“War is war. Guns are not just for decoration.” —V.I. Lenin By March 1920, Russia’s whites—an odd and disparate conglomeration of monarchists, anti-Bolshevik socialists, jaded liberals, reactionary clerics, frightened nobles, disinherited landowners, and loyalist army officers and soldiers—had turned what looked like certain victory over the Reds into an ignominious defeat....
The Russian writer Valentin Rasputin, himself no lackey of the Soviet regime, once attacked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for having crossed the line where “war against communism became war against . . . Russia.” In Rasputin’s eyes, the prophetic exile had stained Russia’s reputation—not merely that of the communist regime—in his relentless assaults on Soviet power. The...
Cultural symbols are sources of contention everywhere. In Russia, a squabble over a monument rings a bell with this proud Southerner. The powerful Communist (CPRF) faction in the Duma recently raised the question of returning “Iron Feliks” Dzerzhinsky, the Soviet Unions first secret policeman, to his pedestal facing the Lubyanka, the one-time home of the...
Saving Private Ryan Produced by Steven Spielberg Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by Robert Rodat Released by Paramount and DreamWorks SKG If you visit the American cemeteries near the beaches at Normandy—there are two of them—you may pick up a booklet describing the landings of June 6, 1944, as I did over 15 years ago....
“Receive me, then, O Lord and lover of Mankind, even as the harlot, as the robber, as the publican, as the prodigal . . . “ —The Prayer of St. Basil the Great The Law on Religion passed this year by the Russian State Duma restricts the activities of “non-traditional” religions...
In October 1996, during testimony before a congressional committee, FBI Director Louis Freeh spent a good part of his time discussing international organized crime. Freeh, pointing to the FBI’s arrest of one Vyacheslav Ivankov—the reputed “godfather” of the Russian mafia who is now serving a ten-year sentence in a federal pen in New York—emphasized the...
“Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow / For old, unhappy far-off things. And Battles long ago.” Wordsworth, perhaps, was prompted by recollections of an age before warfare meant the mechanized destruction of all in its path. Yet war, to paraphrase an American precursor of Zhukov and Guderian, has...
The grand theme of P.D. James’s work is man and his overwhelming sense of rootlessness, anxiety, and guilt in the knowledge of a crime unknown and a punishment outwardly denied in the post-Christian era, though inwardly anticipated. Especially in the last decade or so, James has moved far beyond Dame Agatha Christie, delving deeply into...
“Now in history,” wrote Chesterton, “there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration.” A collective memory, a vague but compelling collection of shadows that bind us to the past, seems to whisper a perennial, bittersweet hymn to the numbed ear of man, particularly modern man. Every nation, tribe, or clan has passed on tales...
At the first Congress on Racial Justice and Reconciliation, held in Washington in May, the Reverend Earl W. Jackson, the black director of the mostly white “Samaritan Project” of the Christian Coalition, told 500 mostly black Christians that, despite many blacks’ warnings that he was selling out to the “religious right,” “our agenda” is “the...
The rise to political prominence of former Airborne Forces General Aleksandr Lebed, and especially his emphasis on law and order as the only real basis for proceeding with reforms, has raised the specter in the Russian mind of the proverbial Man on a White Horse, the military savior whose iron-fisted rule puts the national house...
In the year 1818, Aleksandr Pushkin penned these lines in his well-known verse “To Chaadaev,” addressed to his friend Peter Chaadaev, one of the leading Russian liberals of the period: Comrade, believe: joy’s star will leap Upon our sight, a radiant token; Russia will rouse from her long sleep; And where autocracy lies, broken. Our...
“The predisposition to religious belief,” wrote sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, “is the most complex and powerful force in the human mind and in all probability an ineradicable part of human nature.” Christians would agree with Mr. Wilson, but it is his fellow atheists, not Christians, who have dominated the religious (though not the truly spiritual)...
On May 8, 1995, President Boris Yeltsin addressed an auditorium filled with gray-haired war veterans, their chests bedecked with rows of ribbons and medals, and told them of the cost of victory in the Great Patriotic War. Citing new archival research, Yeltsin revealed the “terrifying figure” of 26,549,000 Soviet citizens “lost” in the war against...
Goldeneye Produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli Directed by Martin Campbell Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein Released by United Artists In the best of the James Bond films derived directly from the novels of Ian Fleming—Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball—Sean Connery was able to evoke the gentlemanly,...
“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” —Albert Einstein When James Bowie took his considerable reputation as a brawler and duelist, along with the famous knife his brother Resin had fashioned for him, to Mexico, married the daughter of the vice-governor of the province of Texas, and became a respected citizen...
The mystery novel, to borrow a line from Original Sin, has all the virtues of its defects. “The mystery,” Baroness James explained in a recent Washington Post interview, “deals with the planned murder” and is thus confined to a certain formulaic structure in which a detective protagonist confronts an often unsavory lot of suspects, all...
Virginia, the cradle of the American Republic, has proved to be a particularly tempting locus for the designs of the capitalist Utopians. Our own conservative Republican governor, George Allen, with the general support of the state party and Washington’s Republican press organ, has led the charge of the developers’ earth movers on the state’s countryside,...
Russia’s ill-fated decision to intervene in the Chechen civil war has precipitated a political crisis at least as heated, and far more bloody, than the 1993 presidential-parliamentary showdown. Consider the following; all the major “democratic” parties, including former prime minister and Yeltsin backer Yegor Gaidar’s “Russia’s Choice,” have denounced the intervention and called for a...
“Extremist” is a word that may conjure up images of hooded Klansmen crowded around a burning cross or of Black Panther separatists or kooky 60’s “revolutionaries.” Or perhaps images of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao come to mind. There is a supposition that those who are commonly called “extremists” are unreasonable, irrational, perhaps crazy, and quite...
“Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.” —William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus In his 1990 pamphlet “How to Revitalize Russia,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “When our fathers and grandfathers threw down their weapons during a deadly war [World War I], deserting the front in order to plunder their neighbor at home, they in effect made a...
Years after his arrest by the Soviet authorities, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, while recuperating in a prison hospital after a cancerous tumor had been cut from his body, cast out the last remnant of a spiritual tumor from his soul. A prison doctor, soon to die by the hand of another zek, “fervently” recounted to Solzhenitsyn his...
The house is barely six months old, but it has already begun to settle. Loose steps creak, doors hang, and cracks appear along the baseboards. If I were a carpenter, as my father was for 40 years, or knew enough of such things, I would have built my own house, as he did. But I...
“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” —Thomas Adams Conspiracy theories have found a ready audience in many countries in many different times. When cataclysmic events shock a country to its foundations, when people feel impotent before history’s tidal wave, when war or economic collapse or political disintegration mark the end of a historical era and, having...
“Mankind is in crisis . . . a long crisis which began 300, .and in some places, 400 years ago, when people turned away from religion. . . . It is a crisis which led the East to Communism and the West to a pragmatic society. It is the crisis of materialism.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Following...