“Fifty Russian Winters: An American Woman’s Life in the Soviet Union”, by Margaret Wettlin, introduction by Harrison E. Salisbury

324 pages, Pharos Books, ISBN-13: 978-0886876548

Margaret Butterworth Wettlin – “Peg” to her friends – was an American writer who was best known for her translations of Russian literature. Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1907 to a Methodist family (though raised in West Philadelphia), Wettlin attended West Philadelphia High School where she was class president; upon graduation she attended the School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1928. Her first job after college was as an English teacher at various schools around Pennsylvania till 1932; after witnessing the collapse of the US economy in the Great Depression, and fascinated by the Soviet experiment of establishing a new economic polity, she traveled to the Soviet Union, planning to stay a year…and ended up remaining for fifty. She met and married the stage director Andrei Efremoff in 1934; they would have a son and a daughter together. The couple headed for Mongolia where they spent a year helping the locals build a revolutionary national theater before returning to Moscow. Until the war broke out, Wettlin’s life, like the lives of those around her, was dominated by Stalin’s hunt for his enemies. Though she had planned to return to the United States periodically, in 1936 Stalin decreed that foreigners living in the Soviet Union had to leave the country or stay and become Soviet citizens; deciding that she could not abandon her family, she stayed.

Wettlin and her family escaped the purges, but Moscow was under siege, and so the family managed to flee south to the Caucasus to wait out the war. When they returned to Moscow the couple resumed their literary and artistic passions: Efremoff began teaching at the Moscow Theater Institute, and she resumed writing, especially an account of her war experiences, Russian Road, and began translating Russian classical literature. After her husband’s death in 1968, Wettlin decided to return to this country; the State Department determined that she had become a Soviet citizen “under duress” and granted U.S. citizenship to her and her family. In 1980, accompanied by her daughter and a grandson, Wettlin arrived in West Philadelphia (it would be seven years before her son and his family were allowed to leave Russia). In West Philadelphia, Mrs. Wettlin was impressed by the immeasurable improved race relations and MAC machines (“insert a plastic card, punch a button, and out comes your money. I think it is fantastic”). She died on September 1^st, 2003, in West Philadelphia, aged 96.

Damn, what a life, and Margaret Wettlin recorded it all in Fifty Russian Winters: An American Woman’s Life in the Soviet Union. Most Russian history tends to be brutal, impersonal and boring (well, what do you expect? The Soviet Union was a brutal, impersonal and boring place…that was trying to kill you), but Wettlin did a stunning job of re-creating what she experienced, from life living under the treat of the Stalinist purges to the devastation caused by the marauding Nazis throughout the USSR. This book is a page-turning memoir of how she and her family – and millions of other Soviets – struggled to survive the hardships of famine, repression, war and purges. Amazingly, she kept her heart, her mind and her eyes open and many times survived by creating a job or filling a need in the educational system of the Soviet Union one school or university at a time, even managing to give birth to two children when there were no hospitals, no drugs and no sanitation, almost dying in the process.

The greatest weakness of the book was also the most interesting part: Wettlin’s underdeveloped and unsupported political views. She never joined the Communist Party, but she certainly supported the proclaimed Soviet ideals of equality and reform. She even became an informant for the secret police in support of this dream, but when she became disillusioned that her work didn’t seem to be making things better, she quit. She is critical of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev because they made people’s lives worse, not better. She never would have gotten a good grade on a political science term paper, as she offers no evidence to support her beliefs. Her opinions regarding all of this really shed a lot of light (for me at least) on why so many people continued to support the Soviet Union for so long, despite the hardships they faced. The book is far from perfect, but that’s a large part of why it’s so interesting.

“Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 – A World on the Edge”, by Helen Rappaport

464 pages, St. Martin’s Press, ISBN-13: 978-1250056641

Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 – A World on the Edge by Helen Rappaport is the painstaking result of 20 years of trawling through foreigners’ accounts of the Russian Revolution, from the first conflict of February 1917 through to the final revolutionary spasm in October of 1917. Some are well-known versions – such as John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World – while most others are forgotten memoirs published soon after 1917; many of her sources are nothing more than bundles of letters held in obscure library archives. As the capital of the Russian Empire Petrograd had always been a cosmopolitan city where wealthy foreigners could lead lives of great ease and luxury. When World War I broke out in 1914 life became a bit more constrained but still quite comfortable for most foreigners, chiefly British and American diplomats, journalists, bankers, and other businessmen who had come to Russia to take advantage of its extraordinary and largely untapped natural resources. Many brought their families with them and had lived contentedly for years. When chaos erupted they had to scramble for their lives, trapped inside a country that was suddenly at war with itself. Fortunately, most of these people survived the Revolution and returned to the West, where many wrote memoirs and popular press articles that vividly described what they had seen. Rappaport’s sources, then, are varied to say the least: diplomats, nannies, businessmen, Red Cross nurses, aid workers, journalists and spies:

• There was Emmeline Pankhurst, who stopped campaigning for women’s votes in Britain as soon as the war broke out; after touring Britain to urge women to support the war effort, she hastened to Petrograd in June 1917 with Prime Minister Lloyd George’s backing to try to block Russia’s leftwing revolutionaries from bringing Russia out of the war with Germany.
• There was New York journalist Rheta Childe Dorr, an intrepid correspondent who described in breathless prose a once-powerful country losing a foreign war, millions being forcibly conscripted to an unpopular cause, massive flows of internally displaced populations, widespread malnutrition and disease and a vacuum where the government should be.
• There was the writer Somerset Maugham, who went to the Russian capital as a British spy and sent encrypted messages to his London controllers in which Lenin was “Davis”, Trotsky was “Cole” and Alexander Kerensky, the self-important leader of the provisional government, was “Lane”. Like Pankhurst, Maugham was working to support Kerensky and subvert German propaganda encouraging Russia to give up.
• There was Douglas Thompson, an American photographer who covered the collapse of the Tsar and his government with the frenzied excitement of a photojournalist knowing he was at the scene of momentous events; after another day of watching crowds searching for bread while Cossack horsemen scattered them in all directions, Thompson wrote to his wife: “I smell trouble and thank God I am here to get the photographs of it”.

Revolutions are always an amalgam of conformity and confusion, in which the tipping point (when power shifts) often seems banal at the moment it happens: away from the epicenter, life (at least initially) goes on as before: the trams still run, parents take children to school, people queue in line for rations, and so on, and Rappaport’s account give a vivid account of this complexity. As a kind of “you are there” account of the Russian Revolution, Caught in the Revolution lacks any kind of sophisticated analysis of the big issues that divided Russia’s politicians and their impassioned supporters; this is unsurprising as the British, American and French members of the expat community in Petrograd were hostile to the Bolsheviks (as well they should have been) and the other Russian rebels (sadly; imagine how the world would be today if a democratic revolution had succeeded) and wanted the mighty Russian steamroller to continue to tie down the Kaiser’s armies in the east. Whether they were enthusiasts, sceptics or critics of the revolution, most reporters in Petrograd in 1917 were merely eyewitnesses, albeit often with a talent for powerful description. Rappaport chooses their graphic accounts brilliantly.

“The Brontës: Charlotte Brontë and Her Family” by Rebecca Fraser

543 pages, Crown, ISBN-13: 978-0517564387

The Brontës: Charlotte Brontë and Her Family was the first book written by Rebecca Fraser in 1988; Fraser, a writer and broadcaster for the BBC, is also the daughter of famed historian Antonia Fraser, and I think this bio of the Brontës shows from whence she came: it is detailed; it is informative; it is…exhaustive, both in the way it was researched and the way it was written, just like her mother’s books. You’ll learn everything about this unique family (for instance: Charlotte was not the eldest sibling, as there were two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died aged 12 and 11 respectively) in excruciating detail (again, just like dear old mother). Raised on the wild moors of Haworth, England, Charlotte and her family – that would be parents Patrick and (briefly) Maria Branwell Brontë, and siblings Emily, Anne and Branwell (but then you knew that I’m sure, Dear Reader) – compensated for the bleakness of their surroundings by writing about imaginary kingdoms. Eventually, Charlotte, Emily and Anne turned to writing novels, which they published with varying degrees of critical success: Anne’s were virtually ignored, Emily’s Wuthering Heights was universally panned for its “contemptible” characters and lack of art, while Charlotte’s Jane Eyre created a sensation, with those ever-fascinating Victorians being both intrigued and appalled by its heroine’s independence, seeming rejection of religious values and right to feel as passionately about life as a man. Almost overnight, Charlotte became famous, but tragedy soon followed. Within months, her tormented brother Branwell, then Emily, and then Anne died of tuberculosis. Only Charlotte survived: a tiny, plain, almost toothless woman who despaired about her looks and longed for the romantic love she wrote about in her novels. Happily, she was finally able to marry in middle age her father’s curate, a prosaic man who nevertheless was kind to her. But happiness was short-lived; nine months after their marriage, she became pregnant and died, at age 39, of the disease that had killed her sisters and brother.

With scholarship and sympathy, Fraser presents a fresh and modern view of Charlotte Bronte: as a woman searching for love and as a writer who helped change society’s perceptions about her sex. She is thoughtful and is willing to contemplate different angles to certain topics (such as Charlotte’s letters to her teacher M. Heger) which lends a balanced feel to the biography – and placing Charlotte and her writings within her own era was brilliant as I believe that it really put things in perspective, both to how she was perceived then and how we perceive her now. A few things are outdated – such as the idea of Emily Brontë being a mystic – but these quibbles can be easily remedied with a little independent research. Charlotte’s life was marked with sorrow and loss: her mother died when she was five, and was followed to the grave four years later her two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth; Charlotte also outlived her younger siblings, with brother Branwell and sisters Emily and Anne dying in 1848 and 1849 (Charlotte herself died in 1855, three weeks short of her 40^th birthday). All this is told with thoroughness and diligence by Rebecca Fraser…with a style as dry and uninspired as anything her mother wrote. Sorry to keep harping on this, but this book could have been so much more enjoyable in the hands of a more gifted and entertaining writer. From a factual basis it is top-notch: everything and anything you ever wanted to know about the Brontës is there to be found; you just have to wallow through the ponderous prose to glean the information you seek. But if you can do that, then The Brontës is well worth the effort.

“The Third Reich at War”, by Richard J. Evans

944 pages, Penguin, ISBN-13: 978-1594202063

The Third Reich at War is the third book in “The Third Reich Trilogy”, a series of narrative history books by the British historian Richard J. Evans that covers the rise and collapse of Nazi Germany in detail with a focus on the internal politics and the decision-making process. Evans casts a wide view at many aspects of German life during the war years, ranging from the careers of musicians to everyday soldiers. Central, though, to the whole thing is the inter-relationship of Nazi crimes against humanity and how anti-Semitism, especially, touched every aspect of German society. Evans demonstrates solidly how preparation for war was a driving force in German economic measures immediately before the war. The Nazis were aiming to create a racial utopia and exacted this in a number of murderous policies. Evans tries to be even-handed to all victims (including the disabled, the Gypsies, homosexuals and others); that said, it becomes clear, from beginning to end, how motivated the Nazis were by anti-Semitism. In this sense, the Holocaust is part of the wider war, a war against the Jewish world-enemy. Among his many statements, Hitler’s last political manifesto makes this unequivocally clear; it was his parting message to the world, and perhaps best sums up his meaning and legacy.

It is clear that no one opposed the brutal destruction of Poland in 1939, though this is hardly to Germany’s credit and does indicate the extent to which German’s viewed expansion in middle Europe as their birthright – an authoritarian and imperial consensus that Hitler used to gain support for his regime and to give it legitimacy. Evans argues that at some level of generality all Germans were aware of the crimes of the regime; clearly people were being enslaved and stories about the imprisoning of Jews and other civilians on the Eastern Front were making the rounds. At best, Germans could claim deniability as they arguably did not know about the worst crimes. But the slave labor and disappearances of the Jews and the racism of the regime were there for all to see. The enthusiastic support of such radical policies by a fanatical base minority and the acquiescence of the majority made the whole nation complicit. Evans argues that by the time the Russians were at the gates in 1945 and Goebbels argued for a last-ditch stand the Germans were resigned to their fate. Ordinary Germans had a guilt complex by then: they knew this was payback for what the fanatics had done on the Eastern Front. This guilt, and the ability of the Germans to succeed economically in the 1950s under a democracy (in contrast to the Weimar experience), finally solved the German Problem that plagued the 20^th Century and allowed Germany to become a “normal”, peace-loving nation.

Through it all, I found Evans to be appropriately dispassionate as he related the grim details; added to this is the human touch as he weaves in diaries from representative, everyday people throughout this work. Beyond these, he relies a lot on a close reading of the German security reports from the time that used interviews and overheard conversations to give the higher-ups a picture of what Germans were really thinking; it is through these that Evans manages to inject some humor into this narrative as the security officers were careful to record anti-regime jokes, which to someone reading this book provide a bit of much-needed levity. These jokes, diaries, and other accounts show that not all Germans were marching along with the Nazis, especially as the war went on. The Germans, according to Evans, did learn about the mass killings of Jews and others, and they felt guilty about what was being done in their name. As a result, the Allied bombing seemed to some to be a just retribution. In any event, these were two key developments that caused many Germans to look at the regime skeptically: the Nazis were murdering innocent people, and the Nazis couldn’t defend their own people in a war they started. Resistance movements were small and weren’t very effective, by and large, as the Gestapo managed to strangle most of them in the crib. Even the military bomb plotters didn’t achieve much in the end. Violence was at the core of the Third Reich, Evans argues, and while the majority of Germans refused to see this they were still complicit with the regime and were responsible for the consequences.

It is foolish to talk about whether or not Hitler could have won the war by invading Britain or by invading the Middle East instead of invading Russia; the latter course would have resolved the resource problem, but it was never really an option. The Nazis took their primitive ideology quite seriously, and so there just had to be a death struggle with the Russians so that the most superior race (the Aryans) would emerge supreme (to the surprise of the majority of Germans, the Nazis were always quite serious about this ideology). Despite the Nazi’s brutal tactics in suppressing subject peoples, and despite wide scale collaboration, effective resistance did emerge. This was particularly the case in the East where it became very clear to the subject peoples that they had nothing to lose. This resistance encourages one to think that even had Hitler won militarily, the regime was inherently unstable and, in the long run, would have been doomed by a deadly and committed insurgency.

By the end of the war, the Germans themselves are completely subjugated. They survived on starvation rations, both sexes worked long hours, and the young and old alike were drafted into the army. Clearly, Hitler’s regime was able to mobilize complete support and sacrifice despite the reservations of a majority of Germans. The lesson I take from all this is that there is nothing particularly unique about the Germans when it comes to being complicit in the worst evil. The story of the Third Reich is the story of human nature, and it’s not a pretty one.