The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust: A Memoir by Ben-Zion Gold

    I was looking for a book that might give me some idea of my grandfather's experience in the Holocaust, and I found this beautiful memoir of a man born the same year as my grandpa, also in Poland, 100 miles away. However, Ben-Zion Gold was much more religious than my grandfather's family, and a lot of his reminisces are about religious life at cheder and yeshiva. I know that like Gold, my grandpa had to worry about being attacked on the street for being Jewish, even before the war. Gold writes that of the three and a half million Jews living in Poland in the 20s and 30s, less than a third were religious. The majority were attracted to different Jewish ideas, like Zionism or the Jewish Socialist Bund, or to Communism.

    This book is especially good because Gold writes with immense wisdom as an octogenarian. He can look back on his childhood and understand better not just his own feelings, but the feelings and thoughts of the other children around him. With age, he is more accepting and forgiving of everyone, and I think he also feels nostalgic for everything, even what was bad, because it came from a world and a people destroyed by the Holocaust.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

    This was a very challenging book that I did not fully understand, but the parts I did understand were pretty interesting. In brief, Kuhn argues that the history of science is not continuous and is not always the history of pure progress. Rather, it is a history of revolutions and paradigm shifts. Apparently this book popularized the word "paradigm." Science depends on paradigms to set out the goals of research, the questions worth asking, many of the rules of a field, and the general conception of what is true. With a paradigm in place, scientists can conduct normal research (synonymous, I think, with basic research), which is a type of science designed to confirm the paradigm, using experiments to confirm the theory. However, sometimes, in the course of normal research, scientists discover anomalies. Some anomalies, and more likely when many anomalies of the same type are found, it can trigger a crisis in the field--the paradigm ceases to adequately explain the world. Then, from that crisis, a revolution in science can occur, in which a new paradigm emerges to explain both the old paradigm and the anomalies as well. A paradigm doesn't need to completely explain all phenomena, it just needs to be better at doing so than its competitors.

    Paradigms are useful because, once they can be taken for granted, scientists don't need to publish long treatises, establishing very fact upon which they make assumptions for more detailed research. Rather, once a paradigm has crystallized out of experience and theory, scientists can publish shorter articles, acknowledging, sometimes implicitly, the paradigm under which they work, and continuing to develop more detailed knowledge within that paradigm. Then, information can be passed on more quickly through textbooks that compile the normal research that occurs within the paradigm. Given this, scientists need to be aware that the science they learn in textbooks is an incomplete history of science. The science of textbooks, by eliminating all the rejected paradigms and interpreting all research through the accepted paradigm, imply that the development of the field has been a linear process of construction one block onto another. A more accurate conception of scientific development would be something like a story of searching for a road through dark woods, with different paths representing different paradigms, and the normal research under the current paradigm being the best and longest path out that has been discovered so far. But other paths have been taken in the past which led to becoming lost, backtracking, and working down the current path/paradigm. This means that, when looking back, all scientific production would seem like progress, but it may in fact be leading to a crisis and revolution.

A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs, by Theodore Draper

    This book is way too long but it is just so impressive. I found myself being so bored with the granularity of getting three versions of mundane conversations, while also being so impressed with how detailed Draper's research was. He not only reported on Iran-Contra at the time, but Draper went through over 50,000 pages of primary sources to create this book, which is essentially a reference book for the Iran-Contra Affairs (Draper says they really should be thought of as two separate but connected schemes) told in chronological format.

    So why did I read this book? Well, I had some questions about the Iran-Contra Affair. I did not need this many answers. But anyway. This is what I knew. I understood the Iran-Contra Affair to be a scheme in which the Reagan administration sold weapons to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War in order to make money to send to the Contras in Nicaragua, and that Ollie North was the fall guy. This was a very incomplete understanding, and it also made me wonder why the Reagan administration would work with Iran, a country/regime that was not Reagan's preferred one. I was also curious to know what Reagan's personal involvement was. What I learned was that the Iran-Contra Affairs were caused by the collision of a vague use of presidential authority with the massive delegation of power to the "imperial presidency." The cumulative effect of growing power to the president made it so that the president was presumed by many bureaucrats to have sole power over foreign policy, and the creation of the National Security Council Staff empowered bureaucrats (Ollie North) to plausibly act with that increased presidential authority.

    The NSC, as originally created, meant four members: the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, along with two advisory members, the CIA Director and the Secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were originally granted staff, but under Eisenhower, the NSC staff were put more squarely under the sole control of the President through the Executive Office of the President. The National Security Advisor position, created post-WWII, developed over the next four decades to become a rival with the Secretary of State for control of foreign policy. The NSC staff also grew to 1,600 by President Reagan's time, from just 35 under LBJ, who were mostly temporary assignees from the State Department. The Reagan-era NSC was large enough to duplicate many roles in the State Department and operate independently of it. This capacity would allow for Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North to start his own covert operations outside normal channels.

    North gained too much influence as an NSC staffer from staying too long. On assignment from the Marine Corps, it would be typical for North to spend 2-3 years at the White House, North was there for nearly six years, over and over again managing to get the White House to override the orders of the Commandant of the Marine Corps for him to follow a normal career progression to become an infantry battalion commander.

    Before this all happened, Congress passed some laws that the Reagan administration would go on to break. They were the Boland Amendments, passed between 1982-86, which limited US government assistance to the contras in Nicaragua. Moreover, in 1983, the State Department launched Operation Staunch, which was an attempt to stop the flow of weapons from any country to Iran. The Reagan administration would break both of these, one being a violation of the law and an arrogation of power from Congress, and the other being a violation of the administration's own policy, showing the internal divisions between Reagan and his own Secretary of State, George Schultz. Reagan was also just plain confused about what was going on, and also just didn't want to know. He was repeatedly telling his subordinates to do things that were very legally questionable, and then just telling them to "follow the law" over and over. 

    To get around legal restrictions on aid to the Contras, North started to coordinate funding from third party donors, starting mostly with private individuals. This alone was already pushing the limits. Congress had made clear the government could not send military aid to the Contras, but North was sort of inventing a loophole to send non-governmental money to the Contras. North even acknowledged in letters that he was deceiving Congress and hiding the money from Congress. North was not just doing his job. He was clearly very passionate about the Contras and got carried away- one private funder quoting him as saying, "no, I don't care if I have to go to jail for this and I don't care if I have to lie to Congress about this." Draper acknowledges some kind of post-Vietnam syndrome affecting North, blaming the American defeat in Vietnam on a lack of funding from Congress, and seeing this as a noble opportunity to get around Congress.

    The reason why Draper calls it the Iran-Contra AffairS is because he very convincingly shows that they were really two different issues that got combined later on, not a master plan in the slightest. The reason that Iranian money got sent to the Contras was not because it was planned that way, but because the two covert operations were both handled by Ollie North. The Iranian plan really originated outside the US government with Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi and sketchy Iranian businessman Manucher Ghorbanifar. They wanted to end the arms embargo on Iran and sell arms to Iran as a business opportunity, since Iran was in desperate need in its years-long war against Iraq. They ended up developing the idea that they would use Israel as an intermediary, which became the reality.

    The Contra affair is somewhat straightforward, since it makes sense that Reagan would want to send cash to anti-communists. But Iran makes no sense. SecState, George Schultz, was opposed. SecDef, Caspar Weinberger, was opposed. But analysis out of the CIA and the NSC Staff showed that there was some room for a rapprochement with Iran, which felt threatened by the ongoing Soviet invasion of its neighbor, Afghanistan, which would last until 1989. But there was some confusion about whether it would be weapons sold to the government of Iran for rapprochement or to some opposition group to topple the government. And there was also analysis of different camps in the Iranian government jockeying for power (mostly invented by Ghorbanifar), which confused things more. Ultimately, it seems like Reagan did not know what he wanted out of Iran policy, but wanted to free hostages in Lebanon that he thought Iran could control. But Iran didn't even have these hostages! Hezbollah did! The State Department's policy was still that there was an arms embargo on Iran, but by the late summer of 1985, people in government were explicitly talking about an arms-for-hostages deal through Israel with Iran. Simplified, the plan was for Israel to sell weapons to Iran  and for the United States to resupply Israel. Israel thought that new weapons for Iran would prolong the war with Iraq, but official US policy was that it wanted the Iran-Iraq war to end, not stalemate for years.

    On August 20, 1985, the first shipment of arms reached Iran from Israel. But no hostages were released. Ghorbanifar explained that these weapons were seized by an "extremist" faction, and did not make it to the moderates for whom it was intended, as if they existed or were separate groups in the government controlling weapons (false). Then, arguments broke out--it turned out that the weapons were mistakenly delivered on an Israeli-marked plane, which could cause huge embarrassment to Iran, and were also of the wrong type. So, the Israelis agreed to send more weapons in exchange for one American hostage, who was the least valuable. The most valuable hostage was a CIA agent who was, unbeknownst to all, already dead in Lebanon. In November, to avoid the earlier embarrassment, Israel planned to ship the weapons to Iran by way of Portugal, so it wouldn't be clear what was happening. But nobody told Portugal, and the Portuguese authorities detained the flight. North became involved at this point and directed retired Major General Secord, who had been privately working on the Contra affair, to go to Portugal to try to get the plane off the ground. The Portuguese were befuddled at why the Americans, whose State Department was proclaiming an arms embargo on Iran, was trying to get them to let a shipment of arms reach Iran. To finally solve the problem, the CIA provided a charter flight from Portugal to Iran for the weapons, for which the Israelis deposited one million dollars into Secord's private account, Lake Resources, which was used for Contra funding, mixing the Iran and Contra funds. This was the first direct use of US government funds to support the Iranians. Critically, CIA covert activities require a finding of their necessity by the President, which nobody did at the time.

    As the relationship went on into January 1986, significant profits were made, some of which were due to typos, which resulted in the Army selling the weapons too cheaply to Israel, who marked them up and sold them to Ghorbanifar, who marked them up and sold them to Iran. North, who never ever took a cut for himself from these funds, took the "residuals," $16 million from the arms sale to Iran, and diverted it to the Contras. The US government just got bad deals over and over on the arms shipments. The original goal, hostage release, was not being met, since Iran could not get Hezbollah to release hostages. And the money that the Department of Defense got was miniscule compared to what Ghorbanifar, Secord, and the Contras were getting. I really wish that Draper had more information on the Hezbollah-Iran negotiations, which were impossible for him to get, but that would have revealed a whole lot of information about a whole other side of the negotiations. It was honestly just so funny that in May of 1986, somebody finally asked Hezbollah to release the hostages and they said hell no- we'll release them when Israel withdraws from the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon, Lahad prisoners are returned, Da'wa prisoners freed in Kuwait, and for the United States to pay all of Hezbollah's expenses in holding the hostages. Come on now. 

    As the scandal was revealed, the nightmare was impeachment, a la Watergate. People in the executive branch reacted so differently than they would in today's much more partisan environment. They were hurt by the fact that they pissed off both liberals and conservatives in both parties. And the public generally didn't believe the administration's explanations. Even Barry Goldwater, Mr. Republican, said, "I think President Reagan has gotten his butt in a crack on this Iran thing." Nowadays, I think the president would just say he can do what he wants and nobody in his party would blink, but then, North was shredding so many documents that the shredder broke, and the Attorney General was investigating his own president for breaking the law.

    The fundamental problem that caused the Iran-Contra Affairs was a failure to respect the Constitution. The Constitution empowers three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances on each other. But LtCol North and his boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter made clear in later testimony to Congress and trials that they gave their absolute loyalty to the President. They thought this was they duty, but they were mistaken. While they served at the pleasure of the President, they swore an oath not to the President, but to the Constitution. And it is Congress who the Constitution appoints as the holder of the power to appropriate funds, not the President. North and Poindexter asserted that the President controls foreign policy, but this is not what the Constitution says. While the Constitution grants the President significant affairs over foreign policy, it requires approval of the Senate to approve treaties, and both houses of Congress must be responsible for any funding. Similarly, when North and Poindexter made calls to other government officials from the White House, those officials "snapped to," thinking of doing what the President wanted, but not that what the President wanted may have been against the law. Draper concludes the book by focusing on these constitutional issues. He points out that Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist Papers, was clear that 

The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world to the sole disposal of a magistrate, created and circumstanced, as would be a president of the United States.

The massive power that rested in the executive by the time Reagan was President, and is even greater today, has proven to be the greatest danger to the existence of the constitutional republic in the United States. None of this power has been taken by force, but has been willingly granted by Congress and the courts. The problems of the Iran-Contra Affairs were not problems unanticipated by the founders and framers of the Constitution. The founders understood that the power of foreign policy could not be solely controlled by the executive. As James Madison put it, "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace in the legislature, and not to the executive department..." and later, in a letter to Jefferson, that 

The management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or disclosed in such parts and at such times as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging, and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other.

 

 

Mexico in Review

    As I finished the Russia unit, I started to intersperse some miscellaneous books because it gets boring to read only the same topic over and over again. But the big unit I moved to next was another country, Mexico. I read 6 books about Mexico: Pedro Páramo, Mexico's Crucial Century, 1810-1910, In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl, Fifth Sun, El laberinto de la soledad, and then All the Pretty Horses. All the Pretty Horses is the first in a trilogy that I plan to read, but I am cutting off the blog post here, and I hadn't even been sure I would include it as a Mexico book, but the book was set mostly in Mexico and I finished it before writing this post. Two of the authors, both of more "literary" books, were Mexican. I tried to avoid the Mexican Revolution since I think there is just so much on it, but it was impossible to truly avoid it since almost everything in modern Mexico is touched by it. So Pedro Paramo, El laberinto de la soledad, and All the Pretty Horses all discussed the Revolution or the Cristero War in some way or another.

    The first big theme I picked up on in my reading was modern Mexico needing to catch up to the modern world. There is sort of a feeling that Mexico was this great empire under the Aztecs and then a really successful colony under the Spanish through the 18th century, but that it fell behind, and that the 19th and 20th centuries have been a big effort by Mexico to catch back up. This is really noticeable in Mexico's Crucial Century, as well as in El laberinto de la soledad, where Octavio de la Paz is very explicit that he sees the Revolution as a big moment that allowed Mexico to reach modernity.

    The other big theme was most apparent in Shadow of Quetzalcoatl and Fifth Sun, which was the birth of Mexico through contact between the indigenous people and the Spaniards, resulting in alliances or war between and among all the different people in contact with each other. It is pretty unusual in world history for two people to merge so fully like in Mexico, and when I went to Mexico City in June, it was apparent in murals and art and in the history museums that Mexicans see themselves as a combined people, who glorify their European and their indigenous history, especially the Aztec side of things. 

    Visiting Mexico in June made all of this a lot more significant and salient for me. Getting to see Teotihuacan and the Templo Mayor made it really cool to see how massive of structures the people of Mesoamerica could build, but then also how primitive it was compared to what the Spanish were doing an ocean away. The arrival of the Spanish was nothing short of cataclysmic, just like the arrival of the English and the French to the north. But the difference was that the natives combines with the Europeans in Latin America in a way that didn't happen to the north, and the way that people conceive of themselves in North and South America today are different as a result. North Americans can only really claim either Native American or European heritage, but it is very unusual to be able to claim descent from both like is common in Mexico.

    A big difference from the Russia unit is how the state is felt in each country. In Russia, the state is the primary violent actor. There was tons of death and destruction, but it was all at the hands of the Russian state or a state invading Russia. In Mexico, it was the opposite: a more extensive violence that operated at a higher level than Russia at peace but a lower level than Russia at war. The big danger to the safety of the people I read about in the Mexico books was not the government of Mexico, but the local government or criminals. 

    Reading the Mexico unit made me want to read a lot more literature in Spanish, building on my goal of reading more fiction this year. I think I've turned a corner and gotten a lot more interested in reading fiction, but I still don't know how to write about it yet. With my non-fiction books, I've settled into a "reflection," where I write the things I think are important to know from the book and I give a couple of my thoughts on it. But that has gotten a little redundant so I am trying to mix it up in these units where I can do some comparisons. With fiction, it is a totally different ballgame and I still don't know exactly what to write about for those books. But this unit has encouraged me to add more books in Spanish to my miscellaneous reading in between and throughout units, because I really need the practice. Next, I am moving on to some books broadly in the category of science.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

     Man, this was a good book. Better than I expected. Contact McCarthy can really write. He doesn’t just create a good story about boys going on horseback from Texas to Mexico in the fifties, he can make it all about the important things in life without taking you out of the context of the story for a moment. He can put such interesting words in peoples’ mouths and also just describe what they say really well. At one point he writes,

     

He spoke of his campaigns in the desert of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold. His own father said that no man who has not gone to war on horseback can ever truly understand the horse and he said that he supposed he wished that this were not so but it was so. 

     Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shared a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all the horses that ever were.

     McCarthy writes wise characters who go on soliloquies about life in believable ways, despite being teenagers or peasants. When he writes words into the mouths of peasant children, they are simple, but cut to the heart of issues like love, money, etc. the people in his writing all have a very functional intelligence. The protagonist, John Grady Cole, is a teenager who loves horses and doesn’t need to speak much. But he is a talented young cowboy who loves horses and the western lifestyle. When he is in a dark cell recovering from knife wounds, McCarthy writes, “So he thought about horses and they were always the right thing to think about.” The horses are honestly big characters in the novel, and their connections to their riders are so important. It is no coincidence that McCarthy calls Blevins’ big bay horse “thunderstruck,” when it was Blevins who feared being struck by lightning.

     All in all, I loved this book and crushed it in a few days, and I will definitely be continuing with the rest of the border trilogy. Thanks to Frank for the recommendation. 

El laberinto de la soledad por Octavio de la Paz

 Mientras leía este libro, perdí mis anotaciones, y ahora no tengo con que recordarme de mis pensamientos. También estoy de vacaciones y prefiero relajarme que escribir tanto. Voy a decir esto- la gran diferencia entre México y los Estados Unidos se ve en las relaciones raciales y étnicas. En Estados Unidos, hubo un genocidio de los indígenas. En México pasó lo mismo, pero el fenómeno más significante es la combinación entre los indígenas y los españoles. Por eso, la fundación de México es un nacimiento doloroso, pero en Estados Unidos es un cuento de desplazamiento y una conquista más pura de puede decir. Creo que esta diferencia impacta toda la auto concepción de los dos países. La otra mitad de este fenómeno tiene que ver con la esclavitud pero no forma tan gran parte de la historia mexicana, pues no voy a escribir tanto de eso ahora.  

     Otra cosa importante de que escriba De La Paz es cómo imperios sienten una “seducción  al muerte” en sus últimos días, sin embargo, los aztecas nunca sintieron eso porque estaban todavía muy temprano en su ascendencia sobre los pueblos de Mesoamérica cuando llegaron los españoles. Me parece inusual que cae un imperio así, en plena ascendencia, de una fuerza external. Lo más usual sería el largo declive hasta un colapso, como el imperio romano. Pero no sé. Quizás me parece así porque me siento que veo en mi mundo más declive.

     Algo interesante del libro es que De La Paz está escribiendo sobre “el fin de la Historia” en México, anunciando la llegada de México, después de la revolución, al laberinto de la soledad, que describe el dilema de los pueblos cuando llegan a la modernidad. Para él, a diferencia de Fukuyama, el mundo alcanzó el “fin de la Historia” después de la segunda guerra mundial. Para Fukuyama, la Historia finalizó cuando cayó la unión soviético, revelando que la democracia liberal es la última fase del estado o del gobierno. Para De La Paz, el dualismo de la unión soviético y los Estados Unidos es una especie de fin de Historia porque es un “empate.” Sabemos nosotros que se rompió este empate unas décadas después de la publicación de este libro, y también sabemos que el liderazgo de los Estados Unidos sobre el mundo ha sido en declive desde el libro de Fukuyama.

     Lo interesante de este libro que no contiene The End of History and the Last Man es que es el primer libro en que leo de la llegada al fin de la Historia un país desarrollando. Fukuyama solo habla de países desarrollados. El consejo de De La Paz a México al fin de la Historia es lo siguiente: México, como cualquier otra nación, llega solo an fin de la Historia. En este laberinto de decisiones que encuentra, los mexicanos deben buscar los demás naciones solitarias para formar una solidaridad entre las naciones contemporáneas. Así todos se trascienden los problemas de la modernidad.

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend

Image from the book.

    Fifth Sun is a really cool Aztec history that seeks to primarily use indigenous sources, focusing on primary sources from the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. I really liked it. Townsend covers the earliest Aztec history, from the Mexica migration to what became known as the Valley of Mexico, until about a hundred years or so after the Cortez's conquest of Tenochtitlan, by which time the Aztec Empire had passed out of living memory and was being recorded by the grandchildren of those who lived through it.

    The Aztecs originally came from the American Southwest to the Valley of Mexico sometime in the mid-13th century, at first arriving as a nomadic people who served as mercenaries for the other Nahua peoples who had settled the area in the century prior, also coming from the same region and speaking similar language. Then, the Aztecs were called the Mexica (Meh-SHEE-ka), and they settled the city of Tenochtitlan on bad marshland that nobody wanted in the middle of Lake Texcoco sometime in the early 14th century. There is obviously a lot of history I'm skipping over, but long story short, they became the dominant people in the valley after a civil war erupted in 1426. That was the year that Tezozomoc, ruler of the Tepanecs, the most powerful people in the basin, who had ruled since 1370, died in his bed. During the unrest, the Aztec ruler (who still only ruled the small city of Tenochtitlan at this point), Chimalpopoca, was killed, and so was his son, Xihuitl Temoc. His cousin, Itzcoatl, would become the first Emporer of the Aztecs, with the help of Tlacaelel, another relative, by forming the Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan against Azcapotzalco.

    An issue that never went away after the war that led to Aztec dominance in the valley was Tlaxcala (Tlash-ka-la). The Tlaxcalans were never defeated by the Aztecs. This became the basis of human sacrifice, since the Aztecs could not fully defeat the Tlaxcalans, but could capture them for sacrifice. The most interesting thing about the Aztecs to most people is human sacrifice. However, when the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs had only been practicing human sacrifice for a couple decades, and really mostly against the Tlaxcalans. Like many things about the Aztecs, it was more recently established than many would think. This not only served a religious purpose for the Aztecs, but allowed them to save face by claiming that the Tlaxcalans did not defeat them, but rather needed to be kept around for the ceremonial "Flower Wars" to capture future sacrifices.

    Under Moctezuma I, the Aztecs united their royal dynasty by agreeing to a system of power sharing between the Itzcoatl's branch of the family and Chimalpopoca's. Moctezuma and Tlacaelel were both sons of Chimalpopoca. They would do this by having their successor, from the other side of the family, always take as his primary wife a daughter of the ruling emperor.

    When Moctezuma II took power in 1502, the Aztecs were for the first time unopposed in their region, and faced no rebellions from the other Nahuas they ruled over. With more time, their Empire would have become incredibly strong across the region. At thirteen, Aztec boys left home to train to be warriors, and went as teenagers into battle ingroups in order to gang up on and separate a man from his battlefield cohort and bring him down as a unit. They would finish with apprenticeship by about twenty, and were then responsible for making kills and taking captives on their own. By the reign of Moctezuma II, his sacrificial role took up lots of his time, and he rarely went to the battlefield. Those sacrificial practices were often used as religious and propaganda opportunities, as some captured warriors from enemy groups would be taken to Tenochtitlan just to watch sacrifices, and then set free to tell their people what they saw. 

    The arrival of Cortez and the Spanish brought about the downfall of the Aztecs. The Spanish made landfall and heard tales of a vast city in the heartland of Mexico and began to make their way there, defeating all the peoples they met in between, developing quite a reputation. And then, on their way, they met the Tlaxcalans, who hated the Aztecs and formed an alliance with the Spanish after being defeated by them initially. Townsend disagrees with any notion that the Aztecs saw the Spanish as gods. But they definitely did see the Spanish as a very powerful people who could not be defeated on the battlefield. Part of the myth of the Aztecs viewing the Spanish as gods may have been due to them using Nahuatl words for gods in reference to the Spanish talking a lot about converting to Christianity to worship the Christian god.

    Cortez arrived without permission from the Spanish crown and was in a rush to take Tenochtitlan and show off his success before he could be recalled. But then, while he was in Tenochtitlan, he got word that a second fleet arrived, from his rival, the governor of Cuba. Moctezuma II hoped that this tension would save his city, but instead, Cortez took Moctezuma hostage and travelled to the coast, where he bribed the men sent to capture him, and actually reinforced his party. They reentered Tenochtitlan and boarded in Axayacatl's palace, the great palace in the center of the city. But the next day, the Mexica attacked. At this point, the narrative gets confusing. I'm not clear on the exact order of things, but at some point, the Mexica begin the celebration of Toxcatl, which involves lots of dancing in front of an effigy of Huitzilopochtli. As the danced, the Spaniards flowed out of the palace and began slaughtering the Mexica with the help of their Tlaxcalan allies. The Mexica pushed them back into the palace, which they fortified, creating a stalemate in which the Mexica couldn't get in and the Spaniards couldn't get out. 

    After seven days, the Spaniards made a break around midnight, traveling quietly to the sole causeway that remained after the fighting had torn apart the city. They were discovered on the causeway, and the Mexica launched war canoes at them, killing 56 of the 80 horses the Spanish had, and dozens of Spanish men drowned or were killed, with about one-third surviving the night. An even smaller proportion of the Tlaxcalans survived the "noche triste."

    After escaping, it was time for the Spanish to reinforce to take and occupy the city for good. To do this, Martin Lopez, a shipbuilder, taught the Tlaxcalans to build brigantines, small sailing ships, which could quickly traverse the lake. This was the most important memory of the Tlaxcalans who related their stories years later, since it was the first time they ever sailed. Battle went on for weeks. The Tlaxcalans and the Spanish used their brigantines to land in less defended areas, loot them and leave. They used cannons to knock down walls and buildings, and then would go fill in canals with rubble or sand. Then, with a flat, open space available, the Spanish were invincible with horses and lances. The Mexica would re-excavate canals, and were twice able to isolate and kill large groups of Spaniards. During the fighting, the city transformed with barricades and canals, and the Mexica took captives to the top of their pyramids to sacrifice them where their comrades would see. The Mexica strung decapitated heads from a rope for all to see. The fighting lasted three months, and the Mexica also dealt with the effects of starvation and their first-ever wave of smallpox. They offered the Spanish safe passage to leave and forget all this, but were rebuffed.

    That's all I have in me for this one. I'm very busy right now and I just wanted to get through my notes on the actual conquest of the city.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Aztec girls (and maybe boys too?) were not given names until their personalities were known, and were called something like "Elder daughter" or "Youngest daughter" until then. 
• Townsend does a great job of telling the story of the Aztecs from a native point of view, which reminds me of Facing East From Indian Country, which I liked for the same reason.
• Until about 1600, more Africans were brought to Mexico than anywhere else in the world.
• Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz wrote some poetry in Nahuatl.
• Indigenous identity in Mexico suffered most in Mexico during the 19th century, when liberals came to rule the country and forced a sort of "Mexicanization" that required everyone to adopt the national culture and speak Spanish.
• Emiliano Zapata soke Nahuatl.

Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm

    The name of this book really drew me in, and I stuck with it because of my interest in learning about the rise of authoritarianism in the early twentieth century. Authors like Fromm, Arendt, and Hoffer are so engaging because their perspectives on the Second World War and authoritarianism are not only well-written, but highly relevant to democratic decline today. Fromm is especially concerned with the problem that is caused by “freedom from” without “freedom to.” Specifically, capitalism and liberalism freed individuals from feudal roles without tying them to anything positive or giving people a way to achieve self-actualization. As a result, individuals found themselves lost and unmoored in the world, and sought out authoritarian movements to anchor them to something. Fromm writes that “modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional, and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless.” Fromm is important because while he acknowledges that psychology cannot alone explain the flight to Fascism, he explains in detail the psychology behind why individuals subjugate themselves to a fascist state.

     I think Fromm’s description and analysis of modern society are accurate and remain highly applicable today, but I am still skeptical of his historical analysis of the Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation. I think the book suffers from a perspective that begins with the end of the Middle Ages. The book sort of acts like history only exists in Europe, and like history began with the closing of the commons. So much of what Fromm writes is describing why -Europeans- succumbed to authoritarianism, but doesn’t explain much about different groups of people all over the world who have done the same. His conclusions are universal- “We also recognize that the crisis of democracy is not a particularly Italian or German problem, but one confronting every modern state.” But he doesn’t really talk about historical examples or peoples outside Europe. Maybe it would have helped him to write the book fifty years later, seeing authoritarian movements take hold in Asia and Latin America.

     For Fromm, human beings are unique among animals in that humans require a far greater degree of learning than instinct. We have few instincts and are essentially helpless and doomed if left alone in the wilderness as children. We are -free- from instincts and have the free will to decide what to do from birth. In that sense, Fromm writes of “freedom from” that “human existence and freedom are from the beginning inseparable.” “Freedom from” is the lack of external restraints, while “freedom to” is the positive ability to self actualize, by not being impoverished or socially repressed. Fromm argues that since the Renaissance, the West has made massive advancements in “freedom from” while “freedom to” has lagged behind. I wonder what he would say about non-Westerners dealing with the same issue today. But that gap between “freedom from” and “freedom to” is what “has led, in Europe, to a panicky flight from freedom into new ties or at least into complete indifference.” 

     With the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, and the fall of feudalism, religiosity, and the old order, “the individual was left alone; everything depended on his own effort, not on the security of his traditional status.” Today, we often think of this change as purely good, and it was almost definitely a net good. But for many, that loss of traditional status was a bigger loss than their material gains, and for some, social mobility meant mobility downwards, not upwards. Social castes are irrational and wrong, but there are many who benefit from a caste system that leaves them higher in the social hierarchy than they would be otherwise. So like white supremacists today who would rather be poor and benefit from racism, antisemites in Germany would do the same.

     Fromm starts to lose me when he gets deep into Calvin and Luther. He asserts that Calvin’s idea of predestination emerges again in Naziism through the basic idea of inequality of men. But I was unconvinced since lots of people have thought men are unequal, and nothing about Calvinism or Lutheranism could explain why Italy was the first country to adopt Fascism. Fromm is extremely hostile to both Calvin and Luther, writing that they “belonged to the ranks of the greatest haters among the leading figures of history.” But even if you accept that Calvin and Luther were the worst guys ever, it is hard to imagine that they somehow uniquely prepared Germans to become servants to the Fuhrer.

     Critical to Fromm’s analysis is that the same cause, the advent of the modern world, can have two effects. One is to make men more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and the other is to make men more isolated, alone, and afraid. Capitalism severs the individual from the world, allowing him to choose to use his freedom to relate with it spontaneously (which I did not understand), or to give up his freedom to eliminate the gap between the individual and the world.

     Ultimately is it “the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual” that creates the most fertile ground for Fascism. Further aggravating is the fact that facts have lost their power and salience in the modern world since we are bombarded, already by the 1940s, with radio, film, and newspapers that desensitize us to the events of the world. Left with this mass of information that is beyond any person’s comprehension, people become ready to accept any leader who can promise excitement or meaning. The remedy, as I understand it to be, is basically in creating a welfare state, according to Fromm. By meeting the basic needs of the individual and educating him, he is empowered to do that “spontaneous” interaction with the world that helps him achieve the life satisfaction to avoid being seduced by authoritarianism.

Miscellaneous:

• Great passage: “But Hobbes’s picture became outmoded. The more the middle class succeeded in breaking down the power of the former political or religious rulers, the more men succeeded in mastering nature, and the more millions of individuals became economically independent, the more did one come to believe in a rational world and in man as an essentially rational being. The dark and diabolical forces of man’s nature were relegated to the Middle Ages and to still earlier periods of history, and they were explained by lack of knowledge or by the cunning schemes of deceitful kings and priests. One looked back upon these periods as one might at a volcano which for a long time has ceased to be a menace. One felt secure and confident that the achievements of modern democracy had wiped out all sinister forces; the world looked bright and safe like the well-lit streets of a modern city. Wars were supposed to be the last relics of older times and one needed just one more war to end war; economic crises were supposed to be accidents, even though these accidents continued to happen with a certain regularity. When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak. Nietzsche had disturbed the complacent optimism of the nineteenth century; so had Marx in a different way. Another warning had come somewhat later from Freud. To be sure, he and most of his disciples had only a very naive notion of what goes on in society, and most of his applications of psychology to social problems were misleading constructions; yet, by devoting his interest to the phenomena of individual emotional and mental disturbances, he led us to the top of the volcano and made us look into the boiling crater.
• Fromm identifies the Renaissance as a movement by a small group of wealthy elites, while the Reformation was a movement of the urban middle class. So when the Reformation occurred among people who didn’t have the wealth or power that Renaissance patrons and lords had, they were overwhelmed with a sense of individual nothingness and helplessness. They stood alone facing the world, feeling “insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.” 
• What are the significant psychological atmosphere changes going on today? How are they the same or different from those that occurred with the development of capitalism? Is it about a pervasive visibility? Seeing and being seen? We didn’t know what privacy was until we lost it.
• Interesting idea about how death is a bigger idea in more individualistic societies since the death of an individual is just part of the life of the whole in collectivist societies.

In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelda Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations by Merilee Grindle

     So I didn’t love this book but it was an interesting look at turn of the century Mexico and a pretty interesting woman. Zelda Nuttall was a single mother and a Mexican American archaeologist who lived in Mexico but also travelled and lived throughout the United States and Europe. She published about the Aztecs mainly, and helped to make many discoveries.

     Unfortunately, not a ton is documented about her, so a lot of the book is filler about the setting of her life and the people she knew instead of about her. And the book takes a weird tone at times about the way she would assert herself to get credit for her discoveries. It felt a little infantilizing to me and made her seem egotistical instead of just matter-of-factly getting credit for her work. I think it is done to imply a point about her struggles as a woman, but that doesn’t get said explicitly. She is ultimately a really interesting person, but the book is probably a little too long.

Mexico's Crucial Century, 1810 - 1910: An Introduction by Colin M. MacLachlan and William H. Beezley

    So, I wanted to read about Mexico from the Mexican War of Independence until the Mexican Revolution. It turns out that such a book exists, and now I have read it. Mexico's revolution in 1911 is obviously a huge deal in Mexican history and is probably the defining moment in Mexican history, especially if you consider it as one whole historical event along with the Cristero War. But I was interested in how Mexico got to that point, and how Mexico fell behind the US in the time before then. Mexico fought several wars in the 19th century, against the Spanish, against the French, against the United States, and several times against each other. The "crucial century" in the book's title is all about state formation and a gradual stop-and-start strengthening of federal government control that wasn't consolidated until Porfirio Diaz came to power from 1876 to 1911. 

    There are many points at which Mexico ended up politically delayed compared to the British colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America. First of all, Mexico didn't want to be independent of Spain. Mexico was forced into independence by the French conquest of Spain. Interestingly, when Spain was liberated from French occupation, Fernando VII returned to the throne unwilling to accept a modified form of constitutional monarchy like many thought. If he had adopted some reforms of liberalism, he might have held onto Mexico, but his actions further motivated the Mexican insurrection. Second, Mexico didn't have a Washington. Everything I read always reinforces how special George Washington was. Having a single figure who embodied the country with unanimous support and who knew when to step down was absolutely critical in early nation-building. The closest Mexico had to that was Father Hidalgo, but he was executed in March of 1811. After that, Mexico continued through a decade of sporadic fighting before securing independence. It is also critical that the United States had a head start, and as neighbors and competitors, used that head start to muscle Mexico out of the way. By the time Mexico gained its independence, the United States had already been independent for decades, had purchased Louisiana from the same French Empire that conquered Spain (which caused Mexican independence) and was encroaching on Mexico's border at a uniquely vulnerable time in Mexican history. Then Mexico just still didn't get very good leaders. Santa Anna is one of these big leaders, but it took a long time for him to become a centralist, and spent a lot of time fighting against central government, and Mexico failed to gain enough central strength to oppose rebels in the north who would form the Republic of Texas. I mean, at this point in time, Mexico was dealing with provinces refusing to send troops to fight in its wars and breaking off. So while we study the Texas portion in America, we don't follow as closely the fact that Jalisco and Zacatecas also seceded at that time.

    One of the critical points of conflict in Mexico's "crucial century" was the role of the Catholic Church, which was the primary line along which conservatives and liberals were divided. When Father Hidalgo issued the grito de Dolores, initiating the war for independence from Spain, he asked the people of Mexico to fight those who would aid in French control over the Spanish colony after Napoleon conquered Spain. It was the threat of liberalism and atheism that specifically prompted the development of a Mexican state, which had been more or less content under Catholic Spanish rule until then. In the final stage of the War of Independence, Agustin de Iturbide promulgated the Plan of Iguala, which made three specific guarantees: independence, religion, and equality. He specifically promised to protect the Catholic Church in the new Mexican state.

    Besides the conservative-liberal divide and/or the secular-religious divide, there was a debate between federalism and centrism. There were liberal centrists and federalists and there were conservative centrists and federalists. The long battle would culminate in an ultimate centralization by the end of the century, but it took a long time to get there. It took far longer and much bloodier conflict in Mexico than in the United States to reach an agreeable plan for an acceptable federal government. The authors say that the federalist-centralist divide was not very philosophical, mainly just depending on where a given liberal or conservative lived in the country, AKA Mexico City or not.

    Mexico didn't really get a clean democracy until 2000. From 1810 to 1876, it was a very weak central state with some elections, but just as many coups and civil wars. From 1876 to 1911, it was a dictatorship under Porfirio Diaz, with some elections. Then until the 1920s, it was in a chaotic revolution, which culminated in the rule of the PRI, a political party that established a one-party state until 2000. That's a very delayed political development. Spain was sending armies to retake Mexico as late as 1829. France intervened in 1838-39. When Santa Anna finally tried to centralize the regime, revolts in favor of federalism swept the entire regime, including seven in Jalisco, five in Puebla, and a temporary independence for Yucatan. Then the Mexican-American War from 1846-48. Liberals and conservatives fought civil wars in the 1850s. Then France invaded again from 1861-67. This was not a stable country or a country that could stabilize! These wars had huge negative impacts on the Mexican economy, reducing output from mines and farms, causing roads to be abandoned, and population loss. Mexico was economically weaker for much of 19th century independence than it was as an 18th century Spanish colony. Around the time that Texas broke away and the United States conquered Mexico's northern half, it took six months for a wagon from Mexico City to reach Santa Fe, New Mexico, and even longer to reach California.

    I'm just gonna wrap this up a little early because I honestly sort of lost where I was in the post and I am just too busy right now but I think I covered the big themes. The last thing I'll mention is the huge French connection going on in 19th century Mexico. French invasions and investments were a really big part of 19th century Mexico and that feels so foreign and bizarre today. Mexico was basically colonized economically by France even though the actual attempts at political takeover never happened. I'll also say that the authors assert that the Porfiriato may have politically stabilized Mexico and grow its economy, but the regime failed to distribute those gains fairly among the people, and resulted in land concentration and a reduction in real wages. The authors point out that Mexico diverged from the successful model of development in Britain and the United States that built strong domestic markets to provide consumption bases for production. Mexico suffered from being too poor to afford its own goods, and relied on external trade at a time when tariffs were rampant abroad.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Guatemala amicably separated from Mexico when Iturbide abdicated the throne of his "Empire of Mexico."
• Iturbide had initially been a royalist officer.
• At the Battle of San Jacinto, Sam Houston found out that the Mexican army bedded down for the night without setting a watch. So he took his numerically outnumbered force and led an attack that defeated them and caught Santa Anna.
• The Paseo de la Reforms was originally modeled off the Champs Elysees and created by the French Emperor Maximillian, who named it the Calzada de la Emperatriz. Benito Juarez named it Paseo de la Reforma.
• During the American Civil War, the Union occupied Brownsville, Texas, and the result was the creation of a boomtown called Bagdad on the south side of the Rio Grande that disappeared again after the war.
• The Yucatan Peninsula became independent in the mid-19th century and also had the Caste War, which caused a significant population decline.

Le petit prince d'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

     Ce livre est très beau et intéressant. Dans le livre, l’auteur se rencontre un garçon que est venu d’autre planète. Le livre est philosophique, et il a des thèmes de perdre, voyager, et découvrir la but de la vie. Bien sûr, les « grandes personnes » comprennent moins que les garçons. Aussi, le petit prince, je crois, ressemble à Jésus, et les arbres baobabs ressemblant à les Nazis ou autres forces du mal.

     Le petit prince vient d’autre planète, où il a une petite fleur, une rose. Il a pleur pour sa rose, que seul à quatre épines pour se défendre contre le monde. Dans terre, il devient triste quand il voit beaucoup roses, parce que la rose sienne n’est pas unique. Cependant, il apprendre que sa rose est unique parce que c’est sa rose. 

     La vie d’auteur est très intéressant aussi. Il était pilote et aventurier que est mort pendant la seconde guerre mondial. Je lis en ligne à propos de lui pendant que je lisais le livre. Je voudrais pratiquer plus de français.

Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb, translated by Ádám Szegi and Kornelia DeKorne

    What a fantastic book! Instructional books can be so boring but Polyglot is this amazing memoir/instructional combination that is informative and entertaining. She is so interesting since she only started her language learning journey when she was in her thirties, after training to be a chemist. Lomb gives the reader the story of her life through lessons in adult language learning. This book is not for a new language learner so much as it is for ALLs, or Adult Language Learners, who are striving to learn multiple languages. So more for someone learning their third, fourth, or fifth, not their second language. I picked it up because I saw passages from the book on the internet and was interested in some functional tips, and I couldn't put it down because Lomb's voice just makes the book really readable and fun. She writes relateably and she writes beautifully, from "Could it be possible to build with such diamond bricks the thought bridge that spans the space between minds?" to funny stories about inviting a French tourist to the Budapest tourism office where she worked...but accidentally describing it as a brothel (or when she brags about going to the movies 17 times on a three-week trip to Moscow, becoming such a regular that they held a movie five minutes for her because she was running late). She also calls the central Hungarian plain a "mirage-haunted flatland," which I've never heard before.

    Lomb is insistent that she does not have any special aptitude for language learning (despite being fluent in 16 languages) and that anyone can do what she can do. She even writes out a formula:

Invested Time × Motivation/Inhibition⁠ = Result

But I am skeptical that anyone can do it. She describes pure elation at perusing dictionaries, and staying up late to tune her radio to foreign airwaves and taping broadcasts she likes. Basically, she may not have had an aptitude, but her motivation was beyond what almost anyone would do. She is unique, though. She discusses signing up for advanced Polish classes without knowing a word of Polish: when the instructor is astonished that she is at a totally basic level, Lomb replies, "those who know nothing must advance vigorously." She is just an indefatigable character.

    The beauty of foreign language study, she writes, is that it is one of very few things worth doing poorly. Dabbling in medicine, science, or law won't get you into an OR, a laboratory, or a courtroom. But having just a little bit of a foreign language provides huge marginal benefits over lacking any familiarity. Knowing enough to get directions somewhere is a massive improvement over being lost abroad.

    Lomb advises starting a new language by just picking up a dictionary and exploring it. As an ALL advances in learning, she advises them to use the dictionary, but not to abuse it by immediately jumping to it. Instead, ALLs should try to use context clues, and if they must use the dictionary, should write down not just the meaning of an individual word, but the meaning of the context in which it was used. After that initial dictionary perusal, she recommends picking up a textbook and starting to teach oneself (she definitely didn't have access to the internet for language learning in 1970). She then recommends picking up books and just starting to read. If she doesn't know a word, she tries to just learn from context and keep going unless she becomes completely lost without the word, and then she opens up a dictionary. The point of reading is to enjoy the language, not to stop to look up each word, which ruins the experience. To practice listening, she listens to news bulletins in foreign languages.

    Lomb gives the reader some rules she calls the Ten Requests. Paraphrased here, they are:

1. Spend a little time working on the language each day, especially in the morning 
2. When your enthusiasm is low, don't stop studying, switch to another form (e.g. listening instead of reading).
3. Never learn isolated units of speech, learn in context.
4. Write phrases in the margins of your text and build prefabricated phrases to use as crutches in conversation.
5. Translate random billboards, ads, and numbers you see in daily life.
6. Don't memorize anything that hasn't been reviewed for accuracy.
7. Always memorize idiomatic expressions in the first person (e.g. I'm pulling your leg).
8. Foreign language is a castle that must be besieged from all directions: newspapers, radio, movies, technical or scientific papers, textbooks, and conversation.
9. Don't let fear of embarrassment stop you from making mistakes, and don't let pride get in the way of being corrected.
10. Have faith that you are a linguistic genius, and that it's the pesky language's fault, or the dictionary's fault, but that you are smart enough to do it.

Then she also gives a list of things one should not do when learning a foreign language:

1. Do not postpone learning.
2. Do not expect your fellow language-learners to be good partners for conversation.
3. Do not believe that taking a class is all you need to do. You need to work outside class.
4. Do not obsess over words you don't know, build comprehension on what you do know.
5. Do not forget to write down your thoughts in your own words by using familiar expressions.
6. Do not be deterred from speaking by fear of making simple mistakes.
7. Do not forget filler expressions like "My French is kind of shaky" to use in conversation.
8. Do not memorize anything outside its context.
9. Do not leave newly learned structures or expressions hanging in the air--use them and practice them as soon as possible.
10. Do not be shy of learning poems or songs by heart.

    Lots of her language advice is also life advice. She writes how she "heard from a swimming coach that how soon children learn to swim depends on how much they trust themselves and the surrounding world. I [Lomb] am convinced that this (self) confidence is the precondition of success in all intellectual activity." All in all, I loved this book and would recommend to anyone learning a third language.

Pedro Páramo por Juan Rulfo

    Pedro Páramo es un cuento de fantasmas. Cuando Juan Preciado viaja al pueblo de su madre fallecida para enfrentarse con su padre, se informa que su padre ya está muerto hace muchos años. Lo que encuentra el protagonista es un pueblo lleno de fantasmas de su padre y de todos la gente del pueblo, y los fantasmas cuentan o actúan los acontecimientos importantes en la vida del pueblo y del padre de Juan Preciado, Pedro Páramo.

    Algo interesante de la novela es su influencia en Cien años de soledad, que salió mas de una década después. El libro relata el declive del pueblo de Comala, que termina desierto, y también tiene temas de incesto, una falta de desarrollo económico, y memoria como Cien años de soledad. Comala hasta suena parecido a Macondo. 

Russia in Review

    I decided to start this year with a focus on Russia, and I read five books about Russia: War and Peace, Collapse, Stalin, Doctor Zhivago, and The Future is History. Two were fiction, works of acclaimed Russian literature, and the other three were non-fiction, including one biography. Four of the authors were Russian, and the other one, Stephen Kotkin, is an American of Belarussian-Jewish descent. I also watched Come and See, a Belarussian movie from the 1980s about a boy's experiences in World War Two in Nazi-occupied Belarus. The books covered, in the order listed above (which is also the order I read them in), the 1800s-1810s, the 1980s-1990s, the late 1920s to 1941, the 1900s-1940s, and 1984-2015. So this was largely a focus on Russia in the pre-WWII Stalin era and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    The biggest theme in my readings was war. So I came away with a feeling of Russia as a civilization facing hordes of enemies within and without, constantly in a struggle to survive. It is hard for me to say whether this is some deeper truth about Russia or just says more about my interests. I think it would be hard to find a time when Russia was not in some deep conflict. The entire existence of the Soviet Union it was either in conflict with itself or with America or Germany. And then the one book I read set in a pre-Soviet time was set in Tsarist Russia's wars against Napoleon. It would be interesting to read about Russia in more peaceful times.

    With all this war and conflict, Russia felt very bleak. And that, to me, is a truth about Russia's last century or so. The Soviet Union dealt a huge injury to Russian civilization from which it has not recovered. The initial Revolution and Civil War obviously killed millions, but the collectivization of farming and the subsequent purge under Stalin were even worse. Communism took away Russia's best minds and put the whole society under tyranny for generations. It was amazing how different War and Peace really felt as a book compared to all the others that were set during Communist rule. Soviet Russia was really right up there with Nazi Germany but was allowed to linger on for decades after the Nazis were toppled. The resulting structure left in the 1980s was totally hollow because everyone, even the leaders, understood that the Stalinist tyranny was totally beyond the pale.

    While I didn't really love Doctor Zhivago, something striking was how Russia produced so much good literature, especially before Communism. Between Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Nabokov, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn, it's just an unbelievable run of legendary authors. I would love to read more of them. And it is really apparent how the best of them were either before Stalin (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), ended up disillusioned with Stalin (Gorky), had their work suppressed by Stalin (Pasternak), or went into exile because of Stalin (Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn). And since then, my impression is that great literature has basically been extinguished in Russia. Russia has seriously declined from being a cultural powerhouse before Communism to being what Masha Gessen called a place without a future in The Future Is History after Communism.

    It is really clear to me now how Moscow is the center of a Russian world that extends to the Baltics, Poland, the Carpathian Mountains, Transcaucasia, and Siberia. The Russian people are at the center and all the other peoples around them are really just dealing with it. It reminds me of how Mexico and the Caribbean sort of exist in the hinterland of the United States and are forced to deal with whatever America does. Russia also is similar in the way it intervenes in those countries, usually without any foreign countries saying anything about it, which shows why Russia is so offended by NATO expansion and Western support for Ukraine. Russians really view places like Crimea as something even more integral than the United States views Latin America, since Ukraine and Belarus were not just formerly part of the Soviet Union, but also Slavic peoples, known as "Little Russia" and "White Russia," respectively. All in all, this sort of unit on Russia left me much more interested in Russian history, Russian people, and especially Russian literature. 

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

    This is really a horror novel. Jacobsen simulates the worst-case scenario of nuclear war. North Korea shoots a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) out of the blue at Washington. Washington responds by launching dozens of nuclear missiles at North Korea. In the middle, North Korea also hits the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in California with a nuclear submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). American missiles pass over Russian airspace and the Americans can't get in touch with the Russians. The Russians launch a massive counter-response at the United States, which responds by launching every nuclear missile it has left. In the meantime, North Korea also detonates an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) over the United States (which is basically just using a nuclear bomb out in space for its shockwaves that knock out electronics down on Earth) and also shoots chemical and biological weapons at South Korea. All of this happens in under an hour.

    In 1946, the American nuclear stockpile was just 9 nuclear bombs, growing to 13 in 1947, 50 in 1948, and 170 in 1949. In 1949, the Russians exploded their first atom bomb, almost an exact copy of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki four years earlier. By 1950, the US had 299 and Russia 5. By 1951, the US had 438 and by 1952, the US had 841 and the USSR had 50. In 1952, the thermonuclear bomb, or hydrogen bomb, was invented, which uses one nuclear explosion to trigger a larger nuclear explosion. The prototype thermonuclear bomb created in 1952 had the explosive power of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding all at once. When tested, it completely obliterated an island called Elugelab in the Pacific, leaving only a crater in its place. By 1953, the United States had 1,169 nuclear bombs in its stockpile, and 1,703 by 1954. The United States manufactured 1.5 nuclear weapons per day and reached 2,422 nuclear bombs in 1955, including three new styles of thermonuclear bombs, and 3,692 bombs in 1956, making 3.5 nuclear bombs per day. By 1957, it was five a day for a total of 5,543 bombs, then 7,345 in 1958, 12,298 in 1959, 18638 in 1960, and an all time high of 31,255 in 1967. Today, both the United States and Russia each have around 1,700 deployed nuclear missiles, and China has a stockpile of 500, with Indian and Pakistani stockpiles of around 165 and 50 in North Korea. The US only has 44 missiles meant to intercept them.

    The book does an excellent job of conveying the difficulty of reacting to a nuclear launch. At best, the President has about a half an hour to react, but really a lot less since there is time to confirm that there is a nuclear launch and that also assumes that the president is immediately available to make the decision. The timing could be as short as seven minutes from launch to detonation if a sub parked itself 600 miles from our coastline. It would not be possible to fire a torpedo from another sub quickly enough to sink a sub launching nuclear missiles. Submarines are uniquely dangerous in the world of nuclear weapons, and that's why North Korea maintains one of the largest submarine fleets in the world. In shallow waters, where echoes make enough noise for subs to be undetectable, submarines can move hidden to launch nuclear weapons from anywhere.

    My biggest criticism of the book is just that it is about a worst-case scenario, not a realistic scenario. When the President reacts to the North Korean nuclear launch, he launches dozens of nuclear ICBMs from Wyoming in addition to SLBMs from the Pacific Ocean. But these ICBMS must pass over Russian airspace, alarming the Russians. I have to think that the Department of Defense has already gamed out how to shoot nuclear weapons at North Korea from subs in a way that would show both the Chinese and the Russians that the nukes aren't directed at them. But the biggest issue is the quantity. No one would start a nuclear war with just one nuke, since it would invite counter attack. If you're launching against a nuclear power, you want to hit all their nuclear capabilities first. So if North Korea launched a "bolt out of the blue" nuclear attack against the United States, it would make sense to respond with one, two, three, etc. SLBMs, not dozens of ICBMs. Launching dozens would look a lot more like a decapitation strike against a nuclear power if the trajectory could be mistaken for that, one or two not so much. Additionally, the book assumes that the Russians don't know about the North Korean launch and aren't in touch with the Americans (maybe not the most ridiculous assumption), and therefore don't understand that the United States is responding to that. Finally, after Russia responds with dozens more nuclear launches, the United States chooses to launch the rest of its arsenal, which basically ends the world. Use them or lose them.

    The situation of massive nuclear destruction that Jacobsen describes would cause a global temperature reduction of 27 degrees Fahrenheit, and a drop as large as 40 degrees in America. Nuclear winter would last for as much as ten years, and in places like Iowa and Ukraine, temperatures would not rise above freezing for six years. The ozone layer would also lose as much as 75% of its shielding power, pushing human life underground to avoid the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. Maybe bugs inherit the Earth.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Carbon dioxide from a nuclear explosion sinks, so cellars and subway tunnels are death traps for asphyxiation. But maybe that's one of the better ways to die in a nuclear war given the circumstances.
• Cars with electronic ignitions can't start after an EMP detonation. A nuclear detonation 300 miles over Omaha would cover the entire contiguous United States.
• The nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima was ten feet long and weighed 9,700 pounds, which is about as much as an elephant. To achieve the same level of explosion, the US would have needed to drop 2,100 tons of conventional weapons.
• Until 1960, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force each controlled their own stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
• At a 1960 meeting to discuss strategic use of nuclear weapons, the only objector to a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union that would cause nuclear fallout in China was Marine Commandant General David M. Shoup, who said, "All I can say is, any plan that murders three hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way."
• The nuclear triad is the combination of three ways that America can launch nuclear weapons. 400 ICBMs on land, 66 nuclear capable bombers in the air, and 14 nuclear-armed submarines at sea (and also 100 tactical nuclear bombs at NATO bases in Europe).

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen

            In The Future Is History, Masha Gessen follows a couple individual Russians to tell the story of Russian politics from over the 30 years from the beginning of glasnost and perestroika though the first invasion of Ukraine and its effects. The individuals who are centered are mostly Russian elites either through their relationships to major politicians or are political activists.

            The Russian world that Gessen describes can be bizarre. There is a transition from an intense communist ideology to an intense nationalist ideology. She describes one child who attended an elite communist preschool waking up from a nap by being fed caviar and being called a “Future Communist,” and how portraits of Lenin and Marx were prominently displayed in the school. But the nationalism was always under the surface. Immediately after that description of communist preschool, she describes “coffins,” which were questions on standardized tests just for Jewish students. These students would be pulled for additional examination and asked questions that were usually impossible to solve.

            While I was reading the book, I started to think of Russian and French civilizations as similar in receiving mortal wounds from left-wing revolution. They both went into revolutions that destroyed their previous, aristocratic ruling class. And then the revolutions were both betrayed by men who would become dictators. But where Napoleon was defeated by a European coalition, Stalin got to be a part of the coalition that destroyed Hitler. But then they both ended up on the losing end of a hegemonic struggle- France with Germany and Russia with the United States. Maybe Vladimir Putin would have seemed more like Napoleon III if his invasion of Ukraine had led to his downfall. France finally lost all claim to European hegemony in WWII, and Russia lost it in the fall of the Soviet Union. But unlike France, Russia wasn’t brought into the US-led international order. Instead, Russia has joined a Chinese-led opposition to the Pax Americana, so the story is going in a pretty different direction now.

            The Soviet Union itself probably weakened Russian society significantly. There are many big, obvious reasons, like land collectivization and the purges. But also some things that are less atrocities and more just the way Communists ran the country. Like a lack of social mobility: groups were formally segregated by the types of work they did, and artists lived with other artists, Politburo members went to dachas with other Politburo members, etc. And the birth rate plummeted while abortions shot up. Abortion was a common contraception method, and in 1984, there were nearly twice as many abortions in Russia as there were births. The official recognition of various nationalities also divided people and focused on promoting national minorities into the power structure in order to coopt the elites of that group. The national republics would form the seams for the breakup of the Soviet Union.

            After the Soviet Union broke up (very well documented in Collapse), the new democracy was not all it cracked up to be. First of all, it wasn’t a very healthy democracy. Civil society and elections were never seriously established, and all through Yeltsin’s presidency, Russians dealt with a bad economic situation. People got nostalgic for the certainty of the Soviet Union, which the majority had not wanted to collapse. There was even a cable channel that showed only old Soviet television 24 hours a day—it was called “Nostalgia” and put a hammer and sickle in the corner of the screen. That nationalism and nostalgia helped form the movement of Alexander Dugin, a chief ideologue of Putin’s Russia. When he formed a new political party to advocate for Russian chauvinism, he named it National Bolshevism (not too distant from “National Socialism” either). The basis of the ideology was an opposition to “open society,” as advocated by Karl Popper and popularized further by George Soros in the 1990s. Gessen writes that the Soviet Union may not have offered a real vision of the future, but it offered an ability to know one’s future, and to make small-scale decisions about it. Russia from the collapse of Communism to the rise of Putin was unpredictable and chaotic for the average Russian.

            Something I learned from the book was how big the scapegoating of gay people is in Putin’s Russia. In the 2010s, when Russia broke out in major protests that were sweeping the world, Putin brought the hammer down on gay people, and Russia passed several anti-LGBT laws. Something that I’ve seen in America is that it became popular for normal people to film their own “to catch a predator videos” in which they claim to identify pedophiles. In Russia, they would turn them into the police, but according to Gessen, these were often just gay men who were targeted for being gay. I have seen the same videos in America, but they don’t get sent to the police, they get beaten up. There is no way to know if they are really pedophiles, since the videos just show them getting beaten up and forced to confess. This is not a good substitute for the legal system.

            Those protests in Russia failed because protests aren’t actually that strong of a way to topple a government. They don’t work if the government can muster massive force against protestors and do it without fear of democratic backlash against the government. But protestors in 2010s Russia thought they might be successful because they had seen that exact form of protest topple the Soviet Union—why would this be any different? The difference was that Putin is a harder man who had no qualms about using force against the protestors. In 1989-1991, Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders were directionless and couldn’t justify using force to themselves. Putin, on the other hand, had a faith in his nationalism and knew he had the support of the country. And if he didn’t, it didn’t matter, they couldn’t remove him in an election. Gorbachev had wanted to be removeable by elections, which is a much weaker position to operate from. The guy who takes democracy and turns it into authoritarianism is always going to be stronger than the guy who takes authoritarianism and turns it into democracy. Yuri Levada sees these protests as a continuity in Russian history, in which the society enters a state of arousal, protesting, and needs to be crushed by the leader so that all can feel secure again in the knowledge that their leader reigns supreme. Importantly, these same protests that failed in Russia succeeded in Ukraine, and led directly to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

            Gessen takes issue with the term “illiberal democracy” because it is too generous with the regimes it describes. Putin’s regime, she writes, is authoritarian, and should be called that. It may have elections, but so did Stalin’s Russia. The elections are just a sham in which no serious opposition can exist since they will be jailed. The only difference is the existence of a carefully-managed number of minority parties in today’s Russia, whereas Soviet Russia had an official one-party policy. She also distinguishes totalitarianism from authoritarianism by adopting Ekaterina Shulman’s definition that “a totalitarian regime demands participation: if you do not march the march and sing the songs, then you are not a loyal citizen. An authoritarian regime, on the other hand, tries to convince its subjects to stay home.”

            I think that Russia and China today both represent alternatives to the West and liberal democracy. Both have sham elections. Russia is more interesting to strong-executive conservatives, who like its traditionalism, official nationalism, and the strength of a strongman. China is less appealing to Americans, but has more appeal to people in the developing world who want the answers to getting high levels of growth. Europe doesn’t seem to appeal to anyone these days, and I can’t think of any other plausible civilization that people want to imitate. One description of Russia was especially interesting:

Entire civilizations in history had ceased to exist. How had life in them felt in the last decades and days? Russia and the Russians had been dying for a century—in the wars, in the Gulag, and, most of all, in the daily disregard for human life. She had always thought of that disregard as negligence, but perhaps it should be understood as active desire. This country wanted to kill itself. Everything that was alive here—the people, their words, their protest, their love—drew aggression because the energy of life had become unbearable for this society. It wanted to die; life was a foreign agent.

 

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Under Communism, the Russian city Nizhny Novgorod was named Gorky, after the writer Maxim Gorky’s penname, which he had chosen because Gorky means “bitter” in Russian. His real name was Alexander Peshkov.
• Chess champion Garry Kasparov is an Armenian-Jewish Russian from Baku, Azerbaijan. That’s a complicated ethno-national situation.
• In 1990, Bush and Gorbachev signed a trade agreement that sent lots of dark meat chicken that Americans didn’t like as much as white meat to Russia. The deal was so big that chicken thighs flooded stores and were called “Legs of Bush.”
• When asked to name the greatest people who ever lived, Russians like to pick Russians. Stalin became more popular after the end of the Soviet Union, rising from 12% in 1989 to 40% in 2003, and dropping only to 36% in 2003. Putin had risen from 21% in 2003 to 32% in 2008.
• Apparently Putin hosts an annual call-in show where he answers (carefully-selected) questions from average Russians.

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.