Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney

    This is a hard book to evaluate. I did not like it nearly as much as my other work of Russian literature, War and Peace. Doctor Zhivago was similarly difficult due to having so many named characters with so many different names, but it lacked something greater that War and Peace had. Doctor Zhivago feels bleaker, and with fewer likeable characters. I found Yuri, the main character, to be pretentious and selfish. He goes off on these long soliloquies and the whole thing feels like Pasternak writing himself into the book and being obsessed with his own genius. Very full of himself for a guy who is barely able to feed himself by the end of the book.

    Part of the reason the book was so dark and depressing was that the commentary is that the old order in Russia was bad, but the new one was even worse. It covers a really dark time in Russian history, so the whole book is really depressing from the 1905 Revolution through World War Two. All the passages I highlighted are depressing. Things like, "All around, people continued to deceive themselves, to talk endlessly. Everyday life struggled on, by force of habit, limping and shuffling. But the doctor saw life as it was. It was clear to him that it was under sentence. He looked upon himself and his milieu as doomed. Ordeals were ahead, perhaps death. Their days were counted and running out before his eyes." I would say the only happy passages are describing nature or his love for Lara, the woman who he cheats on his wife with. So the whole leaving his wife and children over and over to be with Lara wasn't super pleasant in that context. 

    I'm not sure whether or not I was supposed to like Yuri by the end of the book. My dislike of him tarnished the end of the book for me because I was just sick of this guy. Doctor Zhivago was well-written and especially interesting for its criticisms of the Soviet Union, but those criticisms are less profound when the whole world agrees with them now. Doctor Zhivago the character "seemed always to be in a hurry to decide that he was not getting anywhere, and the spoke with too much conviction and almost satisfaction of the futility of undertaking anything further." There it is- he's just a boring guy. The book itself feels like it's lost some of its edge without the looming Soviet Union trying to suppress it.

Miscellaneous:

• A quote about art that I liked: "Only the familiar transformed by the genius is truly great."
• Another quote, that wraps up Lara's story: "One day Larisa Feodorovna went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's concentration camps in the north."

Stalin (Volume II: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941) by Stephen Kotkin

    Here is an epic book, the second of what will at some point be three volumes by Stephen Kotkin in the biography of Stalin. This authoritative text covers the collectivization of farming, the purge of the Party, and the run-up to the Second World War. The book is a tome, but is a great story and really good. The book is much more about high politics than the prior volume, and Kotkin addresses this--acknowledging that it is set in Stalin's "Little Corner." All in all, it's necessary reading for Russia in the 20th century.

The Collectivization of Agriculture

    When the Great Depression hit the Western world, Stalin and the USSR were able to avoid it thanks to having already been cut off from the capitalist economies prior. Then, with the capitalist world in crisis, the Soviet Union could take advantage of the economic desperation of more developed countries and leverage it into development of the Soviet Union. Stalin signed technical assistance deals to build American-style factories in the USSR, with American companies constructing steel plants at Magnitogorsk (Urals), Kuznetsk (Siberia), and Zaporozhe (Ukraine). Ford Motor Company built a mass-production facility in Nizhny Novgorod for cars and trucks based on River Rouge. Caterpillar re-equipped factories in Kharkhov and Leningrad for tractors and harvesters, and new tractor plants were built in Stalingrad and Chelyabinsk. Dupont manufactured chemicals, Sweden and Italy ball bearings, France plastics and aircraft, and Britain electrical technology. 

    Concurrently with this technological-manufacturing revolution, Stalin was implementing an agricultural revolution in the countryside, perhaps better conceived of as a counter-counter-revolution. In Volume One, Kotkin asserts that the Russian Revolution consisted of two revolutions: the Communist revolution in the cities, and the peasant revolution in the countryside, in which peasants seized the land from the nobility. But a decade on, the two revolutions collided. Starting in 1928, Stalin blamed grain shortages on kulaks, wealthier farmers (but not by much), who he accused of hoarding grain in order to politically justify seizure of their land by the government in order to reorganize it into larger, state-run farms.

    Collectivization spurred massive protests, violent rebellion, and then overwhelming famine across the Soviet Union. Protests were unsuccessful since peasants could not coordinate opposition across regions, despite OGPU recording many (6,500 in March 1930 alone). Peasants could rebel with hunting rifles, and assassinated more than 1,100 rural officials who sought to enforce collectivization, but most of the 2.5 million (according to secret police) did so peacefully. More common types of protest were arson and the destruction of their own livestock rather than see it fall into Communist hands. But because the "socialist sector" nor dominated the economy, Stalin declared that the USSR had entered the historical era of socialism. In this new era, the Soviets would export just over 5 million tons of grain, making up 15% of the world market share where they had once been near zero. Collectivization also helped Stalin build his cult of personality, sacking party bosses and so-called "Trotskyites" who couldn't keep up with production quotas.

    Ukraine is an especially interesting case. Kotkin denies the idea of the Holodomor as an intentional, targeted famine weaponized against the Ukrainians specifically. But certainly all the famine across the Soviet Union at this time was man-made. Interestingly, Kotkin does note that the Ukrainians were particularly rebellious against the imposition of collectivization, with almost half of peasant mass actions occurring in Ukraine, with revolt taking over every inhabited settlement along the Polish border. Kotkin argues that Ukraine was not a special case in the Soviet Union, as upwards of 50-70 million Soviet inhabitants across the county were caught in regions with little to no food. The famine came with disease too, with more than a million cases of Typhus in 1932-33 and half a million of typhoid fever. In a March 1933 report, OGPU claimed to have stopped 219,460 runaways in search of food. Peasants ate dogs, cats, horses, gophers, anything they could get their hands on. Kotkin writes that death and disease affected Ukraine, Moldavia, the North Caucasus, the Middle and Lower Volga Valley, the Central Black Earth region, and the Kazakh autonomous republic.

    Between 1931 and 1933, famine and related epidemics killed between five and seven million people, with perhaps ten million more starving but surviving. In the Kazakh autonomous republic, where nomads were forcibly settled, starvation and disease killed between 1.2 and 1.4 million people, the vast majority Kazakhs, in a population of 6.5 million (of which 4.12 million were Kazakhs). This was the highest death ratio in the USSR, whereas Ukraine lost 3.5 million to the Holodomor in a population of 33 million. In 1933, a Kazakh family owned, on average, 3.7 cattle, whereas they had 22.6 in 1929. Stalin never blinked. Perhaps if he had he would have been toppled at this point. But he banned fishing in state waters and private charity, blacklisted entire counties for food distribution, ordered forced return of peasant escapees, and was able to make it impossible to avoid the collectives. OGPU arrested 410,000 in 1932 and 505,000 in 1933. And, at the cost of millions of lives, the grain harvest was improved. Kotkin writes:

Indeed, it was the famished peasants who would lift the regime and the country out of starvation, producing between 70 and 77 million tons of grain in 1933, a bumper crop comparable to the miracle of 1930. The peasants, in their land hunger and separate revolution, had made possible the advent of a Bolshevik regime in 1917-18; now enslaved, the peasants saved Stalin's rule.

Party Control

    In June 1933, the Party announced a purge. Membership had ballooned to include 2.2 million full members and 1.35 million candidates. The 1929-30 purge had removed about one in ten Party members, but this one would remove one in five, with nearly as many quitting, resulting in 800,000 not keeping Party cards. Despite the disaster of collectivization and the strengthening of Germany and Japan on the frontiers, elites rallied to Stalin. One correspondent wrote to Trotsky, exiled on a Turkish island, "they all speak about Stalin's isolation and the general hatred of him, but they often ad: 'If it were not for that (we omit the strong epithet), everything would have fallen to pieces by now. It is he who keeps everything together.'" 

    In 1934, there was only one man left who could threaten Stalin's sole rule. Sergei Kirov was an Old Bolshevik, a full member of the Politburo, and a close personal friend of Stalin. Supposedly, he was so popular that he actually won election to be General-Secretary of the Party in February 1934, but that Lazar Kaganovich, a Stalin loyalist, manipulated results to ensure Stalin would win. But on December 1, 1934, he was assassinated by Leonid Nikolayev, a former Party member without a clear motive. There are a couple explanations, generally either favoring the idea that Stalin or someone in the Party ordered the assassination or that Nikolayev acted alone. I won't get into them here. But the result is that there was no one left on the Politburo who would challenge Stalin. All the powerful original revolutionaries were either dead or exiled. 

    The assassination of Kirov by a fellow Party-member served as a pretext for a massive culling of the Communist flock. Nikolayev was made into a member of the 1920s Zinoviev opposition, and the regime started to accuse people of being Zinovievites and arrest them in waves. 843 "Zinovievites" were arrested in the ten weeks after the murder, and thousands were administratively exiled. Through these banishments, arrests, and executions, the Politburo was stacked with Stalin loyalists. With Stalin at the top, he had Molotov and Kaganovich, and then a troika of younger apparatchik deputies who owed loyalty to Kaganovich and Stalin: Yezhov, Zhdanov, and Andreyev. Kotkin writes, however, that the Kirov assassination was not necessary in order for Stalin to "take advantage" of the assassination to tighten his grip on the party. On the contrary, Kotkin writes that Stalin needed no such pretext to do what he did, and that he had no hand in Kirov's assassination and then genuinely engaged in a witch hunt for enemies out of anger and loss.

Stalin as a Person

    Stalin's personal life is documented, but still somewhat mysterious. For fun, Stalin played billiards, and according to one anecdote sometimes even crawled under the table as punishment for losing. I think that we like to imagine that evil people are obviously evil and totally unpleasant, but Stalin was probably fun to be around for the people who were in his circle and who he wasn't actively executing. After rumors in the Associated Press that Stalin was ill or dead, he responded, 

As far as I know from the foreign press, I long ago left this sinful world and moved on to the next. As it is impossible not to trust the foreign press, if one does not want to be crossed out of the list of civilized people, I ask you to believe this report and not disturb my peace in the silence of that other world.

But he was not really a family man. In 1932, Nadya, Stalin's wife, committed suicide. There may have been some kind of argument beforehand about Stalin flirting with another woman, but it all seems pretty unclear. She left behind three children, and Molotov recalled that it was the only time he had ever seen Stalin in tears, openly weeping. When Pravda mentioned her death the next day, it omitted that it was a suicide. It was also the first time Stalin's marriage was mentioned in the Soviet press. Years later, they daughter, Svetlana, would say that Stalin "was too intelligent not to know that people always commit suicide to punish someone."

    Stalin didn't even really see himself as Stalin. Maybe some level of dissociation was necessary to do what he did. Kotkin writes that when Stalin's son, Vassily tried to "trade on his lineage," Stalin exploded at him, "You're not Stalin and I'm not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no, not even me!" But Joseph Jugashvili didn't have much of an internal life separate from "Stalin," despite what he may have said to Vassily. One example comes from Kotkin's comparison to Mussolini. Describing a typical day for Mussolini, Kotkin writes that he would have sex with his mistress, nap, listen to music, eat fruit, complain about the women vying for his attention, and reminisce about his wild youth. He told his son-in-law that "genius lies in the genitals," and he told his mistress that Jews are pigs, the English are disgusting, and the Spanish are lazy. He was inattentive to the state and blamed others. But Stalin had few women in his life, and 

was profoundly alone in the sulfuric aquifers of his being. But he hated to be alone. His awkward character exacerbated the isolation that inevitable befalls a tyrant upon whom everyone's life depends. Not only had he driven his second wife to suicide, but most of his closest friends were gone: Kirov, Lakoba, Orjonikidze. Stalin was complicit in the death of the third, and perhaps of the second, while being blamed, in whispers, for the first. He had deliberately murdered almost all his comrades in arms, including those he had been genuinely fond of, such as Bukharin. The few who survived—Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan—had largely been reduced to minions.

But Stalin certainly shared Mussolini's contempt for others. That said, it was colder, as cold as any dictator has ever felt about expendable human life. After General Blyukher objected to bombings in Eastern Siberia for the collateral effects on civilians and the USSR's own troops, Stalin replied, "I do not understand your fear that the bombing will hit the Korean population ... What do the Koreans matter to you, if the Japanese are hitting our batches of people?" 

The Terror

    Stalin's reign of terror was unique in modern history, at least, for its inward focus on his own regime, his own party, his own friends. Before Kirov's assassination, the peak year for Soviet executions was 1930, with 20,201 of them during dekulakization. After Kirov was killed, from December 1934 to 1936, the NKVD arrested 529,434 people, and executed 4,402 of them. But between 1937 and 1938, the NKVD arrested 1,575,259, 87 percent for political offenses, and executed 681,692 of them. With a working age population of 100 million, this meant that 1.5 percent of working people were arrested and nearly half of them were executed. In fact, even more were executed, since many records are inaccurate because "an untold number of people sentenced to incarceration were actually executed , and many others died during interrogation or transit and fell outside of execution tabulations, the total who perished directly at the hands of the Soviet secret police in 1937-38 was likely closer to 830,000."

    A tremendous motivation for the purging was the continued existence of Trotsky, in exile in Turkey, then Norway, then Mexico. Stalin had spies working for Trotsky, and gathering all of Trotsky's writings before he could publish them. Trotsky viciously attacked Stalin in his writings, and served as Stalin's chief critic from the left. Trotskyism was a geopolitical concern for Stalin and a direct threat to his rule. In the Spanish Civil War, Stalin wasn't just fighting fascists and propping up a left-wing government, he was also sabotaging the Trotskyists in that government, thereby undermining it.

   Stalin also destroyed the officership of his military. Of 144,000 officers in the Red Army, Stalin had 33,000 removed and 7,000 executed between 1937-38. Of the top 767 high-ranking commanders, 503 were executed or imprisoned. Of the highest levels of the 186 division commanders, 154 were executed or imprisoned, "as well as 8 of the 9 admirals, 13 of the army's 15 full generals, and 3 of its 5 marshals. What great power has ever executed 90 percent of its top military officers?" The Red Army personnel department required the submission of autobiographies that identified that many of the officers at high levels had worked for Trotsky or worked for someone who had worked for Trotsky. This was obvious because Trotsky had run the Red Army until 1935--it was a fatal association. Mikhail Tukhachevsky, called the Red Napoleon, was the highest level military figure to be purged, as he was an individual who could truly threaten Stalin:

In the cellars on May 26, a mere four days after his arrest, Tukhachevsky began to sign whatever interrogators put in front of him. Zinovy Ushakov, who prided himself on obtaining confessions no other investigator could extract, mercilessly beat Tukhachevsky, whose blood dripped onto the pages of a confession to crimes he did not commit. By some accounts, Tukhachevsky’s teenage daughter, Svetlana, was brought to the prison, where the interrogators told him they would rape her.

One of the individuals who approved the post-facto arrest order for Tukhachevsky was himself dismissed eight days later. He knew what to expect. He killed himself the next day in his apartment. This was happening all over the place. One NKVD operative, after being ordered by Yezhov to board a Soviet ship to Antwerp for a rendezvous, fled with $60,000 to the United States. But it turned out that he wasn't being recalled for execution, he was going to be promoted. Meanwhile, Hitler, just as much of a monster, was sending his disliked generals into exile in Italy with pensions, not having them executed or tortured. Stalin was unique.

    The NKVD, the Soviet FBI-equivalent that carried out the massacre of the purge, was also suffering its own massacre, "not after it had arrested at least 1.6 million people but all the while it was doing so. Between 1936 and 1938, arrests of NKVD personnel exceeded 20,000. All eighteen "commissars of state security" who served under Yagoda were killed. Among the NKVD it was chaos, as bosses and underlings fed each other to the execution machine to keep their jobs or take someone else's. They would ramp up arrests to make themselves more innocent in some perverse way, and then find themselves arrested. The terror primarily affected the highest rungs of Bolshevik society. Kotkin describes the environment:

[T]he postmidnight knock, the search and confiscations in the presence of summoned neighbors (“witnesses” were required by law), the wailing of spouses and children, the disappearances without trace, the fruitless pleading for information at NKVD reception windows, the desperate queues outside transit prisons and unheard screams inside, the bribes to guards for scraps of information on whereabouts. But ordinary Soviet inhabitants mostly did not feel an immediate threat of arrest. As the morbid joke had it, when uniformed men arrived and said “NKVD,” people answered, 'You’ve got the wrong apartment—the Communists live upstairs.' Newspaper editorials complained that collective farmers were illegally enlarging household plots, reducing compulsory deliveries, and avoiding tax payments after the arrests of all their supervisors.

The terror was no spiraling out of Stalin's control. Indeed, in the summer of 1937, Stalin adopted "quota-driven eradication of entire categories of people in a planned indiscriminate terror known as mass operations." Yagoda, and Yezhov after him, became some of Stalin's closest advisors during each of their times as leaders of the NKVD (both were eventually executed). In tsarist day, the head of the okhranka met with Nicholas II just once in his entire career--political policing was necessary, but not honorable. In 1935-36, Yagods was in  Stalin's office every month, and from 1937 through August 1938, when Stalin received visitors on 333 days, Yezhov made 288 appearances, second only to Molotov. From 1937-38, there were on average nearly 2,200 arrests and over 1,000 executions per day.

    The terror reached the civil leadership of the party as well. The 1934 party congress had 71 members and 68 candidates for membership to the Central Committee. By the opening of the June plenum in 1937, thirteen had been arrested, three had committed suicide, four had died of natural causes, and one was assassinated. During the plenum, Stalin approved the destruction of another thirty-one, so that more than 50 of the 139 did not finish the sessions. Around 100 of the 139 Central Committee members would not survive to the next party congress. The vast majority of them had not even opposed Stalin in the 1920s or even come up against him subsequently. Most had been loyal party members all through Stalin's rise and dekulakization, but they and their subordinates and associates were all destroyed, and in many cases, so were their replacements. Among party functionaries, 15,485 of the 32,899 positions in the 1939 nomenklatura had been appointed between 1937 and 1938, and 6,909 of the 10,902 party secretaries of counties, cities, and districts were appointed in the same period. Of 333 regional party bosses, 293 had assumed their posts since the 17th Congress, and 91 percent were between 26 and 40 years old. 85 percent of Red Army officers were under 35. The New York Times summed it up: "It is as if twenty years after Yorktown somebody in power at Washington found it necessary for the safety of the State to send to the scaffold Thomas Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, Hamilton, Jay and most of their associates." 

Kotkin's Theory of Power

    There's an interesting aside at the beginning of the second part of the book that feels like a response to Robert Caro in which Kotkin writes that

To an extent, power reveals who a person is. But the effects on Stalin of accruing and exercising power unconstrained by law or constitutional limits--the power of life and death over hundreds of millions--were immense. Alongside the nature of Bolshevism, the setting of his regime--Russia with its fraught history and geopolitics, its sense of historic mission and grievance, which were given new impetus and form by socialism's fixation on capitalist encirclement--also indelibly shaped who he became.

Caro believes that power doesn't corrupt, it reveals. But Kotkin identifies in Stalin a change that occurs due to the absolute nature of his power and the nature of the Russian state. This might be less present in Lyndon Johnson or Robert Moses because their power was not absolute and the American state and New York and Texas aren't the same as Georgia or Russia. Kotkin also writes that the cult of personality that existed around Stalin, like that around Hitler, was not just about Stalin or Hitler, but about their devotees, and something inherent to them, as Russian or German people, that created not just a powerful individual but a powerful relationship between the individual and the masses. Power isn't really encapsulated in a person, it is a relationship between people.

    Hitler and Stalin, despite many dictatorial and murderous similarities, were very different people. Hitler owed his power to rhetoric, while Stalin was not known for his speeches, but his work behind the scenes. Hitler's desk was empty and he almost never worked at it. Hitler decided on important issues without reading. Stalin read prodigiously, and was known to cite from long reports from memory. Stalin certainly could improvised, but according to Kotkin, he "devoured documents." Stalin was dedicated to ideological development, and put lots of time and difficult effort into developing six versions of a second version of A Course on Political Economy, last published in 1910 and meant to be an update on the authoritative lessons of two decades of Soviet experience.

"Waiting for Hitler"

    Kotkin finishes with the part of the book that gives it's name to the volume: "Waiting for Hitler," which I found to be the least interesting part of the book since it's been covered so much before in other books I've read. However, Kotkin is a great writer and still has lots of insights. One that I particularly liked was that in WWI, "Russian general staff had shuddered at the thought that a quick German rout of the French would lead to a separate peace on the western front," giving Germany a free hand to attack Russia, but "their fears were misplaced: the fighting had lasted four stalemated years. Surely France, assisted by Britain, even with the Soviet Union on the sidelines, could again stalemate Germany" in the Second World War? Ha ha. 

    Kotkin discusses something regarding Hitler's analysis that I remember from Tooze's Wages of Destruction, in that Hitler launched a surprise attack against the USSR not because his primary worry was eclipsing British power, but American power. Hitler understood that American support for Britain would eventually lead to an American war with Germany, and that at that point, "the only way to escape a two-front war was to knock out the Soviet Union before the United States joined Britain in a genuine war in the west." Invading Russia was obviously idiotic and doomed in retrospect, but since the war against Britain wasn't a land war, Germany's strength in land warfare wasn't being effectively used. And if the United States did join the war in full, then Hitler would be hugely vulnerable to Stalin in the east. It is a perpetual problem for Germany. Stalin, on the other hand, fooled himself. He could see how insane it would be for Hitler to start a war with Russia, and couldn't believe that the Germans would do it. He thought that the German plan was to use the threat of war to extract some concessions from Stalin.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Marshal Voroshilov would drink vodka and chase it with slices of butter.
• Stalin also had control over international communism through the Comintern. For example, in France, Stalin was able to stop the French Communists from opposing France's military budget and a two-year service requirement as part of a deal with the Prime Minister, Laval.
• During the Spanish Civil War, Nationalist troops "engaged in gang rapes of women, marching with panties flying from their bayonets. Women in the tens of thousands had their hair shaved off and their mouths force-fed castor oil, a laxative, so that, when paraded through the streets, they would soil themselves."
• The Spanish Republic sent most of their hard gold to Russia for safekeeping and ended up using it to buy weapons from the Soviets at inflated prices that bankrupted the Spanish government.
• Stalin reduced the rise of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (Russia) by turning two of its autonomous republics (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) into full Union republics and giving Karakalpak to the Uzbek republic. The South Caucasus Federation was also dissolved to create the republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. These would become the fault lines for the dissolution of the Soviet Union five decades later. Stalin also chose not to require education to be in Russian, and most non-Russian schoolchildren were illiterate in Russian. It was a subject in school, but not all school was taught in Russian.
• Yezhov was a raging alcoholic. While in charge of the NKVD, he had to be carried away from vents blackout drunk. Reminds me of how Nazi death squads often needed to get drunk before committing their murders.
• Huge numbers of foreign Communists were killed in the purges as well. But British, French, American, and Czechoslovak Communists largely survived because they belonged to legal parties that did not require refuge in the Soviet Union. Chinese Communists also survived hidden in the Chinese interior. Of the 68 German Communists who fled to the USSR after Hitler came to power, Stalin had forty-one put to death.
• Czechoslovakia was dubbed by Mussolini "Czecho-Germano-Polono-Magyaro-Rutheno-Romano-Slovakia" because the Czechs comprised a bare majority of the population, with 3.25 million Germans, 3 million Slovaks, 750,000 Hungarians, 100,000 Ruthenians (Ukrainians), and 100,000 Poles.
• France had 16 governments between 1932 and 1940.
• Poland wasn't just a passive victim in 1939. Poland was the first government to recognize Germany's March 1938 takeover of Austria, and then took advantage of the moment to compel Lithuania to recognize Poland's annexation of Wilno. At the same time, Poland issued an ultimatum to Czechoslovakia to hand over two-thirds of its ethnically Polish territory in Silesia, and the Czechs capitulated.
• Stalin viewed his son, Vasily, as basically a spoiled youth, and didn't see much potential in him.
• Between 1935-37, 79 Polish Jews were killed in anti-Jewish violence, with significant incidents of anti-Jewish violence in 97 towns. Poland implemented quotas in 1937 to limit the number of Jewish university students, and excluded Jews from certain professional associations. In 1937 alone, 7,000 trials took place of Jews accused of insulting the Polish nation.
• Right until the moment that the Germans launched the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviets were still shipping oil, manganese, grain and other exports to Germany--that's how surprised they were.

Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok

    Collapse explains the grainy details of the last years of the Soviet Union, focusing on the major actors: Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Unlike Tolstoy, Zubok writes that "history is never a sequence of inevitabilities," and focuses far more on the choices individuals make than the circumstances that influenced those choices. That said, Zubok is clear that any leaders of the Soviet Union would have found themselves highly constrained in the late 1980s by the poor performance of the Soviet economy. For Zubok, this fact was not an inevitable cause of the destruction and disintegration of the USSR, but created a crisis that required a response. Gorbachev's response destroyed the USSR.

    To manage the Soviet economy, the states used two kinds of money. One was the beznal, a completely cashless form of money that was used as a virtual accounting system between the state and state enterprises. The big transactions in the managed economy were done in beznals, sort of like major credits, and they could never be cashed. Normal people used nal (cash), which were physical banknotes used to pay for salaries and wages and then used in stores for goods and services. The system empowered the USSR to spend billions of beznal without creating inflation. The main threat to Gorbachev in 1988 was the results of his own economic reforms, causing disruptions to production, housing construction, and supply chains. Gorbachev's reforms included a legalization of private business, allowing state enterprises to produce according to demand they sought to fill (after satisfying government contracts, and allowing foreign investment in the Soviet Union. One such reform is the beef industry reform, which gave peasants the options to lease and form cooperatives while continuing subsidies. However, by giving peasants the option not to transport food to the cities, they chose not to transport the food, and failed to deliver one-third of their harvest and wasted or lost another third.

    While Gorbachev pursued economic reforms, he also pursued political reforms, becoming more of a social democrat than a communist. He degraded his own power in favor of a more democratic form of government by single-handedly destroying the nomenklatura process of putting party officials in control of government, firing between 800,000 to 900,000 party officials in just a year. In 1987, Gorbachev called for democratization and by 1989, the people of the Soviet Union had their first election to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union. So in a very short time, Gorbachev gave up his dictatorial powers as Secretary-General. Zubok compares this to the captain of a ship, without a compass or a map, fires his crew and takes on the passengers as a new crew to reach their destination. Gorbachev passed economic levers from central regulators to local enterprises. He passed the political levers from the Politburo to the Congress of People's Deputies and from local Party organizations to local Soviets. The attempted "democratization" of power ended up playing out merely as the creation of a power vacuum. 

    In the 1989 elections, Party leaders lost their seats to complete unknowns in the Slavic core of the country. In Moscow and Leningrad, workers and intelligentsia voted against the Party candidates, none of whom were elected. Boris Yeltsin was elected as an independent against the Party-nominated leaders of a big automobile plant with 89 percent of the vote. Gorbachev declared the election a success as a triumph of democracy and declared that the Politburo needed to stop intimidating people. Gorbachev was elected as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, making him politically independent of Party elites. However, his power was diminished overall; having inherited the authority of Stalin, Gorbachev threw it off to take on the lesser power of an elected official. Gorbachev struggled with the transition from Party to parliamentary leader, where he faced opposition. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell, and from that point on, Gorbachev struggled to regain the initiative. Until then, Gorbachev had been the initiator of events, but after that point, he faced change initiated by masses of people on the Ground in the GDR, new democratically-elected politicians in the USSR, and by Westerners tampering with the entire process. He also faced leaders of the Party in the republics declaring themselves Presidents, just as he had done. This happened with Nursultan Nazarbayev in the Kazakh SSR and Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan. 

    The most dangerous and rebellious republic was the one at the center of the USSR, the Russian RSFSR. Their new parliament quickly entered a crisis with the Union parliament over the price of meat, and quickly started raising the price of oil that they "exported" to the other republics, also increasing Russian pensions to deal with inflation. Gorbachev then asked the Soviet Union legislature to give him additional presidential authority to negotiate with the republics and implement market reforms. The Russian parliament responded by passing a law making Gorbachev's decrees void on the territory of the RFSR. Pressure grew on Gorbachev to declare an emergency, which he did.

    As the Russian parliament and Yeltsin gained power, Gorbachev showed himself unwilling to use force against them. On March 28, 1991, Deputies to the RSFSR Congress faced 40,000 armed soldiers outside the Kremlin when they demanded Soviet leadership withdraw troops from Moscow, voting 532 to 286 to declare Gorbachev's stationing of the troops to intimidate them as unconstitutional. Gorbachev refused to lift the emergency, but did agree to remove the troops. The opposition rallied its supporters in Moscow and had over 100,000 people attend a protest in which many thought the troops would fire at them. But instead, the troops and riot police did nothing and pulled out from Moscow the following morning. Yeltsin was now a major player since it was clear that Gorbachev was going to negotiate with him, not destroy him. The major political question became one of a Union Treaty that would re-establish the relationship between the republics and the center in a more decentralized way.

    Focused on enemies outside the Party, Gorbachev was blind to enemies within, plotting against him. On August 18, 1991, while at a dacha in Crimea, Gorbachev was informed that the KGB guards protecting him would now be guarding him as a prisoner, and his phone lines were cut off. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Armenia had already declared independence from the Soviet Union and inflation exceeded 300% per year. Party leaders were sure that Gorbachev was losing all power and that more republics would secede. Gennady Yanayev took the role of President during the coup, with Sergey Akhromeyev and Dmitry Yazov as military leaders along with Vladimir Kryuchkov at the KGB. Critically, Boris Yeltsin decided to condemn the coup plotters, who surely would have arrested him if they succeeded, and appealed to the citizens of Russia that the coup was against Gorbachev, and that Gorbachev should be returned as the true legitimate leader of the Soviet Union. The coup failed to gain the full support of the army and KGB and the leaders surrendered or committed suicide after less than a week. Ultimately, failing to arrest Yeltsin was the biggest mistake of the plotters, along with failing to project power over the airwaves, using state TV only to show pre-recorded censored news and clips from the Swan Lake ballet. The coup plotters never really intimidated anyone, despite the reason for the coup being that Gorbachev wasn't being intimidating enough. At a critical moment, Yanayev hosted a press conference in which he visibly trembled and journalists mocked him and the other plotters. Meanwhile, Yeltsin was climbing on top of tanks to shake hands with the soldiers inside, projecting absolute confidence. On the second day of the coup, August 19, KGB colonel Vladimir Putin was working as an aide to Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak, and told his boss that he couldn't work for both sides in the conflict, and that he would submit a request to be discharged from the KGB. Kryuchkov, the KGB head deeply involved in the coup, surprised him by agreeing to discharge Putin. In the end, the coup plotters surrendered, and Yeltsin was totally triumphant, able to "free" Gorbachev while also getting Gorbachev to agree to more democratic reforms, such as suspending the activities of the Communist Party. He dissolved the USSR People's Congress in September and gained nothing in return.

    With a total vacuum of power above the republics, the real negotiation began among the four biggest remaining republics with nuclear weapons on their territory (although not usable without Moscow): Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. The three Slavic republics ended up meeting in Minsk, where they ratified independence for all three from the Soviet Union and planned to confederate in another, meaningless way. Yeltsin wanted to work it so that Ukraine would be the proximate cause of the breakup, and waited until Ukrainians overwhelmingly voted for independence. That way the breakup wouldn't be blamed on the Russians. This may have been the final nail in the coffin, but the USSR was dead by this point in December 1991. It is bizarre to think that the USSR ended with three core Slavic countries, especially Russia, "seceding" from it.

    With Russia seceded from the USSR and the USSR unable to pay its bills with no tax revenue going to it, he started working on the army to come over to Russia. This worked because of the fact that Yeltsin had the money to pay them and Gorbachev did not. The same happened with the diplomats and the embassies. After achieving the initial legal framework of having Russia secede from the USSR, the Russians transitioned to inheriting the USSR and just taking over its institutions exactly as they were before. Perhaps this has to do with why Yeltsin was unable to bring in Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan into a united country, which he had always thought was possible. Once those national aspirations were out of the bag, there was no bringing them back in. Ultimately, for Zubok, it was the weakness of the center, not the power of the republics, that ended the Soviet Union. In March 1991, only 20 percent of people in the core republics wanted to live in separate republics instead of a united state. This became a majority in August, most dramatically Ukraine, but even in Russia. It was not a true choice to live apart, but a choice for law and order in a smaller state instead of chaos in a large one.

    There are two major comparisons to make with the fall of the USSR. The first is China at the same time. I had already been very familiar with the idea that China succeeded where the USSR failed by implementing only economic reforms, but not political reforms, and enacting repression on those that protested. What I really only encountered in this book was the importance of the nationalist ambitions from the republics that caused the end of the USSR. It is really important in understanding the fall of the USSR that it came along national lines. Not every ethnic group got a republic. The ones that became independent were the nations that lived in the borders of pre-established national republics in the Soviet Union for over a half-century before the fall. This reifying of the nation by the USSR directly led to its downfall in 1991.

    The other major comparison is the United States today. The USSR is an excellent example of the dangers of an anti-establishment figure in tearing apart a state. However, the fact that the United States has no national republics is a big difference with the USSR. The states themselves are the closest proxy, but a benefit of being a New World power is that they don't have any specific ethnic or national composition like Armenia or Lithuania. However, one wonders what happens when a country is on a decline and someone decides to shake things up.

Miscellaneous:

• Russia has always made ridiculous state profits off of alcoholism. In 1985, writes Zubok, the tax on alcohol procured one-third of Soviet GDP.
• While Gorbachev's predecessor, Yuri Andropov, was Secretary-General (1982-84), he at one point looked into splitting up the Soviet Republics along non-ethnic lines to staunch nationalism in the republics that ultimately led to the division of the USSR, but never enacted the plan before he became ill and died. 
• Two great quotes before the chapter on the August 1991 coup:
• "C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute." - Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, 1809
• "People can forgive [authorities] everything except weakness." D. Volkogonov to Boris Yeltsin, December 1994.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Constance Garnett

    This was an amazing, one-of-a-kind book. War and Peace is an absolute epic and Constance Garnett's translation, despite being over 100 years old, is totally readable and enjoyable today. I thought Tolstoy did an incredible job blending history with narrative, fiction with fact, and humor with drama. The book is long with a huge number of named characters, which can make the beginning a little difficult without consulting family trees for the characters. But after a little while I didn't have anymore problems and understood who all the characters were and how they were related to each other.

    The book covers the period from the Battle of Austerlitz to the Battle of Borodino. In that seven year period, Napoleon went from being reviled across Europe and Russia to being respected to being reviled again. With his victory at Austerlitz, Napoleon was the dominant power in Europe, but with his victory at Borodino, his forces were mortally wounded and would never recover. Being set in that period, there is sort of a "Bridgerton" vibe, since the characters are all plotting marriages among the nobility. Also interesting about the noble culture is that, despite being at war with the French, all the nobles speak French more than Russian, and some struggle in Russian.

    Tolstoy has a great talent for alluding to universal experiences so naturally in his writing. For example, "'Yes, that all happened!' ... he said, with a happy, childlike smile to himself. And he fell into the deep sleep of youth." Or this one: "When Pierre had gone, and all the members of the family were met together, they began to criticise him, as people always do after a new guest has left, and as rarely happens, all said nothing but good of him." He also does fantastic descriptions of war, illustrating the way that you can see an artillery shell explode far away before you hear it and the adrenaline rush of the cavalry charge. But he also does great descriptions of the not-so-glamorous aspects of military life, about the feeling of being deprived of liberty, and of how "Here there was none of all that confusion of the free world, where he did not know his proper place, and made mistakes in exercising free choice." He's also comedic, giving us a whole internal monologue of a woman in society wondering her impact on a man and thinking of how impressed she is with him followed by a look in his mind: "'The poor girl is devilishly ugly,' Anatole was thinking about her."

    Tolstoy is through and through a Russian patriot. He writes that, "every Russian gazing at Moscow feels she is the mother; every foreigner gazing at her, and ignorant of her significance as the mother city, must be aware of the feminine character of the town, and Napoleon felt it." Moreover, he despises Napoleon, calling him "the most insignificant tool of history, who never even in exile displayed one trait of human dignity," while referring to Kutuzov, the Russian commander-in-chief, by saying that "it is difficult to conceive of an historical character whose energy could be more invariably directed to the same unchanging aim," and that one cannot "imagine an aim more noble and more in harmony with the will of a whole people," and "so completely attained as the aim towards which all Kutuzov's efforts were devoted in 1812."

    In the middle of the book, we start to learn why Tolstoy really wrote the book, which is to denounce the historians who emphasize the "great men" of history and analyze history as the decisions of certain powerful people moving the world. He reflects deeply on cause and effect, power, and free will. One great example from Part 9:

When the apple is ripe and falls—why does it fall? Is it because it is drawn by gravitation to the earth, because its stalk is withered, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it?

Not one of those is the cause. All that simply makes up the conjunction of conditions under which every living, organic, elemental event takes place. And the botanist who says that the apple has fallen because the cells are decomposing, and so on, will be just as right as the boy standing under the tree who says the apple has fallen because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall. The historian, who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and was ruined because Alexander desired his ruin, will be just as right and as wrong as the man who says that the mountain of millions of tons, tottering and undermined, has been felled by the last stroke of the last workingman’s pick-axe. In historical events great men—so called—are but the labels that serve to give a name to an event, and like labels, they have the least possible connection with the event itself.

Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

Another passage, on the nature of power, as seen from the mayor of Moscow:

    Every governing official in quiet, untroubled times feels that the whole population under his charge is only kept going by his efforts; and it is this sense of being indispensably necessary in which every governing official finds the chief reward for his toils and cares. It is easy to understand that while the ocean of history is calm, the governing official holding on from his crazy little skiff by a pole to the ship of the people, and moving with it, must fancy that it is his efforts that move the ship on to which he is clinging. But a storm has but to arise to set the sea heaving and the ship tossing upon it, and such error becomes at once impossible. The ship goes on its vast course unchecked, the pole fails to reach the moving vessel, and the pilot, from being the master, the source of power, finds himself a helpless, weak, and useless person.

Tolstoy declares that power "is a relation of a certain person to other persons, in which that person takes the less direct share in an act, the more he expresses opinions, theories, and justifications of the combined action. But, he states that power is not the cause of the movement of peoples, but just a part of that movement, and "the conception of cause is not applicable."

    Tolstoy rejects the idea of true free will over and over again. Everything is the result of some uncomprehensible sequence of events and actions. He says it would all be more obvious to us the law of history did not relate to man, since "A particle of matter cannot tell us that it does not feel the inevitability of attraction of repulsion, and that the law is not true. Man, who is the subject of history, bluntly says: I am free, and so I am not subject to law" [emphasis added]. What little free will exists is something like a dark matter in history, like the "undefined force[s]" that move the planets, generate electricity, etc. and "forms the subject matter of history."

    I'll finish up by saying this was an even better book than I expected, and I expected a lot from a book that is considered a classic. It is a beautifully told, genre-defying epic and I could not get enough of it.

Shackleton's Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer by Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell

    This book was a cool take on the business-school-style leadership advice manual by building a framework of how to lead all around Sir Ernest Shackleton, Antarctic explorer. The book succeeds by tying in lessons with a chronological story of Shackleton's life and early voyages building up to his climactic Endurance expedition to attempt to cross Antarctica on foot. Shackleton failed--his ship became stuck in pack ice for months, and when the ice finally thawed, the ship sank. He led his men on a long journey in life boats through ice floes to a small, barren island, from which Shackleton again departed in a life boat to find help in South America, where he made an overland treck across mountains to a whaling station. Above all, Shackleton was a truly decent person who could also bring out the decency in others. He was an optimist. The authors quote Napoleon: "a leader is a dealer in hope." Despite failing to achieve his mission, Shackleton succeeded in bringing every man home safe and several even volunteered for a future expedition with him. 

    The journey of the crew of the Endurance was a brutal one. Antarctica is covered by a layer of ice up to three miles thick. Although it only snows one or two inches per year, fierce winds whip up dry snow in a sandy consistency that burns. The mean annual temperature is -70 Fahrenheit, and temperatures under -120 Fahrenheit have been recorded. The crewmen used Burberry boots designed for five pairs of socks as well as Finnish boots made of reindeer skins, but they wore out quickly on the ice. They had balaclava helmets that covered their ears and snow goggles tinted greenish yellow to precent snow blindness. Their journey coincided with World War One. They departed on August 1, 1914, but as England mobilized Shackleton offered to return the ship and place it at the disposal of the Admiralty. But First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill insisted that the expedition proceed, and they entered open seas.

    Shackleton was a leader on the personal level. He was well liked because he showed everyone his respect and attention--no one had to "earn" his respect. He also understood his role as the leader in setting the mood of the group. When the ship was trapped in the ice, Shackleton projected confidence and strength while he developed his plan for the thaw. As a result, his crew spent the time reading books, playing sports on the ice, and were generally cheerful. They trusted him also because they knew how well-prepared he was in advance of the voyage, earning himself the nickname "cautious" Shackleton. The men even used that time to develop elaborate igloos for their sled dogs ("dogloos") and created a spectacular "Dog Town" with tapered spires and elaborate porticos before it was destroyed by crashing ice floes. Shackleton used the men's competitiveness to enhance their training, sponsoring prizes for races between the different sled dog teams. When Shackleton noticed the weakness of a specific man, he remedied it without insulting his pride, such as when one was extra cold, ordering hot drinks served to all so as not to stigmatize him. Shackleton enjoyed poetry, especially a line from "Prospice," by Robert Browning: "Sudden the worst turns the best to the brave."

    A leader is judged not by his performance but by the performance he elicits from those who follow him. Shackleton achieved the best performance possible from his men by doing his part thoroughly, showing them respect and care, and above all putting forth a calm, optimistic demeanor that would inspire them. He did not allow himself to get lost in doubt or self-pity, at least not in front of those he led. He is truly an example for leaders at all levels. Thanks to Frank for the recommendation.

Miscellaneous Fact:

• Supposedly, Shackleton advertised for the Endurance expedition with this: "Men wanted to Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success." However, the ad is apocryphal.