T. J. Binyon, Pushkin: a new biography. Knopf Publishing Group, 2004, ISBN 9781400076529, O. Figes, Natasha's Dance, Picador, 2006, 9780312421953

In Blairite Britain, writing an anti-Russian rag became a hallmark of a public intellectual. In 30-40s France to exist as a public intellectual one had to be either a Communist or a Nazi. In the 50-60s only a self-proclaimed leftist could be published or be appointed to an academic post in humanities though the approval of USSR's policies became outmoded and one had to to be anti-Soviet, Maoist leftist. Italy repeated this trajectory with 10-15 year lag. From late 70s to early 2000s, to be in good standing with the French intellectual milieu one had to praise Islam and publicly support islamist causes. British situation is peculiar only because the requirement to publish anti-Russian rants somehow graduated from being a necessary to an only qualification of an intellectual. Even "The Economist", which used to be a voice of intellectual British establishment turned in requisite parts into a mouthpiece of a Polish plumber: hatred of Russia with racial undertones poorly covered up, the picture of the Cold War having all of the sophistication of McCarthyist leaflets and stories from the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistant wars, reminiscent in their candor or truthfulness of Napoleon's "Moniteur" war reports from 1812 Russia.

This justifies an emergence of such bizarre opuses as Binyon biography of Alexander Pushkin or Orlando Figes' "Natasha's Dance", which he modestly qualifies as "Russian cultural history." So far, poor A. Pushkin, an approximate counterpart to the English Bard, was a relatively uncontroversial figure among Russian greats. He was killed on a duel long before the Communist takeover, progressed from youthful radicalism into safe Monarchist-liberal conservative political views and did not care much of the Ortodoxy. Compared to his contemporaries, he did not sexually abused children like Lord Byron, stupefied himself by drink to the degree of Alfred de Musset, or consumed copious amounts of opium as did poor Coleridge-- as a result of medical quackery-- or T. DeQuincey, completely voluntary.

From Binyon's book you will hardly learn that Pushkin wrote something of value,
for which he provides self-excuse that he will not discuss his poetry, prose or dramaturgy. But there is also nothing about the evolution of Puskin's political views, journalism-- in his world of aristocratic artists he practically pioneered for-profit writing-- or historical scholarship.

His book a scurriluous collection of obscene anecdotes and sexual affairs mostly lifted from the writings of Pushkin's personal enemies. And he had plenty: cuckolded husbands, police spies, usually lowlifes with a prurient eye for the lifestyles of the hereditary aristocrats, and high society homosexuals and their hangers-on whom he outed with savage epigrams. Binyon repeats their accusations verbatim without slightest attempt at verification of their plausibility or bias.

Even if these slanders were 100% true, all that would prove is that Pushkin was a typical nobleman of his time, progressing from adolescent sex with female servants to prostitutes, with the acquisition of independent means, and settling for continuous nights of drinking and gambling in his thirties, then into comfortable marriage within his own class punctuated by mutual adultery. This makes him little different from Wellington, Palmerston, Disraeli, Beau Brummel or any number of approximate contemporaries.

Yet, these dissolute rakes mapped the South Pacific, discovered Antarctica,
defeated Napoleon, criss-crossed a couple of continents with railroads and, amidst these distractions, created the like of "She walks in beauty" or the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

I can envision Binyon spilling ink from his quill, or drumming at his laptop in
his Oxford townhouse with exclamations of bravado: "Damn Russkies! Get this, and this and now this. How about this?" I am not offended, just sad, that Oxford tenured this bigot.

Orlando Figes' book is not much better. Based on strange interpretation of alleged uniquely Russian infatuation with the culture of the raw and primitive (how about Paul Gogen, or Mata Hari, or the Der Brugge?), he proclaims that human sacrifice and cannibalism are the centerpieces of the Russian culture. A single unconvincing example of the "Rites of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky is being dragged through nearly 800 pages of Figes' screed. Certainly, the great composer, as were most intellectuals of his age and his class, was a (very non-radical) racist and an anti-Semite. But, first, he is about as representative a figure for the Russian turn-of-the XXth century culture as De Sade was for the French Enlightenment. Second, he hardly was a born-again pagan with occultist sympathies similar to the members of German "Thule Society" or D. H. Lawrence or Windham Lewis.

Similarly to Schoenberg whom he scorned during the latter's life but reappraised after his death, Stravinsky had a taste for mysterious and unexplicable and a very keen eye for tradition as well as the trends of contemporary life. As a member of propertied classes uprooted by the Russian Revolution, Stravinsky had conservative political leanings and resented socialist tendencies in contemporary Europe.

If anything, these two books, contrary to racist and vulgar intentions of their authors, confirm how thoroughly and boringly European Russian intellectuals have become since the birth of Pushkin just on the eve of XIX century till the death of Pasternak and Akhmatova who became the last vestiges of the "Silver Age" of Russian letters and arts.

Martin Amis, House of Meetings, Child 44, Tom Rob Smith, Sashenka, Simon Sebag Montefiore

These works of fiction cannot be understood without the Bacchanal into which Blairite "Cool Britannia" has proliferated. Racial paranoia--with Russians in hell, Israelis in Limbo and EU in Purgatorio-- in the Blair's Britain is a logical answer to the Londonistan. To symbolically redeem the balkanization of the English society, intellectuals needed to invent and exorcize a bogeyman. Not that there hard-line islamists, Eastern European irredenta and Nazi sympatizers and ex-Soviet mobsters who immediately transform from "Freedom Fighters" against Russian Imperialism into Russian Mafia as soon as they cross the channel, are as numerous there as in Holland, or in France. What is peculiar about the UK is the leeway, which was given by the Blair's Government for their self-organizing, dropping out of the mainstream society and subsequently popularizing their extreme views as a new mainstream. Similar processes were going in Jospen's France where some cities, such as Orleans, allegedly became a virtual no-go zone for the French police. However, French bureaucratic system immediately began a crackdown on these liberties when the political climate changed.

And so, in Blairite Britain, writing an anti-Russian rag became a hallmark of an intellectual (see my review of T. J. Binyon's "Pushkin" and O. Figes' "Natasha's Dance"). Too bad that quickly it became the only hallmark . And once the [Economist comment] movement is initiated, everyone jumps on the bandwagon [Tyler Brule comment].

So the emergence of Martin Amis' "House of Meetings" was not surprising: to justify his elite status in the world of English letters he was obliged to write something demeaning and portray Russians as a nation of alcoholics and rapists. His knowledge of Russia was probably limited to small talk in cocktail parties with a few oligarch exiles to London, their bodyguards and whores, and Discovery Channel-style series listened to between numerous drinks. Interestingly, in 30 raving Amazon reviews posted so far, only about 1/3 praise his use of language, a few find a story or characters particularly well developed but a vast majority highly values his book for showing what the brutes Russians are. Obviously, these are repressed souls who cannot say this loudly anymore about African-Americans or, for instance, Albanians or Chechens, not that many of them ever met one.

It is not surprising to pour disdain on people, more precisely, on cutout characters, for becoming bestial in the inhuman conditions of the gulag, nor it is surprising. What is surprising and I claim it through knowning much more former gulag prisoners than Amis ever did, how many of them retained humanity and even
sense of humor.

However, by common recognition of the English-language critics, Amis Jr. is a fine writer. So we could forgive his racism in a testament to W. H. Auden: "...And will pardon Paul Claudel, pardon him for writing well." [Paul Claudel was a right-wing Catholic who applauded Nazi killings of Jews and Communists. Unlike fellow Nobelists Hauptmann and Hamsun, he escaped WWII with his reputation unscathed because of a few protests against cruel treatment of French POWs, which fit nicely into the Gaullist legend of the "fighting nation."]

After Amis, the bandwagon was jumped by everybody with literary talent and totally without. Simon Sebag Montefiore certainly knows more about Russia than Amis but who told him he can write fiction? Tom Rob Smith's "Child 44" is a bestseller thriller but his depictions of the life in USSR behind the Iron Curtain are about as true to reality as James Bond movies. Let me provide random glances into his masterpiece. A provincial cop on the beat in the late 1940s USSR has a Jewish first name Aron, about as probable as an English bobby being named "Hassan" or "Fikret" at the same time. A provincial sleuth drives his car on a highway from his sleepy township of Voulsk to a regional center. Him traveling on horseback over the steppe would be strange but not that unreal. While it is possible that a police precinct would have a (chauffered) car, or even two, usually a truck with back seats or a jeep from the Lend Lease War surpluses, the whole idea of a personal car is ridiculous. Finally, there is a lawyer building the case of retarded defendant in his care on the notions of English Common Law! I am not very much offended by his treatment of Mother Russia, neither one can expect accuracy of detail from a successful thriller writer. Yet his characters are cutout automatons with primitive motivations so much so that after half-an-hour with his book I completely forgot the name of the book's protagonist.

Ultimately, I am not asking the reader why this garbage gets written. I am asking why they publish them all? Could the publishers just settle on one or two of the better selling lot, if needed in triplicate number of copies and save on fees and trees? Is this a conspiracy of dunces or groupthink unbound? I reserve my opinion.

Niall Ferguson. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Penguin, 2008

Highly placed American academics are hardly a brave crowd. If in Visconti's "The Damned" it was Hitler's ascent to power, which prompted the head of the industrialists' clan to search for the corporate heir agreeable to the regime, Harvard mandarins were needed only a Bush to read a writing on the wall and appoint the neocon author of the "Empire" and "Colossus" to the faculty. Though, NF brought indefatiguable ability to half-bake his biased and highly inaccurate compilations faster than I can review them, british accent and other qualities of a media star to the hub where kids of the rich and powerful can mingle together without a threat of being diluted by working-class riff-raff. Harvard's financial aid for the needy starts at below $170,000 of family income(2007), yet, only ~20% of the student body presently belong to these depths of poverty. Even Michiko Kakutani, the "New York Times" book reviewer spotted that "the readers are better off with ..."Manias, Panics and Crashes" by ... Kindelberger and ... Aliber and "Extraodinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," a Charles McKay classic."

The book is absolutely monstrous in its inaccuracy and lack of professional approach to what I thought was science. It is full of flagrant and meaningless statements such as: "What are the common factors shared by financial world and a true evolutionary system - 'Genes', in the sense that certain business practices perform the same role as genes in biology, allowing information to be stored in the 'organizational memory' and passed from individual to individual or from firm to firm when the new form is created?" or "Take the case of retail and commercial banking, where there remains considerable biodiversity"(p. 352). While relationships between firms, their clients and owners are frequently discussed in terms of copulation, it does not produce progeny.

Here is another pearl of Niall's wit and wisdom: "The difference is, of course, that whereas giant asteroids (like the one that eliminated 85 per cent of species at the end of Cretaceous period) are exogenous shocks, financial crises are endogenous of financial system." First, asteroid is blamed for the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe, which eliminated the dinosaurs. The evidence for the Permian-Triassic "Great Extinction", to which 85% is referring, is much more sketchy. Second, throughout the entire book he speaks about the exogenous shocks to the financial system such as collapse of the world trade in the wake of the World War I. Is he competing with the proverbial student of the German gymnasium who made more spelling errors in one word than there were letters? Like the book by Lord Smail (reviewed in Jan. 2008), this is drivel by a well-connected member of academic aristocracy who obviously spends no time in archives (if he considers himself historian), studying financial data (if he is a financier), or economic models (if he is an economist). Yet, he is a TV star, like Paris Hilton.

Paul Lendvai, One Day that Shook Communist World, The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and its Legacy, Princeton UP 2008

Impenetrability of Hungarian language makes it nearly impossible for the outsider to study the 1956 revolution objectively. The book by Lendvai is quite interesting but I cannot understand how accurate it is. Largest contribution of his study seems to be his nuanced assessment of Janoscz Kadar, a leader installed by the Soviets during the coup. First, unlike most other emigre studies, Lendvai senses that his participation was much, much more active than simply being a Soviet puppet. In particular, he blames Nagy's execution squarely on Kadar and his influence. "Kadarism," i.e. an attempt to balance socialism, nationalism, preservation of independent statehood and the demands by his Soviet overlords is an interesting phenomenon and Lendvai pioneers objective research here. Many other Eastern Bloc leaders (Dubchek, Egon Krenz, Gomulka, Kania, Yaruzelski) tried to follow in his footsteps but none succeeded to the degree Kadar did. The book speaks very little of internecine struggles within the revolutionary camp and glosses over the Oct. 30 massacre at the Communist Party Headquarters and other atrocities of the rebels.Internal factionalism seems to be the major cause of the failure of the rebellion. E.g. Hungarian service of Radio Free Europe, probably packed by ex-Nazies, by its broadcasts tried to undermine Nagy's regime, i.e. the core of the resistance, which it considered "red." Moreover, after the failure of the rebellion they continued to lie that the resistance was still active in the mountains and some duped refugees returned to continue armed struggle only to be shot or sent to the camps. Hungarian army was surprisingly passive in the event of the Soviet invasion, especially the Air Force. This author thinks that the peasant soldiery had little good to expect from the rebels promising bloody vengeance to the occupiers of landlords' estates-- a unique feature of this Revolution was extremely violent, conservative, pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic sloganeering of its organizers-- and the Air Force was mostly Soviet-trained. Only few higher officers mostly associated with the previous Horthy regime (Maliter, Kiraly) were active in the revolution. According to Lendvai, the most active combat detachments were worker-student guards, yet, their organizer Dudas (probably, a Romanian Jew) was twice arrested by right wingers during this period. The overall toll of victims is such: several tens shot by the Soviet-organized tribunals, ~700 Soviet soldiers and 1000-2000 rebels killed in the storming of Budapest, unnamed number of the Communist Party, secret police members and Soviet advisers massacred by the rebels, 41,000 participants were imprisoned (28,000 in labor camps) and uncertain number escaped abroad (from low 15,000 in Lendvai to accepted 100-200,000, though the difference may be that Lendvai counted only the active participants in the rebellion, not the general refugees). My verdict: failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 still is not sufficiently clarified in its political, military and humanitarian aspects but Lendvai's book is a good start.

Why democracy is incompatible with an Islamic state?

Let me state that my provocative title does not mean that democratic form of government cannot exist in a country with the Muslim majority. What I point out is that what is called "democracy" by the dictionaries can only exist in the Western paradigm of the "nation-state," which started to emerge in the Early Modern Europe.

Namely, the nation-state, an outgrowth of the national monarchy, is the Hobbesian Leviathan, which has two following distinct features. First, it possesses monopoly on violence, i.e. all violence unless performed by the state army or police is prohibited and is punishable according to the legal code. Second, there is a fiscal monopoly so well written into the sixteenth amendment to the US Constitution. Government alone has the right to extract money (taxes) without voluntary consent and equivalent promise in goods and/or services. All private extractions are called stealing or robbery dependent on the situation. Part of the fiscal arrangement is that government pays salary to its own officials rather than allows them to collect fees directly from the population. The opposite situation is called "corruption" or "graft" and is prosecuted.

I remind the reader that nothing of a kind existed in the European Middle Ages. Ordeals, i.e. judicial combat between litigating parties, vendettas and private warfare of the feudal lords were the norm. Equally true was the payment of the dues and tithes to the lord of the manor, the Church and upkeep of the public officials.

To establish the Leviathan, the Early Modern European Governments, not without a few civil wars along the road, developed a compromise with the populace, which was to
be entitled to certain modicum of control over these two monopolies through their elected representatives or supposedly impartial mediators called judges. The mechanisms of this control got codified (except for Britain) and received the name of "electoral democracy."

None of that could be ever imagined in the dualistic system of Sharia Law. In theory, the ruler is supposed to wage the perpetual war, jihad, against the enemies of Islam. However, he has few other societal functions beyond raising resources for fighting with the infidels. Internal administration of the Islamic state is theoretically in the hands of two groups of people, qadi(s), who interpret Sharia and Adath, the local customs as allowed by Islam, and imams, spiritual and cultural leaders of the village communities and tribes. There is no European Leviathan; the right of the Western parliaments to legislate, e.g. marital affairs or school curricula, would be as alien to Ibn Haldoun as the dictates of the PTA on the circle of friends of her daughter would seem strange for American soccer mom. When Soviet or American occupation troops established puppet legislatures in Afghanistan, they viewed them as they would view their own deliberative bodies.
Even if the elections-- as in Soviet Union, or American-occupied Iraq-- were fictions, the legislatures were assumed to be legitimate bodies of political elites. But for the local population their "delegates" were not delegated any powers, which
the population itself was forbidden to exercise from now on. It does not mean they are not taken seriously by the Muslim tribesmen. American soccer moms take school coaches very seriously, they want them to be proficient in their sports, not to molest children and otherwise to be good role models for their offspring. Yet, they do not perceive in this situation a delegation of parental power any more than the Afghanis and Iraqis accord political power to their "elected representatives." Equally impossible is to expect a creation of modern army in a state permeated by the Sharia ideology because the power structure of the Middle Eastern armies is not a functional hierarchy but repeats to a large extent distribution of power between tribal and party groups in the larger society.

All that is not being said to bolster the claims of Western superiority. The society
based on the above principles was better organized and generally wealthier than
the states of the medieval Europe. It did not suffer from stultifying bureaucracy and oppression of contemporary China and the Byzantium. Moreover, typical "western" societies had their own pangs of achieving modernity. For instance, Napoleonic system relatively painlessly replaced multiple local authority of the landowner, parish priest, member of parliament, etc. with a single figure of prefect personifying French state in its entirety. When there were attempts to copy this system in a newly unified Italy, simple subjects of Victor Emmanuel could not accept it, especially in the agrarian South. The tag of war between Leviathan of the modern nation-state and the overlapping authorities of the Church, landowners, mafia, military aristocracy,
businessmen civil servants and party bosses, each with his own claims on spoils and goodies to pass around, continued at least until late 1980s (some think it is still there). Russian Empire, only by the end of the XIX century, established pretty effective domination over alternative centers of military and fiscal power in the Central Russia. Yet, when confronted with reality of pogroms in the Southern Russia, imperial officials demonstrated to the European dignitaries a genuine incomprehension that the state was required to stop what they perceived as intercommunal violence. It is easy to blame that on antisemitism but imperial bureaucrats were equally at loss dealing with depredations of Russian settlers in Siberia with respect to indigenous peoples and were hardly more "backward" in that than their American, Canadian and Australian counterparts. In large chunks of Siberia before the Bolshevik coup it was still a powerful owner of a gold mine or a fur-trading outpost who performed local administrative functions instead of the government. In the 1990s this arrangement re-emerged in the phenomenon of the "oligarchs" but, contrary to the popular lore, they were not creations of emerging capitalism but a throwback to premodern statehood.

One concludes that the Sharia state was far from unique and represented natural, for the medieval economy, compromise between the central and local powers. It is futile to impose the instruments of the industrial-era governance such as "free and fair" elections, professional civil services and technocratic armies on the societies, which never were Leviathans in the first place when the Western Leviathan is itself under attack from the powers of multinational corporations and institutionalized cronyism of the elites of the American South. Otherwise, one needs to imitate the methods of dealing with coranic scholars and village elders employed by Ataturk, Saddam Hussein or Nasser and Assad. Besides poor moral choices, these methods are difficult to implement in the era of Kalashnikovs, Stingers, cell phones and the Internet.