The Dark Lord of Mordor

Andrew Meier's The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin's Secret Service reminds us that the Soviet Union's battle with its capitalist enemies had important clandestine dimensions. The story of Cy Oggins, an American spy entangled (along with his wife) in the clash of ideologies, illuminates a great deal about interwar espionage, radical politics in America, and the ties that bound American and Soviet strands of communism together.



Oggins' story begins right before the First World War. At that time, many American workers as well as Ivy League intellectuals, immigrants, and pacifists were irresistibly drawn to radical politics. Cy Oggins' journey to the extreme left of American life wasn't all that unusual. Soviet Russia filled many of his countrymen with rapture. Wasn't it extraordinary that a regime had chosen land and peace over war and colonialism, chosen a red flag, the symbol of the workers' struggle, or selected a revolutionary national anthem, the Internationale? As Maier points out, many Americans were so inspired that they actually supported a new form of Russian tourism for those who wished to see what the future looked like. Or, to put matters the way Meier does, this was an epoch in which the theories behind great 19th century economic treatises were "spilling out onto the streets."



Oggins had plenty of reasons to be inspired by Russia, and plenty of other reasons to be repulsed by Russia's capitalist opponents. In addition to the general complaints about bourgeois exploitation of American workers (and indeed Cuban and Philippine ones), the Left had reason to complain about the way America's ruling class abused its power in undemocratic, illegal actions against worker-supported parties and movements. This was the age of the Wobblies, Emma Goldman and anarchists, Maurice Hindus, war resisters, Beard and Dewey, etc. And overseas, this was also the age of the Comintern, when the Soviet Union was, at least theoretically, only the nexus of an international strategy to liberate working people everywhere. Indeed, Meier reminds us that even in Russia ordinary Communists waited from one day to the next for the German Revolution that Marx had promised.



And all this Left-wing excitement existed even before the Great Depression, when capitalism seemed be collapsing even from the perspective of its greatest proponents in Washington and on Wall Street.



The Lost Spy does a wonderful job of showing readers why communism was so exciting. It also explains how international spy networks functioned, and how valuable so-called "traitors" could be to Moscow, euphemistically called The Center by its various agents abroad. Oggins ended up tracking White Russians and Trotskyites in France, and Japanese militarism in Shanghai and the Far East puppet state of Manchukuo. The book also tracks the hazards of working for Stalin. Many of the Oggins' friends were executed in Stalin's Great Purges. Most others were at least forced to confront some bitter truths about the Great Leader, as Stalin was sometimes known, including the fact that he eventually chose to ally himself with Nazi Germany. Oggins himself ended up in Lubyanka, one of the most infamous prisons in Russia, before being sent to a concentration camp in the distant north, where he inevitably died.



Ultimately, The Lost Spy elucidates the strange interplay between the ordinary and extraordinary in the secret life of spies. One minute the book is about a traveling man's sad inability to spend time with his seven year son; the next minute the book is about how a single spy could be of value to the Generalissimo as he sought to come to grips with Trotsky's Fourth Internationale or indeed the Empire of Japan. But as interesting as Meier makes his spies seem, Stalin is even more interesting. In this book, Stalin is Souron from the Lord of the Rings, searching out resisters across the world with a roving eye, no matter how small or seemingly innocuous. In this world, Trotsky's apparently futile resistance, takes on new significance. Even as his son and closest supporters fall to the rising tide of evil, Trotsky's hobbit-like opposition continued to occupy the thoughts of the Dark Lord of Mordor right up until an ice pick put an end to him.

Becoming Human

Before I had a child I sometimes attended Ethical Humanism Society meetings. I exaggerate only a little when I say that my wife and I seemed to be the only couple in attendance under the age of 75, and certainly the only multi-racial couple. Ethical Humanist Society meetings felt like Unitarian church services stripped of all of the unnecessary ceremony and amateur choral music. There was a lecture, usually on politics or ethics, followed by audience questions, a five-minute musical interlude, and announcements, and people were free to go.



Although I loved it there, people weren't friendly. Far from it: elderly couples routinely shushed us, routinely shushed their neighbors, and routinely shushed one another. They cared so much about the topics under discussion, they had no time for common courtesies. On one occasion, an ancient lady heckled her husband as he rose to question the speaker. "Saul, shut up. Nobody wants to hear you ask the same question about Israel over and over again." Undeterred, Saul asked his question (which, admittedly, bore no relationship to the topic at hand), sat down, and proceeded to hiss this simple statement to his wife of perhaps 50 years: "I hate you."

I felt at home there. Why? Because notwithstanding the median age of congregants, the Ethical Humanist Society is one of the only places in American where people value politics. Of course, most members of the Ethical Humanist Society were Democrats, Socialists, or Green Party members, but they were political in a sense that trascended party affiliation. They believed with Aristotle that people are fundamentally political creatures. They were alive only insofar as they made conscious and collaborative efforts to choose a better world for themselves and their proginy.



I recall a book by Margaret Meade entitled "Four Ways of Being Human." This title is telling: it reminds us that people can learn what it means to be a human being in very different ways. Culture is everything. When I was young, I learned that personhood was predicated on politics and little else. You could certainly talk about economics, religion, anthropology, history, and even art, but only insofar as these topics helped to shape your politics. It wasn't that politics was more important than religion, but rather that religion was itself a political undertaking. If you were religious, that was fine, but it was up to you to explain how your faith in God was going to help make this world a better place. Perhaps this was a shallow, one-dimensional way of looking at life. Even so, this was how I was raised.



Middle aged now, I've stopped being political. Unlike my mother or her father, I don't lobby, campaign, argue with friends, write letters to the editor, participate in board members, launch nonprofit organizations, etc. However, I've never stopped believing in politics. My atavistic, 19th century view of politics is at least helpful for understanding Bolshevik Russia. Most modern Americans now subconsciously believe that one becomes human--as Margaret Meade would say--only after they have mastered the complexities of consumerism. But in 1917, this wasn't the case. People were apt to sacrifice almost everything else in order to create a new and better political life.

The Physics of Shostakovich

Two weeks ago I decided that my commitment to Russian culture had to extend to Russian composers whose work was being performed at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra--C.S.O. for short. If I didn’t go to see the upcoming performance of Rachmaninoff and Shostakovitch, who would? (I didn’t realize that real Russians had already purchased tickets directly in front of us). No matter than I knew nothing at all about orchestral music, had little appreciation for what is commonly if mistakenly called “classical” music, and dropped out of piano after a single year, my fingers never reaching beyond ten, or perhaps twelve, ivory keys, before my teacher, who I still recall (30 years later) received a paltry five dollars an hour, suffered a nervous breakdown—a term that mean very little to me at the time but, sadly, means more and more to me as I move ever deeper into middle age—and left off teaching altogether.



No matter, I bought the tickets and even attended a pre-performance lecture by a noted musicologist. The historical draw for me, is that Shostakovich had composed this work in memory of Russia’s first modern revolution, that of 1905. According to the program, 1905 was the unifying revolution, the one almost all shades of Russian educated public opinion accepted, whether liberal, socialist, or merely constitutional. The musicologist told us that Shostakovich was Stalin’s composer, as our co-author, Nick, has previously reminded us by posting on a book that explores this complicated relationship in some depth.



In fact, Stalin was a great lover of music and also of Shostakovich for the most part. Shostakovich the composer possessed many of the hallmarks of Socialist Realism, and this generally but not always pleased Stalin. These elements of Socialist Realism, and Stalin’s patronage in general, have had an ambiguous impact on the composer’s legacy in Russia and elsewhere. After Stalin’s death, liberal Russians distained Stalin’s aesthetic judgments, and in any even rightly perceived that Shostakovich had missed out on a few of the most important elements of musical modernism.



Even so, the lecturer told us that “1905” was an excellent piece of music, and one that effectively incorporated many of the Russian songs of rebellion and revolution that were the patrimony of most Russians at the time. He also speculated that the “1905” might have been an oblique critique of Khrushchev’s decision in 1956 to brutally crush a popular revolt against Soviet hegemony in Hungary. The evening also included Rachmaninoff, and the central role of virtuoso piano parts seemed to make this easier to love than Shostakovich.

Yet one couldn’t listen to the Romantic stuff without picturing Liberace in a white, diamond studded outfit on stage. And thus, as I imagine my more musically literature readers can stand more of my uneducated ramblings about music, I shall quit this post. And the reader need not fear that I will decided to analyze the accomplishments of Soviet physicists anytime soon, though I reserve the right to do so.

Moscow Times

If Soviet Roulette has a competitor, it’s surely the Moscow Times. Up until this point, Soviet Roulette has responded to its opponent with a dignified silence. More than that, this blog has remained blissfully unaware of the Moscow Times’ audience, subject matter, and editorial policy. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we’ve never read a single issue until today. We knew the small paper had a website, www.themoscowtimes.com, and was established in 1992, but little else. Even so, in this era of niche marketing, we can remain silent no longer about a rival entity that has recently become the first Russian newspaper to become available on Kindle.



The issue we’ve look at appeared on 2 February 2010. It focused on business news, and was apparently designed to appeal to North Americans and Europeans were in Russia to do business. Since Russian business is almost synonymous with oil, the paper’s journalists and editorialists wrote about Gazprom, which has a monopoly or gas exports to the tune of about $16 billion a business quarter, rising oil price, and a new oil partnership with Venezuela.




Aside from oil, the paper looked at nuclear talks with the United States, tensions with Georgia over satellites and breakaway S. Ossetia, the phenomenal success of MacDonald’s in Russia, the 8 percent GDP contraction, Ukrainian elections, NATO in Afghanistan, efforts to avoid layoffs in the domestic car industry, allegations of police corruption, the kidnapping of the son of an important businessman, the allegedly flawed logic behind attempts to revive the cult of Yeltsin and liberal economist, Gaidar, and the battle between Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and the neighborhood of Rechnik, which stands to be leveled in a redevelopment scheme.

Most interestingly, Moscow Times hosts a number of different advertisements for Moscow expatriate communities. If you’re stuck in Moscow for business, you can choose between groups for newcomers, alumni, Democrats Abroad, entrepreneurs, speed daters, Nigerians, people are practicing their Russian language skills, etc. The real estate ads are interesting too, in that you have the opportunity select Stalin-era apartments or even “pre-revolutionary ones” according to either your politics or aesthetic predilections, whichever matters most to you. Moscow Times also helps expatriates or perhaps tourists to find the best in Russian high culture via Dostoevsky, and Ostrovsky performance and events at the Bolshoi Theatre.

With grudging respect, Soviet Roulette must conclude this post with the grudging acknowledgement of the usefulness of a column on the “five books to read on Soviet and Russian film.” In Oscar-season parlance, the nominees are: “Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film,” “Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography” by Oksana Bulkakowa, “Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception,” “Ivan the Terrible” by Yuri Tsivian, and “Tarkovsky: Cinema as Power.”

Breaking News

If I had a readership, it might be interested to know that Soviet Roulette (why not refer to a corporate entity now that I have got official business cards?) is "in talks" with a fellow Russophile to start a Lake County Russian literature reading group.

I realize that publicizing these discussions before they are finalized is tres gauche. (I recall Joseph Heller's line, that a character in Something Happened was "too gauche to know what gauche meant.) And I think specifically of a friend's blog that tracks her own dating adventures in real time (It's hard enough to plan a romantic date without subjecting that date to the scrutiny of a thousand blog readers, isn't it?). Even so, this blog hasn't broken a single piece of news to date, so it's time to start.

At first, we discussed a general Russian literature reading group, but that seemed too open-ended. This led us to agree upon Tolstoy as the logical unifying theme for this group. We've all read War and Peace and Anna Karenina, I'm sure. But don't a lot of us overlook Tolstoy's shorter work? And isn't Tolstoy the perfect choice for a reading group? He dominated the 19th century, but also lived well into the twentieth century, on the cusp of the Revolution.

And Tolstoy is for everybody, as the bumper sticker, or bell hooks, might say. He's written on everyone and everything. And if the reading group decides to branch out to other great authors, Tolstoy has had a great deal of personal contact with almost every other major Russian author of the 19th and early 20th century, including Chekhov, Gorky, and Turgenev. (In fact, I've just come across an interesting passage in Stanislavsky's biography where Tolstoy invites Stanislavsky over for assistance on one one of his plays but then demurely allows his wife to berate the famous actor and director for his presumption.) He also seems to be Plato to Dostoevsky's Aristotle, so it wouldn't be wrong for the group to move its way over to the Gambler or other short Dostoevsky works, would it?

I like Tolstoy for this because he's written so much nonfiction too, so the group could conceivably spend some time on the author's stance on morality, religion, cultural criticism, art, vegetarianism, peace, nonviolence, opposition to the death penalty, and politics. Plus, there's the voluminous Tolstoy memoirs and work by rival family members, Tolstoy cult followers, etc.

At any rate, we plan to have a syllabus so perhaps blog followers will keep up with the readings and respond to blog discussions on the readings in question.

My (Own) Invented Country

Forgive me for posting a second time on the magazine, Russian Life, but I’m still under its spell. Reading Russian Life, I’m reminded of the scholarship that emerged from Benedict Anderson’s anthropological book, Invented Traditions. That book and its imitators reminded us all that national traditions are constructed rather than timeless objects. (See also Isabel Allende's brilliant book on her own artificial nationality, My Invented Country.)Indeed, the very essence of a country, say Scotland’s affinity for bagpipes or kilts, or the British love of tea, may have been adopted only recently, and adopted from a foreign country to boot. Anderson’s thesis was that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, the result of literary culture and modern technologies such as the printing press. People had to learn through the act of reading that they were supposed to be aligned with many other people in their home nation-state.

The implications of this truism about the artificial nature of national identity are profound and far-reaching. And every issue of Russian Life reminds me of this fact. When you pick up an issue of Russian Life, you see how Russians (and those who write about Russians) are engaged in an active and passionate struggle to create meaning out of the potentially meaningless. What does it mean to be a Russian? Russians are interesting primarily because they have answered this question so badly over the centuries. Is Russia an Eastern country, a Western one or some combination thereof? Is Russia inherently despotic or anti-democratic? How important is Orthodoxy to Russia’s sense of self? With so many foreign influences, would Russia be Russian without Russian poetry? Do Russians have to like chess and figure skating to remain Russian?

The British and French and Americans have done such a good job of camouflaging the artificial nature of their own nationalities that these discourses can be extremely dry. In any event, the March/April 2010 issue of Russian Life tells us a lot about the cracks in a Russian nationhood that is constructed internally, but also in dialogue with external actors (such as Russian Life.)

To their credit, the editors are aware of these cracks and report on them. In this issue, they explore the oddities of the Russian language, and even the way in which Russians take pride in these oddities. Apparently, the Russian fondness for rhyme leads to the following everyday catch phrases, that bare little resemble to their ostensible meanings: “I kindly invite you to a lean-to,” “just a piece as big as a cow’s toe,” “love is a carrot,” “What people you meet in Hollywood,” “a horse in a coat,” “a cat soup,” et cetera and so on.

This month, Russian Life also deals with Russia’s attitude toward NATO (i.e., the West) in Afghanistan, Russian orchestral music, the architectural legacy of the Kremlin, the nationalist assertion that abortion is undermining Russia’s power, Russia’s lost cultural heritage in Riga, the Nobel nomination of Svetlanda Gannushkina (member of the governing board of the International Memorial Society), and so on. One interesting aspect of Russian Life’s approach to the enigma of Russia’s identity (to paraphrase Churchill’s cliche) is that the Russian Life appears to embrace both liberal and conservative approaches to Russia’s efforts to stabilize its sense of self.

On the one hand, the editors seem to mock Putin, on the other hand the editors necessarily acknowledge the fragility of the liberal approach to Russian nationalism. For Russians really suffered a psychic loss by being displaced from a former homeland such as Latvia, and Russians really haven’t quite recovered from their national disgrace at the hands of chess prodigy, Bobby Fischer. It’s fascinating to follow the magazine as it attempts to play both sides of the national identity issue.

Decline and Fall

I wonder what they are saying in Russia about the country's performance in the Olympic figure skating competition. Shut out of the women's and pairs competition, they muster only Plushenko's silver and a bronze for Dobnina and Shabalin. Gone is the legendary Russian elegance, the impression that the ice had been annexed by the Bolshoi ballet. Russian figure skating could entice even Cold War kids into a fleeting, forbidden admiration. How could an enemy be so evil if they produced such beautiful people?

Of course they weren't all graceful. Some were defined more by pragmatic bullishness and angry haircuts. Plushenko lost on style, not athleticism. Most startling were those scary outfits of Dobnina and Shabalin, as if Diaghilev were pushing them out there to shock the bourgeoisie. Their bodies were entwined with ropes, as if they were into bondage rather than ballet.

I see on wikipedia that the total medals won by Russia and the Soviet Union combined is the same as the US's haul: 44 medals. With the center of the skating world clearly shifting toward Asia, this marks the end of one of the most attractive products of the socialist machine. It's confusing too that Russians, women especially, are so ascendent in the tennis world, a phenomenon that only began with the fall of the Soviet Union. Why would socialism be good for skating but bad for tennis, while authoritarian capitalism is good for tennis but bad for skating? Or is something changing in Russian culture itself?