The latest issue of the Yale Annals of Communism Series contains significant revelations in the midst of rather turgid and disconnected documents. As Pipes (Russian History/Harvard; Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 1994, etc.) notes, much of this material, consisting of messages within the Soviet bureaucracy, tends to be elliptical and refers to events and people without much significance today. Although Pipes explains the material and identifies the protagonists, it is inevitably a little like looking for small nuggets of gold among the pebbles. Nonetheless, the starkest revelations—no longer unexpected, but stark in their brutality- -concern Lenin's repeated acts of cruelty. ``Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers,'' he instructs the comrades in charge at Penza, underlining the words ``no fewer than one hundred'' three times. ``It is necessary secretly—and urgently—to prepare the terror,'' he orders the secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee. Perhaps most surprising is that this treatment is extended also to Jews: ``Treat the Jews and urban inhabitants in the Ukraine with an iron rod,'' he orders. Similarly, he instructs his followers to carry out the confiscation of church valuables ``with the most savage and merciless energy''; orders strikers arrested and hundreds of people deported; gives orders to subvert a treaty that he has just signed; and dismisses his experts as ``shit.'' Other minor revelations include proof that Lenin's mother enrolled herself and her children in the nobility of Simbirsk, so that Lenin, to the embarrassment of the Soviet authorities, was actually a hereditary noble; that in his personal relations with his subordinates he could be highly solicitous (insisting that Stalin take three-day weekends); that he had a low opinion of Trotsky's military abilities (``nothing but bad nerves,'' he sniffs after reading one of Trotsky's telegrams); and that he wrote even to his mistress, Inessa Armand, as if he were reporting to the Central Committee. Not engrossing, but highly enlightening.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-300-06919-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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