Dmitri Volkogonov, changer

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Like yesterday’s post, this rumination was sparked by Martin Amis’ book Koba the Dread.]

Here’s a tragic quote about political change, from Dmitri Volkogonov, a man who wrote biographies of Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky:

“Perhaps the only thing I achieved in this life,” he wrote (when his life was ending), “was to break with the faith I had held for so long.”

That faith was in communism.

Volkogonov died at the age of 67. What happened to change his mind after a lifetime of toiling for the glory of the USSR? It happened in stages:

Long known in Western military circles as one of the hardest of hardliners, Volkogonov began, by the middle of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, to have serious doubts about the Soviet regime. At first, these concerned only Joseph Stalin, whose purges led to the deaths of both of Volkogonov’s parents. He spent nearly twenty years compiling a revisionist (by Soviet standards) biography. He forthrightly described Stalin’s alleged crimes but remained an admirer of Vladimir Lenin and (following the Nikita Khrushchev line) believed that Stalinism was a perversion of true Leninism. (His views on Lenin changed after he went back into the archives to do his biography of Lenin. It was then that he read that Lenin too had murdered thousands of his opponents.)

Volkogonov’s wife also begged him not to publish the book and he did hold it back for a time, fearful of the consequences. Once the book was published, these consequences were not slow in coming. He was fired in 1991 from his job as director of the Institute of Military History at the Ministry of Defense of the USSR by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Once the Soviet Union’s collapse was complete, Volkogonov combined his historical work with political activity in the newly established Russian state. Following the failed Soviet coup attempt of 1991, Volkogonov was appointed Defense Advisor to Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. By then, he was already afflicted with the cancer that would kill him in 1995. Before he died, he contributed much to the so-called “liberal” strain of Russian thought that was condemned during the Soviet period.

Why was Volkogonov able to change when so many could not? I’m not sure, and really don’t know enough to say, but apparently the turning point involved his going back into the archives to read in great depth the letters and other private papers of Lenin and Trotsky, and finding so many smoking guns (of the rhetorical type) that he could no longer deny the nature and goals of both men.

It must have been an astounding and especially dramatic change experience. But not everyone would have reacted the way Volkogonov did. Some would have shored up and defended their previous views and life work, making excuses and rationalizing away what they had found, in order to preserve their view of the world and their own place in it.

This obituary (Volkogonov died in 1995) from the LA Times offers a bit more information. His death occurred just weeks after he finished his magnum opus Seven Leaders, which ties a great many threads together, examining “every Soviet ruler from Lenin to Mikhail S. Gorbachev–from details of their quirky obsessions to analyses of their momentous decisions.”

The English title of the book seems to actually be Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime. The following is from the Publisher’s Weekly review of the book:

Volkogonov cogently argues for a seamless connection between Lenin’s absolutism and Stalin’s merciless dictatorship. Drawing on new material, including declassified documents from state and Party archives, he reveals Lenin’s paranoia toward foreigners as well as Stalin’s pivotal role in egging on his puppet in North Korea, Kim Il-sung, to start a war with the South in 1950. Khrushchev, though he repudiated the Stalinist cult of personality, was out of touch with the masses, in Volkogonov’s estimate, while indecisive, mediocre, suave Brezhnev mistook economic and social stagnation for stability. Both Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko were “political pygmies” who strived to preserve a sclerotic system. Bristling with startling revelations, this scathing panorama of seven decades of Soviet rule brims with much treachery, intrigue, reversals of fortune and personal idiosyncrasies.

As I said, I know very little about Volkogonov. In fact, I’d never heard of him until I encountered his name in Amis’ book. But I have little doubt that a goodly part of what gave Volkogonov the motivation to write this final book—and even, perhaps, the strength to live long enough to finish it—was his remorse at his own nearly-lifelong complicity in the myth of Communism, and his outrage at those who made it possible.

Revolutions betrayed

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been wading through Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a book about Soviet Russia and its crimes and betrayals. The reason I’m reading that particular book is that one of Amis’s goals in writing it was to explain how it was that so many intellectuals on the left became apologists for and dupes of a regime so (to use Reagan’s word) evil.

At some future date I plan to write a post on that subject. But right now—because Memorial Day has got me thinking about the subject of liberty—it was this paragraph of Maxim Gorky’s, reproduced by Amis in his book, that caught my attention. It was written by Gorky, who had been a supporter of the 1917 October Revolution, only two weeks later:

Lenin and Trotsky do not have the slightest idea of the meaning of freedom or the Rights of Man. They have already become poisoned with the filthy venom of power, and this is shown by their shameful attitude towards freedom of speech, the individual, and all those other civil liberties for which the democracy struggled.

I quote this for several reasons. One is to show how smart and creative people such as Gorky are used and then betrayed by revolutions such as the Communist one (or the recent one in Egypt, which has been on my mind lately). Another is to show how early the character of the Russian Revolution was apparent; no one who was paying attention to the events of 1917 had any real excuses for thinking that its results would be any different, or any better, than what they eventually were. Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but Gorky had foresight. Unfortunately for him and so very many others (twenty million? more?) his foresight came too late, and there were too few who shared it.

Gorky’s own story is a dark and terrible one indeed. But that’s not the point of this post, which is to reflect on how uncommon it is that revolutions are not betrayed, and why.

Revolutions tend to attract an alliance—usually quite temporary—of different groups with very different psychological and political makeups and motives. First there are the idealists, the ones who see human nature as infinitely malleable, and who believe their own rhetoric and that of others who would manipulate their naivete to get what they want. Then there are those on the bottom—let’s call them the proletariat, although the group has had other names in other times—who in a society such as czarist Russia had a lot to complain about, and who wanted things to get materially better for themselves. Then there are also those who love liberty, and who see the revolution as a way to further that cause. These groups are not mutually exclusive, but there’s not necessarily a great deal of overlap.

And then there are the leaders who are adept at taking power and whose rhetoric inflames and inspires the others to action. They are the most interesting of all. In the American Revolution we were fortunate enough to have leaders who cared deeply about liberty, and who had thought long and hard about the seduction of power and how to draw up institutions to resist it and the tyranny that could follow. This is rare, because such character traits are antithetical to those that ordinarily animate revolutionaries.

People who are attracted to that line of work tend to be extremists in their cause, “ends justifies the means” folk. That is, if they believe in their cause at all; some are nihilists. But my guess is that many or even most of them do believe, at least initially, but that overarching it all there’s almost always a driving personality trait: the desire for and love of power for its own sake. That is antithetical to considerations of liberty. Revolutionaries so often have as their goal liberty for me (the leaders themselves) but not for thee, and anyone who gets in the way of the glorious enterprise is fair game.

Successful revolutionary leaders must be adept at wielding power not only within their countries, against the regime they wish to overthrow, but within their own revolutionary cadres. That’s how they get to be leaders in the first place. After the success of the revolution, when they come to control the government, they continue to use those skills to fight to stay on top, and that ordinarily requires a strong dose of ruthlessness. They are generally quite up to the task. Stalin, for example, was a master at it—his solution, like that of so many others, was to kill the opposition.

Over time he killed almost all his old colleagues. But you know, there was that wonderful omelet he was making—although I think that goal became subsumed quite early to the other goal of Stalin’s, which was total control.

Yes, Stalin was just about the worst of the offenders against liberty. But those who would separate him out as qualitatively different from the others such as Lenin and Trotsky are sadly mistaken. The seeds of Stalinism were present from the very beginning, and they were inherent in the entire project, which was to go against human nature. How could that be accomplished except by brute force? Here’s Trotsky way back in December of 1917, as quoted by Amis:

In not more than a month’s time terror will assume very violent forms, after the example of the great French Revolution; the guillotine… will be ready for our enemies… that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which makes man shorter by a head.

He accepted and even embraced the prospect.

Here in the United States we were very, very lucky. We had leaders who rejected the “great” French Revolution and its “remarkable invention,” and therefore we were able—not perfectly, but to an extent greater than in any other revolution—to preserve liberty in its aftermath. So on this Memorial Day, as we honor the fallen in wars that had as one of their goals to preserve that liberty both at home and abroad, let us also mourn the fallen in so many revolutions betrayed.

[ADDENDUM: Some people have pointed out in the comments section here that the French Revolution came after the American one. My reply is that yes, I’m well aware that the French revolution came shortly afterward. But the French solution – to murder the opposition, and to establish a Reign of Terror – was always present as an alternative, and was actually quite an obvious one, even without the French Revolution having happened. It was the way it had been done since time immemorial, really. The Founding Fathers in the US rejected not the guillotine itself, but something like it. A rope or firing squad or ax would have done just as well; the guillotine was only used by the French because it was thought to be more humane, so it’s not the instrument I’m talking about, it’s the idea of killing off the opposition without legal niceties being involved. But I admit I should have phrased it more clearly in the original post.]

A song for Memorial Day

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve posted this song before, but I think it bears repeating, especially on Memorial Day.

It’s Tim McGraw’s extraordinarily moving song “If You’re Reading This:”

If you’re readin’ this
My momma’s sittin’ there
Looks like I only got a one way ticket over here.
I sure wish I could give you one more kiss
War was just a game we played when we were kids
Well I’m layin’ down my gun
I’m hanging up my boots
I’m up here with God and we’re both watchin’ over you

So lay me down
In that open field out on the edge of town
And know my soul
Is where my momma always prayed that it would go.
If you’re readin’ this I’m already home.

If you’re readin’ this
Half way around the world
I won’t be there to see the birth of our little girl
I hope she looks like you
I hope she fights like me
And stands up for the innocent and the weak
I’m layin’ down my gun,
I’m hanging up my boots
Tell dad I don’t regret that I followed in his shoes

So lay me down
In that open field out on the edge of town
And know my soul
is where my momma always prayed that it would go
If you’re readin’ this, I’m already hoooommmmmeeee

If you’re readin’ this,
There’s gonna come a day
You move on and find someone else and that’s okay
Just remember this
I’m in a better place
Soldiers live in peace and angels sing amazing grace

So lay me down
In that open field out on the edge of town
And know my soul is where my momma always prayed that it would go
If you’re readin’ this
If you’re readin’ this
I’m already home

Obama & Sons

The New Neo Posted on by

That is, Daughters. Obama’s slip of the tongue—saying “my sons” when he has daughters—seems very odd indeed.

Does he have sons we don’t know about? Or perhaps he always wanted sons, and this is in the nature of a Freudian slip?

Or is the more pedestrian explanation the fact that the error isn’t quite as bad as it looks, because the substitution isn’t of “sons” for “daughters,” but of “my” for “your.” The original line was this:

I want women to control their own health choices, just like I want my daughters to have the same opportunities as your sons.

Obama said “my sons” instead, getting stuck in an echo of the phrase “my daughters” and making it symmetrical (“my daughters/my sons”) rather than oppositional (“my daughters/your sons”).

If anything, I think the slip is more a symptom of his increasing tension as a candidate than anything else. So I cut Obama some slack here—although something tells me I’m going to get a lot of disagreement on this one.

Movie musicals and rub a dub dubbing, and Audrey Hepburn

The New Neo Posted on by

In yesterday’s thread about the undeserving poor, commenter IGotBupkis took aim at the musical “My Fair Lady” versus the movie version of the play “Pygmalion.” His comment was rather long (go here to read the whole thing), but I’ll excerpt a bit:

I’ve always been of the opinion that [“My Fair Lady”] sucks. BIG time.

a) It’s just horribly miscast. Hepburn as Eliza? Who the eph can possibly look at her and NOT see the beauty therein? It’s preposterous. And Harrison, well, Harrison played Higgins as a cold, emotionless fish…

(b) To take [playwright Shaw’s] words [in “Pygmalion”] and intersperse them with music and such is to destroy the inherent cadences and rhythms he set up. Just as there are some films which ought not to be colorized…as the directors were talented enough to USE the interplay of light and shadow that B&W gave a picture, so, too, is the notion of taking Shaw’s work and making a musical out of it.

In general, the hierarchy of preference in my mind goes like this, with only a few exceptions: books over movies, and stage productions over films. But straight plays over musical versions of the same thing, even when Shaw is the playwright? I’m divided on that because I see the genres as so different that each stands alone as a complete and satisfying work of art.

But not the movie of the musical “My Fair Lady.” I’m with IGotBupkis on that one. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of a film musical that holds a candle to its stage musical version (many of which I had the good fortune to see in the originals). In fact, most movie musicals are barely watchable to me, faint echoes of their glorious stage selves.

That’s true for MFL, too. Audrey Hepburn is too fragile and lovely to begin with, too much of a lady with a bit of dirt smeared charmingly on her face. And Harrison is a much colder and gruffer Higgins, far more repellent than Leslie Howard in the film (not to mention the huge age difference between Hepburn and Harrison, which goes further to unbalance the film), although I still think his performance works on a comic level if not a deeper one.

But the musical itself is a great one. I saw it as a small child, with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison, and it was a delightful masterpiece. I saw it later in various excellent revivals, and it was different but always wonderful. Shaw’s dialogue comes shining through in all its wit and humor, and since it is a rather light theme the music fits right in, at least to me. What’s more, many of the lyrics were inspired by Shaw’s words in the play.

But movie musicals, as opposed to musicals on the stage, require a suspension of reality that just doesn’t work for me. With a proscenium arch, a curtain, and all the conventions of the theater which let the reader know we’re in another and different—and more magical—world, the fact that the characters break into song periodically is only minimally jarring. On the screen, there’s a different expectation, and although I’m not exactly sure why, it seems far more absurd that people are singing and dancing when they should be going about their ordinary business.

And then there’s the fact—as commenter “Susanamantha” points out—that Hepburn is lip-syncing in MFL. Why, oh why oh why, cast an actor or actress in a musical who can’t cut the mustard as a singer? Surely there are enough available who can. The dubbing adds an extra layer of artificiality to a situation already overburdened with it, and not in a good way.

Movie lip-syncing (which I wrote about before, here) used to be a lot more popular than it is today. Commonly, the actors and actresses involved (and this includes Audrey Hepburn in”MFL”) did sing while the film was being made, and then they were dubbed afterward, sometimes without their prior knowledge. In MFL, Hepburn was led to believe her vocals would be used in the movie, and she was singing every note for all she was worth. The directors used a technique whereby for most songs the entire thing was dubbed, but for others they inserted another singer only for the high parts, which gives those songs an odd effect as the voice shifts back and forth between Hepburn’s real voice and the dubber, Marnie Nixon.

Here is Hepburn singing “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” herself (not very good, IMHO; I can see why she was dubbed):

And here’s the way it appeared in the movie (Marnie Nixon all the way):

And here’s a mixed song, as it appeared in the movie, with Hepburn doing the majority of the vocals and Nixon coming in for the higher notes (for example, you can hear Marni begin at around 1:20):

Here’s what Hepburn herself had to say about the process:

Although Hepburn had lip synced to her recorded tracks during filming, Nixon looped her vocals in post-production and was given multiple attempts to match Hepburn’s lip movements precisely. Overall, about 90% of her singing was dubbed despite being promised that most of her vocals would be used. Hepburn’s voice remains in one line in “I Could Have Danced All Night”, in the first verse of “Just You Wait”, and in the entirety of its reprise in addition to sing-talking in parts of “The Rain in Spain” in the finished film. When asked about the dubbing of an actress with such distinctive vocal tones, Hepburn frowned and said, “You could tell, couldn’t you? And there was Rex, recording all his songs as he acted … next time ””” She bit her lip to prevent her saying more. She later admitted that she would have never have accepted the role knowing that Warner intended to have nearly all of her singing dubbed.

Hepburn was an actress with exquisite taste, and she shows it there. But it was also true that her singing just wasn’t up to the demands of the role, and her charms were also unsuited to portraying the untutored Eliza of the beginning of the film.

But I love Audrey; there was nobody even remotely like her. And here she is, doing a better job of singing a song more suited to her skills:

The glorious Egyptian revolution…

The New Neo Posted on by

…seems to be going the way of most glorious revolutions—not well (although I suppose it depends who’s doing the judging).

It’s fifty-fifty between the Muslim Brotherhood and a Mubarak surrogate in the first round of voting:

In what many described as a “nightmare scenario” that will mean a polarised and possibly violent second round…”It feels as if the revolution never took place,” lamented a despondent George Ishaq, a founder of the leftwing Kifaya Party.

“The Brotherhood are despotic and fanatical and Shafiq is the choice of Mubarak. It is a very bad result. The revolution is not part of this contest.”…

Hisham Kassem, a publisher who had backed Moussa, said: “It’s a disaster. Shafiq will try to restore the Mubarak regime. And my trust of the Brotherhood is minus zero.”

Other liberals retreated into black humour. “All it takes now is for Mubarak to be released and be made vice president,” one tweeted. “This is not the second republic,” said another, “it’s a stillborn deformity”.

Zeinobia, a prominent blogger, compared the outcome to the humiliating defeat of Egypt and the other Arab states by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. In an already tense atmosphere, there could well be serious unrest if, as some predict, Mubarak is acquitted on charges of corruption and illegal killings next month.

From the very first article I wrote about the revolution in Egypt, I mentioned my fear that the end result of elections would be that the Muslim Brotherhood would take power. I’ve never seen any reason to revise that opinion, and it didn’t take any remarkable insight on my part to call it that way right from the start.

[NOTE: I wrote about the Muslim Brotherhood and its history here. And this is about the revolutionary fervor of the young.]

The undeserving poor

The New Neo Posted on by

An exchange in the comments section of this post made me think of one of my favorite scenes from “My Fair Lady.” It’s a discourse on the welfare system by Eliza’s ne-er-do-well father, Alfred Doolittle:

Here it is:

And here’s the same speech, in the earlier movie rendition of its original appearance in “My Fair Lady’s” prototype “Pygmalion’:

[ADDENDUM: Leslie Howard, who played Higgins in the movie “Pygmalion,” led a relatively short but interesting life. Among other things, he was what used to be called a “ladies’ man,” and once said that he “didn’t chase women but ”¦ couldn’t always be bothered to run away.”)

Divide and conquer?

The New Neo Posted on by

This Politico piece about how Obama’s campaign has been flatfooted and awkward contains the following rather amusing observation:

Some key Democrats say they have been dismayed watching Obama become a divider not a uniter, trying to incite anger among women, students and older voters.

To be fair, Politico is trying to contrast Obama’s 2012 overt campaign message with his 2008 overt campaign message, although even back in 2008, Obama talked out of both sides of his mouth on that. However, unless they haven’t been paying attention for the last four years, those “key Democrats” quoted should have noticed that there’s no way Obama could run with a “uniter” message this time without sounding ludicrous to all but the most devoted Obamaphiles.

Or it’s all just spin.

Obama the stoner

The New Neo Posted on by

So all right already—Obama was a stoner in high school.

Didn’t we already know that? And although the photos are rather interesting in a retro-70s way, do we really care?

Not all that much, although it certainly tells us some of what Obama was doing way back when. For that matter, I never cared much about George Bush’s drinking, or whether Clinton inhaled, although I wouldn’t have liked an alcoholic or pot-smoking president.

What’s important about the Obama-the-stoner story is how little attention has been paid to it contrasted to how much attention it would received had it been in the past of some Republican candidate. I get awfully tired of remarking on that sort of thing, but it remains true. The MSM has been remarkably uncurious about so many aspects of Barack’s—then known as Barry—life.

The story is more interesting for the questions it raises about certain unknowns connected with Obama’s academic performance. If he was such a stoner at Punahoe, how did he get into Occidental, and if he was (by his own admission) an indifferent student at Occidental, how did he get into Columbia? And so on and so forth.

But maybe this was how Obama learned history. I can think of worse ways:

[NOTE: By the way, Vanderleun of American Digest was on the case long, long ago.]

Suzanne Farrell

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps you’ve never seen Suzanne Farrell dance.

Perhaps you’ve never even heard of her. She’s sixty-six now and retired from performing for over twenty years. But in her heyday she was unique, and choreographer George Balanchine was besotted with her.

Farrell came to the New York City Ballet, Balanchine’s company, as a teenager and began performing as a soloist very quickly. Just as quickly, the very-much-older Balanchine fell in love with her, divorced his wife Tanaquil LeClerc (once another of his ballerinas, LeClerc had tragically been forced to retire very early in her career because she’d contracted polio), and hoped to marry Farrell. She refused, and declined to have an affair with him, either, although he kept on choreographing ballet after ballet for her. At 23, she married another NYCB dancer and they both left the company, although she returned many years later.

I saw her dance quite a few times, mostly when she was achingly young. I attended a performance of the famous 1965 production of “Don Quixote” in which Farrell was Dulcinea and the 61-year-old Balanchine danced a worshipful Don Quixote. I didn’t much like it, but Farrell was extraordinary. Although slender, she was never emaciated. She had a tiny head and a longish torso. Taller than most, her body didn’t have that steely, muscled quality so many dancers get, even female ones. She looked softer, gentler, and had a way of moving that I can only describe as liquid (and that’s a compliment, although it might not sound that way).

Farrell didn’t mind being off-balance, but she made off-balance into a kind of balance. Her dancing was almost eccentric; nothing she ever did was ordinary or expected, especially her flowing and flexible upper body and arms.

But perhaps Farrell herself said it best:

A lot of dancers don’t want to move, they just want to pose. I’m not a poser.

Watch: