THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Update: Figes has admitted that he himself was the author of the nasty reviews, contrary to his earlier statements.
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Noted UK public intellectual and historian of Russia Orlando Figes has found himself in a rather embarrassing situation that’s big news in the UK, where the private lives of historians get the kind of publicity we Americans can only dream of.

It seems as though Figes’ wife was posting nasty anonymous reviews on amazon.com of competing historians, notably Robert Service and Rachel Polonsky. After Polonsky got suspicious, she and Service did detective work up the electronic trail to find Figes’ wife.

So why was Polonsky singled out? Best guess–back in 2002, she wrote a scathing review of Figes’ Natasha’s Dance for the Times Literary Supplement. In it, she was careful not to accuse Figes of plagiarism. There’s a track record of legal action under plaintiff-friendly English libel law when that happens. (To be fair, Polonsky has also used English libel law to her benefit.) Nonetheless, Polonsky made it clear that she found unattributed borrowing in Natasha’s Dance, much as Richard Pipes had when he reviewed Figes’ A People’s Tragedy in the New Republic.

I had a rather striking moment along those lines myself in grad school. I had read Mark Von Hagen’s Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship (1990), which included a memorable anecdote about Dora Elkina, who was trying to teach Red Army soldiers to read with childish sentences about Masha eating kasha:

After some frustrating moments that brought her close to tears, she hit upon the idea of turning the lesson into a political discussion and explained to the soldiers why they could not be with their Mashas and why the country was experiencing a shortage of kasha. (p. 103)

So I was struck when reading Figes’ A People’s Tragedy (1997) to find this without a reference to Von Hagen:

Close to tears, she hit upon the idea of turning the lesson into a political discussion and explained to the soldiers why they could not go home to their Mashas, and why the country was short of kasha. (p. 601)

Years later, I ran across this. Richard Pipes’ The Russian Revolution (1990) has this character sketch of Lenin:

The first impression he [Lenin] made on new acquaintances, then and later, was unfavorable. His short, stocky figure, his premature baldness . . . his slanted eyes and high cheekbones, his brusque manner of speaking, often accompanied by a sarcastic laugh, repelled most people. Contemporaries are virtually at one in speaking of his unprepossessing, “provincial” appearance. On meeting him, A. N. Potresov saw a “typical middle-aged tradesman from some northern, Iaroslavl-like province.” (p. 348)

Figes’ People’s Tragedy has this, also without a reference to Pipes:

At first, Lenin made a bad impression on the Marxists in St. Petersburg. Many of them were repelled by this short and stocky figure with his egg-shaped, balding head, small piercing eyes, dry sarcastic laugh, brusqueness and acerbity. Lenin was a newcomer and his musty and ‘provincial’ appearance was distinctly unimpressive. Potresov described him at their first meeting as a ‘typical middle-aged tradesman from some northern Yaroslavl’ province.’ (p. 147)

UPDATE: the Times of London has an anonymous discussion of the legal intricacies behind the poison pen reviews.

Putin is not normally given credit for his sense of humor, but we must as always give credit where appropriate (via BBC Monitoring and Johnson’s Russia List). In a session of the Duma, Vladimir Zhirinovskii was lambasting Moscow mayor Yurii Luzhkov for allowing lucrative properties to fall into the hands of foreigners. Luzhkov is a easy target, given his bare-fisted style, his interest in economic development, and his wife’s lucrative career in construction. Specifically, Zhirinovskii complains, Ronald Lauder had been allowed to take a controlling interest in the real estate development on the site of the gone and unlamented Rossiia hotel. To make matters worse, Zhirinovskii says, the site is next door to the Kremlin and Lauder is head of the World Jewish Congress (an ironic accusation, of course, coming from Vladimir Vol’fovich).

Then Putin steps to the podium and says that the accusation is ludicrous, since he can’t imagine Luzhkov giving up Moscow property to anyone, let alone foreigners.

Now that’s a funny line. Politically, it’s even better. Putin scores a point for wit. Zhirinovskii, who’s seen by most observers as a thoroughly domesticated opposition figure who serves as a safety valve for the Kremlin, maintains his populist and nationalist credentials. And Luzhkov, whose power base in Moscow makes him politically formidable, gets taken down TWO pegs. Well-played, Mr. Putin.

In the summer of 2009, I noted a piece by Pat Buchanan on the origins of World War II which essentially took the same position as the Russian military: it’s the fault of the Poles for not accepting Hitler’s ostensibly reasonable demands for the cession of Danzig.

In the wake of the most recent Katyn tragedy, Buchanan has made the same point, though a bit more delicately, presumably to be cognizant of Polish feelings. He writes of the irony that Polish defiance in insisting on landing in fog at Smolensk led to tragedy, just as in 1939:

it was Polish defiance of Adolf Hitler’s demand to negotiate the return of Danzig, a German town put under Polish control after World War I, that gave birth to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which led to Katyn.

To repeat my point in the earlier post, Hitler had just jumped up and down on his own Munich agreement by absorbing what was left of Czechoslovakia and utterly destroying any hope that he might solely be interested in ethnically German territory. Why should the Poles trust Hitler after that?

An essay I wrote on the state of military history in academia, in which I suggest that the situation is not nearly as dire as it has often been presented, has just come out in Historically Speaking, the magazine / bulletin of the Historical Society. The article is protected by a subscription firewall, but many of my arguments have been presented in this blog earlier, like here and here.

The AP is reporting this morning that a Tupolev-154 carrying the President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and some of the country’s highest military and civilian leaders crashed in heavy fog while trying to land at a military airport in Smolensk, Russia.

On board were the army chief of staff, national bank president, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers, the Polish foreign ministry said.

Ninety-six people are said to have died in the crash. The President and other state officials were en route to events marking the seventieth-anniversary of the Katyn massacre.

For an early report on the story, click here.

UPDATE @ 9:21 am CST: RIA Novosti is reporting that human error was the cause of the crash. The death toll is now estimated to be as high as 132.