“'Everything is turned upside down at once,’ he wrote to one of his best friends. 'Absolute power disrupts everything. It is impossible for me to enum“'Everything is turned upside down at once,’ he wrote to one of his best friends. 'Absolute power disrupts everything. It is impossible for me to enumerate all the madness' in a country that had become 'a plaything for the insane.’” (p. 266) —Tsar Alexander I (reigned 1801 – 1825) on his father, Paul I, assassinated 1801
A dramatis personae at the start of each chapter helps track the actors and reemphasizes the idea of the intense melodrama here. This was not a group of subtle people. Even the occassional genius — Peter, Catherine — did not lead analyzed lives. The book is written with astonishing clarity and detail, yet it’s relatively trim. Twenty sovereigns (304 years) are profiled in 660 pages. Happily, the book lacks the main attribute of many survey texts, tedium. One thing helping readability, I think, is the many lively first-person voices derived from memoirs and letters. What did Martin Amis say of SSM — that he’s a Stakhanovite of the Russian State archives? Something like that. These are portraits of the power drunk. Each one has his or her signature cruelty. Moreover, each time a tsar died the succession looked more like a coup d’état than anything. You can imagine all the heads rolling.
The sex was incessant. Peter the Great, who probably wasn’t homosexual, when very drunk insisted on sleeping with his head on the stomach of one of his batmen. He also enjoyed orgies, passing women among himself and his buck naked subordinates.
The story of Catherine the Great and Potemkin is largely a story of sex, though there was also much armed conquest at the time, including major campaigns in Ukraine where Mariupol, Kherson and Odessa were founded. Catherine and Potemkin were ravenously libidinous. With Potemkin usually serving as both lover and pimp; that is, securing handsome young men for her from his armies. At the end of a given lover’s tenure, usually a few years, Catherine pensioned him off with thousands of rubles and serf-laden estates. Then she moved onto the next. But it must also be said that she loved; the young men weren’t simply diversions, though they were surely that too.
Here’s a note from p. 237: “Notorious for his idiosyncrasies, Suvorov, probably Russian‘s greatest ever commander, resembled a shabby, wirey, bristlingly alert scarecrow who liked to do calisthenic exercises stark naked in front of the army.”
The assassination plots, sometimes involving hundreds of people, are riveting to read about. The first was Alexi, not a tsar yet but a tsarevich, who was killed by Peter the Great, the father he despised. Also assassinated were Peter III, Paul I, Ivan VI, Alexander II and of course Nicholas II. The triple-cross that occurs during Paul I’s assassination plot will set your hair on fire. And then General Mikhail Kutuzov, the hero of the Napoleonic Wars —whom Tolstoy famously made say “I will make them eat horse meat” — steps right out of the pages War and Peace.
It is General Kutuzov who evacuates then burns Moscow. The astonished Napoleon writes, “To burn their own cities! A demon has got into them. What a people! (p. 307) Napoleon fumbles around in the Kremlin for weeks. Kutuzov marches his much reduced army group to the west. Kutuzov let’s Napoleon go: he is determined not to pursue him with such reduced forces. Emperor Alexander is of a different mind. With the two additional armies he pursues Napoleon across the breath of Europe. At the last minute Napoleon turns away from Paris, a feint, while the Russians and their Prussian allies enter. Alexander’s sister writes to him: “The imagination can hardly take in the idea of Russians in Paris!“ (p. 314)
And as always, there is the interminable fucking. I can’t begin to hint at the magnitudes of fornication taking place here across a continent. Alexander, after defeating Napoleon and occupying Paris, after touring London, during which he trysted with many British women, returns to Petersburg to find his mistress of fifteen years in love with another and is heartbroken. How could she? After all that I’ve done for her! Then we move onto the Congress of Vienna, aptly named.
“The Russians were said to be the worst-behaved visitors. On 9 November, Police Agent D reported that Alexander's courtiers, 'not content with treating the Hofburg like a pigsty, are behaving very badly and constantly bringing in harlots'. Vienna overflowed with such an embarrassing bounty of easily available sex that the streets seemed to swim with eager peasant-girls, a supply that was as inexhaustible as it was irresistible. One of Alexander's officers blamed the girls: 'It is impossible not to mention the unbelievable depravity of the female sex of the lower orders.’ The police agents reported that the maladies galantes —VD — were raging.” (p. 321)
Of course, it’s always the women who are to blame. Eve listened to the serpent etc . . . This is part and parcel of the tsars’ repellent belief in the divine right of kings; their mission unquestionably God’s will. Meanwhile they fuck and murder and subjugate populations.
“As Poland's rebellion was crushed [about 1830], a cholera outbreak sparked rioting on the Haymarket in Petersburg. Hastening there with just two adjutants, Nicholas faced down the mob, then ordered them to their knees. ‘I have to ask God's mercy for your sins,’ thundered God's own emperor. ‘You have offended Him deeply. You've forgotten your duty of obedience to me and I must answer to God for your behaviour! Remember you're not Poles, you're not Frenchmen, you're Russians. I order you to disperse immediately.' The rioters obeyed. No wonder Nicholas I believed he was the sacred personification of Russia. 'I am only here', he told his children preciously, 'to carry out her orders and her intentions.' Nicholas I was convinced that 'Our Russia was entrusted to us by God, once praying aloud at a parade: 'O God, I thank Thee for having made me so powerful.'” (p. 356)
Nicholas II was a rabid antisemite. It was under his regime that the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” document was concocted by the secret police, the Okhrana. The protocols implicated Jews in the outrage known as the Blood Libel, which said Jews were murdering Christian children in order to use their innocent blood in despicable rituals. Sadly the slander persists with some half-wits down to our day.
“On 20 March I9II, the body of a boy named Andrei Yushchinsky had been discovered in a cave outside Kiev. The Black Hundreds claimed that the body had been drained of blood by Jewish ritualists. While the boy had almost certainly been murdered on the orders of a vicious female gangster, the authorities, both to promote counter-revolutionary nationalism and to prevent anti-semitic disorders, arrested and framed an innocent Jewish brickmaker named Mendel Beilis. Even though the evidence was non-existent and the ritual itself was a myth, the justice minister, Ivan Shcheglovitor, briefed the tsar and appointed the top Kiev prosecutor to prosecute Beilis.¶ Now the prosecutor Grigory Chaplinsky reported to the emperor, ‘Your Majesty, I am happy to report that the true culprit in the murder of Yushchinsky has been found. The Yid Beilis.' Nicholas should have stopped the case. Instead he crossed himself and approved.” (pp. 551-552)
One feels sorrow for the children when they are killed by Bolsheviks, but it’s hard to feel sorry for the empress of the emperor, being such pigheaded religious ecstatics. I haven’t even touched on the story of Rasputin. That, reader, will set your hair on fire!
So just a few highlights. Montefiore’s a fine writer. One wonders how he handles such a bulky narrative in a mere 657 pages? I don’t know but it’s stunning. I have one quibble though, the description of Alexander III’s reign is riddled with lustful sex hungry missives to and from the emperor and his mistress. Bingleries, the emperor calls them. In one letter the mistress rhapsodizes about the how emperor’s “little fountain” gushed three times. Ick! Dozens of pages like this; most annoying....more
Extremely good. At times dazzling. It’s prompted me to reread all the Yoknapatawpha novels, this time in sequence. But if you don’t know Faulkner‘s woExtremely good. At times dazzling. It’s prompted me to reread all the Yoknapatawpha novels, this time in sequence. But if you don’t know Faulkner‘s work, I can’t imagine a more splendid introduction to it than this book. Admittedly, there is a lot here about the Civil War that I already know, but the insights into how the war affected WF’s life and work are fresh and new. For example, there are parallels between WF’s great-grandfather and namesake, William Falkner—no u, that was the novelist’s enhancement—and Faulkner’s horrible fictional Colonel Sartoris, especially as he appears in the novels Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished. The author discusses all of Faulkner‘s novels and many stories as they reflect the Civil War, especially as that conflict was understood by him and his fellow Southerners. This is a rich book and there are many intellectual joys here I’m not touching on, but the comparison late in the book between the reconciliation the Germans undertook after WW2 with regard to their Nazi legacy, and the utter lack of such a coming to terms by the South with regard to slavery, is beautifully argued....more
Began this on 4th night of rioting in Minneapolis Minnesota. George Floyd’s murder is just the latest crime in more than four centuries of racial injuBegan this on 4th night of rioting in Minneapolis Minnesota. George Floyd’s murder is just the latest crime in more than four centuries of racial injustice. This book outlines the murderous genocide of convict leasing that developed in Mississippi after the Civil War and led to the Konzentrationslager known as Parchman Farm, and the era of state segregation known as Jim Crow.
Some notes on a reading that seems especially timely. As MLK said in his paraphrase of Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but itSome notes on a reading that seems especially timely. As MLK said in his paraphrase of Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
1. The book starts with the genesis of the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march in 1965. It was originally the idea of the mentally challenged but very popular pastor and roué, James Bevel, in the wake of the shooting death of Jimmie Lee Jackson by an out of control Alabama State Police force. Later, KKK members go to a black church in Lowndes Country and terrify a gathering of 200 parishioners there to grieve. The writing is vivid, minutely detailed.
2. The animosity of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to MLK’s often freewheeling decision making, which often excluded them, is startling. SNCC, created by now Congressman John Lewis, was in a snit at the idea of a Selma to Montgomery march. Founder Lewis broke with his own organization to march. The pettiness of the motives surprise one.
3. J. Edgar Hoover, closeted queen and founder of the FBI, whom LBJ’s AG Katzenbach believes to be actively senile, calls MLK “the most notorious liar in the country.” (p. 34) I mean, talk about projection.
4. On 7 March 1965 the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march is attacked by state troopers, sheriff’s deputies and so-called possemen as soon as it begins to clear the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The black marchers are hit with billyclubs and brutally tear gassed. There are a lot of injuries. Many marchers race back to Brown Chapel in Selma, the march’s starting point. The are ruthlessly pursued by the peace officers and attacked the entire way.
5. On hearing the reports MLK appealed to clergy nationally to march the following day. ”No American is without responsibility,” King’s wire declared. “All are involved in the sorrow that arises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life.” In response pastors, priests, and rabbis from around the country hop on planes and head to Selma: “800 travelers from 22 states.” (p. 73)
6. That night ABC breaks into its national broadcast of Judgement at Nuremberg starring Spencer Tracey to air the devastating footage from the Pettus Bridge. Forty million viewers have their evening entertainment interrupted. One wonders how many stayed with the movie after watching 15 ghastly minutes of policemen beating nonviolent demonstrators seeking their constitutional right to vote?
7. Branch contrasts the President’s willingness to commit soldiers to protect American bases in South Vietnam with his wallowing in legal entanglements implicit in sending troops into Alabama. The section when Gov. George Wallace visits the White House is a knock out; the almost convivial way the articulate Texan takes the racist governor apart is a marvel. After 3½ hours they tell the press that they’ve had “a frank exchange of views.” (!) (p. 98)
8. Jim Crow south sought to dehumanize African-Americans in a manner similar to the Nazis’ dehumanization of Jewish people—turning them into a degraded other. True, the lily-white south didn’t gas blacks—they needed them to clean their homes and raise their children—but what was lynching but a step in that direction? Slavery was certainly a form of genocide since only a percentage of captives survived the crossing. See work of Eric Foner and others. In fiction there’s the National Book Award winning The Middle Passage by Charles R. Johnson, and Booker Prize winning Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth.
9. “Many [U.S.] senators praised the Selma demonstrators for steadfast commitment to democratic principles. ‘As American citizens, they have faith in America,’” said one Republican senator, “‘and we must sustain that faith.’” (p. 124)
10. Then later, from a flatbed truck before the capital building in Montgomery, “King looked over heads massed down the gentle slope of Dexter Avenue to Court Square.” “‘There was never a moment in American history more honorable and more inspiring,’” he said, “‘than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith, pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.’ King saluted President Johnson’s ‘sensitivity to feel the will of the country’ and his forthrightness to recognize ‘the courage of the Negro for awakening the conscience of the nation....’” (p. 165)...more
Great stories of heroic black Americans escaping slavery and the noble whites who helped them. Reading the book is heartening. It’s an astonishing talGreat stories of heroic black Americans escaping slavery and the noble whites who helped them. Reading the book is heartening. It’s an astonishing tale meticulously pieced together from disparate sources. Author Foner came across the papers of Sidney Howard Gay, Corresponding Secretary at the American Anti-Slavery Society of New York, which detail specifics of the many runaways the Society aided. This view from New York City forms the core of the tale, which is supplemented by heretofore obscure abolitionist newspapers and such. Admittedly, the narrative is thin in places. But then you get to the escape of Henry “Box” Brown, an industrious “slave” who cleverly had himself boxed up in North Carolina and shipped to the Society’s offices in NY in 27 hours. When he was uncrated he emerged singing a hymn of praise, so exhilarated was he with his newfound freedom. There’s discussion, too, of the “slave” Margaret Morgan who, without objection from her “owner,” crossed the Mason-Dixon Line into Pennsylvania where she married and started a family. Five years later, after the owner’s death, his grasping niece sent a team of abductors to Pennsylvania who entered the Morgan home while the husband was away kidnapping Morgan and her six children, all of whom were carried to Maryland and slavery. This case resulted in the notorious SCOTUS decision Prigg v. Pennsylvania that allowed the kidnapping to stand! There are three or four sickening examples here of the Court supporting the peculiar institution of slavery. Oh, the outrages come thick and fast, friends. The Morgan tale had me gasping aloud. There are many other cases here— such as the kidnapping of free blacks into slavery; see Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years A Slave—that tend to leave the reader exhausted and stunned. This truly was, to use Gil-Scott Heron’s words, Winter in America. It is astonishing that the nation prevailed. Thanks, Abe.
Background from the New York Times, 2015:The first scholarly study of the Underground Railroad, published by Wilbur Siebert in 1898, named some 3,200 “agents,” virtually all of them white men, who presided over an elaborate network of fixed routes, illustrated with maps that looked much like those of an ordinary railroad.
That view largely held among scholars until 1961, when the historian Larry Gara published “The Liberty Line,” a slashing revisionist study that dismissed the Underground Railroad as a myth and argued that most fugitive slaves escaped at their own initiative, with little help from organized abolitionists. Scholarship on the topic all but dried up, as historians more generally emphasized the agency of African-Americans in claiming their own freedom.
But over the past 15 years, aided by newly digitized records of obscure abolitionist newspapers and local archives, scholars have constructed a new picture of the Underground Railroad as a collection of loosely interlocking local networks of activists, both black and white, that waxed and waned over time but nevertheless helped a significant number reach freedom....more
3.5⭐️ Interesting international views of the U.S. Civil War. For instance, Britain leant heavily toward the South, which sought diplomatic recognition3.5⭐️ Interesting international views of the U.S. Civil War. For instance, Britain leant heavily toward the South, which sought diplomatic recognition, but was put off by north British mill owners and workers who were staunchly anti-slavery.
Many generals of both North and South were graduates of the West Point Class of 1846. Grant and Sherman, I already knew, were supremely competent fighters. But I did not know that Robert E. Lee was so highly regarded among that class, nor that he was a brilliant fighter who acquitted himself admirably in the Mexican–American War (1846-48). Certainly his showing against Grant at Petersburg was masterful, even if he ultimately lost. Lee was almost put in charge of the Union army before deciding to "go with my state [of Virginia]." Stonewall Jackson, too, is here considered a "military genius" and a master of tactical maneuver, though he was not as skilled in battle because of the personal faults of aloofness and poor communication with his subordinates. The chapter "Civil War Generalship" lays out each general's strengths and weaknesses.
Lincoln's growth as strategist for the Union, a skill learned only after much trial and error, is fascinating to read about. Churchill greatly admired him. How the North shut down Southern ports and initiated a naval blockade, virtually starving the South of foreign exchange, is cogently explained. The Union strategy was called the Anaconda Plan, which sought to deprive the non-industrial south of imports as well as exports (King Cotton). It was arrived at only after much wringing of hands because Lincoln had no good advisors at the start of the war. He was to become, however, quite proficient as a war-time leader. Something that can't be said of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.
The North's bumbling in the early years of the war is depressing. The incompetence of the generals, especially McClelland, who was risk-averse if not downright timid, and Hooker, who quailed before Chancellorsville, is painful to read about.
Slavery had however kept the South primitive. It had no industry. The North was able to bankroll the war, and they did not stint, relying on the ancient idea of selling government bonds and imposing a temporary income tax. By contrast, the South, because of the Union blockade, was cut off both from proceeds for exports and imports, which were essential since it manufactured little. The North also had exquisite quartermasters handling logistics and communications. It helped, too, that the lion's share of the railroads were in the North.
If Robert E. Lee had taken command of the Northern armies, and had at his service the North's top-notch communications and logistics, the Civil War might have been concluded in far less time than four grueling years. It's tremendous fun, this narrative, as it sorts the heroes and idiots on both sides for the reader's delectation. The account of Stonewall Jackson's death is harrowing, unforgettable. Keegan breathes life into what in another's hands would be undistinguished drivel. This is my fourth Keegan book. I look forward to reading many more.
For me, the real fighting in the eastern theater, as opposed to skirmishing and retreating, doesn't start until Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville and Antietam. Gettysburg is mayhem, utter hell, droves slaughtering droves. And why? For what? To keep persons of color in slavery and not seek industrial development? What a waste of effort. It's like insisting on remaining Neolithic. The story's mind-numbingly effective in Keegan's telling, though he's done little original scholarship. All Americans should have as clear an understanding of our national calamity as this fine book affords. I have not read Shelby Foote yet, though I hope to. But there's much to be said for the one-volume approach Keegan uses here for the way it crystalizes the story of the war into a crisp and memorable narrative....more
Fascinating. Not for the faint of heart. I wonder if Martin Amis knew of this book when he wrote his novel, Time's Arrow.Fascinating. Not for the faint of heart. I wonder if Martin Amis knew of this book when he wrote his novel, Time's Arrow....more
A few things. First, I have read widely about Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (40 to 70 million dead), Stalin's purges and programs oA few things. First, I have read widely about Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward (40 to 70 million dead), Stalin's purges and programs of collectivization (20 million dead) and Hitler's genocide (11 million dead). I am largely unshockable. However, the avarice and deceit of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo (15 million dead) has been something of a revelation. I hereby enter his name in my Rogues Gallery roster. It is important that we remember what he perpetrated for his own personal gain. Adam Hochschild's book does an excellent job of registering these crimes in the collective memory. The book has been justly praised. Let me add my own.
Also, it turns out the first great unmasker of Leopold was an American, George Washington Williams. He was a lawyer, minister, popular author and activist. He wrote an open letter to Leopold that was published in the Times in 1890 and which might have saved millions of lives had he been listened to. Williams was a man of considerable intellectual acumen and courage. Largely because he was black, however, he was ignored. I had always thought that that great whistleblower was Roger Casement. And certainly Casement's key contribution is recounted here, as is that of the great popularizer of the Congo cause, E.D. Morel, but Williams' audacious early warning was a surprise to me. I hereby enter his name into my book of latter-day Cassandras, and decree he be given greater emphasis in all relevant texts and courses....more
An exquisite novel about the transportation of Africans across the Atlantic to bondage in the United States and the Caribbean. It won the National BooAn exquisite novel about the transportation of Africans across the Atlantic to bondage in the United States and the Caribbean. It won the National Book Award three years before Barry Unsworth’s fine and similarly themed Booker Award-winning Sacred Hunger was published. Belongs in the same league with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and William Faulkner’s Light in August. A vital American document. I must reread it soon....more
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