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Angel Factories

May 21st, 2010

  • Published: The New Republic

Children of the Gulag

By Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky

(Yale University Press, 496 pp., $55)

Several years ago, a friend who helped me to find my way around the Russian State Archives in Moscow asked if I would like to meet another woman who was also working there. She was not doing research for a book, and she was not a scholar. Instead, she was indulging her curiosity and her nostalgia. Forty years earlier, she had worked as a baby nurse in a children’s home inside one of Stalin’s labor camps. Now she wanted to find out what had happened to some of the people she had known there, to jog her memory of names and dates. Read on »


Ghosts From the Soviet Past

April 21st, 2010

  • Published: Spectator

Molotov’s Magic Lantern

By Rachel Polonsky

Faber, 416 pp.

Above all, it is the inhuman scale of things which impresses the visitor to Moscow: the vastness of Red Square, the width of the uncrossable streets, the implacability of the traffic. The city’s history seems equally inhuman, haunted as it is by centuries of tyrants, millions of political prisoners, countless wars. Impossible to navigate and impossible to know, Moscow doesn’t exactly embrace the casual tourist. Read on »


Yesterday’s Man?

January 11th, 2010

  • Published: The New York Review of Books

Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
by Michael Scammell
Random House, 689 pp., $35.00

He began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud’s. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Read on »


1989 and All That

November 9th, 2009

  • Newspaper: Slate

Stephen Kotkin

Uncivil Society

(Modern Library, 240pp)

Konstantin Pleshakov

There is no Freedom without Bread

(Farar, Straus and Giroux, 304pp)

 

Everything comes around again, in the end; every debate needs to be held twice. For the past few years, the Russians have been conducting an extraordinary national argument about whether Stalin was bad, a question one would have thought was settled long ago. And now, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 1989, we have two books, both by eminent historians, both seeking to start an argument about whether there was an anti-Communist opposition in Central Europe. Read on »


Now We Know

May 31st, 2009

  • Published: The New Republic

Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America

By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev

Yale University Press, 2009, 637 pp

If one were trying to define the lowest point in the long and venerable tradition of American anti-communism, surely it came in 2003, with the publication of Ann Coulter’s Treason. Coulter’s “thesis” in this work of cut-and-paste-from-the-Internet history was that a straight line could be drawn between Americans such as Alger Hiss, who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1940s, and Americans such as Barack Obama, who criticized the war in Iraq half a century later. Read on »


Russia’s Usable Past

December 8th, 2008

  • Published: Slate

Inside the Stalin Archives

by Jonathan Brent

Atlas&Co., 2008, pp.304

Jonathan Brent arrived in Moscow, in the winter of 1992, bearing gifts: salami, biscuits, chocolates in the shape of the Statue of Liberty, bottles of Jack Daniels, stacks of $1 bills, cartons of Winston cigarettes. Read on »


Stronger Than the Gulag

August 5th, 2008

  • Published: The Washington Post/Slate

Although more than three decades have passed since the winter of 1974, when unbound, hand-typed samizdat versions of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” began circulating in what used to be the Soviet Union, the emotions they stirred remain today. Read on »


Deluded and abandoned

July 23rd, 2008

  • Published: The Spectator

The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis, Little, Brown, 472pp.

Once, while travelling in an odd part of Siberia, I was told of a place called ‘the English colony’. A remote spot — it was said to be several hours from the nearest town, but trains were infrequent and roads non-existent — the ‘English colony’ was the site of a former Soviet camp: a small piece of the gulag where the prisoners had been British. Or so the story went. Read on »


A Movie That Matters

February 14th, 2008

  • Published: The New York Review of Books

Katyn a film directed by Andrzej Wajda, written by Andrzej Mularczyk and Andrzej Wajda

The ruins of a Russian Orthodox monastery, 1939: paint peels from the walls, light filters in from the cracks in the ceiling, cigarette smoke whirls through the air. Primitive wooden camp beds are stacked up high, one on top of the other, for the monastery has been turned into a prison. The prisoners, soldiers in khaki-brown wool uniforms and black boots, are gathered in a large group. Craning their heads forward, they listen to their commanding officer make a speech. Solemn and tired, he does not ask them to fight. He asks them to survive. “Gentlemen,” says the general, “you must endure. Without you, there will be no free Poland.” Read on »


How Hitler Could Have Won

October 25th, 2007

  • Published: The New York Review of Books

The Greatest Battle by Andrew Nagorski
Simon and Schuster, 366 pp.
And: Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War
by Rodric Braithwaite
Knopf, 398 pp.

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union at 0400 hours on June 22, 1941. By June 23, the Wehrmacht had destroyed the entire Soviet air force. By June 26, the Soviet commander of the Western front had lost radio contact with Moscow. By June 28, German troops had entered Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belarus. And on the morning of June 29—just a week into the invasion—Stalin failed to appear in the Kremlin. Read on »


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