Simon Sebag Montefiore. The World: A Family History.

     Continental upper class males with little to do, usually eat, drink and philander. Anglo-Saxon upper classes frequently engage in literary endeavors. Simon Sebag Montefiore is a graphomaniac of distinction. "The World" is a  1200+ pages compilation similar in scope and concept to the Will and Ariel Durant "Story of Civilization", only with a lot of sexual details unmentionable in the 1930s when they began their magnum opus. 

   The book is a wonderful reading during insomnia but, otherwise, is a non-insightful compilation of facts, part correct, part erroneous, largely in a chronological order. Simon Sebag is not shy mentioning illustrious Montefiores of the past. I (and hardly anybody else) can verify all the stories in this enormous volume and, more importantly, their sources. So I mention only the errors from the Soviet history, which come to mind. Maybe, historians of antiquity, middle ages and the like can walk through his narrative in their field of studies. But the concentration of the factual errors in one small section sheds an untoward light with respect to whole endeavor. 

    The information that Leonid Brezhnev was instrumental in arresting Lavrentii Beria appears exclusively in the fake memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov, Stalin's chief of assassinations and is not credible at all. Brezhnev also was not a prime mover of the conspiracy to remove Nikita Khrushchev but emerged in the end as a compromise candidate between the coalitions of the "old guard" (Ignatov, Voronov, Podgorny) and the "Young Turks" (Shelepin, Mazurov, Semichastnii). So he belonged to the clique of the fence-sitters (himself, Andropov -- then the Secretary in charge of the relations with the Eastern Block and Suslov -- the chief ideologue) who procrastinated until the outcome of the impending coup became clear. 

    The power coalitions considered his appointment an interregnum similar to the Malenkov and Bulganin tenures in mid-fifties, before Khrushchev consolidated his power. However, the co-conspirators severely underestimated Brezhnev's acumen and cunning and were removed one by one, the latest -- Nicolai Podgorny -- the nominal head of the Soviet State, in 1977, a dozen years since the coup. 

    The closer he moves to the Russian present, the least credible are his sources and more-of-the-cuff are his conclusions. This would not annihilate the whole volume if I were not suspicious that a similar number of factual errors and gross misjudgements are not present in, for instance, Arab or Persian sections of the book. 

New Taxonomy of the Polities.

 Twenties century division of the political systems into democracies, autocracies and totalitarian states -- I don't know who invented it, but Brzezinski ingrained it into a law of nature -- is outdated. In the beginning of the XXI century there was only one totalitarian state -- North Korea and a few true authoritarian states, i.e. states ruled by a dictator not answerable to anyone. Now, even the situation with North Korea is not so clear-cut. Cuba and Belarus were also counted as dictatorships but with the death of Castro brothers only a die-in-the-wool Miami Cubans assert this with conviction. For the US Congress, considering modern Cuba an authoritarian state is an exercise of electoral opportunism. 

Turchin whom we reviewed in a previous essay, classified human societies as follows: 

>Politocracies. These are the societies where material wealth comes from the affinity to the extant political powers. 

>Militocracies. Societies where the military establishment exerts economic power and civilian management. 

>Kleptocracies. Societies where political power comes from catering to the needs of the wealthy. 

In the modern world, the pure forms are hard to find (maybe, North Korea as politocracy and Egypt/Pakistan as militocracies) but the point of reference is obvious. This has an obvious analogy in the description by this author, in his review of Azar Gat's magisterial volume, as well as in works of Soviet and post-Soviet historian Yuri Semenov [1]. But he definitely classifies modern USA as a "kleptocracy". This is certainly true after 2010 Citizens United decision by the US Supreme Court. 

That is, a single entrepreneur (Trump, Musk, etc.) can be easily cajoled or crushed by a deadly combination of Department of Justice, ever vigilant NSA and their media toadies. But the Big State, since Reagan, rarely challenges the kleptocratic elite as a whole, even to the degree that such flagrant criminals as Epstein are almost impossible to prosecute. Vice versa, each new presidency usually rushes to their service with tax cuts, easing of regulations and a flurry of federal programs, usually in the fields of health and national security, speciously designed to produce less and pay out more. 

The solution is not the revolution, as the radicals on the left (Occupy the Wall Street; easily dismantled by the Democratic elites) or the right (Bannon; now indicted) may think. First, "We The People" must recognize that there is nothing special in American society. It must obey universal rules of corruption and decay, and revival. As Orwell said: "The freedom is to proclaim that two by two is four. Everything else follows". 

[1] Go to the Comment 3 of the first essay on Azar Gat. 

Biden.