the same colour, proclamations, severe food shortages
Political ‘disappearances’ are already commonplace
Disappearance of Winston’s mother and sister
Winston enters state institutions
Birth of Julia in 1957
Piccadilly Circus during street fighting in London, 1950s
By 1960:
Eastasia has emerged as a unified state from ‘a decade of confused fighting’
Around 1960:
Ingsoc becomes a widely-used term
1960s:
Big Brother becomes a household name
c. 1962-4
Revolutionary leaders Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford are photographed in prominent roles at some important Party function in New York
Around 1965:
Goldstein flees
‘in the middle ‘sixties’, ‘the old, discredited leaders of the party’ were ‘purged’ – ‘wiped out once and for all.’
1965:
Oceania currently at war with Eurasia
Julia’s grandfather disappears
Jones, Aaronson, Rutherford disappear
1966 or 7:
Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford confess in a show trial and, around a year later, disappear
1970:
The older generation of Party leaders is wiped out. Only Big Brother remains
Around 1973:
Winston is married to Katharine for 15 months
1977:
Winston has a strange dream involving O’Brien
O’Brien later says that he has been working on Winston’s case since this date
1980:
Oceania is now at war with Eurasia
1981:
Winston seeks out a sex worker
1984:
Ninth Three-Year Plan under way
Oceania conquers large parts of India
From Hate Week on, Oceania is now at war with Eastasia
Winston and Julia are arrested
At least one year later:
Oceania, now at war with Eurasia, first suffers defeat in Africa then wins a significant victory
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During the first year of the Covid pandemic, a spray-painted slogan appeared on a road sign near Galway in the west of Ireland. Above the words ‘Monivea 23km’ was sprayed ‘G ORWELL 1984.’ Either someone had a grudge against the village of Monivea, or someone was trying to say that we were living in 1984, presumably because of Covid restrictions. If we Google George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984, we get the same message repeated a thousand times: ‘We are living in 1984.’
I have recently re-read some f***ing Orwell, namely 1984. It’s a good story, if like me you have a high tolerance for relentless misery. But no, 1984 has not happened – anywhere, ever. Not in Galway in 2020, not on pre-Musk Twitter and no, not even in the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalinist terror.
This is the first post in a series about Orwell’s 1984. Future posts will look at why I think it’s a good novel even though it’s implausible, the timeline, and the enigmatic character of Goldstein. All page references are from the 2008 Penguin paperback.
In 1980 the Science Fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote a caustic dismissal of 1984. He gets a few things wrong, and I suspect he only skimmed the novel on the re-read. Contrary to what he says, there is no way to tell if one is being spied on via telescreen at any given time (4). He claims that Britain is the seat of power in Oceania, but it’s pretty obvious that Britain has been reduced to a province of a US-based empire: it’s been renamed Airstrip One (which is funny satire but ridiculous worldbuilding), its anthem is ‘Oceania, ‘tis for thee,’ and its people use dollars (5, 8).
But Asimov is correct in his overall point that the real world has not developed in a 1984 direction. It has developed in the opposite direction. The coercive powers of states have grown, but it is not in some Stalinist way. It’s all in the service of corporate power and profits. We can be spied on through devices we carry around with us, but this technology is mostly used to sell us crap. In Oceania, there is no more racial division or religion, which is not the situation we face. The militarised cops and fedsbin the US don’t use their weapons to disappear anyone who commits ‘thoughtcrime.’ They use all that hardware to kill black people, to police the borders, or to infiltrate and entrap.
Multi-lithic world
In Oceania, the world has become nightmarishly uniform and monolithic. Anyone who is not ‘orthodox’ is liquidated. Our world is the opposite. What should we call it – multi-lithic? Everyone lives in their own extreme algorithm-curated bubble. Trump supporters and Q Anon types live in a different reality where they won the 2020 election. We now have cranks who run around filming themselves all day as they harass political opponents and tear up library books, all the while claiming that they live in a 1984 dystopia. In reality they would be the first to sign up for Ingsoc – they’d get to have cameras pointed at them all day.
People are not coerced into morning calisthenics, evenings at the community centre or mass rallies. Such ‘horrors’ seem quaint. Instead people live in a world where the public and social spheres are withering away and all relationships are monetised.
We don’t all gather for ‘Two Minutes’ Hate’ or ‘Hate Week’ against a state-approved enemy. We line up and write vitriolic messages at each other’s thumbnails, usually over trivial stuff. We are not prohibited from debating; we are encouraged to debate endlessly, feeding the algorithm and muddying the waters. But we are prevented, as far as possible, from exercising any real power over events. We can think what we like. But we are not to organise.
All these trends predated the internet, and were certainly discernible by the real-life year 1984.
But we are not simply talking about whether 1984 resembles the present day. We are asking whether it is plausible. And doesn’t the world of 1984 resemble certain societies from history, such as the Soviet Union?
Actually it doesn’t.
When reading this book as a teenager I took Oceania as a ‘more extreme’ version of the Soviet Union. That seems to be what Orwell intended. But since then I’ve done a bit of reading, and now I can tell you that Oceania is actually something completely different.
It would not be difficult to list superficial similarities between Big Brother and Stalin, Goldstein and Trotsky, Oceania and Soviet Russia. But that’s actually where the problem lies. In the ways Oceania should be like the USSR, it isn’t. In the ways it shouldn’t be like the USSR, it is.
Contempt for ‘proles’
Let’s start with the ‘proles.’ The Party believe that ‘proles and animals are free.’ (53-55) There are separate uniforms and even separate drinks for ‘proles’ (beer) and Outer Party (gin). There is open contempt for the ‘proles.’ In the USSR there was never a rhetorical dehumanisation of working-class and poor people. Exactly the opposite: workers were idealised and put on a pedestal. It was often hypocrisy (as when they crushed a workers’ uprising in Budapest ‘in the name of the working class‘), but that’s beside the point. Such open contempt would have been unimaginable. Trotsky in 1936 was scandalised even to hear that a manager had used the wrong form of address with a worker.
Social engineering
The Soviet Union is associated with (we might say ‘notorious for’) social engineering. Ingsoc has no such ambitions, beyond the ranks of the Party. It basically leaves the ‘proles’ to their own devices. There is no attempt to change their culture, to improve their health and living conditions, no attempt to provide healthcare or education. We are explicitly told there is less social mobility and poorer education than before the Revolution. Ingsoc has left people to rot in buildings that have been standing since Victoria; the USSR built entire cities. Even if we take the Soviet Union at its very worst, this was the opposite of its approach. Access to education was widened a hundredfold and there was free healthcare.
A less benevolent example: in the late ’20s – early ’30s the Stalin regime set about forcibly collectivising all the farms in the country. This led to a terrible famine and a fierce campaign of repression. But such an ambitious project is unimaginable in Oceania, where the state leaves 85% of the population to be Del Boy and Rodney.
Culture
What about culture? Ingsoc destroys books, translates Shakespeare and Milton into horrible Newspeak, destroys words, disdains beauty. The Soviet Union invented new words by the dozen, but it did not destroy old ones. Literary classics were made far more widely available and affordable across the Soviet Union and Stalinist Eastern Europe. Not-for-profit publishing meant there was actually much more emphasis on acquainting the people with what isboften called ‘high culture.’ In Oceania, separate media are produced for ‘proles.’ Michael Parenti points out that it was in fact after the return of capitalism, in the 1990s, that books were destroyed in industrial quantities, and the standard of literacy plummeted.
Science
There is no scientific progress under Ingsoc. Even military research consists of white elephants. In relation to the real Soviet Union, I have two words for you: Sputnik, AK-47. The USSR promoted Marxism, which is a materialistic philosophy. Ingsoc openly rejects ’19th century ideas about the laws of nature’ (277-8) and embraces a totally relativistic ideology – matter only exists in the human mind.
Sex
There is no evidence whatsoever that there has been any advance for women under Ingsoc. Around page 15 we have the unintentionally amusing phrase ‘girl, of about twenty-seven.’ In Part 2 Chapter VIII O’Brien assumes that Winston speaks for Julia. Also, the party hates sex. But for the first 15 years after the revolution, the Soviet Union had the most socially liberal regime in the world when it came to sex and the liberation of women.
This paperback was obviously marketed in a certain way – spare a thought for the poor divil who bought this book expecting a lot of sex and, 50 pages in, was utterly traumatised
Permanent Warfare
The Soviet Union, like Oceania, was hampered by huge military expenses. But the Russian Revolution was born out of an anti-war movement. The Reds were far keener on peace proposals than the Whites during the Civil War. The Polish-Soviet War lasted less than a year. There were no external conflicts between 1921 and 1938. The consistent foreign policy from the Stalin period on was to seek stability, even to the point of hesitating to support the Spanish Republic and North Korea.
Oceania is not the USSR
All the above shows that Oceania and Stalinist Russia are actually very different places, not just in degree but in kind. Most of the creepy Stalinesque detail about censorship is drawn from Orwell’s own experience doing censorship for the British state during World War Two. Doublethink is a powerful concept, and I value Orwell’s description of it. It’s an example of how this book has contributed a useful political vocabulary. But doublethink is a satire on extreme political partisanship generally. The grisly history of Stalinism gives many compelling examples of doublethink, but you can find examples in a lot of other places too. In other words: what does apply to the USSR often doesn’t apply uniquely to it.
But the ways Oceania is similar to the specifics of Soviet Union are even worse.
Oceania is a massive state encompassing three continents plus swathes of Africa and Asia, including four of the most developed industrial countries on planet Earth: the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. It is not isolated. It is not poor.
And yet: ‘very likely no boots had been produced at all,’ and ‘perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot’(44). No boots at all! There are shortages of razor-blades, darning-wool, buttons and shoelaces (52). ‘Prole’ women fight one another for saucepans (73). The people of London live in ‘patched-up nineteenth-century houses.’ O’Brien gives Winston a mysterious drink he has never seen before and says, ‘It is called wine’ (178). According to Goldstein’s book, ‘The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs.’ Winston works a 60-hour week and sometimes has to pull extra shifts on top of that (Part 2, Chapter III).
OK: the real Soviet Union was characterised by exactly these kinds of shortages and, yes, the fields were cultivated with horse-ploughs. With Stakhanovism and Subbotniks (‘voluntary’ Sunday work), Soviet people in the 1930s worked very long hours.
But Russia had horse-ploughs, long hours and shortages before the Revolution. It was in the decades after the Revolution that the horse was replaced with the tractor and consumer goods were made widely available for the first time. As for work – well, the stereotype of the Soviet worker in the 1980s was not that he was some overworked Stakhanovite, but that you’d see him drinking beer and playing cards next to the roadworks he was supposed to be doing.
The missing links in Orwell’s worldbuilding are clear from the novel’s treatment of two drinks: tea and coffee.
Julia is able to find tea on the black market because Oceania has conquered parts of South Asia. Good! That makes sense. But for some reason coffee and chocolate are always difficult to find, even though all of South and Central America have been core territories of Oceania for 35 years.
Underdevelopment
Unlike the USSR, Oceania is not a semi-feudal economy cut off from the markets and resources of the world. Unlike the USSR, it is not a country going through an industrial revolution in a decade. It has no business being so extravagantly poor. The ugly trappings of the ‘grimy landscape’ (5) of Oceania are out of their proper place. They belong to early-twentieth-century Russia – or, more precisely, to the underdeveloped parts of the world. They are not features of ‘communism’ but of underdeveloped countries, whether communist, capitalist or feudal.
The open brutality of the secret police, and the crudeness of government propaganda – these, too, are borrowed clothes which hang awkwardly on Oceania. They are features, again, not of ‘communism’ but of underdevelopment. They are not a sign of a regime with unshakeable foundations but of a precarious regime.
You might object that Spain, Italy and Germany all went totalitarian. So why not Britain? But Spain, Italy and Germany went fascist, and fascism has completely different origins which it’s not worth getting into here. Oceania very clearly follows the pattern of the USSR, not Spain, Italy or Germany. As Asimov points out, the trappings are all communist, the parallels all Soviet.
‘I do not understand why‘
Goldstein’s book-within-a-book finally explains this great mystery. Ingsoc spends all the money on war, so as to deliberately keep the people poor, so as to maintain control. But for 90% of readers, this explanation is not necessary. They already know (or think they know) why Oceania is poor: because of communism. And Orwell has done absolutely nothing to clear up the misunderstanding.
This explanation, by the way, is coherent on its own terms, but that doesn’t mean it’s plausible.
Winston writes, ‘I understand how [the system oppresses the people]. I do not understand why.’ Towards the end of the book he gets the following answer: humanity could have superabundance, equality and democracy; but 2% of the population, the Inner Party, have taken control, and are deliberately wasting all the wealth, just so that they can maintain poverty, and with it inequality, and with it their own power (216-217).
This explanation rests on certain important insights about the relationship between scarcity and tyranny, between economic equality and political equality. But it puts the cart before the horse. In the USSR, scarcity created the dictatorship. In Oceania, the dictatorship deliberately creates scarcity.
But how such a dictatorship was able to entrench itself in the first place is not clear. Britain after World War Two was an advanced capitalist country with a high level of education, an abundance of material goods and solid infrastructure (to say nothing of the huge empire). Moreover, this advanced country and empire are part of a federation with, well, the entire Western Hemisphere. Oceania is not poor and it is not isolated. You can’t copy-and-paste Stalin into this setting. He doesn’t belong there any more than does the horse-plough or shoelace rationing.
You might argue (as Orwell does) that all revolutionary leaders secretly want to be sadistic tyrants (275-276). I don’t think that’s true, but even if it was it wouldn’t matter. These crypto-dictators wouldn’t be able to take and hold power after a popular revolution unless the extraordinary conditions prevailing in Russia were somehow duplicated in Britain.
What to expect in the next post
Oceania is not a plausible setting. But there is one reading of the novel which makes it plausible. I’m going to go into that next week, along with some other positive things about 1984. Or i might decide to publish a timeline of Oceania. We’ll see.
But as a short answer to the question posed in this post – no, 1984 is not plausible. Thankfully, it has never happened anywhere, ever.
Review: Prevail by Jeff Pearce, Simon & Schuster, 2014
Prevail by Jeff Pearce is about the Italian fascist war in Ethiopia in the 1930s. Pearce deals with the 1935-6 invasion, the guerrilla struggle, the British intervention and liberation in 1941, and the global impact of the struggle.
This book is important because the Italo-Ethiopian War is often reduced to a bullet point on a list of ‘events leading up to’ the Second World War, or as an episode in the history of appeasement, with the camera focused on white diplomats tugging their collars. In this book the white diplomats get some attention, but the focus is on African protagonists and their epic struggle against conquest. No doubt there have been other good books in English about the war, but I haven’t happened across them. Neither has popular culture, with the exception of Bob Marley, brought it to the attention of the English-speaking world. Eurocentrism has cheated us of a fascinating story.
I hadn’t really read anything on this topic before, so below is a list of twenty interesting facts I learned from Prevail. I hope they give you an appetite to read further.
Ethiopian troops on the way to the Northern Front, 1935
The Invasion 1. The Ethiopian armed forces were made up primarily of the retinues of petulant aristocrats. These guys were wedded to obsolete modes of warfare and refused to submit to any general plan. At one point the foot-soldiers, when they managed to storm some Italian position, ran all the way back to the rear just to throw trophies at the feet of their emperor – to his immense frustration! It was these organic weaknesses, as much as the shortage of modern weaponry, which made the war an unequal struggle.
2. Emperor Haile Selassie was a retiring and dignified character, to the point of being frustratingly passive at times. But in his modesty he is a foil to the strutting and ranting Mussolini, and at one point in the war he did personally mount an anti-aircraft gun and fire on Italian bombers.
3. The Italians justified their war by claiming they wanted to end slavery in Ethiopia. Humanitarian intervention, in other words. Plus ça change…
4. The fascists started the war by engineering stage-managed ‘incidents’ where they could semi-plausibly claim to have been attacked by Ethiopian troops. Japanese imperialism performed the same tricks in China at the time.
5. After starting the war, the Italian state angled for international sympathy by promoting atrocity stories. One Italian pilot was shot down and his grisly fate at the hands of enraged locals was made into headlines. Meanwhile the Ethiopians were being killed in their thousands. Plus ça change…
6. The British and French diplomats sold Ethiopia down the river. Mussolini admitted in 1938 that if the British government had closed off the Suez Canal, the invasion simply could not have gone ahead. They didn’t even have to start a war with Mussolini! Why did they sell out Ethiopia? One answer is appeasement. But in addition, they didn’t want to support an anti-imperialist struggle which might give dangerous ideas to their own imperial subjects.
This grainy image apparently shows the use of mustard gas, which Italian planes dropped on Ethiopian forces
Global Impact
7. The war was seen all over the world as a proxy struggle over racism and imperialism. Thousands marched against the war in Harlem, New York. There were protests in Ghana (Gold Coast), South Africa, and many other places. News from Ethiopia would trigger brawls and riots between Italian-Americans and African-Americans.
8. A year before the International Brigades were recruited to fight in Spain, thousands of Black people from the US volunteered to fight in Ethiopia. As the last independent country in Africa, Ethiopia was a potent symbol of resistance to white supremacy – even if as an absolute monarchy it was an unlikely icon for progressive forces. But very few of these volunteers ever made it there; the US government cracked down hard.
9. Two Black aviators made it from the US to Ethiopia. One was a prima donna and con artist, the other a dedicated and brave pilot who would go on to fly Haile Selassie’s personal plane throughout the 1935-6 struggle.
Ethiopian guerrillas on the move
Occupation and Guerrilla Struggle
10. The Italian occupation in Ethiopia was incredibly racist, brutal and vindictive, even by the low standards of European imperialism in Africa. There was a massacre of one-fifth of the population of Addis Ababa when the Italian troops and their allies were given three days to loot and destroy the city. this was a reprisal after the Ethiopian resistance tried to assassinate a top Italian official.
11. Guerrilla struggle continued after the defeat of the Ethiopian armed forces in 1936 right up to 1941. Groups called the Black Lions and the Patriots (Arbegnoch in Amharic) carried on a struggle from remote areas. Some key leaders were women. The young men grew massive afros.
12. Sylvia Pankhurst, who was previously well-known as a suffragette and communist, became the foremost champion of the Ethiopian cause in Britain. She printed a newspaper documenting Ethiopian resistance victories. It’s difficult not to admire her dedication to internationalism even though it seems she was uncritical of reactionary features of Ethiopian society. On her death she was given a state funeral in Ethiopia.
An Ethiopian irregular soldier carries a wounded comrade
13. The Ethiopian war was a key moment in history for other socialist, black freedom and pan-African leaders. Pearce cites the contemporary writings and activities of CLR James, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, Leon Trotsky and many others.
14. Josephine Baker, an African-American singer who was one of the most famous people in the world at the time, made a vocal statement in support of Mussolini’s invasion. Pearce explores the possible reasons for this bizarre action.
15. Haile Selassie lived in exile in England from 1936 to 1941 and allegedly snubbed Marcus Garvey.
Members of the Argebnoch
Liberation
16. World War Two changed the political landscape and made Ethiopia a soft spot for the Allies to strike blows at Italy. Britain and France, remember, controlled all the surrounding countries as imperial colonies. Even so, intervention was grudging, delayed and under-funded.
17. The British intervention was led by some glorious English eccentrics and consisted of just 2,000 guys – Sudanese, Ethiopians and British. But they brought supplies, arms and trained military specialists to the Ethiopian resistance, which transformed the situation. It was not an easy struggle, but the Italian forces were overstretched and hated by the local people. They were defeated quite rapidly.
18. After liberation, the British state set about looting everything they could get their hands on – treasure, machinery, vehicles, etc. They stripped bare an already underdeveloped country. Selassie was further enraged by Ethiopia’s treatment at the hands of the Allies. Even though they died in their thousands in the anti-fascist struggle, the Ethiopians were not recognised as a constituent part of the Allied cause.
19. Selassie gave little reward to the youth who had made up the ranks of the Patriots. Ethiopia remained a very conservative and stagnant society under his rule – though the impact of war and occupation could not have helped in its development.
20. During the war, the Italian fascists looted a huge monument called the Aksum obelisk, which stood in Rome for decades. It was only returned to Ethiopia in 2005 – a symbol of how unrepentant the powers-that-be in Italy remained for a long time after the whole brutal affair.
I think the game works well, especially the interplay between the two phases. There are plenty of moving parts, but they are mostly easy to grasp and add depth, unpredictability and balance, and turn every game into a unique story.
Still, there are things I want to tighten up. I have exciting ideas for a second edition, but I doubt I will even start working seriously on that in 2023.
Instead, here is a Rules Update. The main purpose of these changes is to make the game run faster and more smoothly, to make it easier for first-time players. At the same time, they can be implemented fully with all existing copies of the game.
The rule changes are attached here as a handy PDF for you to print and stick into your game manual. They are also written out below.
PREVIOUSLY, players received token payouts when they passed Corner Districts. NOW, every player collects all tokens due to them, of every colour, at the beginning of their turn.
Combat
PREVIOUSLY, combat worked according to a system inspired by Risk. NOW, combat is simpler. Both players roll D6. Whoever rolls higher is the winner. Subtract the lower from the higher number. The losing player loses that number of soldiers, to a maximum of 3. On a tie, the attacker loses 1 soldier. Repeat until one side retreats or is destroyed.
FOR EXAMPLE:
Player 1 rolls 6 and player 2 rolls 4. Player 2 loses 2 soldiers.
Player 1 rolls 4 and player 2 rolls 4. Because player 2 is defender, Player 1 loses 1 soldier.
Player 1 rolls 1 and player 2 rolls 6. The difference is 5, but a maximum of 3 soldiers may be lost per combat. So player 1 loses 3 soldiers.
Action Cards
PREVIOUSLY, an unlimited number of action cards could be used per turn. NOW, only 2 Action Cards may be used per turn. This applies both to Power Struggle phase and to Insurrection phase.
Key Areas
PREVIOUSLY, when a player seized a Key Area in Insurrection mode, they would gain D3 reinforcements (Key Areas are the places outlined in white on the board). NOW, each Key Area gives a preset number of reinforcements, once per insurrection, as follows:
Telegraph Office & Telephone Exchange – 1
Levsky Prospekt Upper – 1
Levsky Prospekt Lower – 1
Fillippov Estate – 2
Kantankurov Estate – 2
Prison – 2
Duganenko Station – 3
Vinland Station – 3
Khazag Station – 3
In summary: Key Areas in the city centre give 1; Estates and the Prison give 2; Railway Stations give 3.
(The thinking behind this rule change is as follows: first, to reduce the amount of dice rolling; second, to rebalance the map away from the centre and toward the periphery.)
PREVIOUSLY, reinforcements spawned at the player’s base. NOW, reinforcements spawn at the Key Area.
Launching an Insurrection
PREVIOUSLY, a player needed a minimum of 15 points across all dials to launch an Insurrection. NOW, instead of a points limit, there is a ‘grace period’ lasting two turns from the beginning of the game during which nobody can launch an Insurrection. Once those two turns are up, anyone may launch an Insurrection.
Rolling Doubles
PREVIOUSLY, a player would get a second move if they rolled doubles for movement. NOW, this rule is removed.
I hope these new rules work well, and I appreciate any feedback to BolshevikBoardgames.wordpress.com
Things I’d like to change, but won’t just yet
There are other things I’d like to change, but can’t yet. There is an anomalous empty space at the top of the map which I’d like to change to a Key Area named ‘Kulpovo Heights’ or something. For colour blind people, I would imagine that the board as a whole is in places frustratingly low-contrast. I named the naval base ‘Thorstadt,’ a play on ‘Kronstadt,’ but since then I’ve learned there was a guy with a similar name whose ideas I don’t like, and I want to avoid anyone thinking it was some kind of homage to him.
But these changes would require interfering with design, and that’s a can of worms I don’t want to open until I have clear ideas (and a clear schedule!) for a more general redesign.
I’d like to change movement, too – making it less about dice rolls and more about players making choices and sacrifices. But that will require playtesting and balancing. I’d be very pleased if I could figure out a way to eliminate some of the physical assets – like cards, tokens, dials, the second manual – without sacrificing depth. This would make the game cheaper on The Gamecrafter and less daunting for new players.
In the meantime, if anyone wants to experiment with their own House Rules, please feel free to send me feedback on how it works.
Street fighting during the Civil War. From the Mosfilm movie The Sixth of July, dir Yuli Karasik, 1968
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That was, until I Googled a few of the mainstream media reviews. Apparently it’s ‘a masterpiece,’ ‘grimly magnificent‘ and ‘a fugue in many tongues.’ Since the moment I was exposed to this gushing, I have felt an urge to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Judged as a work of popular history, Russia is deeply flawed. Judged as a work of anti-communist demonology, it’s spirited but crude. The fact that it demonises the Red side would be a selling point for some, but many have failed to notice what a clumsy demonisation it is.
So I’ll be reviewing the book in a short series of posts. This first post will deal with the things I liked about the book, and then go into some serious criticisms of its one-sidedness, its bias toward the rich, its credulity and its general sloppiness.
Positives
Fortunately, the whole book is not as bad as that one chapter I looked at before. That chapter is merely on the bad side of average. Overall, the book has some strong features which manage to shine through.
First, it is a detailed narrative history of the Russian Civil War, a rare thing in the English language, which gives the book a certain value in itself.
Second, Beevor had the help of researchers in Eastern Europe, so there is a wealth of new material here that I haven’t come across elsewhere.
Third, when it is in narrative mode and not moral judgement mode, the book is well-written. For example, the section on the year 1919 is mostly good, and if I was reviewing only that one-fourth of the book I wouldn’t have much bad to say.
Fourth: the book deals with White Terror as well as Red. I was honestly surprised because most western accounts pass over anti-communist atrocities in tactful silence. However, even in this treatment of White Terror there are big problems, which I’ll point to below. Another thing to stick a pin in and come back to later: here as elsewhere, Beevor’s own evidence makes a joke of his conclusions.
Not every element of the book is crude. The narrative is strong at times. In short, for its style it is readable, and for its content it is a useful resource. Per-Ake Westerlund has written a useful review in that spirit.
Now, on to the bad points.
Cossacks and a White officer in Odessa railway station, 1919
What were they fighting about?
In its review the Wall Street Journal asks: ‘If the American Civil War ended slavery, and the English Civil War restrained the monarchy, what did the Russian Civil War achieve?’
If this book was the only thing you ever read about the Russian Revolution, you could be forgiven for asking such a question. The most striking feature of Russia: Revolution and Civil War is its complete inability to see anything positive in the revolution. It’s such a one-sided book, you would probably be appalled to find out there are well-read people (such as me) who regard the Revolution as a great event in world history. If you uncritically accept everything Beevor says, you could only regard me as a dangerous lunatic for holding such a belief.
I suppose it is true that the seizure of the land of the nobility by the peasants was not an enjoyable experience for the nobles. But what about the point of view of the peasants themselves? Weren’t they happy to get more land? And weren’t they a hundred times more numerous than the nobles? Beevor doesn’t even ask the question. But when the peasants began ‘to seize their landlords’ implements, mow their meadows, occupy their uncultivated land, fell their timber and help themselves to the seed-grain,’ he describes it as ‘violence’! (p 50-51)
Was there nothing inspiring in the fact that millions of poor people organized themselves and exercised power through workers’ councils? Apparently not; Beevor dismisses Soviet democracy in a few lines.
The author acknowledges how bad the Great War was, so how can there be nothing positive or even viscerally satisfying for him in the revolt of the soldiers? Was the liberation of women really such a trifling matter that it can pass without any mention at all in 500 pages? How about free healthcare? The world’s first planned economy, which provided healthcare, education and housing to 200 million people and turned a semi-feudal country into the world’s second industrial power?
Isn’t it at least interesting for a military historian that, in the Red Army, formal ranks were abolished and a regime of relative egalitarianism prevailed between commanders and soldiers? That sergeants, ensigns, steelworkers and journalists found themselves commanding divisions and armies, and won? 3/4 of the way through this post I wrote you will find a bullet-point list of similar points.
What, indeed, did the Russian Revolution achieve? Nothing at all – unless we count the achievements.
By failing to deal with these points, the book is neglecting to tell us what the Reds were fighting for, or what the Whites were fighting against. The whole thing becomes a leaden nightmare. People in funny hats are dying of typhus and hacking each other to pieces with sabers for no apparent reason.
Every writer on history makes decisions about what to include and what to leave out. Beevor left in all the bits about dismemberment and torture chambers and rats gnawing at the soft parts of people, and left out all of the above. That’s his prerogative. But isn’t it manipulative? Isn’t it morbid? If you are that reader who has never read anything else on the subject, don’t you have a right to feel cheated?
Baking the evidence
The first half of the book, especially, exhibits all the features I outlined in my previous post.
Whenever Beevor comes across a quote from a communist that can be interpreted in a negative way, he proceeds to bake it, to over-interpret it until it is twisted beyond recognition. I imagine him sitting at his keyboard and muttering ‘Gotcha,’ before he ascends to the pulpit with a scowl on his face to deliver a sermon whose theme is the wickedness of the Bolsheviks.
One example: in June 1917 a Menshevik stated that no political party in Russia was prepared to take power by itself. Lenin responded that his party was ‘ready at any moment to take over the government.’ The meaning of this statement is blindingly obvious: they were ready to form a single-party government if necessary, though still open to a coalition government. But Beevor ascends to the pulpit. Apparently it was a ‘startling revelation’ which ‘proved that Lenin cynically despised the slogan “All power to the Soviets”’ and sought ‘absolute control.’ A large part of the texture of the book consists of moments like this.
At other times he caricatures wildly, or presents his own very strange interpretations as if they were factual statements. A street protest in April 1917 is described as a ‘tentative coup’ and a ‘little insurrection’ – ‘tentative’ and ‘little’ are doing a lot of heavy lifting. Any kind of peaceful, democratic Bolshevik political activity – visiting soldiers and talking to them; winning a Soviet election – is invariably described as ‘infiltration.’
Lenin, who Beevor loves to hate
Credulity
In addition, Beevor gives credence to dodgy sources. One example: it has been generally accepted for 100 years that the October Revolution in Petrograd was almost bloodless. Or so communist propaganda would have us believe!
Beevor quotes the memoirs of one Boyarchikov, describing a clash at the telephone exchange during the fateful first night of the Revolution. There is a fierce gun battle in which loads of people are killed. After the fight, the pro-Soviet Latvian Riflemen pick up all the dead and the wounded, the enemy’s and their own, and throw them out of an upper-storey window! Next they throw the dead and dying into the river, presumably to hide the evidence (Page 99-100).
This account is obviously absurd. A slaughter such as the one described would have had many, perhaps hundreds, of participants and witnesses, and the press would not have been shy about spreading the news. Why would the Latvians throw their own comrades out of a window and then into a river? For that matter, why would they even do that to the enemy?
You might wonder why someone would make up such a Ralph Wiggum-like story. The answer is that the October events in Saint Petersburg triggered a veritable fever dream of fabricated atrocity stories. The detail about the bodies being dumped in the river was probably invented to explain the lack of corroborating evidence, ie, a massive pile of dead bodies, or a politicised mass funeral.
Beevor repeats some of the discredited rumours from the time: that the Women’s Battalion were ill-treated, and that the Bolshevik Party was funded by ‘German gold.’ In both cases he admits that there’s no evidence, but this doesn’t stop him from bringing it up in the first place, or from writing words to the effect of shrugging his shoulders and saying ‘I guess we’ll never know.’ It’s the old ‘shouted claim, mumbled retraction’ trick.
Russian and Finnish Red Guards, 1918. CC-BY Tampere 1918, kuvat Vapriikin kuva-arkisto. Finnish Civil War 1918 Photo: Museum Centre Vapriikki Photo Archives.
Only trust the affluent
In addition, he describes too much of the story from the point of view of officials who were trying to suppress the revolution, or members of the intelligentsia and bourgeois who were observing it with detachment at best, or horror at worst. Rarely does he condescend to show what a worker, peasant or rank-and-file soldier experienced or thought. As individuals, working class people enter the narrative only as sadistic persecutors. As a mass, they enter the narrative only as a ‘blindly’ destructive force which ‘the Bolsheviks’ exploit for their own ends.
This is because Beevor only trusts bourgeois and middle-class testimony. Second-hand rumours recorded in officers’ letters or bourgeois diaries are gospel. Later in the book he remarks, surprised, that the Red Army was magnanimous and fair after its conquest of Omsk. He accepts this about Omsk only because he has a first-hand account from a solid bourgeois citizen confirming that it was the case. Instances where the Reds were magnanimous to poor people are not relevant.
When Beevor spent a few pages writing about a failed attempt to get Tsar Nicholas’ brother to assume the throne, I left the following note in my ebook (Here it is with the original typos, because they’re funny):
jesus christ, this is a historian in the 21st century, obsessing about dynastic minutiae while ignlring the sociology and street politics where historyis really beimg decided [sic]
This book must be confusing for the casual reader. How did the Bolsheviks take power? Did they convince everyone to support them with a flashy German-funded ‘press empire’ (Page 76) or was it by prevailing upon a bunch of simpletons to ‘repeat slogans’ until they were blue in the face? (Page 93) In theory both could be true, I suppose, but it doesn’t really explain why a tiny party grew so rapidly to the point where it was able to lead the Soviet in a popular insurrection.
Eyewitness accounts of the February Revolution which described soldiers firing machine-guns at demonstrators were ‘repeated constantly’, he says, but it is ‘impossible to tell’ if these accounts are true, even though he admits that there were machine-guns trained on them and that rifles were fired at them (Page 34). What contempt for the working-class authors of these eyewitness accounts.
His default ‘point of view’ in the narrative is that of the affluent person ruined by the Revolution, or even just inconvenienced. For example he bemoans the lack of ‘privacy’ for wealthy people who had to share their large homes with multiple poor families. Not a word about the lack of privacy suffered for decades by working-class people who lived in slums (often three to a room, often sharing beds) or in company barracks. He laments the fact that formerly wealthy families had to sell their goods in the streets. No hint of sympathy for the vast majority of families, who never got to own such goods at all until after the revolution.
‘Revolution could also reveal that the downtrodden harboured some terrifying prejudices,’ he says, and then tells us an anecdote about a stall holder who made an anti-Semitic comment. Of course, the not-so-downtrodden (Tsar Nicholas, and all those generals and ministers who Beevor loves to quote, and the entire Orthodox Church, and the entire White movement) held the exact same prejudices, but in their case it is apparently not terrifying.
Early on, he briefly acknowledges how squalid and difficult life was for 90% of people under the old regime. But he does so in a way that’s not meant to evoke sympathy or understanding; it’s just more icky details to make the book even more ‘grimly magnificent.’ The effect is to humiliate and dehumanise the poor. And he goes on to humiliate and dehumanise them with a sweeping, derogatory remark here and a prejudiced quote there in every other chapter. Usually through the safe remove of quotation marks, but with insistent repetition, Beevor describes workers, peasants and Russian people generally with phrases like ‘Asiatic savagery,’ ‘children run wild,’ ‘ignorant,’ ‘blind,’ ‘dark mass,’ ‘grey mass,’ ‘anarchic Russia.’
But as we noted, when Lenin calls rich people parasites, Beevor charges him with incitement to genocide!
A Russian peasant, depicted in a Red Army poster
Stalinism
One reviewer writes that Beevor ‘comments occasionally on the ways events foreshadow (‘give a foretaste,’ he calls it) of horrors to come.’
(As an aside, imagine being so impressed by the phrase ‘Give a foretaste’ that you would note it in your gushing review. Has she never read a book before?)
Russia: Revolution and Civil War actually makes no mention of Stalinism, of the later development of a bureaucratic tyranny that was responsible for such crimes as the Great Terror of 1936-39, the catastrophe of forced collectivisation and the mass deportation of minorities. This is probably because the book is too busy alternating between narrative and moralising to bother with analysis, but it is actually refreshing. Beevor does, however, set things up so that his star-struck reviewers can easily kick the ball into the net: they repeat in chorus, like the sheep from Animal Farm, that this book proves Lenin was just as evil as Stalin.
The reviewers don’t show any understanding that the violence and suffering of the Civil War was completely different in scale, in context and in character from the atrocities of Stalinism. Nor do they appear to suspect that anyone apart from the Bolsheviks might have been responsible for the Civil War and for the violence and suffering that ensued. More on that in future posts.
Sloppiness
Russia: Revolution and Civil War is often sloppy. Beevor repeats several times that Lenin was cowardly, but provides only one example (he went into hiding when the government wanted to arrest him, which seems pretty reasonable). Then he goes on to provide several examples of the Bolshevik leader being personally brave. Each time he remarks on it as a strange exception! Similarly, he says that Lenin is intolerant, but goes on to note one ‘exception’ after another. He doesn’t modify his characterizations, just lets them stand even when they’re full of holes.
Lenin is a key character in the first half of the book, but disappears in the second half – which suggests the heretical idea that maybe he didn’t have complete totalitarian control over events. The atamans of Siberia are introduced – then never followed up on. The narrative ends with Kronstadt, as if the author simply got tired; but at this point the Whites were still in Vladivostok. The introduction and conclusion are insubstantial, especially in comparison to the leaden weight of the book. They are like the wings of a fly growing out of the flanks of an elephant.
Another confusing point: Beevor notes in passing, half-way through the book, that Lenin was good friends with the writer Maxim Gorky. Up to this point Beevor has frequently quoted Gorky, always cherry-picking his most extreme criticisms of the Bolsheviks, never giving a more balanced impression of Gorky’s politics. The reader will wonder how Gorky could possibly stand to be in the same room as Lenin, and how for his part the ‘intolerant’ Lenin could be friends with Gorky. If reality corresponded to Beevor’s unbalanced account of the Revolution, then Gorky would have lasted about six weeks before being shot by the Cheka. As opposed to having a park in Moscow named after him!
As I noted before, much is made of the Cheka in December 1917 – all twenty of them. The development of this institution is not described in the rest of the book either; the Cheka just enters stage left and immediately starts slaughtering people. More on that next week.
In the chapter I reviewed before, Beevor was simply too strident and excitable to give an inch on anything. In the examples above he’s more conscientious, mentioning facts that are inconvenient to the case he’s making. But in failing to reconcile his characterizations with the evidence, he is making a bit of a mess that will leave readers scratching their heads.
And there I will leave you, perhaps scratching your own head; if you read the book and thought Beevor was courageously bearing moral witness to some hitherto-undiscovered chapter of history unsurpassed in horror and squalor, I hope I’ve given you something to think about.
Please subscribe and keep an eye out for Part 2 of this review.
The 1919 Review 
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