An essential addition to the cultural history of the late Soviet era.
A probing history of dissidence in the post-Stalin Soviet Union.
When Stalin lived, his government paid little attention to the nation’s guarantees of constitutional rights and used terror, imprisonment, and torture to curb dissent. When Stalin died in 1953, the regime was less inclined to kill its opponents. In this deeply researched history, Nathans, author of Beyond the Pale, introduces bohemian intellectual Alexander Volpin, son of the poet Sergei Esenin, who, inspired by Rosa Parks and other civil rights activists, “sought to apply modal logic to two humanistic fields he considered most susceptible to ‘exact methods’: jurisprudence and ethics.” In doing so, he demanded that Soviet officials obey the constitution and not Communist Party dictates. He was also an exasperating opponent: When one interrogator grilled him in the early 1960s about a supposedly secret organization—secret because it was unknown to the KGB—Volpin replied that he had not been aware of the KGB officer’s existence, either, “but that has not led me to conclude that you exist secretly.” Other dissidents resisted the Soviet regime on legalistic grounds. Some were committed Leninists; many, such as Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn, argued for freedom of conscience and expression. While the dissidents never coalesced into a movement, many published samizdat literature, books and manifestos painstakingly typed out and circulated secretly, including practical manuals on how to hold up to police interrogation. (One brave dissident, Sergei Kovalev, replied to each of his interrogator’s dozens of questions, “I refuse to answer.”) Nathans closes his authoritative study by suggesting that the post-Stalin Soviet Union was a paradise of free expression compared to Putin’s present-day “feral state, where political opponents and those branded as traitors are as likely to be poisoned or assassinated as tried in a court of law.”
An essential addition to the cultural history of the late Soviet era.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780691117034
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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