Review: Helen Rappaport, Caught in the Revolution, Petrograd 1917

Living capital cities are always full of foreigners and always have been. Occasionally, a sclerotic regime has tried to keep them out – of Lhasa, for example – but most regimes need them as diplomats, bankers, businessmen, engineers, skilled technicians, doctors, translators, chefs, nannies, tutors, entertainers …

St Petersburg and Petrograd (as it was from 1914) was full of foreigners – indeed, bringing in foreigners had been government policy from the time of Peter the Great. All that the outbreak of World War One did was to empty the city of Germans (except for the spies) and replenish their ranks with additional Allied personnel. So when Petrograd led Russia into Revolution, not just once but twice in 1917, there were plenty of foreigners around to observe what went on and Helen Rappaport bases herself on the records left by a relatively small cast of American, British and French foreigners in Petrograd. She has produced a highly readable book though rather unbalanced. Foreigners from neutral countries – and there were many in the First World War including Russia’s near- neighbours Denmark and Sweden – were well-represented in Russia working for Red Cross or similar relief organisations and they may have had a different perspective on events in Russia to those involved in the Allied cause. There were also at least some more working class foreigners than those to be found here. Rappaport offers a view from the middle and upper classes.

She has researched thoroughly and I think that her narrative of the February Revolution which brought down the unloved and unmourned Romanovs is very strong. For those at the time this was the Revolution and what came after in October was a coup.

But her lack of sympathy for the Bolsheviks does lead to some carelessness. She produces “property is theft” as a “favourite Marxist dictum” (page 308) when of course it is the catch-phrase of a nineteenth century French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Lenin in 1917 did not speak of property as theft but urged the expropriation of the expropriators using the more striking phrase “Loot the looters!” In an economy and administration which had literally ground to a halt, the call to loot the looters was about the only means available to the government to bring about any kind of redistribution of wealth, whether from landlord to peasant or private owner to state. Even then, it could not solve the problem of hunger which bulks large in Rappaport’s narrative. The Romanovs could not feed Petrograd, the Provisional Government could not, nor could the Bolsheviks. Many starved and between 1917 – 21 the population plunged as those who could, left.

Again, she makes another small slip, saying that the Bolsheviks finally adopted the Western calendar on 13 February 1918, instantly adding 13 days (page 326). In fact, in Bolshevik controlled areas, 31 January 1918 was followed by 14 February which would otherwise have been 1 February. I have a postcard from a Danish traveller in Siberia writing home on the 14th to say cheerfully that for the first time it’s the same date in both Russia and Denmark.

I do think there is more material around than Rappaport has discovered and she recognises this in soliciting access to fresh sources (page 340). There is, for example, material written on the back of postcards  since Russia’s postal service did function right through 1917 almost without interruption – even in Petrograd and even if unreliable. Lots of mail did not arrive at its destination and  lots was delayed. Between the collapse of Imperial mail censorship and the imposition of Bolshevik censorship, there was a space in which people probably felt much freer to write about what they saw and what they were thinking, though the legacy of censorship probably still cast its shadow

Review: Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch

The Female Eunuch was published in 1970 when Germaine Greer was thirty or thirty one. I forget whether I read it at the time, though I was reading other Second Wave feminist work, and I decided to (re-?) read it now partly because she is someone who quite a lot of people now hate and want to No Platform.

The book starts a bit uncertainly as Greer tries to behave like a proper scientist, adducing and evaluating evidence. Some of this discussion seems a bit quaint because science has moved on – for example, DNA testing did not exist in 1970. But it also feels quaint when it engages the literature which the Discovery of Sex in the 1960s spawned, a literature in which it is very easy to get lost as it searches, sometimes blindly, for the location of the female orgasm. Greer has a Queen Victoria moment when she writes of female ejaculation that it is “utterly fanciful” (page  44). Then the book moves into sections where I felt that the text was probably being eked out with material from Greer’s Cambridge doctoral researches. Finally, Greer finds her own voice in the last hundred pages and lets rip.

A few things struck me. This is a book about relations between men and women. Lesbians get a few mentions and gay men barely any (and the ones I noticed were not sympathetic). It’s not Greer’s scene and she isn’t really very interested. You could say that the whole book is about Greer’s own dilemmas. She is a heterosexual woman who wants to relate to men (and probably in the plural rather than the singular) but where the ways available for doing so are profoundly unattractive, unlike individual men. She is beautiful, clever, loud and likes relationships and sex - none of which taken singly may sound particularly off-putting but which offered as a package seem to have nowhere to go. Beautiful on its own allows you to be some man’s trophy. Clever on its own allows you to be a blue stocking but after the experience of Cambridge, No Thank You. Loud is more difficult thanks to polite society and likewise sex, which doesn’t seem to go with being someone’s wife and having children. In the last hundred pages, Greer decides that marriage is the main enemy and comprehensively trashes it. On all fronts, she does not want to be a eunuch and, to a greater or lesser extent, that is the deal she feels she is being offered. Why would anyone want to be a eunuch?

You can see where this might later lead her and I was looking out for signs of attitudes which have made her the focus of so much anger and it was there in the odd cutting remark.

In 1968-70 I was a graduate student in London and hung out with second wave feminists who gravitated into things like the London Women’s Liberation Workshops. They appear at page 349:

When these worthy ladies appeared at the Miss World Contest with their banners saying “We are not sexual objects” (a proposition that no one seemed inclined to deny) they were horrified to find that girls from the Warwick University movement were chanting and dancing around the police…

The parenthesis did make me smile, for a moment, but immediately it's obvious that it manages to be both a masculine unchivalrous remark and an unsisterly aside, the offence compounded by the acid contrast of “worthy ladies” and “girls”. But behind the cutting remark there is a coherent and worthy intellectual position: Greer is quite clear that for her feminism is not an Anti-Sex League and that sexual desire when not corrupted by patriarchy and capitalist advertising is indeed prompted and sustained by individuals in all their individuality and not by persons as objects – something she acknowledges in a very nice, single sentence about a truck driver and his wife:

I remember a truck driver telling me once about his wife, how sexy and clever and loving she was, and how beautiful. He showed me a photograph of her and I blushed for guilt because I had expected something plastic and I saw a woman by trendy standards plain, fat and ill-clad. (page 162)

So you might say she lands herself in hot water unnecessarily, carried away by irritation and frustration. But if we made that a No Platform offence, we would not need any platforms at all.

Review: Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

This is a lovely book written by a thirty year old woman who has returned to her native Orkney to recover having written off the best part of ten years in London – most of the time spent in becoming an alcoholic and staying that way. The book has a natural honesty, though I would avoid phrases like “searingly honest” since that conventional trope tends to make the honesty a smaller thing than it is.

A large part of the book’s interest lies in the way Amy Liptrot uses her habitat in Orkney – the sea, the rocks, the birds, the wind – as a thing to think with about her predicament. Occasionally, she seems to be trying too hard at the metaphor or at creating what I suppose T S Eliot might have called the “Objective Correlative” of her feelings. But most of the time it does not feel forced and most of the time it is disciplined – the book does not wander off at tangents but sticks to the twin themes of alcoholism and the exploration and inventorying of the natural world to which she has removed herself.

This discipline also helps the book to come across as an act of reparation. She is repairing herself in writing it, making good wasted time by doing something with her life, and also making some kind of gift to other people including those she has alienated along the alcoholic way. That surely is one reason way the reader ends up wanting to wish her well.

Review: Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think

In 1958, aged ten, my father took me on a day trip from Folkestone to Boulogne aboard the Royal Daffodil, one of the ancient ferries which British Railways used for the Channel crossings. You didn’t need a proper passport – a disposable day passport was available cheaply and easily. I found a terrific toy car – a Citroën DS – in a Boulogne shop and on the way back through British Customs kept my hand clamped over it in my raincoat pocket in the belief that it might be an illegal import. It probably was.

Now as someone whose way out of England is still through the Channel crossings, I read the News a bit anxiously as the border between England and France gets harder each day, wondering who will close it first. It was the English who inevitably opted out of Schengen – the word “British” is inaccurate in these matters – but I believe it will be the French who, one way or another, will shut the border completely. They would, wouldn’t they?

There will be lots of people buying Hazareesingh’s book. We would all like to know how the French think because we know that they do think and that this is one of the reasons why they are so difficult to live with unlike the English who don’t think, just get on with life as we have always lived it and intend to continue. We don’t, for example, have to worry about heads of our Ruritanian state – we have them already neatly lined up, hair parted, for the next one hundred years – and increasingly we don’t have to worry about elections: we presently have a government which simply installed itself, promptly telling Parliament that it is now a consultative body like the old Russian Duma.

Hazareesingh’s quite long book is very readable and often amusing. It has two weaknesses. It’s panorama of French thought is quite often not much more than a series of thumbnails. It reminded me in this of Bernard Wasserstein’s On The Eve which I reviewed here a while back. Thumbnails are all right if you are looking for a background briefing but I don’t belong to the class of people who need background briefings on how to deal with the French. The second weakness is its Oxford Common Room geniality. The author has been holed up in Balliol since 1990 and that does not bode well for anyone. At worst, he lets the French off scot-free which may be one reason they have awarded his book one of their big prizes, always a relief to have a foreigner who doesn't trash us.

Hazareesingh’s approach is broadly narrative chronological and it is perhaps this approach which allows the author to avoid anything which you might think of as a confrontation or contestation except in chapter 10 which is more decisive in this respect. What I would like to have seen is more use of the possibilities inherent in the contrast of history and structure – thank you, Lévi-Strauss and Sartre – trying to tease out how the structural awfulness of France today is the product of a history, including an intellectual history. How come the French end up with the paralysed figure of Hollande, who you could see as a sort of tribute act to Brezhnev? How come they end up with so little liberty, so little equality, so little fraternity? Why is it a police state? ( The author never mentions the CRS). Why do the French hate each other so much? Why are they always attracted to authoritarian solutions, left or right? How do they put up with having their lives micromanaged by the state, things closed when you want them open or not allowed to sell what you want, so that the only way to get a plastic bottle of Evian in Paris is to buy it from an illegal street trader? 

Why is the history so grubby and still unacknowledged as such – something on which Hazareesingh might have said more than he does. There is a marked contrast with Germany here. Fanon – a fine thinker and writer - gets in, but that’s about it. Why do they still go around denouncing each other? What is this childish rentreé into the trade union strike season all about? Why have they been  so incredibly conservative about everything down to smoking themselves to death, not learning English, being the slowest to adopt modern communications technology and media, thinking it part of les droits du chien to shit everywhere, and so on and so forth? And one which surely ought to have interested the author more, Why do so few – even none – of their universities figure in World Rankings?

I have a suggestion. The author is incredibly well-read to the point where his book sometimes reads like short book reviews strung together. He should take a deep breath, put all that aside, sit down and write an essay setting out just what he thinks about France. He could title it How I think about the French, even write it in French and put it out, a hundred pages long, no more, through a Parisian publisher. He's done the spade-work already.

Review: Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography

I read this at a couple of sittings and enjoyed every bit of it. It's like Marxism; read this and you have the answer to everything. The ideas underpinning in it are strikingly simple, though only one of them is fully articulated.

First, even now countries are limited or enabled by their basic geography - where they are on the globe, whether they have rivers,mountains, natural harbours, fertile soil, forests or deserts. Marshall makes out a compelling case. Second, geopolitics - geographically influenced or determined political possibilities and necessities - geopolitics is always Realpolitik. Your neighbours are unlikely to be your friends and you have to prepare for the worst. It's always going to be Them or Us, a zero-sum game. You must always be ready to fight.

It's this second, less articulated theory which gives the book its Boys Own Annual feel. They ( usually China, Russia) are out to get us and they will get us if we don't get there first. It's true that Marshall quite often shows understanding for and even some sympathy for what they are about - he gives a very good account of why President Putin felt he had no option but to take Crimea - but his suspects are the usual suspects and he has a Foreword by Sir John Scarlett (Tony Blair's man at MI6 and not exactly a persuasive choice) to back him up.

Keep that reservation in mind but do read the book. It's very well done and full of ideas and small asides you will never even have thought of. He does, for example, give an interesting geographical explanation of why the Americans eventually decided to use the H-bomb on Japan though it doesn't explain why they didn't give the Japanese a demonstration of its power on empty land before they used it on real cities. True, that would not have had the shocking power of the real thing and the Americans felt that it was the viciousness of the Japanese military spirit - don't forget their war crimes - which had to be broken.

Available Now: Trevor Pateman, Materials and Medium - An Aesthetics

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In store now at Basil Blackwell, Broad Street, Oxford  and online at www.bookshop.blackwell.co.uk

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Review: Lauren Elkin - Flaneuse

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There was a time – and I don’t know when it ended – when if you were self-assured, had the necessary leisure and some ability to write, you could write about pretty much anything which took your fancy, expressing your opinions or sentiments, often in short literary form (the essay), and you would have a decent chance of finding a publisher who would put you into print. You would then become a contributor to the genre of Belles Lettres.

At some point, belles lettres got put under pressure and specifically by professionalised academic writing where it was obligatory to distinguish fact and opinion and, in either case, obligatory to situate what you were saying fully and explicitly in the field of what other people had been saying - and preferably, very recently saying. The footnote and the Bibliography are the outward markers of academic writing - you might even say invented to mark the difference with belles lettres.

Publishers - and I suppose readers too - became wary of belles lettres. What was left from what academic writing had taken over was fiction, poetry and journalism, including the journalism of book reviews. Nowadays, the last bastion of belles lettres is the serious book review or essay in one of the serious Reviews: The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Financial Times, and so on.

Lauren Elkin situates her book within academic writing by providing copious notes – which I felt under no pressure to read – and a fairly long Bibliography. But the jacket design – very messy, actually – title page and quaint publishing house (Chatto and Windus) situates this as a non-academic book. On the jacket flap we are told it is “Part cultural meander, part memoir” – I am surprised they put it like that because this is tantamount to saying that the book is belles lettres.

And none the worse for that. It’s an interesting read, the short quasi-academic studies spliced with personal narrative and the stage set changing from city to city. The title and sub-title Flâneuse: Women Walk The City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London is not misleading but I would bet a bit of money that the author was under some pressure from literary agent and publisher to make it all hang together so that it could Fit into some category – social history or literary representations of the city or sexual discrimination at street level or just autobiography. There are many possibilities, some of which would have led to the writing of a dreadful book, dull and correct and easy to shelve. 

I enjoyed reading this book, though she lost me for a moment when late on she mentions keeping a dog in Paris, a dog shit city when I lived there (1971 – 72) and even long after. But I did find her narratives of Parisian history helped me understand how and why I have come to dislike Paris. She narrates the tragedies which today repeat themselves as farce: the ritual demonstrations, the immature bad temper (they were still honking car horns last time I went, albeit less fervently than in the 1970s), and the intense conservatism of the radicals, who think that the past is the model for the future right down to the cigarettes they still smoke. If you think Ruritania is stuck, try France - a country haunted by a collective memory of which several parts still have to be denied. Empire and Collaboration for starters.

I think the weakness of the book is that Elkin does not quite know what she stands for. On occasion, she expresses a forceful opinion or cracks a telling joke but much of the time she muses, a bit ironic, a bit fey. I made a mental contrast with Katie Roiphe. She should strike out a bit more, strut her stuff rather than stroll it .