White Eagle, Red Star

White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-20 by Norman Davies, 278 pages

In the aftermath of the First World War, the Russian Empire fractured.  While the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold over the core territories, the Baltic States asserted their independence, and Poland became a sovereign nation again after a century of foreign domination.  As Norman Davies relates, this was not a simple, clean, or peaceful process.  With the Bolsheviks preoccupied with the Russian civil war, the Poles rushed forward to establish their eastern border near Minsk.  The Soviet response was conditioned not only by the border question, but by their dialectical fantasies of a general European revolution, which envisioned Poland as a stepping stone to Germany and the West.  In the end, the superior Soviet forces overextended themselves and were routed by a counterattack at the gates of Warsaw, and the whole episode concluded with a hasty peace which pleased neither government.

Writing in the early 1970s, Davies laments that the war is little known and poorly understood.  The Soviets were badly embarrassed by their defeat, and soothed their wounded pride by casting the bourgeois Allies as the actual belligerents.  However, as Davies chronicles, the British particularly gave the Poles little support, with David Lloyd George far more interested in building bridges with the Soviets than guaranteeing the future of the Polish state.  After the victory was won, the Western powers were glad to share in this view, with much of the credit accruing to the French general Maxime Weygand who was sent to Poland as an advisor and was credited as the architect of the Polish victory.  Yet Davies demonstrates that Weygand was treated with indifference and even contempt by the Poles and contributed little of value.  For the Poles those most responsible were Commander-in-Chief Pilsudski and God Almighty, and having dismissed the latter Davies gives the credit to the former.

As Davies demonstrates, despite the brief duration of the war and the compromise peace that ended it, the Polish-Soviet War had far-reaching consequences, especially in the area of Soviet foreign policy and the growing rivalry between Trotsky and Stalin.  For the Poles, of course, the war merely bought them a couple of decades before Nazi and Communist occupation.  For Davies, from his position in the early '70s, this seemed a small enough thing, but from a later perspective it is undoubtedly significant that Karol Wojtyla spent the first 19 years of his life in a free, Catholic Poland.

Stalin's War

Stalin's War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin, 666 pages

Sean McMeekin's provocative thesis in Stalin's War is that it is Stalin, not Hitler, who should be regarded as the central figure of World War II.  In proposing it, he is defying decades of Western historiography which has centered the war on Hitler's showdown with the French and British empires, as well as the Russian perspective in which the USSR is portrayed as the victim of Western perfidy and German aggression.  In McMeekin's persuasive retelling, neither the European nor the Pacific wars would have happened absent Stalin's active encouragement, and even Barbarossa was just as much a consequence of Stalin's ambitions in Central Europe as Hitler's.  Even more importantly, Stalin received from the war more than he could ever have hoped for, not only a mostly free hand in Central Europe and East Asia, but immense subsidies from US taxpayers to help build the Soviet military-industrial base.

The book is necessarily long and repetitive, yet McMeekin writes in a way that saves it from becoming ponderous.  Some may find the seemingly endless catalogues of lend-lease material supplied to an ungrateful mass murderer tiresome, but this is more than compensated for by the foregrounding of information which will be new even to those generally well-informed about the Second World War.

Judgment in Moscow

Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity by Vladimir Bukovsky. translated by Alyona Kojevnikov, 626 pages

Usually, when a criminal regime is removed from power, there is a reckoning, whether in the form of war crimes trials or truth and reconciliation commissions.  When the USSR collapsed, however, there was no judgment passed upon the men and women who had brutally tyrannized millions for generations.  In the opinion of dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, there could be only one reason for this lapse - the criminals had not really been defeated.  To the contrary, they remained at the levers of power, fully prepared to reassert themselves in time.  And so it happened.

Judgment in Moscow was originally published, in Russian, in 1996.  It was soon translated into a number of languages, but English was not one of them - until now.  In Bukovsky's account, this was due to the unwillingness of his publishers at Random House to market a book documenting  how Western elites fundamentally misunderstood the Soviet nightmare, deliberately or accidentally supported its continuation, and finally helped its engineers escape justice.  This unwillingness was itself a demonstration of the urgent need for an honest accounting for the history of Soviet tyranny and the struggle against it, a need which has tragically continued to be unmet.  The long-delayed publication of Bukovsky's book is at least a small step in that direction.

Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army’s Victory That Shaped World War II

Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army’s Victory That Shaped World War II by Stuart D. Goldman            Hardcover: 185 pgs.             Genre: History, World War II, Mongolia, China, Japan, Soviet Union

     Nomonhan is a Mongolian village straddling the boundary between Mongolia and Manchuria.  Today, Mongolia is an independent country and Manchuria is part of China, but in 1939, on the eve of World War II, the former was a client state of the Soviet Union, while the latter region was controlled by Japan.  The border between them was hotly disputed at the time— so hotly disputed, in fact, that an undeclared war erupted between the Japanese and the Soviets near the small village.  In this book, author Stuart Goldman makes the case that this forgotten border war significantly influenced World War II.  As a result of being soundly defeated by the Russians in the conflict, Goldman contends, Japan turned its attention toward expansion into Southeast Asia, putting it on a collision course with America and resulting in the Pearl Harbor attack.  Hence, the so-called “Nomonhan Incident” (also known as the Battles of Khalkhyn Gol) had a major influence on America’s entry into the war.  Another effect of the decisive Soviet victory, according to the author, was enabling Russia to survive the German invasion of 1941 and ultimately drive the Germans out of their country and all of Eastern Europe, helping to win the war for the Allies.  Goldman gives us a look at the diplomatic strategies of Britain, France, Nazi Germany and Russia leading up to the Second World War, allowing this reader, at least, to better understand the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis agreement.  The author paints Stalin, especially, as a very shrewd leader.  I found these passages fascinating, but they make up less than half of the book.  Most of the book, understandably, talks about the conflict itself (the movement of armies on both sides), but in a very detailed, academic way that I found boring and hard to slog through.  I’m sure military historians and military personnel would find this part fascinating, but I think the average reader would agree with my assessment.  My opinion about the book, then, is divided: one “thumb up” for the diplomatic history and descriptions of grand strategy, but the other “thumb down” for an overly-detailed narrative of the conflict itself.

Witness

Witness by Whittaker Chambers, 799 pages

In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, then an editor at Time magazine, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  He informed the committee of his long years in the Communist Party, first as a member of the "open" American Communist Party, later as a member of the Soviet Communist underground, assisting in the subversion of the US government, until his break with the Party in the mid-'30s.  Among the names Chambers named was that of Alger Hiss, then a highly placed official in the State Department.  The confrontation between Hiss and Chambers, as Hiss unsuccessfully sued Chambers for libel and then was himself convicted of perjury, polarized the nation.  Some saw Chambers' testimony as evidence of a vast Communist conspiracy, others as dangerous lies that had to be exposed, and still others believed that, even if what he said was true, it still had to be discredited lest it encourage the wrong kind of thinking.

Seventy years later, Witness, Chambers' autobiography written shortly after the conclusion of the Hiss case, can be read as a historical document chronicling a time when much of America's elites, faced with a choice between defending American institutions and providing cover for an aggressive dictatorship bent on subverting them, chose to side with Stalin.  More significantly, it can also be read as the story of the ultimately spiritual struggle of one man, sunk deep in darkness but saved by the light, who found the grace to witness to the truth in that world-historical moment.

Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe by Robert Gellately, 594 pages

The closing years of the First World War saw an unprecedented wave of human liberation sweep across Europe.  The repressive tyrannies that had shackled the human spirit for so many centuries, particularly the traditional regimes of the Russian, German, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires, were at long last swept away.  Idealists were finally free to pursue lofty visions of a better world without superstitious nonsense about human limitations, and they found their visionaries in such men as Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler.  The screams of their tens of millions of victims echo still today, even if many, now as then, seem deaf to them.

Although he certainly identifies the many similarities his subjects shared, Gellately also highlights differences, notably the contrast between Hitler's "consensus dictatorship" as against the Soviet Bolshevik dictatorship, resulting in revolutionary Communism as opposed to evolutionary Nazism, expressed in differences between the "arbitrary and sweeping terror" under Lenin and Stalin and the "aimed terror" of Hitler.  While providing surprises and insights even for those familiar with the period, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler manages to be an accessible introduction to the darkest chapter in human history so far, from the conditions which encouraged so many to commit themselves to the inhuman ideologies of Leninism, Stalinism, and Hitlerism, through the clash of those ideologies in a social catastrophe "so utterly unprecedented in all its many horrific faces, that it raised questions about the very meaning and future of Western civilization."

My Journey Through War and Peace: Explorations of a Young Filmmaker, Feminist, and Spiritual Seeker

My Journey Through War and Peace: Explorations of a Young Filmmaker, Feminist, and Spiritual Seeker by Melissa Burch   208 Pages

Melissa Burch’s story is based on her experiences as a freelance journalist during the Afghan War. When she was only 21 years old, Burch, and her cameraman, was on her to become the first journalist to capture the mujahedeen rebellion against Soviet invaders on tape.

The book opens with Burch sleeping a dirt floor with seven heavily armed Afghan soldiers, ranging from 19 to 20 years old. The tales of journey through Afghanistan will cause the hair on your arms to stand on end. The relentless heat, hunger and fear never left her. The hiding from the Russian soldiers was perilous and terrifying.  She must have covered the entire country either on horseback, motorbike or foot.  I felt her pain as she described a march through the rocky, mountains with Afghan soldiers

There was on anecdote where she and he soldiers were hiding when the Soviets were passing by. They had no sooner left the safety of the deserted compound, than it was blown up. 

One of the things that surprised me about Burch’s time is Afghanistan was that she was never raped. A lone woman traveling with many men had to be vulnerable. Not to say that she didn’t take up with one of the leaders, but it seemed more mutual consent.

My favorite parts of the book were after her return to the States. Maybe it was because I could relate more to that experience.

I approached Burch’s memoir with a bit of negativity. Earlier this year I had tried to read Malala Yousfzai’s I am Malala. I was prepared to be pulled into to that story, but I didn’t past page 50. I was a little afraid that I might experience the same issue with My Journey Through War and Peace: Explorations of a Young Filmmaker, Feminist, and Spiritual Seeker. But from the opening scene that I described earlier, I was hooked. Although places were a little choppy, but it is riveting.

I give My Journey Through War and Peace: Explorations of a Young Filmmaker, Feminist, and Spiritual Seeker 5 out of 5 stars.

Reflections on a Ravaged Century

Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest, 298 pages

Robert Conquest is firmly established as one of the finest historians of the Soviet Union, with his reputation benefiting rather than suffering in the long run from his clarity about the nature of the regime.  Reflections on a Ravaged Century is a look back at the twentieth century experience of totalitarianism, and at what made the Nazi and Soviet ideologies so appealing to so many, especially intellectuals.  Conquest begins with the understanding that the values which have guided Western civilization are neither self-evident nor universal, but rather appeal to a certain temperament encouraged by a certain culture, and he continues to warn against the danger of political enthusiasms, including those enthusiasms which present themselves as being coldly rational.  Finally, he considers what the new century might hold, fearing current trends which point towards a future where the interests of big government and big business converge to establish the servile state.

It is a cliche that everything changed after 9/11, and it is certainly impossible to read a speculative book from 1999 without some sense of disconnection.  Likewise, this book was written before Putin took over from Yeltsin, so that the shape of post-Soviet Russia was still very fluid, with the strong possibility of a far left or far right government in the near future.  It is remarkable, however, how much the currents flowing beneath the surface have continued despite the unforeseen - despite momentous changes, in 1989 as in 2001, there is much that has not changed.

Arcady’s Goal

Arcady’s Goal by Eugene Yelchin, 234 pages

Arcady’s parents were enemies of the people so they were taken away when Arcady was a baby.  He has grown up in children’s homes in the Soviet Union, always knowing that he was considered an enemy of the people also.  One day, an inspector sees Arcady playing soccer.  Arcady is a soccer champion.  He is an incredible scorer and always beats whoever he plays.  The inspector decides to adopt him.  Arcady thinks that it’s because of his great soccer skills and he’s afraid that if he doesn’t play well for this man that he will be sent back to the children’s home.  It’s just possible, though that Arcady may be wrong and that the man adopted him for an entirely different reason.  This is a good historical fiction for kids.