Sunday 28 April 2013

RYSZARD KAPUSINSKI: A Life by ARTUR DOMOSLAWSKI

RYSZARD KAPUSINSKI: A Life
By ARTUR DOMOSLAWSKI
Verso, 2012, 456 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

When the Solidarity protest movement kicked off in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk in 1979 against the neo-Stalinist Polish government, Ryszard Kapusinski faced a difficult choice – would the “world’s most famous Polish reporter”, writes Artur Domoslawski, “side with the mutinous people or his pals on the Central Committee”.

Kapusinski, the Polish United Workers’ Party member of thirty years, tried his decades-old balancing act between writing about genuine revolutions outside Poland and his loyalty to a domestic party claiming but dishonouring revolution.  General Jaruzelski eventually decided the issue – when he declared martial law, Kapusinksi resigned from his ‘communist’ party.

Born in 1932 in provincial Poland, where the fury of war and the grind of poverty dominated the landscape, the young and zealous idealist set out to ‘build socialism’ through the Moscow-supported post-war government.  With the 1956 exposure of Stalin’s crimes, however, and the repression of local dissidents by Moscow’s surrogate party in Poland, Kapusinski supported the de-Stalinisation movement to ‘mend socialism’.

This reforming movement, however, was too cautious and controlled to satisfy Kapusinski’s revolutionary leanings which eventually found their outlet as a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency (PAP).  ‘The revolution at home was over, and he went in pursuit of it elsewhere’, said a PAP colleague.  Kapusinski was fortunate that, for their “own economic and geo-strategic” reasons during the Cold War, the European neo-Stalinist states generally supported the anti-colonial movements of Africa and Latin America thus enabling Kapusinski to safely celebrate revolution at a distance.

He was politically agile enough, however, to offer, through his reportage, a “universal allegory of the mechanisms of power and revolution” which applied just as much to Poland as to countries in revolutionary ferment overseas.  Whether in a half-starved, colonial hell-hole, or in a “well-fed and well-entertained” country like Poland, Kapusinski diagnosed how and when an oppressed people stops being afraid of the regime’s gendarmes, ceases to obey and challenges for power.

His writing style also had wide appeal.  Its sensual tone and poetic rhythm gave the lived experience of the people at the bottom of the power structure a literary force.  Kapusinski lived their life, was “bitten by the same insects, fell ill with the same diseases, ate the same food” and saw their struggle and political radicalisation through their eyes.

A side-effect of this emotional identification, however, was a tendency for Kapusinski to romanticise the new wave of Third World revolutions and to be somewhat uncritical of certain revolutionary tactics and heroes, although he was perceptive about the potential for post-independence degeneration which derived too often from the anti-colonial slogan being ‘liberty not equality’.

Kapusinski could also invent and embellish to create an image of himself as a “fearless war reporter” who narrowly escaped death by firing squad and who personally knew socialist icons like Che Guevara and Salvador Allende.  These experiences may have been inventions but the global and class inequalities, and the power structures which kept them in place, were no invention by Kapusinski.

What threatened to more seriously damage Kapusinski’s credibility were the allegations by Poland’s rightwing anti-communists who suggested his success had been owed to his friends in high party places and his cooperation with the regime’s intelligence services.  Could this devalue Kapusinski’s entire work?

No, replies Domoslawski.  Kapusinski did not spy on Poland’s domestic opposition and Polish journalists’ intelligence reporting from Third World countries “did not usually have great significance, nor was great weight attached to it”.  Kapusinski regarded his overseas political assessments, including reports on CIA operations, as “a morally good deed” – a case not without merit, given where the CIA has stood on global human rights and democracy.

Kapusinski’s last decades before his death in 2007 were marked by his rejection of a neo-liberal market “shock therapy” future for the former neo-Stalinist states and an expanded capitalist world of mindless consumption and entertainment which masked poverty, hunger and imperialist war.

Domoslawski’s biography is discursive and exploratory, honest and questioning.  It’s greatest merit is as an appetiser to the journalism of Kapusinski which, despite its occasional political and ethical glitches, stands head and shoulders above that of capitalism’s contemporary reporters.  Their sins of propaganda and style, though masked by ‘impartiality’ and being ‘realistic’, accept, and reinforce, the narrow boundaries of what is possible under capitalism, something that Kapusinski, as a committed socialist, had always challenged.

Saturday 13 April 2013

MOSCOW 1937, STALIN'S GENERAL, AGENT DIMITRI

MOSCOW 1937
KARL SCHLOGEL
Polity, 2012, 652 pages, $39.95 (hb)

STALIN’S GENERAL: The Life of Georgy Zhukov
GEOFFREY ROBERTS
Icon Books, 2012, 375 pages, $24.99 (pb)

AGENT DIMITRI: The Secret History of Russia’s Most Daring Spy
EMIL DRAITSER
Duckworth, 2012, 420 pages, $19.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Stalin’s Great Terror spared no sphere, writes Karl Schlogel in Moscow 1937.  In the usually sedate world of architecture, for example, one leading Soviet architect rounded on what he detected as ‘enemies of the people, diversionists, wreckers, agents of fascism, spies, murderers and blood-sucking gangs of Trotskyist and Bukharinist degenerates and traitors who are stretching out their filthy paws into architectural planning work’.

Many Russian architects duly faced arrest, labour camp or execution as part of the two million people killed during the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938.  Most perished without the fanfare which accompanied the mood-setting show trials of the Bolshevik Party’s ‘old guard’, the comrades of Lenin and Trotsky, an entire generation of socialist revolutionaries liquidated by Stalin because they posed a real or latent challenge to his dictatorial power.

Barely two decades after its victory, the Bolshevik Revolution was utterly reshaped by Stalin’s “hurricane of violence”.  As Schlogel notes, most of the party members in the late 1930s were newcomers, an elite benefiting from the purge of the Soviet administration which opened up an “astoundingly rapid career progression” with its access to material privilege that “consolidated their loyalty to the leader”.

Schlogel’s book is a catalogue of vignettes of the political fear, grim living conditions and cultural aridity of life under Stalinism but, whilst strong on exposition, Professor Schlogel’s book is less forthcoming on explanation.  For Schlogel, the Great Terror exists in an historical vacuum and Stalin’s rise to power is untheorised.  Schlogel decrees the time of Marxism as an analytical tool as “long since past” and the result, despite the human trauma of the Great Terror, is an insipid political drama uninformed by the intense struggle for the soul of socialism that pitted Stalin’s conservatism, opportunism, nationalism and mechanical thinking against the Bolsheviks’ best Marxists.

One survivor of the Great Terror, who yo-yoed in and out of favour with Stalin, was Georgy Zhukov who was, writes Geoffrey Roberts, the “main architect” of the Red Army’s victory against Hitler.  Under General Zhukov’s direction, Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad were saved, and Nazi Berlin taken, yet, just three months later, Zhukov was sacked by Stalin.

Zhukov’s life prospects (peasant poverty, small business trading or conscript war casualty) had been dramatically transformed by the 1917 revolution through a military career in the Red Army.  A Bolshevik long before a party card became prudent for job security, Zhukov repressed his doubts about Stalin, even as the Great Terror reached the Red Army High Command and liquidated 20,000 officers.  Zhukov came under suspicion through victim association but he survived and, indeed, prospered, as the purges fast-tracked promotion.

Zhukov’s qualities as military commander won the favour of Stalin who valued Zhukov’s harsh discipline and his profligate-with-lives military philosophy of no surrender and no retreat.  Patriotism also bound the General and his political master, the casualty being socialist values which were in short supply (beyond the required lip service) in, for example, the capture of Berlin , where looting, rape and other retaliatory atrocities against German civilians soured the liberation.

With the war won, Stalin clamped down on even the slightest possibility of military autonomy, banishing the sometimes independent Zhukov to Odessa and airbrushing him out of the history of the war.  Zhukov feared much worse (‘I had a bag ready with my underwear in it’, wrote Zhukov in his memoirs) and, like many of Stalin’s other elite victims, whose loyalty to Stalin was beyond question, his capricious fate sent a message to all Russians - if the most famous and closest to Stalin could suffer, so could any of them.

Zhukov was rehabilitated by Khrushchev where, as Minister of Defence, he undid some of the Stalinist past (exonerating the military victims of Stalin’s purge) whilst maintaining a neo-Stalinist present (advocating hard-line suppression of the popular and reform-Communist uprising in Hungary in 1956, and overseeing the Soviet Union’s nuclear bomb program including tests on Russian soldiers).

Stalin’s successors, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, loyal Stalinists both, remained wary of Zhukov (who knew where the political bodies were buried and the role that his new bosses had played in putting them there) and bounced Zhukov up and down the bureaucratic ladder until his death in 1974.

Zhukov’s biographer, an orthodox Western war historian, respects Zhukov “because he never lost a battle” and his book is skewed towards a military, rather than political, analysis.  Zhukov got a necessary and ugly job done against the Nazis but the book does not contextualise him as part of Stalin’s bureaucratic party-state social base which found democratic socialism a threat to its power and privilege.

The Soviet spy, Dimitri Bystrolyotov, was another, as Emil Draitser writes in Agent Dimitri, who fell foul of Stalin.  ‘Do you want to write your testimony in ink or in your own blood?’, Bystrolyotov was asked by his interrogator when arrested in 1938 as part of a massive purge of Stalin’s security organisation aimed at “eliminating the old guard of spies devoted to the ideas of world revolution”.  Gruesomely tortured, Bystrolyotov served sixteen years in the prison camps of Siberia, his death in 1975 hastened by his broken health and his shattered socialist spirit.

A declassed aristocrat, Bystrolyotov had fled war-torn Russia in 1919 and wandered as a poor labourer through Europe before pitching up at the Soviet Trade Mission in Czechoslovakia.  Having embraced communist ideas out of ‘a great anger’ at economic inequality, Bystrolyotov was recruited by the Soviet spy-front where his aristocratic looks and twenty languages were prized as spying assets.

A ‘sexpionage’ expert, Bystrolyotov “put his male charms to use” to trade love for technological secrets from white-collar, female factory employees and for diplomatic secrets from foreign embassy women.  “Pillow talk” with an SS officer guarding files on Nazi Germany’s secret and illegal rearmament revealed evidence of Hitler’s invasion plans, whilst the Soviet Union’s other enemies (White Russian refugees, Western intelligence officers, Mussolini) were spied on and disrupted.

The fruits of this intelligence, it could be said, though Bystrolyotov’s biographer does not, are justifiable even if the means in a pre-Wikileaks world (seduction, bribery, blackmail) are unsavoury.  Despite the isolation and scarcity distorting the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet Russia’s military and economic survival was essential to the defeat of both fascism and capitalism’s vendetta against the Russian socialist experiment.

Growing tired from the risk of exposure, the constant pretence and disguises, and the often-sordid ethics of his job, Bystrolyotov returned to Moscow in 1937 to his grim fate as a prisoner.  Rehabilitation during Khrushchev’s post-Stalin ‘Thaw’ was followed by will-sapping battles with the KGB bureaucracy for recompense and welfare, censorship of his Gulag memoirs under Brezhnev, and posthumous admittance in 2001 to the KGB ‘Hall of Fame’, with its sanitised history of the KGB and its successor under Putin, a one-time KGB officer.

Draitser, a former Soviet journalist, has laboured to produce a book in which the factual detail is minute but the political analysis is sweeping generalisation, unreflectively concurring with Bystrolyotov’s ultimate disillusion with the entire idea of socialism, which was nothing but a ‘beautiful illusion’, as he put it, ‘dragged through the mud’ on the night of his arrest.

This, then, is Stalin’s political legacy – the conservatising, anti-socialist lesson refracted through the experience of those who, like the  authoritarian Zhukov or the embittered Bystrolyotov, know only of Stalin’s deviant version of ‘communism’.  Collectively, these books are politically gloomy, unrelieved by the alternative of a socialism which is both revolutionary and democratic, an alternative kept well-hidden by most books on Stalin pumped out by the capitalist printing presses.

Thursday 4 April 2013

SEVEN DEADLY SINS: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong, by DAVID WALSH

SEVEN DEADLY SINS: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong
DAVID WALSH
Simon & Schuster, 2012, 426 pages, $27 (pb)
 
Review by Phil Shannon

After four shots at the Tour de France and placing no higher than 36th, and after life-threatening testicular cancer, Lance Armstrong returned to the world’s most prestigious and richest bike race in 1999 and won for each of the next seven years.  Magically, he was a changed man, writes David Walsh in Seven Deadly Sins – changed, as we now know, because he was “chemically enhanced”.

Walsh, a British sports journalist and one of the few to query the heroic, back-from-the-brink Lance myth, notes how, after being repeatedly beaten by doped-up European teams, Armstrong decided to join the drugs arms race by taking the performance-enhancing drug, EPO with spectacular results.

His moving, success-against-the-odds, cancer-survival back-story wooed adoring journalists but Walsh smelled a rat.  After French police and customs busted most of the 1998 Tour’s leading contenders for filling their tanks with EPO, Armstrong left his death-bed to spearhead the 1999 Tour as the clean-skin poster boy.

Armstrong’s performance, recording the fastest Tour time in history and effortlessly outpacing the EPO generation, was, however, suspect to Walsh who got on the case, interviewing cyclists, doctors, masseuses, trainers, coaches and other Armstrong intimates, unearthing a lengthy history of doping by Armstrong and its cover-up by team officials.

This history included backdated medical prescriptions, visits and million dollar payments to the “world’s dirtiest doctor” in Italy about to go on trial for doping professional riders, the use of makeup concealer to hide needle marks, brown paper bags full of EPO, syringes emptied of EPO.

What was keeping Armstrong’s secret under wraps, however, were his formidable intimidatory weapons.  Personal bullying of clean, and drugged but conscience-stricken, riders enforced the code of silence on drug-taking in cycling whilst a former team doctor interviewed by Walsh received a call from Armstrong saying ‘I have lots of money, good lawyers, and, if you continue to talk, I’ll destroy you’.

Armstrong’s pockets were indeed deep, with multi-million annual income from prize money, merchandise, corporate sponsorship and product endorsements.  This funded many legal stoushes, ending in settlements in Armstrong’s favour always stopping short, however, of proceeding to court where perjury almost certainly would await an under-oath Armstrong.

Strategic donations also bought complicity in the cover-up.  Six-figure donations to world cycling’s governing body took care of any positive drug tests which had slipped through the net.  An affidavit from Indiana University Hospital testifying that Armstrong was drug-free was secured, courtesy of a $1.5 million endowment for a chair in oncology at the hospital where Armstrong, under treatment for cancer, had confessed, for clinically necessary reasons, to a history of ‘EPO, testosterone, growth hormone, cortisone and steroid’ use.

Restrictive British libel laws also proved friendly to Armstrong in keeping critical English language books and articles out of circulation though these were few enough as most journalists were readily co-opted to the Armstrong cult by the threat of being denied media access to the super-hero’s magic circle.  Any doubters could be further held at bay by the cynically exploited shield of Armstrong’s support for cancer charities.

These elaborate defences, however, crumbled when two of Armstrong’s highest profile, former teammates, Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis (the first, post-Lance Tour winner in 1996), put on record their own drug use which also implicated Armstrong in damning detail.  Their evidence against Armstrong “served as the thread that, once pulled, unravelled the myth much like a two-dollar sweater”.

Armstrong chose not to contest the resulting lifetime ban and retrospective disqualification of all his results following publication of the 2012 report of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) which confirmed what the USADA head called the ‘greatest heist sport has ever seen’.

Armstrong, who richly profited as a cheat and a liar, deserves opprobrium but so does the capitalist culture that sport operates in with the systemic values that entice individual moral transgression, values involving unhealthy competition for a success measured by obscene wealth and defined by the glorification of the elite individual by a passive, spectating many.

Walsh, a self-described media “revolutionary”, only skirts around this analytical framework, however, in a somewhat self-indulgent book (as much about the journalist as his quarry) but one which adds journalistic colour to the destruction of ‘LanceWorld’, a grubby fantasy which should have been buried long ago were it not for the drug-soaked corruption of sport by money.