The New York Review of Books
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The Victory of Ukraine

  • The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
    by Serhii Plokhy
    Basic Books, 395 pp
  • “Tell Them We Are Starving”: The 1933 Soviet Diaries of Gareth Jones
    edited by Lubomyr Y. Luciuk
    with an introduction by Ray Gamache
    Kingston, Ontario: Kashtan Press, 275 pp.
  • Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor
    by Ray Gamache
    Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 241 pp.,
    (distributed in the US by International Specialized Book Services)
  • April 7th, 2016
  • The New York Review of Books

In later years, there would be bigger demonstrations, more eloquent speakers, and more professional slogans. But the march that took place in Kiev on a Sunday morning in the spring of 1917 was extraordinary because it was the first of its kind in that city. The Russian Empire had banned Ukrainian books, newspapers, theaters, and even the use of the Ukrainian language in schools. The public display of national symbols had been risky and dangerous. But in the wake of the February Revolution in Petrograd, anything seemed possible.

There were flags, yellow and blue for Ukraine as well as red for the Communist cause. The crowd, composed of children, soldiers, factory workers, marching bands, and officials, carried banners—“Independent Ukraine with its own leader!” or “A free Ukraine in a free Russia!” Some carried portraits of the national poet Taras Shevchenko. One after another, speakers called for the crowd to support the newly established Central Rada—the name means “central council”—that had formed a few days earlier and now claimed authority to rule Ukraine.

Finally, the man who had just been elected chairman of the Rada stepped up to the podium. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, bearded and bespectacled, was one of the intellectuals who had first dared to put Ukraine at the center of its own history. The author of the ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus’, as well as many other books, Hrushevsky had spent much of his life in Galicia, the Polish- and Ukrainian-speaking region ruled by the Habsburg Empire, in order to escape persecution at the hands of the tsarist police. Now, in the wake of the revolution, he had returned to Kiev in triumph. The crowd welcomed him with vigorous cheers: Slava batkovi Hrushevskomu!—Glory to Father Hrushevsky! He responded in kind: “Let us all swear at this great moment as one man to take up the great cause unanimously, with one accord, and not to rest or cease our labour until we build that free Ukraine.” The crowd shouted back, just as crowds would shout back at Kiev demonstrations ninety years later: “We swear!”1  Continue reading “The Victory of Ukraine” →

How He and His Cronies Stole Russia

  • Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha
    Simon and Schuster, 445 pp.
  • December 18th, 2014
  • The New York Review of Books

For twenty years now, the Western politicians, journalists, businessmen, and academics who observe and describe the post-Soviet evolution of Russia have almost all followed the same narrative. We begin with the assumption that the Soviet Union ended in 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev handed over power to Boris Yeltsin and Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the Soviet republics became independent states. We continue with an account of the early 1990s, an era of “reform,” when some Russian leaders tried to create a democratic political system and a liberal capitalist economy. We follow the trials and tribulations of the reformers, analyze the attempts at privatization, discuss the ebb and flow of political parties and the growth and decline of an independent media. Continue reading “How He and His Cronies Stole Russia” →

How to Succeed in Business

  • Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
    by Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell
    Knopf, 228 pp., $24.95
  • The End of Men and the Rise of Women
    by Hanna Rosin
    Riverhead, 310 pp., $27.95
  • June 6th, 2013
  • The New York Review of Books

To begin with, a quiz. Who wrote the following sentences: Lee Iacocca, Jack Welch, or Sheryl Sandberg?

(a) When communicating hard truths, less is often more.

(b) It takes self-confidence, courage and a willingness to take the heat when you make the tough calls.

(c) Opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized.

(d) Get your priorities straight and keep a hot list of what you’re trying to do.

(e) Seeking out diverse experiences is useful preparation for leadership.

(f) People used to ask me, “How could somebody as busy as you go to all those swim meets and recitals?” I just put them down on my calendar as if I were seeing a supplier or a dealer that day. Continue reading “How to Succeed in Business” →

In the New World of Spies

  • The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service
    by Andrew Meier
    Norton, 402 pp., $18.95 (paper)
  • Spies and Commissars: The Early Years of the Russian Revolution by Robert Service
    PublicAffairs, 441 pp., $32.99
  • Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operative by Emil Draitser
    Northwestern University Press, 420 pp., $35.00
  • Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West by Edward Lucas
    Bloomsbury, 372 pp., $26.00
  • October 25th, 2012
  • The New York Review of Books

To those who met them in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo in 1935, the Swiss businessman Charles Emile Martin and his American partner, Cy Oggins, must have seemed an enigmatic pair. Oggins was a distinguished-looking man with craggy features, well-made suits, and a penchant for silver-topped walking sticks. He seemed to know a great deal about Oriental antiquities, and sometimes described himself as an art dealer. Martin was more discreet, preferring plain neckties and gabardine overcoats, though his wife Elsa was fond of elegant handbags and furs. Both men were polyglots, with a wide if vague range of European connections. Working in concert with a Milanese businessman, they had come to Manchukuo to sell Fiat cars and airplanes to the Japanese.
Continue reading “In the New World of Spies” →

Vladimir’s Tale

  • The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
    by Masha Gessen
    Riverhead, 314 pp., $27.95
  • April 26th, 2012
  • The New York Review of Books

On November 20, 1998, Galina Starovoitova, a member of the Russian parliament, was murdered in the stairwell of her St. Petersburg apartment building. In the weeks that followed, obituaries, articles, and tributes to her life poured forth from all over the world. Starovoitova, almost everyone agreed, was different from the Russian politicians of the past and different from her contemporaries too. She spoke differently, moved differently, thought differently. She was frank, she was energetic, and she seemed genuinely interested in improving people’s lives. “Everything she said seemed fresh,” wrote The Economist. “Unlike others, she did not compromise her principles as the political winds changed; she did not mix business with politics,” wrote The Independent. Continue reading “Vladimir’s Tale” →

The Worst of the Madness

  • Bloodlands
    by Timothy Snyder Basic Books, 524pp, $29.95
  • Stalin's Genocides
    by Norman M. Naimark Princeton University Press, 163 pp, $26.95
  • October 28th, 2010
  • The New York Review of Books

Once, in an attempt to explain the history of his country to outsiders, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described the impact of war, occupation, and the Holocaust on ordinary morality. Mass violence, he explained, could shatter a man’s sense of natural justice. In normal times,

had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police. A crowd would have gathered, and much talk and comment would have ensued. Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions….

Murder became ordinary during wartime, wrote Miłosz, and was even regarded as legitimate if it was carried out on behalf of the resistance. In the name of patriotism, young boys from law-abiding, middle-class families became hardened criminals, thugs for whom “the killing of a man presents no great moral problem.” Theft became ordinary too, as did falsehood and fabrication. People learned to sleep through sounds that would once have roused the whole neighborhood: the rattle of machine-gun fire, the cries of men in agony, the cursing of the policeman dragging the neighbors away. Continue reading “The Worst of the Madness” →

Yesterday’s Man?

  • Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
    by Michael Scammell
    Random House, 689 pp., $35.00
  • January 11th, 2010
  • The New York Review of Books

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. Continue reading “Yesterday’s Man?” →

A Mad, Bad, and Brutal Baron

  • The Bloody White Baron:The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia
    by James Palmer, Basic Books, 274 pp., $26.95
  • June 30th, 2009

Like a contemporary reincarnation of Adela Quest, the heroine of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, James Palmer was both attracted and repelled by his first encounter with the grotesque, grimacing, wooden gods of Inner Mongolia:

“I entered the shrine of a gruesome god, his sharp teeth grinning and his head festooned with skulls. I wasn’t certain who he was, since the Tibetan pantheon inherited by the Mongolians is replete with such figures. In a small dark room, with incense burning and other gargoyles looming, it seemed capable of an awful, twitching animation; I felt it might lick its lips at any moment. Continue reading “A Mad, Bad, and Brutal Baron” →

Laughable and Tragic

  • The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke
    by Timothy Snyder
    Basic Books, 344 pp.
  • October 23rd, 2008
  • The New York Review of Books

Perhaps it was the elaborate court rituals, perhaps it was the stiff manners of the royal family, or perhaps it was the swiftness of the final collapse: for whatever reason, even the most tragic tales of the latter years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire often lapse into black humor. Continue reading “Laughable and Tragic” →

A Movie That Matters

  • Katyn
    a film directed by Andrzej Wajda, written by Andrzej Mularczyk and Andrzej Wajda
  • February 14th, 2008
  • The New York Review of Books

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.” Continue reading “A Movie That Matters” →