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| 0300163886
| 9780300163889
| 0300163886
| 4.16
| 1,544
| Feb 04, 2015
| May 19, 2015
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liked it
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There should be a guide for us poor readers of biographies. There are multiple biographies available for all famous people and the biographies differ
There should be a guide for us poor readers of biographies. There are multiple biographies available for all famous people and the biographies differ wildly. With this guy Stalin, I have recently tried Stephen Kotkin's massive first-of-three parts 900 page tome with its teenytiny typeface and it defeated me, there was wayyyyy too much detail for a simple soul like me - I drowned, even though Stephen has a wonderful racy style. He knows too much and he thinks you should too! So Kotkin takes 900 pages to tell Stalin's story up to age 45. In great contrast Oleg Khlevniuk takes 340 pages to tell the entire story. * HOW DID STALIN GET TO THE TOP Stalin undoubtedly deserved his standing and reputation as a prominent Bolshevik. His organizational and writing abilities, daring, decisiveness, cool head, simple tastes, adaptability and devotion to Lenin all contributed to his elevation to the top ranks. So, you see, hard work, talent and ambition sometimes will pay off handsomely. [image] WHAT WE DON’T GET TO FIND OUT Praise has gushed forth for this book, but I had some complaints. We are never sure what Stalin thought communism was, what the whole point of it was, how long it would take to achieve; what he thought of Hitler, when he realised the Nazis were lethal, is also unknown. The Stalin in this book is a valueless paranoid who endlessly signs orders for purges, for exiles, for transportations and for executions. He sees enemies everywhere so at some point the only purpose of his dictatorship is to maintain himself as dictator. Stalin becomes the point of the Russian revolution. Another great swathe of this book is concerned with the sterile jockeying of the top politburo cheeses for position, also value-free. Did these horrible bureaucrats think they were benefitting the Russian people? We must assume so, in some way, but really we have no idea. At some point it kind of looks like they’re doing it for themselves (see Animal Farm). So this book leaves out too much! He should surely have mentioned that one of Hitler's main obsessions was the destruction of Bolshevism - he made no secret of it - so what did Stalin think of that ? He doesn't even tell us what Stalin thought communism was for! I mean to say, if all it did was oppress the peasants, liquidate millions of innocent workers, create unintended famines by wrecking agriculture and eventually reaching a standard of living way below anything experienced in the west, what was it all for? You have to wonder. Did Stalin think revolution was possible in the west or in other countries? The Chinese revolution occurs offstage until 1949 when suddenly it happens without any warning and without any hint of what Stalin thought about this huge event. Instead of investigating all this our author keeps us in a claustrophobic space where all we can see is the endless jockeying for position and power amongst the politburo, enlivened by the endless recurring purges. WHY DID IT ALL GO HORRIBLY WRONG? He had no expertise whatsoever when it came to dealing with the economy and probably sincerely believed it could be forced into whatever mold politics dictated. [image] USSR WAS NEVER COMMUNIST It was state capitalist. Wikipedia gives us this definition : A state-capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts as a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production. Indeed, the Stalinist version of communism seemed to have been the mirror image, at the level of the entire state, of the standard idea of the capitalist enterprise, in which the greedy bosses mercilessly exploit the workers, whose wages are kept as low as possible, strikes forbidden, no holidays. And all profits go to the directors who live their lives of luxury, spending their millions on vanity projects. According to the author, this is exactly what happened in the USSR from the 30s to the 50s. HOW IDEAS ABOUT AGRICULTURE DESTROYED THE USSR The main reason it all went wrong, it seems, is that Stalin and his mates had a deep loathing for the peasants. You might be thinking that the communism is all for the working class and you’d be right but wrong if you thought that the toiling millions of Russian peasants were considered to be working class. No! they were exploiters! The better-off ones, anyway. The working class were the industrial workers only. So it was perfectly okay, therefore, to maintain a kind of war on the greedy food-withholding peasants. As soon as he could, Stalin forced all the peasants into collective farms : “Communes” – agricultural and social utopias, the brainchild of socialist fanatics – were proclaimed to be the ideal form and goal of collectivization…. Peasant property became the property of the community, right down to family chickens and personal items. These insane and bloody plans fully reflected Stalin’s ideas and intentions. …. One factor in Stalin’s calculations was his belief (shared by many party functionaries) that a moneyless form of socialism based on the exchange of goods was right around the corner. They could never figure out how to make collective farms productive; they seemed to be crippled by a universal foot-dragging fueled by a gut-level hatred of the Soviet government. If your agriculture is on its knees for 30 years your country is going to fail. There will be regular famines in various areas. The USSR could never seem to fix it. THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS The Bolsheviks were committed to their revolution in the sincere belief that life in Russia was intolerable and communism would make things infinitely better. They didn’t intend to cause famines but they did. Because they had no knowledge of how to run an industrial state they made many horrible mistakes : Vast sums and resources were poured into undertaking construction that was never completed; into equipment for which no use was ever found, purchased from abroad out of Soviet gold reserves; into wasteful redesigns, the inevitable result of excessive haste; and into goods so poorly produced as to be unusable. This is heartbreaking. ** [image] HITLER/STALIN Though this gruesome twosome were the big dictator opponents in WW2 and ruled their empires with amazing cruelty they were utterly different. Hitler rose from nothing and nowhere by the power of his charisma and rhetoric, galvanising thousands with his iron dreams of glory. The German people were in love with Hitler. He had them in a trance, listening to him spit fire for an hour, all without notes, they thought they had caught a glimpse of German heaven. He was their great leader. But Stalin spent ten years toiling tirelessly for someone else's revolution; he slowly wormed and connived his way to the top, nothing was handed to him, he wangled and backstabbed and he also worked 25 hours a day. He hardly ever spoke in public, he was stumbling and rambling and dull. It took him another ten years after the revolution to eliminate his rivals and become supreme dictator. Hitler's cult of personality was spontaneous and heartfelt, Stalin's was manufactured by the Party - but it's true, eventually that became a deep heartfelt thing too. ***** *Compare this with the new biography of Sylvia Plath Red Comet by Heather Clark – 1154 pages on a life that ended at the age of 30. ** Grotesque errors made by democratic governments are of course not uncommon – there’s an entertaining book about the subject called The Blunders of Our Governments by Anthony King. But they are fairly mild compared to the Stalin gang’s mistakes. ...more |
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Feb 12, 2024
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| 0871404672
| 9780871404671
| 0871404672
| 3.88
| 781
| Mar 13, 2013
| Mar 11, 2013
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liked it
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I realised I knew nothing about Marx’s life except that it was a pity he couldn’t have lived to be 120 years old so he could have seen the big revolut
I realised I knew nothing about Marx’s life except that it was a pity he couldn’t have lived to be 120 years old so he could have seen the big revolution he was plotting and scheming for all his life. You can be sure of one thing, though, if he had been around in 1917. He would have DENOUNCED Lenin. He sure loved to denounce. Most days it seems he denounced three guys before breakfast, just to keep in practice. But you know it was a popular pastime in those days, and they dished it out to him too – one guy called him an intellectual customs agent and border guard, appointed on his own authority Well it turned out that his life wasn’t that interesting – not like, say, the life of the Marquis de Sade. That was a wow. Marx was one of the world’s great thinkers but all he ever did was 1) Ask for money from a) his mother; b) his friends; c) Engels 2) Form societies whose members he would immediately denounce and then he would resign dramatically 3) Write vituperative lengthy articles about the murky leftist politics of the day 4) Manage to get them published in obscure magazines and newspapers which a) didn’t pay him and b) went bankrupt after the second issue 5) Relocate to another city where he would repeat steps 1) to 4) Poor Karl. He never became a public speaker because he had a lisp and a thick regional accent, but still all who met him in person instantly knew he was a Great Man. And he would then fall out with them over some esoteric detail or another. He hardly ever had a foot of his own he didn’t shoot himself through. So the actual doings of his life became a dull affair, especially so because our author Jonathan Sperber is a dry as dust narrator and way more interested in KM’s thought and his mortal battle with the Young Hegelians. For long stretches I was kind of guessing what the heck he was talking about and I thought – this is for level three Marxist scholars, not Level 1! Why didn’t it say that on the cover? The account of the ideas in Capital are, I should say, cogent and enthralling for anyone who has some grasp of the basic concepts involved, but they were several feet above my head. WAS KARL MARX A JEW? This is a strange question. We all kind of think obviously Marx was a Jew, but - His family converted to Christianity (purely for practical reasons – it enabled Karl to go to university and join a profession) - He was a lifelong atheist and hated all religion - He married a Christian who then became an atheist - His children were born in England and grew up 100% English and atheist - Throughout his life he had nothing whatsoever to do with Jewish culture Professor Sperber says nobody commented that Marx was Jewish until the 1870s when it began to be thought that the Jews were not just a separate religious/cultural community but a separate race. From that point the antisemites always called Marx a Jew. (The author also deals with the unhappy question about Marx’s own antisemitic remarks which are strewn about his correspondence.) ORDINARY VICTORIAN TRAGEDIES I have disrespectfully described Marx’s life as dull but in one respect it was not. Karl and his beloved wife Jenny had seven children : 1. Jenny. Died aged 38 2. Laura. Had three children, all died in infancy. Committed suicide with her husband at age 66. 3. Charles. Died aged 8, the great heartache of Karl’s life. 4. Henry. Died aged 1. 5. Eveline. Died aged 1. 6. Eleanor. Was the first person to translate Madame Bovary into English. When she found out her husband of 14 years was a bigamist she committed suicide, aged 43. 7. Unnamed child who died on the day of his birth. THE WRONG BIOGRAPHY It’s not easy to pick the right biography when there are a lot of them but this was the wrong one for me. Could be a great one for those already marinaded in Marxist theory; but I was after a kindlier, less abstruse volume. So this was a three star read for me. My fault, not Jonathan Sperber’s. Although he could have been a bit livelier. Not asking too much. ...more |
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Sep 30, 2023
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Sep 01, 2023
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| 0394722744
| 9780394722740
| 0394722744
| 3.95
| 978
| Jan 12, 1983
| Feb 12, 1984
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really liked it
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First, let me say, this is a brilliant account of growing up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 when Liang Heng was 12 and la
First, let me say, this is a brilliant account of growing up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 when Liang Heng was 12 and lasted until 1976 when Mao died. It was a very crazy period and Liang lived the life of a pinball in a political pinball machine. For anyone interested in this extraordinary period in China, this is a must read. VIGOROUSLY CRITICIZE THE CAPITALIST ROADERS! In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution children (young teenagers from 12 upwards) were encouraged to leave school and devote all their time to wildly enthusiastic and very often completely brainless promotion of “Chairman Mao Thought”. They were to “make revolution” against those elements of society determined to be “rightists”. Who and what was a rightist was the question, and the answer could plunge a person into years of Kafkaesque nightmare. Liang’s family were the perfect example. This is what happened. Warning : it’s hard to believe. LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM; LET A HUNDRED SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT CONTEND. OR NOT. In 1957 Mao launched the Hundred Flowers campaign. He wanted to stop the party becoming a smug intolerant uncaring ruling class and, as Liang says, “to correct its shortcomings by listening to the masses’ criticisms”. So everyone at their workplaces were urged to vent forth their views on how the Party could improve. Liang’s mother loved the Party and could not think of any criticisms – the Party had given her a job and saved her from poverty! But her boss told her she had to come up with something, so she finally said that her section leader sometimes used crude language, that he let his housekeeper sleep on the floor instead of giving her a bed, and that the bosses in general were sometimes unfair in giving out raises. At precisely that point, the Hundred Flowers campaign was ditched and replaced with the Anti-Rightist Movement, designed to smoke out anticommunists. Maybe, says Liang, the Hundred Flowers campaign had been a trap all along. Every factory and office was given a quota of Rightists to deliver to the authorities, and Liang’s mother’s name was among them. This was the original sin which pursued the whole family through the next ten years like Inspector Javert’s fanatical pursuit of Jean Valjean. Wherever they went, they were “rightists”. The father comes across as pathetically obsessed with the godlike figure of Chairman Mao, reading his Thought every day, earnestly studying, and praising Mao to all and sundry; this guy had been a perfect Mao follower since the revolution, but it didn’t matter, because of his wife he became a known rightist and was hounded and humiliated for years to come. [image] STRIP AWAY THE SKIN OF THE RIGHTISTS! ANGRILY OPEN FIRE ON ALL REACTIONARY THOUGHT! At first there was a point to the Cultural Revolution, it was used to thwart and confound those in the CP leadership who figured Mao had lost the plot after the Great Leap Forward, which didn’t work. Mao thought maybe they were going to give him the heave ho, so he sprang this weird wild cultural revolution on them – take that! See? I’m still lefter than all you stuffed shirts put together. But after a couple of years the wild Red Guard movement lost sight of what they were supposed to be doing and devolved into clans fighting each other, each swearing total devotion to Mao Zedong Thought. They were shooting each other. It was chaos. A PROBLEM WITH MEMOIRS There is a problem, I guess you’d call it, embedded in a memoir written by a 28 year old about his teenage years. There is an awful lot of (can we say) novelistic detail in here. This is from an account of a political meeting when he was age 15 : Liu’s gold fillings sparkled in his expressive mouth, and a fine spray of saliva rained into the first rows at emphatic moments. And from an account of some Red Guard fighting in the year before that : The bullets whizzed through the air and, as if everything were in slow motion, the flagman fell in front of me and rolled over like a lead ball. The flag never touched the ground. Someone caught it and raised it, hardly breaking stride. And He had been in place less than a minute, firing in the direction of his vanished opponents, when he was struck in the belly with a shell and came tumbling down to my level, his guts spilling out in midair and falling back more or less into place as he landed. There must be a strong desire to make your memoir as vivid and detailed as possible, to do justice to the events you are telling about, but alas, too much detail (and too much precisely recalled dialogue) I think can make a scene like the above one read like a movie, and therefore lessen us readers’ immediate belief. Maybe other readers are more indulgent than me. But this in no way takes away from Liang Heng’s frightening, bewildering account of his jawdropping teenage years. I would love to know what a modern Chinese person makes of all this. [image] ...more |
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Mar 25, 2023
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Mar 29, 2023
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Mar 25, 2023
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| 0300257309
| 9780300257304
| 0300257309
| 4.26
| 1,239
| unknown
| Nov 30, 2021
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it was ok
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It was silly of me to try this book but it’s a subject that fascinates me, which is why I already read three books on the exact same thing*. And Colla
It was silly of me to try this book but it’s a subject that fascinates me, which is why I already read three books on the exact same thing*. And Collapse by Vladislav Zubok was one too many. I was dazzled by the triumph of the recent Watergate: A New History by Garrett Graff – that was yet another large tome on one of my favourite subjects and it was really great. So I thought, okay, yes, a new big book on the bizarre almost bloodless disappearance of the mighty Soviet Union. Let’s read it. Zubok tells the story in a strongly Gorbcentric way, we are hovering over Gorby’s shoulder almost daily from 1988 to 1991 – to steal a little from My Fair Lady, his joys, his woes, his highs, his lows are second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in. We learn that Gorb was a kind of very well-dressed bull in a Communist china shop. Or, he was that earnest and sweet backpacker who turns round on a crowded bus to show someone his map and knocks two old ladies onto the floor with his massive rucksack. He had “a beautiful vision of a more open Soviet Union gradually integrated into a ‘Common European Home’”. In the middle of political chaos “he still believed he would make history and not be regarded as someone who had merely bobbed on the surface of a revolutionary deluge”. He was the one true Communist who destroyed communism. The problem with Zubok is that like Gorby himself he seems not to be able to see the wood for the trees, he drowns the non specialist reader in the complexities of the Soviet political system which was complicated to begin with, before Gorby started monkeying around and made it all beyond complicated. Eventually I had to conclude this is a book for students and professors who need the hyperdetail. I don’t need the hyperdetail. And plus, sorry Vladislav, but your style tends towards the dry. I mean, how can such a dramatic story sound mostly a bit dull? Ah well… goodbye Gorby. Hello Putin. *(Armageddon Averted by Stephen Kotkin; Revolution 1989 by Victor Sebestyen; Down with Big Brother by Michael Dobbs – all recommended.). ...more |
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Apr 02, 2024
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Apr 08, 2024
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Dec 30, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0804729220
| 9780804729222
| 0804729220
| 3.67
| 221
| 1984
| Jan 01, 2000
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really liked it
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This is the best terrible book I have read for years. It’s borderline unreadable but completely compelling. You know the expression you can’t see the
This is the best terrible book I have read for years. It’s borderline unreadable but completely compelling. You know the expression you can’t see the wood for the trees – when we read this book we can’t see the trees for the wood. Vast oceans of utter trivia wash over us, as Jiang Qing fights with a family member about funeral arrangements or a particular necklace or what she liked to wear to the beach, but when it comes to telling us why all these huge fights between communists broke out, hardly a word – they loved to call each other names like “leftist”, “ultraleftist, “counterrevolutionary”, but what was meant by these insults is anyone’s guess. Ross Terrill won’t tell you. And great events will go by in the blink of two sentences but the excruciating details of JQ’s one night stand with a football star will take five pages (see below!). If all that isn’t weird enough I would go so far as to say that this book is like to make you want to microwave your own brain (never do that) because of Ross Terrill’s ridiculous antiquated style that continually reads like a self-parody: Shanghai was a cauldron of contradictions, a city that wore its heart on its sleeve and took in its stride the epoch’s kaleidoscope of greed, thrills and death. Or She was a lurking unit of one whose charm did not conceal a metallic core of purposefulness. Or She did not torment Mao with impossible challenges…for she was genuinely bedazzled at being the philosopher-king’s lover. Or By the early 1970s, in the kingdom of Chinese communism, her smile was a bumper harvest, her frown was an earthquake, her indecision was a bureaucratic logjam. DRAMA QUEEN By the time she was 23 she had married and dispensed with three husbands, that is some going. She was a teenage stage actress then a movie actress under the name Lan Ping. She was fierce and loud and she always got noticed. She wanted to be a big star but she didn’t quite make it. She swanned around with the boho intellectuals, she was kind of a wild child. She would turn up at a famous theatre producer’s house and say well, I’ve arrived, here I am, now what? On more than one occasion she left a husband, moved to a new city and changed her name. She was doing very well as a movie actress in Shanghai in 1937 [image] and then the Japanese invaded and wrecked the whole industry so she did something very unusual. All by herself she left town and went to Yanan, a little town of caves, which was the headquarters of the Communist party. As she’d previously done with theatre producers, she just turned up unannounced. This time she said “I’m here for the revolution, what do you want me to do?” Mao Zedong took a look at this perky forthright more than somewhat attractive actress and divorced his wife. Reader, she married him – the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, the big kahuna, the boss of bosses, just like that. So that is some meteoric career. She was 24 years old. Was she a communist? Well, she figured she ought to be. It was the coming thing, kind of obvious. So, in Yunan they lived in caves – literally! That must have come as a culture shock, after the martinis and daiquiris of Shanghai. The old communists eyerolled and sneered. One said He’s a sex maniac, abandoning a comradely wife of long standing to marry a despicable actress. Mao said: Without Lan Ping’s love I can’t go on with the revolution. (Page 135). What a great quote! Do you believe it? No, I don’t either. So what we have here is a laser-focused go-getter who might have been figuring that if she couldn’t be the number one star in Chinese movies she could be the number one female star in the Chinese revolution. If she did think that, she must have been very disappointed, because the communists had other very boring ideas. The Party concluded that yes, Mao had to be allowed to keep his young sexy wife but she should be nothing but the usual self-effacing out of sight little home-maker. Title of Chapter 4 : Mao’s Housewife in Yanan (1938-49). It was not glamorous. A curious fact – because Mao was Chairman Mao and Lan could live together, which was very rare in Yanan, where most married couples could meet only on Saturdays. STUCK IN LIMBO Finally 1949 rolled around and the Communist revolution succeeded. A new phase for everyone – don’t have to live in no cave anymore for one thing! But alas, she still could not find anything to do with her ambitious energy. She wanted to DO something! Something important! Every position Jiang occupied during the 1950s she had to wrench from extremely reluctant hands. … Many women were happy to put their heads down at “women’s work”. But JQ was not. All her life she despised such activity… A humiliation was involved in women’s organisations that she never was able to endure The Party never could stand her, though, and they had a great excuse not to give her any responsibility. Your job, they said, is to take care of our great leader’s personal, nutritional and household needs. There is nothing more important than that. And the Party went further – they destroyed the evidence that she used to have a career: Prints of her movies, reviews of her performances, articles about her life as an actress, all were gradually tracked down and burned. During the claustrophobic 1950s she was ill an awful lot. Once they packed her off to a Moscow hospital for two straight years. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION This bewildering Chinese meltdown is explained by Russ Terrill as follows. After the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (Russ calls it the Great Stumble Sideways, he’s a laugh) the other top communists were thinking he was past his sell by date, there were mutterings. (He said : “they treated me like a dead ancestor”.) So to re-establish his star power he came up with this fantastical anti-old-fart campaign and like a big Chinese Pandora’s Box opener he unleased the pent-up energy of his pent-up wife AND the wild energy of Chinese teenagers at the same time. Take THAT, old farts. JQ was appointed Deputy Director of the Cultural Revolution Committee. Ka-pow! Just like that. From zero to You Have to Take Me Seriously Now. She rushed around like an usher in a theatre dividing everyone into left and right [image] For a chilling picture of life during the Cultural Revolution, see the movie To Live from 1994. A lot of people died in this period (1966 – 1970). Even approximate details are very difficult but probably somewhere between one and four million people. A whole lot of other people were “persecuted”. Although JQ was the number two person organising the whole catastrophe, Ross Terrill spends 40 pages telling us in excruciating detail how she spent the whole time tracking down and wrecking the lives of every single one of her personal perceived “enemies” going all the way back to the 1930s. There is no big picture here for the reader to grasp, It’s all feeble stuff. "Wang Guangmei didn’t sleep well for several nights after I gave her my advice on dress,” Jiang went on, “in the end she agreed with me and said she would not wear a necklace in Southeast Asia.” There are pages of this kind of stuff… do we really need it? Is that all her life was at the height of her power? ALMOST CHAIRMAN JIANG As Mao got very old and ill, naturally there were several guys who thought they might be the next Chairman. JQ had the barefaced audacity to think that SHE should get the job. Why not a woman? Just because it had only ever happened once before in China (Empress Wu Zetian, reigned 690 to 705). So she got herself a group of three true believers and together they were known as the Gang of Four. This was their best album: [image] I was expecting some exciting coup d’état fisticuffs at this point but no, the other guys organised their coup much more efficiently and the Gang of Four were scooped up without a shot being fired. There was a long ass show trial at which the judges and everyone received daily doses of the sharp end of her tongue. She was duly found guilty of sedition and sentenced to death suspended for two years pending prisoner’s good behaviour, then commuted to life. She was 67. She lasted another ten years, in prison and out on parole, then she committed suicide. CONCLUSION There’s a curious form of sexism, maybe, that emerges when the unusual women who become politically powerful are discussed – it’s like we say ah, of course we support women in politics in general, but not this particular one – Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, Indira Gandhi, Jiang Qing – not these particular ones. Well, they are all going to be awkward customers, given what they’ve had to put up with on their way to the top. JQ was the boss’s wife and she took full advantage. She doesn’t come out of this book as anything other than a mean-minded arrogant footling self-loving prima donna, but there you see, I’m doing it. No reason why China couldn’t have a female leader. Just not that particular one. * PREVIOUSLY ON GOODREADS.... My I-can't-believe-what-I-just-read interim review: I am half way through this strange book but I can’t resist presenting this wonderful scene from the year 1935 when Lan Ping (the future Madame Mao) was 21 years old and a perky young actress in Shanghai. She is on a very hot date with a football player named Li. First they went to the movies. The author helpfully notes that “this teeming movie house was famous for its customer couples who came to sit close to each other as much as to watch the screen”. Unlike all the other cinemas in Shanghai, which insisted on couples sitting far apart from each other, I suppose. Anyway : Making a bid for the dashing football player, she was misjudging the degree of aggression suitable for the man and the moment. Oops, she was coming on too strong. Li plays it cool. He explained I was a man with some prior experiences…To her fantastic enticements I made no response. Lan plied her coquetry: “Perhaps you don’t care?” “No, no,” Li answered with a hiss. “I’m just absorbed in the movie and Hu Die’s great acting.” A moment later he cried out “Well done!”…as Hue Die saved the situation with a cunning maneuver. We have to assume that all this detail came from the lips of Li himself, remembering how he answered “with a hiss” years later. Well, Lan did not stop trying: Lan Ping pushed her “soft jade arm” around Li’s tight warm waist, trying to inflame him before the movie ended and the lights came up. After the movie ends, they go to a hotel room (Get a room!) Darkness found them in a fourth-floor room of the Hui Zhong Hotel… “All this added up to a suitable atmosphere for sexual activity,” Li noted with Chinese practical sense. Lan is an expert in the arts of erotic small-talk : "Are there any matches this week? Which team will you be pitted against?” The author comments: Her words were beginning to seem irrelevant. But now comes the bit you’ve been waiting for: “I love your vigour and courage on the field,” Lan said ardently. “Especially your skill at shooting,” she added with a gasp, her cheeks blushing…her body as hot as a bowl of steamed rice. Able, as always, to unstabilise a man with a shaft of mystery or outrage, she murmured as Li began to kiss her pink lips, “I am going to give you unsurpassable pleasure.” Recalling this date Li summed up the evening in what I’m sorry to say a rather churlish manner: “She rendered me great joy but not complete satisfaction.” * This extraordinary toe-curling hideously detailed precious prose style fortunately does not go on throughout the whole book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 10, 2022
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Apr 2022
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Mar 10, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0192801775
| 9780192801777
| 0192801775
| 3.31
| 2,422
| Jan 11, 1890
| Apr 17, 2003
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liked it
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- My version of utopia would be to have the time to read all these books I bought. - Or you could develop powers like Johnny 5 [image] - But I am not li - My version of utopia would be to have the time to read all these books I bought. - Or you could develop powers like Johnny 5 [image] - But I am not like Johnny 5. I am so slooow. And I’m running out of shelf space. - Well some people don’t have any shelves at all. So be thankful. - In William Morris’s cutesy-communist-glazed-eyes-dreamy-pastoral world everyone would have beautifully hand-carved shelves with 14th century designs. - Communist? Is that your word? - No, - when he describes the revolution of 1952 he says it was led by Some of those more enlightened men who were then called Socialists, although they well knew, and even stated in public, that the only reasonable condition of society was that of pure Communism such as you now see around you - So Mr Morris was taking on the tough job of describing what a pure Communist society would be like, something that Karl himself put into the Too Difficult box. - Yes. As usual with these utopia novels, this is not really a novel but an essay in the form of a novel, mostly in dialogue. - Like this review? - Yes! Ha ha, I wonder where I got that idea from. - Well, never mind how he did it, what’s the result like? This ideal society. - Well, I’m sorry to say that Morris communism turns out to be a version of the worst song John Lennon ever wrote. - “Run for your Life”? - No, “Imagine”. It’s a mimsywimsy Hallmark greeting card society where miraculously everyone is good looking, cheerful, eager to help milk all the llamas or do some strenuous haymaking at the drop of a 14th century hat– the industrial revolution has been abolished along with the concept of nationality (“imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too”). It’s like if The Shire where the hobbits live expanded to take over the whole world [image] - Yes, how this society had solved all the major economic problems of resource management and transportation not to mention medical – nobody seems to get ill – is not really explained. It’s all waved away. Bank robberies? But dear boy, there are no banks. Because there’s no money! We have solved that problem! - So it’s like oh well, after the revolution, we will abolish people being mean to each other and we’ll abolish all disease. - But without passing any laws because there isn’t a government! - Yes, everybody is the government! - You may say that he’s a dreamer. - I do say so. He was a dreamer. But he wasn’t the only one. I think there were eight or nine others. ...more |
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Sep 09, 2021
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Sep 14, 2021
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Jul 10, 2021
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| 1910695114
| 9781910695111
| 1910695114
| 4.46
| 18,412
| Aug 15, 2013
| May 23, 2016
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really liked it
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This is an excellent and essential book but there was simply too much of it, it’s nearly 700 pages long. Transcriptions of dozens of interviews with d
This is an excellent and essential book but there was simply too much of it, it’s nearly 700 pages long. Transcriptions of dozens of interviews with dozens of Russians, all ex-Soviet citizens, about what it was like to live through the collapse of the USSR, the defeat of communism and the rise of the gangster oligarchy. There are many sincere communists in these pages who wring their hands in different ways, some denouncing that perfect idiot Gorbachev, some that ridiculous stooge Yeltsin, there were enemies of the unique Soviet way of life every way you looked. Yes, they say, it was all true about the empty shelves and the shortages and the cramped lives, but in those days they were doing something unique, they had this dream, it badly needed to be reformed, but instead the crazy hotheads threw the whole project in the bin and prostrated themselves before the mighty capitalists. Over and over again. Let’s take a core sample. Page 50: Today, they accuse us of fighting for capitalism…that’s not true! I was defending socialism, but some other kind, not the Soviet kind Page 100 One of my girlfriends got into such a big fight about Lenin with her son and daughter-in-law, she kicked them out. Page 150 There was a mountain of red flags and pennants. Party and Komsomol membership cards. And Soviet war medals! Orders of Lenin and the Red Banner. Medals! For Valor!...being sold for dollars…”These are relics from the era of totalitarianism” Those were his words…Like these were just refuse, but the foreigners liked them. Page 200 I read an essay by a so-called democrat who said that the war generation… which is to say, us…was in power too long. We won the war, rebuilt the country, and after that we should have left because we had no conception of how to live in peacetime. Page 250 There were kilometer-long queues outside of the first McDonald’s, stories about it on the news. Educated, intelligent adults saved boxes and napkins from there and would proudly show them off to their guests. You can see how it is. So for me there were a couple of big problems. First is that this huge book seemed like raw material gathered for another book. And it was the other book I was wanting to read. For me, there was simply too much of the same kind of woeful sorrowful tale of bitter regret. But I can’t fault a book for doing what it set out to do and not what I think it should have wanted to do. But I wanted to find out how the gangsters actually took over (the “pirate privatisation” as one guy calls it), whether they had been there in the background all along, how the transformation from 1989 to (say) 2000 happened, piece by piece. Although I quite see that Svetlana Alexievich is not going to be able to get some despicable billionaire to sit down and say “well, this is how we stole the natural gas industry…” Finally a note on the crazy cover policy of the publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. They have uniform covers for all their books and they are the world's dullest. [image] [image] [image] Wow, okay, we get you're really a Serious company, but give us readers a break, please. ...more |
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Jan 24, 2021
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| 9747551187
| 9789747551181
| 9747551187
| 3.70
| 320
| Oct 20, 1992
| 2000
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liked it
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AN EERIE ACCURATE PREDICTION Prince Sihanouk wrote a newspaper article in 1955 on what it would be like if the Communists took over in Cambodia: There w AN EERIE ACCURATE PREDICTION Prince Sihanouk wrote a newspaper article in 1955 on what it would be like if the Communists took over in Cambodia: There will be no happiness. Everyone will work for the government. No one will ride cars or cyclos, or wear nice clothes; everyone will wear black, exactly alike. There would be no delicious food to eat. If you eat more than allowed, the government would learn about it from your children in secret and you would be taken out and shot. 20 years later, that’s pretty much what happened. As David Chandler puts it : At the end of 1974… the Central Committee decided what actions the Communists would take following their victory. The most important of these was to evacuate Phnom Penh and all other towns… driving their populations – well over two million people – into the countryside. … The Central Committee also decided to abolish money, markets and private property throughout the country. ENIGMA WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY Was there ever a stranger dictator than Pol Pot? He was from the upper classes in Cambodia, born in 1925. His sister was one of the King’s concubines. He went to private schools, then college, then wangled a scholarship to study radio electricity in Paris, in 1949. He joined the communists in Paris, not so unusual. After three years the French college threw him out – he never qualified for anything. Back in Phmon Penh in 1953 at the age of 27 he drifted into political activity, eventually becoming a teacher. His students all loved him, he was a nice guy. A novelist, Soth Polin, reminisced years later: I still remember Pol Pot’s style of delivery in French: gentle and musical. He was clearly drawn to French literature in general and poetry in particular : Rimbaud, Verlaine, de Vigny. WHAT IS A COMMUNIST? In the 1950s, it seems, the term “Communist” in Cambodia often referred to people who had simple tastes, a good education, and a hatred for corruption. “They were the only people who cared about the poor.” THE OPPOSITE OF STALIN Without any discernable leadership qualities (no broadcast speeches, no books, not that much political experience) he gets to be leader of the Cambodian communist party in 1962. How? Author David Chandler is not too sure. Actually when it comes to Pol Pot himself he’s not too sure about much at all. For long periods of his life, even, no – especially – when he was the dictator of Cambodia Pol Pot was invisible to all but his innermost circle. He was the opposite of Stalin. It was like – who exactly is running this revolution? Oh, that guy? Sorry, I thought he was the window cleaner. If it’s a mystery how he got to be boss of the Cambodian communists, it’s a bigger mystery why he came up with the most extreme lunatic revolution the world has ever known. [image] IN 1973 YOUR U.S. TAX DOLLARS WERE NOT WELL SPENT The bombing campaign in Cambodia began in March 1973 and was halted by the US congress five months later. During this time a quarter of a million tons of explosives were dropped on a country that was not at war with the United States and that had no US combat personnel within its borders. Target selection and verification were much less precise than in Vietnam. Targets were supposedly military complexes and villages where Communist units were thought to be seeking shelter. The maps used were outdated. … The number of casualties has never been assessed. Estimates run from thirty thousand to a quarter of a million killed. FLASH FORWARD General Tommy Franks, speaking at a news conference at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan in March 2002 in reference to Afghan deaths due to the US invasion We don’t do body counts. 17 APRIL 1975 Red Khmer troops all dressed in the famous black pyjamas, heavily armed, silent, many young teenagers, as young as 11 or 12, appear on the boulevards of Phnom Penh. The crowds on the streets are welcoming but this quickly turns to dismay when the words goes out that everyone – everyone, even patients in hospitals – must leave the city as soon as possible. The logic was irrefutable : you people in the cities were never part of this revolution. You are therefore the enemy. From now on you will work for us. The irony, lost on the 12 year old soldiers, was that most of the people at that point crowding Phnom Penh were poverty-striken refugees from the countryside. Ah well. David Chandler says : Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were driven onto the roads to travel on foot in the hottest month of the year. Thousands died of exhaustion, exposure or malnutrition over the next few weeks. The very old and the very young were especially vulnerable. In the crush and confusion, family members were separated from each other, sometimes for good. Within a week there was nobody left in the capital or in any towns. DEATH BY IDIOTS Pure racist hatred created the genocides in Nazi Germany and in Rwanda. The deaths of (probably) around 1.5 million Cambodians at the hands of other Cambodians in the Pol Pot period 1975-78 was, it seems, mostly caused by idiocy. For instance, here is David Chandler on the subject of health care in Democratic Kampuchea. Of course the country had at that time no Western medicines at all, and no manufacturing facilities of its own. He says the regime took the idea of “barefoot doctors” dispensing “local remedies” from China : The results of the poorly conceived medical program were disastrous. Survivors’ memories teem with grisly accounts of arrogant, untrained medical practitioners – many under 15 years old – and of the regime’s insistence on prerevolutionary (indeed, precolonial) cures, without emphasising hygiene [image] GENEROUS SUPPORT OF POL POT OFFERED BY THE UNITED STATES It may be thought that the Vietnamese government invaded Cambodia and deposed Pol Pot in January 1979 in order to put an end to one of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century, but apparently their reasons were not so simple as that. However, PP found himself stranded in camps just inside Thailand and perhaps to his surprise discovered that the United States opposed the enforced regime change and considered him to be Cambodia’s legitimate ruler! So there was an ongoing battle at the United Nations over who would represent Cambodia, and the USA was firmly supporting the Pol Pot delegation (as did the UK). Why? Because they were against one country invading another country to replace a government it did not happen to like. As far as that goes, I quite agree, and it is a matter of regret that the US government had apparently abandoned this principle by 2003. AFTER THE SLAUGHTER Pol Pot lived a fairly quiet life for another 19 years, dying peacefully in Thailand at the age of 73. Was it ever suggested that he stand trial for his crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague like Slobodan Milosevic? Nope. So, he just puttered about, married another wife, and gave occasional interviews where he was softly sorrowful about the honest mistakes made. Said he would do better next time, with a shy smile. A FINAL COMMENT BY TA MOK, AN OLD COMRADE He was speaking to a reporter from Radio Free Asia. Pol Pot has died like a ripe papaya. No one killed him, no one poisoned him. Now he’s finished, he has no power, he is no more than cow shit. Cow shit is more important than him. We can use it for fertiliser. [image] ...more |
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Apr 23, 2018
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Apr 29, 2018
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Apr 23, 2018
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| 9780141027944
| 0141027940
| 3.97
| 4,154
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| Oct 29, 2015
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really liked it
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UPDATE YouTube strikes again! I found a talk by Stephen Kotkin about Stalin and it was pretty good. Then I found another, where he was launching this v UPDATE YouTube strikes again! I found a talk by Stephen Kotkin about Stalin and it was pretty good. Then I found another, where he was launching this very book at a store in Washington. So there he is standing amongst the bookshelves and a small group hanging around, and this informal talk is BRILLIANT and if you're interested in Stalin it's a must watch. He extemporises for an hour. He explains so many of the Big Issues about Uncle Joe. I love the guy's style and his sense of humour when he's TALKING, I admit to not loving his writing style half as much, and he doesn't allow himself any jokes in the book. So this is a five star talk on Stalin and for my money a lot more informative than the first 300 pages of the book, I'm sure he'd hate me for saying that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFcb5... ************** A REVIEW OF THE FIRST 300 PAGES This is a brontosaurus – no, a brachiosaurus of a book. I have another 450 pages to go. Time to pause and make a few notes. SPARE A THOUGHT FOR THE FEEBLER READER The paperback of this 949 page book (of which 210 pages are notes and index) is quite heavy. Because of its size the printers have thoughtfully made the spine superstrong with a double layer of excellent glue so that it does not fall apart. Unfortunately this means you have to grip the book firmly with both hands to stop it snapping shut all the time. You would have to be King Kong to bend it open to the point where it would stay open. So this poses a challenge. I have tried balancing heavy weights on each page to keep it open in order to free my hands for other tasks but the book is too strong, one or another of the weighty objects was always catapulted into mid air, causing domestic chaos wherever it fell. So I must report that feebler readers will have to find a different, kinder Stalin biographer. This one will be too much for you. SPARE A THOUGHT FOR THE READER WHO HAS NO MAGNIFYING GLASS Second, because of its vast size, the printers have been forced to shrink the print to a particularly teensy size. If it was printed normally God alone knows how many pages long it would be. You would need a wheelbarrow to move it. And should you be a real Stalin freak and you wish to consult the 200 pages of notes at the back, you will need a microscope, they are printed in the type they use to get all the Bible onto the back of a postage stamp. SURPRISE! IT’S NOT ABOUT STALIN This surprised me, too. I was constantly checking the cover, which says STALIN on it and has a photo of the dashingly handsome not-yet-dictator. But the details of Stalin’s life are really rather murky until he suddenly steps forth from the shadows into the full glare of history after 1918. So the first 300 pages of this book get by very well with only brief mentions of Stalin. Maybe he did this here, maybe he went there, could be he got married and had a kid, not too sure. That kind of thing. Instead of stuff about Stalin we get a fantastically detailed history of the Russian revolution. For the last 100 pages this book really could have been called LENIN with more justification. It’s actually a little too geekily detailed for me, but I realise it is excellent stuff. IT’S ALWAYS THE STRANGE LITTLE DETAILS YOU REMEMBER Stephen Kotkin allows himself to throw in a few barbed comments and humorous asides every now and then, and these are very welcome, there should have been more. But he lets some rather crazy stuff pass by without comment, like this bit here. He is describing the non-judicial execution of the family of the ex-czar Nicholas. Included in those up against the wall were Nicholas’s four daughters. Some of the daughters, whose bodies held concealed jewels that repelled the bullets, were bayoneted to pieces. I find that a very bizarre statement which calls for more explanation. How big does a jewel have to be before it can literally repel bullets? And where do you conceal these jewels? Seems that if they were well placed to repel bullets (front and centre maybe, or right across your forehead) they wouldn’t really be concealed. So even in such a huge book as this (which only takes Stalin up to the year 1928) there are a few things that don’t get explained. ...more |
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Nov 21, 2017
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Jan 04, 2018
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Nov 13, 2017
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| 0802714722
| 9780802714725
| 0802714722
| 4.13
| 748
| 2005
| Feb 07, 2006
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really liked it
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This is the third book on the Khmer Rouge I have read and I thought maybe this one would get to the heart of the mystery, but again, it doesn’t. So –
This is the third book on the Khmer Rouge I have read and I thought maybe this one would get to the heart of the mystery, but again, it doesn’t. So – what is the mystery? You may already know that when Pol Pot’s army of children in black pyjamas took over in April 1975 they created a completely unique revolution. Nothing in the modern world was remotely like it. In Democratic Kampuchea (the country’s new name) money was abolished, all the cities were emptied of people, families were abolished, private life was abolished, religion, of course, was abolished, and all of this gave everyone much more time to spend on lunatic giant agricultural projects run by people with no education. After the Khmer Rouge collapse in 1979 Cambodia lay in ruins. A third of the population was dead. Of 550 doctors only 48 had survived; out of 11,000 university students, 450 were found; and out of 106,000 secondary school students only 5,300 survived. Nic Dunlop says that over the 1,364 days of Democratic Kampuchea 1,466 people died every day. He adds : By percentage of population, the Cambodian holocaust remains the worst to have occurred anywhere in the world, elipsing the numbers killed in Nazi-occupied Europe and the Rwandan genocide put together. THE MYSTERY OF POL POT I wanted to know – and I still do – how anyone could come up with these totally lunatic ideas – to abolish money, to empty all the cities, to completely abandon all Western technology, and all at once. Okay, many revolutionaries have dreamed in cafes and bedsits and jungle hideouts of what would happen after the revolution. They will make a new society – no more rich and poor, no more capitalism, everyone equal. “We will expropriate the expropriators” – you’ve heard all that stuff. It’s one thing to dream, we can dream – we should dream. It’s another thing to wage a successful guerrilla war and overturn a corrupt foreign-supported regime which everyone hates. This is also something which can be done and is done. But then to abandon all common humanity, all logical thought and all compassion and declare Utopia Now! Instant Ultra-Communism! Empty the cities – literally! Abolish money! No more buying and selling! I wanted to know how any grown up people could think this was a) a good idea and b) could be done and c) will be done beginning next Monday. Another example of the monstrous becoming cold reality is the Nazi Holocaust. Again, it’s one thing for Hitler to try to get the Jews to emigrate. And it’s another thing to herd them all together into ghettos. But it’s a whole new category of thinking to float the idea of the Final Solution – physical liquidation. How did that conversation happen? There must have been a conversation, at some time, in some room. Yes, we will do this. Do you think we could really do it? Really? Yes, yes we could. I will make sure of this. Leave it with me. After all the intense historical investigations of the Nazi period we still don’t know who came up with this idea and who greenlighted it. The documentation isn’t there. All the detailed plans of the extermination camps and the lists of the people who died there, they exist; but the decision to begin, that’s not there. Nic Dunlop does not get the answers I was looking for. His excellent book is journalism rather than history. He gets obsessed with the famous prison S-21 aka Tuol Sleng (located in Phmon Penh) where around 17,000 people died. The person in charge of this facility was one Comrade Duch, and Nic’s book is mostly the story of what this guy did, and of Nic tracking him down and confronting him. To give an idea of S-21, here is rule Number 6 : While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all. So this is somewhat like a journalist tracking down Fritz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, or Josef Kramer of Auschwitz after WW2. And Nic Dunlop succeeds, too. For those of you who are Christians, the later history of Comrade Duch will be of great interest. It turns out that after the Khmer Rouge were thrown out by the Vietnamese and S-21 was liberated, Duch vamoosed with other cadres to the Thai border and ended up converting to Christianity. There was a refugee camp called Ban Ma Muang with a population of around 12,000 and Duch wound up there, employed by the American refugee Committee training teams of community health workers. Much time was spent explaining to the people the importance of sanitation and effective irrigation. … According to an ARC official, Duch had been instrumental in stemming a typhoid outbreak in the camp, saving countless lives in the process. So there is your moral conundrum of the day : will Comrade Duch fry in hell for overseeing (and participating in) the death by torture of several thousand people in S-21 or will he be elevated to the realm of heavenly bliss because he took Jesus into his heart and started doing good? A question way above my pay grade, as they say, but I’d be interested in any suggestions. ...more |
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May 25, 2018
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Aug 27, 2016
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| 0195168941
| 9780195168945
| 0195168941
| 3.79
| 1,242
| Nov 29, 2001
| Nov 16, 2003
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really liked it
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This is the most bittersweet, most astonishing story in history, I think, so I’m compelled to read books about it, telling me the same story which I a
This is the most bittersweet, most astonishing story in history, I think, so I’m compelled to read books about it, telling me the same story which I already know, again and again. I don’t want to repeat the same things I said in my reviews of Revolution 1989 by Viktor Sebestyen or Down with Big Brother by Michael Dobbs. So I’ll be brief, as this excellent no nonsense book by Stephen Kotkin is. Why do I think this is such a towering, Shakespearian tragedy? Well – it’s the almost completely peaceful (that’s the sweet part) decline, fall and death of the only serious alternative to capitalism (that’s the bitter part). The USSR killed communism so very dead that any further alternative to capitalism might take another 500 years. And the guy who can most take the credit for this was a true believer in communism. For irony fans, this is a real treat. By the 1980s Stalin had been dead for 30 years so he couldn’t be blamed any more. Thing was, the Soviet economy just didn’t work. And they had this horrible period where their leaders were walking corpses and kept dying. Brezhnev died in 1982, Andropov in died 1984 and Chernenko died in 1985. So they went for Gorbachev, who was 54, instead of another decrepit octogenarian. Gorby was a true believer. He thought communism could be saved if only he could get it back on the right track. Only a few of Gorbachev's politburo colleagues shared his socialist romanticism, but even fewer matched his craftiness. He came up with glasnost (let’s be honest about the USSR) followed by perestroika (let’s reorganise the whole economy). But Glasnost turned into a tsunami of unflattering comparisons And perestroika reorganised communism into the grave. Gorbachev served up the severed head of his superpower on a silver platter and still had to employ all his artifice to cajole two US administrations to the banquet. SOVIET JOKE There was a rather solemn joke told in the 1980s. Lenin is on a train. The train grinds to a halt. Lenin jumps up and orders everyone out of the train, organising them into parties to try to push the train forward on the tracks. Stalin is on a train. The train grinds to a halt. Stalin orders the train driver to be shot on the spot. Brezhnev is on a train. The train grinds to a halt. Brezhnev pulls down the window shades and looks steadily at his companions and says “Gentlemen, let us assume the train is still in motion.” SOVIET MAPS How dishonest were the Soviets? In the 1980s: Even geographical locations that could be indicated on Soviet maps were still being shown inaccurately, to foil foreign spies, as if satellite imaging had not been invented, while many cities were entirely missing REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL, PART 16 The USSR had more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy or blackmail the world, and a vast storehouse of chemical and biological weapons. The Soviet Union also had more than five million soldiers, deployed from Budapest to Vladivostok… It experienced almost no major mutinies in any of these forces. And yet they were never fully used – not to save a collapsing empire, nor even to wreak havoc out of spite. A major riddle persists : why did the immense Soviet elite, armed to the teeth with loyal internal forces and weapons, fail to defend either socialism or the Union with all its might? Yes, for once in human history the guns were not turned on the people. When a collection of drunken old farts tried to stage a coup to get rid of Gorby and reinstitute communism they made one tv announcement and the people saw what they were, which was drunken old farts, and ignored them, and they all slunk away. Followed quickly by the USSR, if a mighty empire can be said to slink away. It's quite a complicated story and Prof Kotkin tells it very well. ...more |
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Feb 25, 2018
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Feb 28, 2018
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Nov 12, 2014
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| 0753827093
| 9780753827093
| 0753827093
| 4.34
| 1,399
| Jul 2009
| Jan 01, 2010
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liked it
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The new leader of the USSR was late for a meeting with some Western diplomats in 1985. He apologised – “I’m sorry, I had to deal with some urgent agri
The new leader of the USSR was late for a meeting with some Western diplomats in 1985. He apologised – “I’m sorry, I had to deal with some urgent agricultural problems.” “Oh,” said one diplomat, “when did they begin?” “1917” said Gorbachev. He had a sense of humour and a nice smile. He was…unusual. When did Soviet Communism begin to disintegrate? Answer 1 : When Karol Wojtyla got the big promotion and became Pope John Paul II in October 1978. A Polish Pope! An Anti-communist Polish Pope! Who immediately set up a visit to Poland (June 1979) and one way or another helped inspire Polish workers in Gdansk & elsewhere to form a free trade union called Solidarity. Answer 2 : When the USSR was dragged unwillingly into an invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979) . They knew their imperial history and were aware that nobody wins a war with the Afghans, but they felt the fear and did it anyway. So that was the first time it was demonstrated that Soviet military might had its limits. Answer 3 : It was when Gorby got the job. They picked him because they were sick of burying decrepit old men – Brezhnev (died 1982), Andropov (died 1984) and Chernenko (died 1985) – it was too much. They needed a younger man. Gorby was 54 when he got the job, which for the Kremlin was reckless vibrant youth. Gorbachev was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist and he killed Communism by wanting it to actually work, as opposed to pretending it worked. He had no idea it was beyond fixing. (Whether it could ever have worked is a discussion for a different review.) Gorbachev never stopped being a Communist, even as the palaces tumbled. Although he did star in a Pizza Hut commercial. [image] Answer 4: It was when Communists gradually lost the stomach for shooting people to encourage the others. In the 1956 Hungarian revolt 3000 died; in the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 108 were killed; and when communism fizzled out in 1991 how many were killed by the diehards? 13 (in Lithuania). With the single awful exception of Romania where 1104 people were killed. (The Yugoslavian wars were not about communism). I previously read Down with Big Brother by Michael Dobbs which covers the same territory but takes it all the way to 1991, when the USSR was formally abolished. Mr Sebestyen’s immensely detailed book ends in December 1989 with the execution of the Ceausescus and the fall of the Berlin Wall (a wonderful example of bureaucratic cock-up – they hadn’t meant to open the gates but the guy who announced the revised travel rules on TV just misunderstood), and so we do not get his version of the dramatic events of the next two years - the attempted Moscow coup, the Yeltsin take-over, the Yugoslavian eruption). His 400 page book would have had to be a whole lot longer. Because of that I’m going to recommend Michael Dobbs’ book over this one, even though this one is excellent too. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev went to England and appeared on tv and told the following joke : A man is queuing for food in Moscow. Finally he's had enough. He turns round to his friend and says "That's it. I'm going to kill that Gorbachev," and marches off. Two hours later he comes back. "Well," says the friend, "did you do it?" "No," replies the other, "there was an even longer queue over there." [image] ...more |
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Aug 23, 2014
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May 21, 2014
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| 0060907320
| 9780060907327
| 0060907320
| 3.91
| 54
| Jun 01, 1970
| Jan 01, 1981
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liked it
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Imagine that - in the late 1960s the annoying Russian dissident Amalrik writes a long essay with the title Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984! A
Imagine that - in the late 1960s the annoying Russian dissident Amalrik writes a long essay with the title Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984! At that point the USSR's grip on its client states throughout the world was, it appeared, total - the Prague Spring has just been flattened with tanks - and the USA appeared to be content with the concept of MAD (remember that? Mutually Assured Destruction. This meant we could sleep safely knowing that they knew as much as we knew that anyone pushing the button first would be evaporated too - if I had had children in those far off days, I would have tucked them up in their beds and said Go to sleep, my pretty ones, you are perfectly safe, our leaders believe in mutually assured destruction... sweet dreams, sweet dreams...). So this breathtakingly presumptuous essay was smuggled westwards and published in Holland in 1970 and all the lefties wagged their heads and snorted derisively. And yes, this essay was wrong, he was out by five years.... So we saw with goggling eyes the vanishing of communism as any kind of viable alternative to capitalism, and now see what's happened to capitalism... not a pretty sight. And now that the roof's fallen in, there's no alternative but to pay the same builders who clearly don't know what they're doing to rebuild the whole house. And now I do have children, I say Go to sleep, my pretty ones, go to sleep....you are quite safe... ...more |
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| 383650569X
| 9783836505697
| 383650569X
| 4.28
| 36
| Aug 01, 2008
| Aug 01, 2008
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really liked it
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[image] Great big photo book of Communist China, 1949 onwards. Here are some of my favourites: 1951 - in front of a great crowd a guy in an open fur coa [image] Great big photo book of Communist China, 1949 onwards. Here are some of my favourites: 1951 - in front of a great crowd a guy in an open fur coat and a hat points a long accusatory finger at another guy who we only see from the back. The first guy looks like he wants his finger to be a 45 Magnum and blow the other guy's head off. He is furious. He is thirty miles beyond furious. The caption says "A peasant points a finger at a landlord". [image] 1966 - more denunciations. This is clearly a big thing in Chinese history. Woe betide ye, ye whited sepulchres, and all of that kind of jazz. In this photo, three guys stand in front of a great crowd in a big hall. We can't see the crowd but in this photo we can hear them, they're yelling some very bad things about their female relatives and their private parts. These three guys look like they want to drink strychnine and die. Right now! They have big handwritten signs hung round their necks. But what makes the photo interesting is that they have enormous daft conical four foot high hats on their heads. The hats have tufts of torn paper at the top. They look like very sad clowns. Mao's portrait hangs beatifically above and on the stage in the shade is an earnest committee sitting at desks making notes. the caption is : "party secretary Chen Lei, governor of the province Li Fanwu and Wang Liyun, vice governor, are humiliated by being made to wear dunce hats". 1967 - a choir of cute little Red Guards, they must be about six or seven years old, clutch copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao and sing revolutionary songs with the sweetest, most angelic faces. Total joy and total earnestness, only available to the very young or the very insane or the very drugged. And now we interrupt this review for a short message from our sponsors: [image] Thank you. And now back to the programme. 1968 - a bunch of sad old men holding up a big hand painted sign. Yes, another one. The photo isn't brilliant but the caption is : "Buddhist monks forced to hold a banner proclaiming 'Fuck buddhist scriptures, they are nothing but dog farts'". 2004 - a working man with a startled, or is it worried, expression as he heads off to work. The caption says : "A worker at a coal refinery. Even China's official news agency describes mining as 'the deadliest job'. Recent years have produced an average of 7000 deaths per year in private mines. The fatality rate for China's coal mine accidents is 100 times higher than the US and 30 times that of South Africa." 2005 - beautiful, extraordinary image of a great jagged granite cliff next to a river. There must be a pathway, although it's not visible, because seven naked men are making their way along it, their flesh is luminescent and vulnerable against the grey cliffs. They are roped together, they are straining forward. Whatever the ropes are attached to is off camera. What the hell is this all about? "Chinese workers ply their trade on the upper reaches of the Yangtse River, here pulling a boat upstream. They work naked to preserve the few clothes they have." One star deducted from this big book because Taschen print all the text in three languages, which is extremely tiresome and not value for money. And also because there are somewhat too many shots of great big crowds doing revolutionary things. And way too much Mao. Sorry, revolutionary Mao fans, but enough is enough. [image] ...more |
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not set
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Jan 11, 2009
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Hardcover
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| 1405053453
| 9781405053457
| 1405053453
| 3.58
| 523
| 2007
| Jan 01, 2007
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did not like it
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The rise and fall of Communism is obviously a very fascinating subject, full of drama, pity, horror and the intensest of hopes - what could be more ho
The rise and fall of Communism is obviously a very fascinating subject, full of drama, pity, horror and the intensest of hopes - what could be more horrible than to see the fiery optimism of the young comrades of the 1920s and 30s fed into the gory charnelhouses of Uncle Joe, Mao and the rest of those old man vampires? But Robert Service in this fat book drains all the drama out like an embalmer replacing blood with formaldehyde. He is such a terrible terrible writer. I give you two examples chosen at random. On p301 we have this The state publishing houses displayed their patriotic and cultural commitment by printing millions of copies of approved national classics. This was a high priority throughout Eastern Europe. YOU DON'T SAY! Blimey, who would have thought it. And on p 476 he is STILL coming up with pearlers like this The absence of constitutional and judicial propriety forestalled the preventability of administrative abuse. HUH??? Bugger off, you boring old fart! This horrible book needed to be half as long and by someone who can actually write. That's right, it needed to be some other book entirely. It's so very tedious. I kept thinking oh well, I don't know much about the Cultural Revolution, so that should be interesting - wrong. There's no subject Robert service can't render into debilitatingly monochrome xeroxed bone-weary language. It stole a lot of my brain cells and wilted my enthusiasm for reading history. I should sue but I have no energy left. ******** SOME GENERAL COMMENTS ABOUT COMMUNISM The dream which became the nightmare from which so many of us have been trying to wake up all our lives, the grim chainrattling spectre which haunts all attempts to ameliorate the sufferings of the poor... "what are you, some kind of communist?!" Ah, Lenin, why did you not live just a few years more, maybe a few months, maybe a few hours would have done it - then you would have taken the surgeon's knife to Stalin like the malignant tumour that he was. Ah Stalin - did the utter failure of your schemes drive you mad or were you mad to begin with? Why did they all obey you? Why did they love you even as you shoved their families into a mass grave in Siberia? Ah Russia, with your long melancholy winters, why did you not revolt against your bitter revolution as it went so disastrously wrong, why did you let them drive you like sheep first here, then there? As for Chairman Mao, it seems his children grew up smart - they have torn down the whole of the shop except for its front, it still says "Communists" on the front but when you go inside - shazam! Aston Martins! Skyscrapers! Roulette wheels! Gigantic sock making machines! And except for a very few - shall we say incidents - they have kept approximate peace amongst one third of the world's population for 50 years, no mean feat, and now they are about to take over the world, in one way or another. And now, who can not find these words intensely moving, we who know what came after, all the death, all the war and the utter, utter failure : The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite! ...more |
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1
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not set
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Dec 26, 2008
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Jun 06, 2008
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Hardcover
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| 0679751513
| 9780679751519
| 0679751513
| 4.27
| 399
| 1996
| Jan 12, 1998
|
really liked it
|
Revived review to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. [image] ****** This is one of the great stories of history, the rapid, Revived review to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. [image] ****** This is one of the great stories of history, the rapid, astonishing and total collapse of one of the largest, most monolithic empires which at the same time represented the grand alternative to capitalism, the hypnotising dream of equality for all, international brotherhood and peace, the dream that caused the world to live in fear of nuclear wipe-out for 50 years. The USSR was so huge, it was Mordor, its troops and tanks numberless, and yet in a couple of years it melted away like snow on the water. And with hardly a shot being fired. Now that’s a story. Michael Dobbs zips along at a steady 55 miles an hour, starting with the disaster of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. His prose is prosaic, he hardly ever turns an arresting phrase in all of these 451 big pages, but that’s okay. He’s brisk, there’s a lot to get done, and he does it. He allows himself room, too, for sideshows like Tiananmen Square and Ronald & Nancy Reagan’s crazy occult advisor, and Boris Yeltsin’s astonished, agonised visit to a Houston Texas supermarket, which is when he realised the true epic failure of the Soviet system. The Afghan War was the first time the USSR had invaded a country, failed to take it over, and then withdrawn (sound familiar?). The first crack in the dam. The appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as successor to the Chernenko in 1985 began the whole mad whirling painful exhilarating and hopeful tale. Gorbachev wasn’t Pandora, he didn’t open the box, declare perestroika, and let fly all the evils of the world out of curiosity; and he wasn’t Adam being handed the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when he became general secretary and gained power over the whole land of Eden; and he wasn’t Bluebeard’s wife unlocking the grisly secrets of the forbidden room and condemning himself to death in the process; but he was close kin with all three. The most contradictory of accidental heroes, he was always a communist, and naively optimistic till the end about the possibilities of rescuing communism, but he killed it stone dead, and quicker and with less pain than anyone else could. He was the top communist in the world and he refused, consistently, to use violence to save his own world. Part blustering old guard, part chess grandmaster and part idiot, loved at first by the people and later tossed aside like a used Kleenex by the same people, he is the hero of this book and definitely one of my heroes. [image] SOME QUOTES Leonid Brezhnev – that’s the Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for 18 years, successor to Khruschev who took over from Stalin, that Brezhnev, told his brother: All that stuff about communism is a tall tale for popular consumption. After all, we can’t leave the people with no faith. The church was taken away, the tsar was shot, and something had to be substituted. So let the people build communism. In 1985 Gorbachev toured western Siberia. Like many visitors he was struck by the contrast between the riches that were pouring out of the ground and the squalor in which people were forced to live. As he toured supermarkets, drilling rigs and gas compressor stations he was beseiged by complaints about shoddy housing, poor food supplies, air pollution, outdated equipment and the lack of consumer goods. The ends had clearly not justified the means. The Stalinist system had created a monster that fed on itself, producing little benefit either for the country or its inhabitants. Gorbachev demanded glasnost (openness) to get his dream of a remodelled communism going. What he got was grim facts about life in the Soviet Union that had long been concealed from ordinary people. Revelations about environmental catastrophes, abysmal standards of public health, and economic lunacy poured out. An eminent biologist reported that 20% of the population lived in ecological disaster zones where every third person could be expected to develop cancer. In some parts of the country infant mortality exceeded African levels. Dobbs has a nice paragraph on how communusm turned into disaster : Economic power was concentrated in the hands of a small group of bureaucrats at the top of the pyramid. Even if these apparatchiks had been totally omniscient and supremely intelligent, it would still have been physically impossible for them to match the collective wisdom of the millions of individuals who form a Western-style marketplace. The Stalinist system could cope with grandiose tasks, like building nuclear bombs and producing thousands of tanks, because it was good at mobilising resources to achieve a specific goal. But the command economy lacked the myriad self-correcting mechanisms of a market economy. When a capitalist entrepreneur makes a wrong decision, he is quickly put right by millions of consumers; a similar error by a Soviet bureaucrat could go undetected for years, with horrendous results. If I may have a little gripe it's this – what, a big fat book like this and no photos? Come on, Alfred A Knopf of New York, what were you playing at? I want mug shots! I want to look the grotesque old bastards in the eye! And raise up my glass to Gorby too. May the God that neither of us believes in bless you in your old age. Otherwise, terrific stuff. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 12, 2011
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Aug 13, 2011
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Feb 14, 2008
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0719565693
| 9780719565694
| 0719565693
| 3.89
| 1,471
| Sep 05, 2000
| Jan 01, 2005
|
it was amazing
|
Rewritten in honour of the Mayan Calendar and it being the final day of the entire world and all that. So this book is a history of the way the world Rewritten in honour of the Mayan Calendar and it being the final day of the entire world and all that. So this book is a history of the way the world really did end in one particular country. I imagine at some point in the early 70s Saloth Sar, later to be cutely renamed as Pol Pot, was listening to the radio and on came that well known utopian anthem Imagine : Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people living life in peace Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can... and dweedly dweeb. And he thought, in a marxist-Leninist-Maoist kind of way - "yeah, that's it! only it should go something like Imagine there's no money and no cities too None of that Western education And no medecine too Imagine there's no families That would be pretty easy to do Imagine all the people Being driven out of the cities at gunpoint and forced to work at vast crazy agricultural projects where they die like flies You-ou-ouuuu you may say that I'm a dreamer But my name is Saloth Sar I'm sure someday you'll join me in my utopiah This book is a mad boggling journey into the darkest heart of insane utopianism. The Khmer Rouge were the all time most deranged revolutionaries ever to succeed in capturing a country and then imposing their madness on the whole population. Forget Apocalypse Now - the horror! the horror! ™ - Cambodia Year Zero (1975) really was the horror, the horror. Imagine the people of Vancouver or Glasgow or your own local big city being given 48 hours to clear out - and that includes hospital inmates. Those left after 48 hours will be shot by ten year olds in black pajamas. Imagine that. Well, it all carried on happening for four years, until Vietnam invaded and removed Pol Pot and his fellow psychopaths. And everyone from the USA to Britain onwards condemned Vietnam for their aggression! Ha ha - you have to have a quiet chuckle over international diplomacy. Just think - when the USA and UK invaded Iraq to get rid of another crazy dictator, who only measured about 9 per cent on the Pol Pol Megalomania Scale, they expected everyone to perfectly understand the absolute necessity for it. And they were quite hurt when the rest of the world said er… not really. Pol Pot attempted to get rid of everyone's ego, completely. The way he could tell you still had an ego was if you cared about anything apart from working with your bare hands on vast crazy agricultural projects where you were likely be dead within a month. Egos were bourgeois and were to be eradicated. So if you didn’t die like a fly, Pol Pot would send a ten year old in black pajamas round to find out why you were still alive. Great book. Not for everyone, I can understand that. ...more |
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Nov 19, 2007
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Paperback
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| 081291080X
| 9780812910803
| 081291080X
| 3.99
| 107
| 1983
| Nov 12, 1983
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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not set
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Nov 19, 2007
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Hardcover
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| 0099459329
| 9780099459323
| 0099459329
| 3.99
| 813
| 1987
| Jan 01, 2001
|
really liked it
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Brilliantly lovely engaging travel book about China before it became the roaring supercharged capitalist success story it is today. (Or has their capi
Brilliantly lovely engaging travel book about China before it became the roaring supercharged capitalist success story it is today. (Or has their capitalist dream gone bust too, like ours? It's hard to keep up these days!) Two anecdotes from me and a quote from Mr Thubron and we're done. Now I don't often mention HF in these reviews, on the grounds that she might object, which is fair enough. But she goes to China on university business regularly (they have a campus in Ning-Bo). And once she told me that she had to go to a "banquet" (a regular occurrence) which is where you get given food, you don't get a menu, they just bring it to you. And one of the dishes looked really weird and she didn't fancy it at all. So she asked someone what it was and they said without batting an eye "shredded deer's afterbirth" There was a BBC news guy in China I heard on the radio a couple of years ago. He said he was standing in the middle of the city of (can't remember, some place I never heard of), where one third of the world's socks are manufactured. that stuck with me! My favourite passage of this splendid book: In Cantonese cooking, nothing edible is sacred. It reflects an old Chinese mercilessness towards their surroundings. Every part of every animal- pig stomach, lynx breast, whole bamboo rats and salamanders - is consumed. No Hindu cows or Muslim pigs escape into immunity by taboo. It is the cuisine of the very poor, driven to tortuous invention. Most Chinese still eat only fourteen pounds of meat a year, and many survive at little above subsistence level. In the rowdy, proletarian Wild Game Restaurant, I interrogated the waitress for anything I could bear to eat. But she incanted remorselessly from the menu: Steamed Cat, Braised Guinea Pig (whole) with Mashed Shrimps, Grainy Dog Meat with Chilli and Scallion in Soya Sauce, Shredded Cat Thick Soup, Fried Grainy Mud-puppy ('It's a fish,' she said) with Olive Kernels, Braised Python with Mushrooms .... If I wanted the Steamed Mountain Turtle, she said, I'd have to wait an hour. And Bear's Paws, she regretted, were off. I had turned suddenly vegetarian. I played for time by ordering python broth, then glanced furtively round at the main courses on nearby tables, hoping for escape; but their occupants were bent over opaque stews where dappled fragments floated anonymously. Around us the windows were glazed with pretty pictures of the animals concerned : deer and cats wearing necklaces. The waitress tried to be helpful. 'What about Dog Meat Ready to be Cooked Earthen Pot over Charcoal Stove on Table?' I guessed in desperation: 'It's too expensive.' 'Then I recommend Braised Wildcat.' 'Well…' I glanced at a domestic tabby squatting on the veranda beside me. The waitress followed my gaze. 'It's not that.' She tried to explain it. It had nothing to do with real cats, she said. She wrote down the Chinese character for it, which I couldn't read. In the end, hoping that it was a fancy name for something innocuous, I heard myself say: 'One braised wildcat, please.' But the soup was a meal in itself. It came in a python-sized bowl, and beneath its brown liquid lurked sediment of what appeared to be ' white chicken meat. It tasted fishy. The darker flecks might been skin. I excused myself by reflecting that pythons (although I had never known one) were less endearing than lambs, which I had eaten often. The tabby had squirmed under my table. It looked scrawny but dangerously edible. In fact I had the impression that almost everything bere was in peril. When somebody brought a warm flannel for my I was half prepared to munch it. What else was nutritional, I wondered? The mosquitoes? The curtains? It occurred to me that should I fall from the fourth-floor stair-well. The cat was still under my table when its braised compatriot arrived. I lifted the lid to reveal a mahogany-coloured flotsam of mushrooms and indistinguishable flesh. A pair of fragile ribs floated accusingly on the surface. I ate the mushrooms first, with relief, but even they were suffused by the dark, gamey tang of whatever-it-was. The meat was full of delicate, friable bones. I did not know if my faint nausea arose from the thing's richness or from my mind. Several times my chopsticks hit rounded, meat- encircled fragments, like miniature rolling-pins, which resembled legs. I smuggled them to the cat under the table, as a melancholy atonement. "You don't like your wildcat?' The waitress was peering into the bowl, disappointed. 'I'm rather full.' I smiled feebly, picking the python out of my teeth. But she seemed to understand my diffidence, and stooped down to sketch me an exonerating picture of the whatever-it-was. She drew what looked like the illustration of an Edward lear Limerick : a lugubrious, four-legged ellipse, with a face either cross or upset. But it was too late : I had already eaten it. And when later I showed an English-speaking Cantonese the word she had written, he translated it "elephant-cat" or "cat-fox", and shook his head, nonplussed.. Is that not great? ...more |
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Oct 26, 2007
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Paperback
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| 0192802046
| 9780192802040
| 0192802046
| 3.74
| 2,252
| Nov 24, 1982
| Nov 29, 2001
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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not set
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Oct 26, 2007
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Paperback
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| 4.16
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liked it
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Feb 23, 2024
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Feb 12, 2024
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| 3.88
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liked it
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Sep 30, 2023
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Sep 01, 2023
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| 3.95
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really liked it
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Mar 29, 2023
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Mar 25, 2023
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| 4.26
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it was ok
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Apr 08, 2024
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Dec 30, 2022
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| 3.67
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really liked it
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Apr 2022
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Mar 10, 2022
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| 3.31
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liked it
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Sep 14, 2021
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Jul 10, 2021
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| 4.46
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really liked it
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Mar 07, 2021
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Jan 24, 2021
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| 3.70
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liked it
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Apr 29, 2018
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Apr 23, 2018
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| 3.97
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really liked it
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Jan 04, 2018
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Nov 13, 2017
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| 4.13
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really liked it
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May 25, 2018
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Aug 27, 2016
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| 3.79
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really liked it
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Feb 28, 2018
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Nov 12, 2014
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| 4.34
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liked it
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Aug 23, 2014
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May 21, 2014
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| 3.91
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liked it
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not set
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Mar 29, 2009
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| 4.28
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really liked it
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not set
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Jan 11, 2009
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| 3.58
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did not like it
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Dec 26, 2008
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Jun 06, 2008
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| 4.27
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really liked it
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Aug 13, 2011
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Feb 14, 2008
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| 3.89
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it was amazing
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not set
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Nov 19, 2007
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| 3.99
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really liked it
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not set
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Nov 19, 2007
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| 3.99
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really liked it
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not set
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Oct 26, 2007
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| 3.74
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really liked it
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not set
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Oct 26, 2007
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