ResoluteReader

Monday, December 29, 2025

Ivan Doig - Dancing at the Rascal Fair

*** Warning Spoilers ***

The second volume of Ivan Doig's Montana Trilogy, is the first chronologically. It probably doesn't matter whether you read this, or English Creek first, because these are independent tales. But Dancing at the Rascal Fair sets up the origins of most of the people who live in Two Medicine Country, a fictional area of Montana just east of the Rockies towards the Canadian border.

Rob Barclay and Angus McCaskill are leaving Scotland to head to Montana where Rob's uncle Lucas is working as a miner. Lucas sends money home every year - sizeable chunks - and Rob and Angus are attracted to the good pay and better quality of life than late 19th century Scotland can offer. Montana is a land of opportunity, riches, good land and an escape from grinding poverty.

The first chapters have a dreamlike quality as Angus narrates his and Rob's voyage and then their long search in Montana's new towns for Lucas. Eventually they end up in Two Medicine Country, where Lucas is not mining, but running a bar and the two of them join Lucas in sheep business. Right from the start the messy reality of small, close-knit, emigre communities is there. Rob falls for Lucas' partner - and getting him and Angus to homestead in the mountains is part of making sure this doesn't get even more messy.

But it is Angus whom we follow for the next generation, as he farms, clears, and also teaches in the local school. He meets, and falls hard for Anna, another teacher and hopes to marry her. When she choses someone else, in part for economic reasons, Angus is desroyed and marries Rob's sister who has been brought over for that purpose. Their's is a caring and loving marriage, but Angus' love for Anna hangs over it like a shroud. Eventually Rob is unable to cope with Angus' unrequited love and hope and their brotherly, almost lovelike, relationship comes apart.

For while this is a story of love and humanity, it's set against the harsh backdrop of Montana's climate and the economic and political reality of the early 20th century. Boys get sent to fight in the trenches, influenza hits and the farming economy goes through its ups and downs. In addition harsh winters, dry summers and the gradual changing of farming practices transform the area and drive some to poverty.

Doig is wonderfully skilful at placing the human emotions of his characters against the backdrop of economic crisis, winter storms, drought and war. We're rooting for his people, while anxious for their survival. Dancing at the Rascal Fair is no cowboy adventure. Its the story of what happens over time. The book takes place over thirty or forty years, yet some chapters deal at length with a handful of days. It gives the reader a feeling of an epic, while occasionally zooming in on great detail.

What happens to Angus, Rob and the others is, in many ways, shaped by forces beyond their control. There's little here about the US's own politics - other than setting up of the National Forests which plays a big part in English Creek. Instead characters play their parts against a backdrop of events out of their control. That, I think is a deliberate ploy to make the reader think about the people.

It should be noted that one group of people who are not here in detail are the Native Americans. Its probably a criticism of Doig's fiction that he neglects their place in Montana's history (though this isn't true of all his books - see Winter Brothers). Here they are literarily unnamed, but ever present in a Reservation on the other side of the hill. Doig's focus on emigrant and immigrant lives reminds us that the modern US was built in part on the labour of economic migrants. But the other part - the genocide - is absent.

That criticism aside, this is a deeply moving look at the lives that people live, which forms the backdrop to modern Montana.

Friday, December 26, 2025

Francis Pryor - Paths to the Past: Encounters with Britain's hidden landscapes

Francis Pryor's books have been some of the most accessible and popular guides to British landscape history. Works such as Britain BC have helped us understand how monuments like Stonehenge are actually part of a human landscape shaped by thousands of years of labour. Pryor's work with Time Team and his pioneering work as a farmer, archaeologist and historian have offered unique perspectives on history, land and society.

Paths to the Past is a short collection of very brief essays, twenty-four in all, that are Pryor's highly personal engagement with a variety of unusual and sometimes spectacular sites and buildings. These range from very large areas - such as Orkney's neolithic landscape - to the very small: Cromwell's Bridge in Lancashire. In each place Pryor explores the buildings, the human landscape and the natural world. Pryor's aim with the book is to encourage the reader to visit these places, and he certainly did provide a number of places for me to go in the future.

Unfortunately I found that while all of the essays are interesting, they tend to be interesting because of the places that Pryor is describing rather than his particular insights. I was constantly underwhelmed. Each of the essays left me feeling that Pryor was going to give us some great insight, but I was left wanting. Sometimes its no more than saying he felt the presence of the past. After a visit to the Great Orme Bronze Age mines in North Wales Pryor writes that he was "standing in their space, listening to their sounds".

On a number of occasions I also felt that Pryor's approach to history was to separate humanity from the landscape. More problematically there is no sense of struggle in Pryor's work. There's hard labour, such as that of the Bronze Age miners squeezing through dangerous passages, but there's no struggle. Enclosure is simply described as a process of landscape change made by landowners, rather than the centuries long battle over land, space and political rights that resulted in the great defeat of the English peasantry. That's a far more interesting story and one that surely has resonnances to today.

These are interesting places and Pryor writes about them very well (few authors can make a reader want to visit a shopping centre in Peterborough). But it felt removed from the engaging (and pathbreaking) work that Pryor has produced previously and which I have celebrated. See links below.

Wednesday, December 24, 2025

Paul Frölich - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most remarkable revolutionaries to emerge from the European socialist milieu in the late 19th century. There is a tendency on the left to discuss Luxemburg in the context of things that she wrote or did that were wrong. I've been to many meetings which bemoan her failure to "launch a revolutionary party" early, rather than staying part of the German Social Democratic Party, hence dooming the German Revolution. These are, of course, crude criticisms even if they do have some basis. Nonetheless it is important that we say, as Lenin did:

'Eagles may at times fly lower than hens but hens can never rise to the height of eagles'. Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (She corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 when she was released). But inspite of her mistakes she was and remains for us an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world.

Paul Frölich's biography of Luxemburg was one of the very first to be written, and was published in unusal circumstances just before World War Two. In fact the English translation became a huge best seller as part of the Left Book Club during the War. It is very much a political biography that places her ideas in the context of her political activty and her organisational context. The Lenin quote above matters not just because of his list of criticisms, or indeed his celebration of Luxemburg's work - but his acknowledgement that her ideas changed in the context of struggle. Indeed part of the celebration of her work that Lenin mentions was impossible because the archive that Frölich built up was trapped by Stalin during WWII and kept from the movement.

What shines through is Luxemburg's understanding of political theory and strategy, based always on working class power. For instance, in the great debate within the German left about how the left should organise and the role of parliamentary activity, Frölich says that Luxemburg

did not insist merely on agitation: the task of a socialist parliamentarian also consisted in taking part in the positive legislative work, whenever possible with practical success-a task which would become increasingly difficult with the strengthening of the party’s representation in parliament. The task could be correctly fulfilled only if Social Democracy retained an awareness of its role as an oppositional party and, at the same time, found the golden mean between sectarian negation and bourgeois parliamentarism-always remembering that its real strength lay outside parliament, in the proletarian masses. Above all, however, it had to give up without reservation the illusion that a working-class party could overpower a capitalist state by a majority vote in parliament, i.e. solely by parliamentary means.

Nonetheless it is clear that the context of Luxemburg's main area of work - the German socialist movement - did have its impact on her throught. Frölich's book is very much a celebration of Luxemburg's work and life - but he isn't uncritical. But in one area he does acknowledge mistakes - her debate with Lenin over the question of political organisation.

This first disagreement between her and Lenin-even if all the various background factors are taken into consideration-nevertheless revealed characteristic differences between these two great leader personalities. Luxemburg underestimated the power of organisation, particularly when the reins of leadership were in the hands of her opponents. She relied all too believingly on the pressure of the revolutionary masses to make any corrections in party policy. Lenin’s total political view prior to 1917 shows traces of unmistakably Blanquist influences and an exaggerated voluntarism, though he quickly overcame it when faced with concrete situations. To overstate the point, it can be said that Rosa concerned herself more with the historical process as a whole and derived her political decisions from it, while Lenin’s eye was more concentrated on the final aim and sought the means to bring it about. For her the decisive element was the mass; for him it was the party, which he wanted to forge into the spearhead of the whole movement.

This is a much better approach than the "she didn't set up a revolutionary party" argument. Not least because it is clear that Luxemburg did always fight for revolutionary organisation, and I was reminded that the Polish group she led played such a role in the crucial war years and during the 1917 revolutionary period.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion of Luxemburg's "mistakes" are in her work on the accumulation of capital. Here again there's a tendency for some reviewers simply to say that she was wrong. Yet in doing so they miss Luxemburg's real attempt to grapple with the limits of Marx's own work on accumulation (born out of his abstraction of the economy from reality in order to clarify his argument) and the fact that she was one of the first to link accumulation to imperialist expansion. She was also, it should be said, someone who was very clear about the role of imperialism in the destruction of indigenous peoples. Her theory here may not be fully developed, but it is a very real attempt to place a Marxist critique of capitalism into a global context.

Luxemburg's work also included two other great pieces of work that developed revolutionary politics to adapt to new eras. Her Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike both remain indispensible booklets for socialists in the 21st centutry as we grapple with the interactions between social movements, capital and political organisation. The Mass Strike in particular will no doubt be read again and again as workers engage in mass struggles over austerity and politics. The "Gen X" revolts spring to mind.

But it is in the last four years of her life that Rosa Luxemburg comes into her own. Her fight to shape a new revolutionary era out of the ruins of the betrayal of the German socialist movement at the start of World War One and then her attempts to learn from and extend the revolutionary epoch after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Here Frölich engages with her criticisms of the Russian Revolution and the policies of the Bolsheviks, particular towards the National and Agrarian questions. He acknowledges her errors, while placing them in context. Not least the fact that Luxemburg was in prison and had limited access to the movement at times. Nonetheless we see how Luxemburg is constantly striving to develop the movement, and with the outbreak of the German Revolution we she how her politics place her far ahead of almost all her comrades. Her clarity of ideas in December 1918 and January 1919 with the counter-revolution flexing its muscles is poignant given her murder by them in early January.

There is no doubt that the loss of Luxemburg robbed the German working class of one of its most able leaders. Frölich's book is one of the best introductions to her life and politics, but it is also an incredible celebration of working class power and the vision of socialism from below that Luxemburg strived for her whole life. If at times it feels a little hagiographic this is, perhaps, to be expected given that Frölich is writing in the darkest period for humanity as Hitler has won and Stalin's politics is stamping over the revolutionary tradition that Paul Frölich's subject stood for.

Related Reviews

Gietinger - The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg
Luxemburg - Reform or Revolution
Luxemburg - The Mass Strike
Campbell - A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg

Monday, December 22, 2025

Chris Harman - Spartacus and the Slave Revolt that Shook the Roman Empire

Redwords have been bringing out a series of books with transcripts of talks by leading Marxists with new introductions. This little book is based on a talk by Chris Harman at Marxism 1998 in London as part of a course on battles that changed the world. In the talk Harman jokes that the reading wasn't to difficult as there are only two sources for the Spartacus rebellion, and these amount to five pages or so. But what we do know tells us a great deal about Ancient Rome and the position of slaves within it. Harman's historical materialist approach places the battles of the Third Servile War in the wider context of the development of Rome and the limits of the Roman Empire.

Give the short nature of the text Harman only touches on some subjects. Indeed, as Christian Høgsbjerg notes in his extremely useful introduction, at one point in the talk Harman realises he is running out of time and has to summarise a lot of material. It is useful then that Høgsbjerg has access to Harman's original notes as he is able to construct and include material that Harman couldn't include on the day of the talk. But two aspects of the talk remain vitaly important. The first is Harman's summary of the class nature of Roman society and how the army was an essential part of this:

Essentially, what happened was the victory of the Roman armies led to two sorts of immense wealth flooding to Rome. One was the immense wealth coming from the territoties which were conquered by Rome.. the second form of wealth ... was the massive enslavement of populations.

Harman continues:

The Roman rich had these vast sums of wealth... [which] enabled them to buy the slaves off the Roman state, and they systematically then established a situation in which they began tilling their estates with slave. And their calculation was quite simply this. 'The Roman army is invincible. Every year, we conquer more people. Every time we conquer more people, we enslave more people, there's an endless supply of slaves'.

This leads us to the second point of Harman's argument. This model was unsustainable and sections of Roman society understood this. The contradiction was that the cost of fighting the wars became prohibitive, and to try to resolve things the Roman ruling class tried to change society, by setting up forms of serfdom. But the centrality of slavery (and war) to the Roman economy made this impossible.

This then places the activity of Spartacus and his rebels into context. Because the taking of Rome by the rebels would have meant them implementing the very regime they were rebelling against (they were, after all, former slaves). Harman's conclusion was that the revolt was heroic, but "history hadn't advanced to such a point in which it's possible for an oppressed class to see overthrowing the empire and estabishing itself as a new ruling class upon a higher, better form of organisation of society". In other words, rather like the peasants of the German Peasants' War, their victory could never be permanent, even if they could never overcome the ruling class's forces.

While it's a short pamphlet and, to be honest, Harman's speaking style doesn't readily translate into an easy reading text, there's a great deal in this talk. Once again Chris Harman's historical materialist approach gives us far more insights that we might expect from just five pages of original source material. Christian Høgsbjerg's excellent editing, introduction and footnotes flesh out the material and make this a fine quick read.

Sunday, December 21, 2025

Bruno Leipold - Citizen Marx: Republicanism & the formation of Karl Marx's social and political thought

How did Marx come to the ideas that are today most associated with this revolutionary politics? This is a question with surprisingly complex answers. Most people who call themselves Marxists today are aware that Marx began his political trajectory as a Young Hegelian, but that he famously "turned Hegel upside down". But, as Bruno Leipold's wonderful new book shows, this is not enough to understand Marx's politics. Leipold argues that to understand Marx's communism, one has to understand its evolution from Marx's roots in Republicanism. He goes on to conclude that Marx's politics have to be seen as developing in both opposition to, and in debt to, the republican tradition.

Marx began his political career as a radical republican who believed that "the arbitary power of despotic regimes" had to be overcome and replaced with a democratic republic where people held democractic power and controlled their elected representatives "through binding mandates". While initially sharing a republican critique of communism, as Marx became a communist himself he "incorporated the republican opposition to arbitary power into his social critique of capitalism" retaining the belief in a democratic republic. Later, in response to the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx further developed his vision of democracy into one that meshed with his earlier radical views "returning to ideas he had defended as a young republican". Of course this was not a reversal, but a development of his radical democracy that "emphasized the need for a much more encompassing emocratic transformation of government."

These three stages are examined in detail in Leipold's book. The first section, which looks at Marx's republican ideas and the republican milieu he was active in is particularly interesting. Leipold begins with the progressive and radical nature of republicanism in the early to mid 19th century, but also its limitations. Marx's "shift from republicanism was driven by a growing disillusionment with the ability of political emancipation, through a democratic republic, to establish truly human emancipation" together with a growing understanding of the unique role of the working class as an agent for change. It is worth noting in passing though Leipold's point that few 19th century republicans "would be satisfied by democracy today". Their radicalism, was a genuine radicalism, but it was born from a utopian belief that everyone could be equal despite class divisions.

That said, and in something I found particularly illuminating, Leipold argues that we must see 19th century republicanism as a "distinct political movement". While liberals might form alliances against the monarchy with republicans at the time, they all "disagreed on the regime that should replace it". Republicanism was a political movement that fought for the "introduction of democracy and popular sovereignty" but with a "distinctive conception of liberty, understood as the absence of arbitrary power or domination". But as Leipold goes on to show this manifests, not as a republican vision for a society free of private property with the means of production held in common, but rather a semi-backward vision of a society of small producers.

Marx became radical within these frameworks but broke with them through a critical engagement both with social movements and with systematic studies of politics and political models. In 1843 Marx

condemned the despotic treatment of subjects and the exclusion of the mass of citizens from political particuipation that resulted from the arbitrary rule of absolute monarchs. In his critique of Hegel, Marx rehected his constitutional model of monarchy, which Marx argued only fractionally extended participation to the king's ministers, bureaucrats and the propertied elite. Marx expressed a preference for a republic over a constitutional monarchy, but also criticized the Maerican model of a republic, where the people were still estranged from the political sphere and consigned to particularism of civil society.

In constrast to these Marx proposed a "true democracy" where "people would hold active sovereign power through the popular administration of general interests... and the tight control over representatives through binding instructions [mandates]." Here I am particularly take with the word "active". It demonstrates that even then Marx's commitment to a popular participatory democracy with constant political engagement. Far more radical than our current democracy with its brief election periods every few years. It is this vision of democracy that re-emerges in 1871 when the Paris Commune explodes.

Around the same time as this, Marx was also going through a change in his attitude to communism. Leipold argues he was "sympathetic" but not convinced in the early 1840s. Marx heads to Paris to challenge communism, but ends up being converted. But, crucially, Leipold writes that "Marx did not so much convert to communism as fashion a new form of it".

This change is rooted in Marx's growing concern with the State as a body that could "not truly free people from obstacles to their freedom, it only relegated those obstacles to civil society". The republican critique of freedom was that people could never be free in a society where a ruler can make them behave in a particular way due to their power over them. Marx concluded that "in order to be free, a person has to live not only in a free state but in a free society". This insight takes Marx into the idea of revolutionary emancipation, whereby proletarian revolution coul lead to the "dissolution of all estates".

If property was the root of power, then a propertyless society could be the basis for a new set of social, political and economic relations that would bring in real freedom. Marx's conversion to communism is remarkably rapid. His time in Paris, described by Leipold as a time of politically sharp debates and engagement with socialist ideas, sees Marx develop a set of ideas that "could no longer be plausibly contained undert the banner of republicanism and democracy and amounted to an encompassing ideological and political conversion to communism."

But it was the revolutionary period of 1848/9 that cemented Marx's understandings of communism and the role of the working class in constructing a society based on freedom. While celebrating the overthrow of monarchies, Marx could also understand that the new bourgeois order was inadequate. As Leipold writes:

For Marx, the bourgeois republic was essentially a change in the political scaffolding that didn't touch the underlying social building... So closely did Marx associate the republic with being simply the poltiical accompaniment of bourgeois society that he often used 'republic' and 'bourgeois republic' interchangeably... Conflating the republic with the bourgeois republic also served Marx's political purpose of highlighting what he took to be the emancipatory limits of republicanism... Achieving the republic would, Marx stressed, not live up to the idealistic hopes of its supporters but instead cement the bourgeois transformation of society.

If the bourgeois republic offered only illusionary freedom to people then what sort of society could offer genuine freedom? Here Leipold usees Marx's Capital to explore how his understanding of capitalism allowed him to develop a vision of socialism and democracy that broke further from republicanism. Marx begins with a critique of the utopian vision of small producers as the basis for egalitarian society. Such a society was one that would be a step backward from the capitalist economy because such a collection of independent producers, isolated from each other, could not utilise the "gains from cooperation, division of labour, the application of scientific and technicalknowledge" and, in a phrase I found particularly insightful, "doomed it in the face of a mode of production that could".

Leipold writes that Marx, "recognised that the political form of bourgeois society, the bourgeois republic, was an inappropriate political form for bringing about communism". But how could a socialist society utilise these capitalist developments? Famously Marx says the "working class cannot simply lay hold of the read-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes". This line comes from Marx's writings on the Paris Commune, It was the Commune that allowed Marx to glimpse for the first time how a radical transformation of workers' relations to the means of production would usher in new forms of democracy and a new epoch of freedom. For some republicans, the opposite was true. The Giuseppe Mazzini said that the Commune's violence "ruined the possibility of national unity". Marx however saw in the Commune the possibilty of a new form of unity that shattered apart bourgeois society and constructed something new. Indeed this was a new shift in Marx's conception of the "social republic" where it was a specific form suited to maintaining and bringing about working-class social and political rule". As Marx writes:

The cry of 'Social Republic', with which the revolution of February [1848] was ushered in by the Paris proletariat did but express a vague aspiration after a Republic that wsa not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that Republic.

Crucially it was the active democratic engagement with society of working people coming together with their control of the economy that made the Commune that "positive form". Here Marx could celebrate the Parisian workers who, out of their struggle, implemented the radical vision of democracy that Marx himself had argued for in his younger republican days. The right to recall elected representatives, the payment of such representatives appropriate wages, and the ability to mandate. It was this active and real, albeit short lived, experiment in radical democracy that gave Marx the final insight into how a communist society could function.

Out of these discussions Leipold explores what freedom and equality mean. His final argument brings together earlier themes around politics, arguing that Marx was clear that politics would not vanish after the transition to communism, but take on new forms. Insightfully Leipold also argues that the argument for freedom in the sense Marx (and republicans) used it has an importance today. It means freedom from arbitary control, dictorial power and being tied to the capitalist accumulation machine. We aren't free, not because we don't have the appropriate definition of freedom in a constitution, but because workers cannot be free when they are forced to work for the capitalists - one where we are trapped by the "despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital". Leipold argues, that the "terrain of freedom has too easily been abandoned to conservatives and liberals". We need to win it back as part of a struggle for an emancipatory vision of socialism.

Bruno Leipold's book is a remarkable, and fresh, engagement with Marx's work. For me it opened up whole new areas of thought and refreshed my thinking around key concepts such as freedom, the state, and democracy. But above all I found it an exciting and stimulating reminder of why Marx's ideas remain crucial to the fight for human emancipation. Those whose understanding of Marxism is constrained by that articulated by supporters of Stalin or the regimes in China or Eastern Europe, would do well to engage with this account Marx's deeply human vision of socialism. Citizen Marx has deservedly won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize, I hope that the publishers bring out an affordable paperback soon for the thousands of people who would gain so much from reading it. It is my book of the year.

Ivan Doig - English Creek

English Creek is, confusingly, the first of Ivan Doig's Montana Trilogy, but the second book chronologically. The books tell the story of the farming community around the Two Medicine Country on the east of the Rocky Mountains. It's an area similar to that were Doig grew up, and if the places are invented there is a sense of these being real places, real people and real situations.

Jick McCaskill is 14. He's the younger son of hardworking parents. His father is a forester and fire-watcher for the National Parks, keeping an eye on the people using and farming in the Two Medicine National Forest. Jick's mother is a fiercely independent woman who runs the household and small holding and keeps the family organised. Jick's elder brother Alec is the brains of the family. His amazing ability with numbers has led to his parents saving their money to send him to college. They hope he might become more than a farmer or rancher. They want him to escape. But Alec falls in love and announces his desire to get married and stay on the farm. So begins English Creek and the story of Jick's transformative summer.

English Creek is one of those novels were little happens. We see Jick's world view transformed as he is on the cusp of adulthood. Still drinking pop and with time to spare around his chores he is just beginning to see how the grown up world works. His father hands him over for a few days to a transient worker, one of many older men who make their living doing various seasonal jobs. Jick gets drunk for the first time, but also encounters the wisdom of older people who show him the way the world of Two Medicine works.

In the few week's covered by the novel there are a few key events - a rodeo, a Fourth of July picnic and a horrific thunderstorm. The story, such as it is, culminates in a dramatic forest fire. But, to be honest, little else takes place. This is a novel about a time, place and people. Rural Americans whose life has been crushed by the depression, who are desperate for rain or higher prices for their cattle and sheep, and whose lives are closely intertwined, even if not obviously, to world events. The ending, is less of a plot conclusion, and more of a shock to the reader when we realise the context for Jick and Alec's lives.

Ivan Doig's books are not well known outside of the US (and probably Montana). This is a shame. His writing is sparse, but beautifully sharp. And their's plenty of vernacular - which flows both from the local accent and the immigrant communities - something explored further in the prequel. Jick's mother makes an unorthodox, and realtively radical speech at the July Fourth celebrations. In it she talks about her father and his friend Ben. Ben English, she says, "is gone from us. He died in the summer of 1927 of a strained heart. Died, to say it plainly, of the work he put into this country, as so many have."

English Creek is a celebration of that work, that hardiness and the despair that was the lot of so many Americans between the wars. Doig's book is a mighty fine celebration of those lives and struggles.

Thursday, December 18, 2025

Catherine Merridale - Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army 1939-1945

In the Second World War the Soviet Union lost almost 27 million people. The majority of those were civilians, but some 9 million were the men and women of the Red Army and other Soviet armed forces. The Soviet Union's sacrifice broke Nazi Germany's military machine and defeated Hitler, but at enormous cost. Catherine Merridale's book Ivan's War is a history of the troops who fought against fascism. It is based on hundreds of interviews in the 1990s with veterans (though it should be noted that of the interviews that made it to the book they are all Red Army soldiers, no one from the Navy or Air Force is interviewed, and all combat veterans).

At the outset Merridale sets out to counter the traditional story of the Red Army representing a cross section of Russian society willingly fighting against fascism. In fact her account demolishes a number of myths - the all powerful Red machine is shown, especially in the early stages of the war, to be badly organised, ineptly led, fearful and inexperienced. But even after the tide was turning, she shows how the men and women of the Red Army were frequently far from the heroic figures depicted in much Soviet propaganda. In particular she does not shy from describing the mass sexual assaults and rape that took place of German women when the Red Army entered the Reich.

What is striking is that while Merridale has uncovered plenty of evidence in the archives for the less noble tale of the Red Army; records for executions, crime and so on. Few of those she interviews acknowledge this in their accounts. In fact they all very much subscribe to the official view of a united army of principled fighters for socialism against fascism. She writes:

When veterans talk of the good old days, the great communal struggle, they never mention the sleeplessness and long-term malnutrition that afflected almost everyone. They also forget the untreated toothache, the chronic infestations of lice, the diarrhea and boils. The soldiers who survived to tell their stories for this book were a small elite in physical terms. War injuries, poor diet, and strain would shorten millions of lives.

Few of them spoke of arbitary executions of prisoners, rape or sexual assault.

There were of course, millions of acts of bravery and heroism. While much is often made of the Red Army's lack of prepardness or the role of its political officers in forcing men to fight, it must also be remembered that millions of people fought to stop Hitler, and did so bravely. This was a racialised war of genocide. The barbarity of the Nazis was met in kind by the Red Army. The savage nature of the fighting did not lend itself to the small platoons fighting together through the conflict. Merridale notes that there's nothing like the memoires of Vietnam or US troops in the Pacific were men spent years together. Survival rates were far too small. This means that memories of those who survived tend to be highly individual.

That said I was disappointed by the book. Despite the huge number of interviews I felt that we heard the voices of the individual soldiers far to rarely. I thought Merridale took up some fascinating aspects to the Red Army - she explores the role of antisemitism among Soviet troops for instance, and shows how the Soviet Union propaganda distorted Nazi crimes by emphasising them as anti-Russian crimes. But there is almost nothing here about ordinary troop's experiences when they liberated Concentration Camps. Perhaps Merridale wasn't able to find any accounts by those who reached Auschwitz in the interviews, diaries or reports she studied. But that seems unlikely. Thus despite this being a book based on interviews, it was not really a book that gave us their voices very often.

Finally, while I thought Merridale's revisionist account that tried to find the real Red Army was interesting - I felt her book was weakened by a flawed understanding of Soviety history. There was a tendency to lump Stalinism together with the revolutionary socialism of 1917, rather than see the former as a bloody break with the later. Stalin's pact with Hitler would have been something that shocked Lenin's Bolsheviks, and was itself a great crime by a man who murdered many and casualy threw lives away in the name of socialism.

At the end of the book she argues that the outcome of the conflict was to enshrine a "tyranny" in place. Here she ends up victim blaming. While writing that the "human cost was paid by Stalin's people, and whether they were willing soldiers or not, all but a small minority believed that they were on the right side in a true just war". But she concludes that "the Soviety peoplem who had acquiesced, however unwillingly, in the emergence of Stalinism, and who had also fought and suffered to defend it, would now permit the tyrant to remain. The motherland was never conquered, but it had enslaved itself."

This really is a strange conclusion. The Stalinist state was a powerful, brutal and dangerous beast. Merridale's book shows how it was able to use violence to drive the Red Army forward. To blame an exhausted people for the ongoing existence of that State after WW2 and to see them as "acquiescing" in Stalin's victory is unfair and historically inaccurate. It also undermines the bravery of those troops who did fight to stop Hitler. These flaws thus make for a disappointing book.

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

Stephen King (Richard Bachman) - The Running Man

I have not yet seen the new version of The Running Man film released earlier this year. Its release however has been the occasion for me watching the original film, the 1987 one starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and finally reading the book. I am very glad I read the book - Schwarenegger's film much less so - as it is a remarkable novel.

Few readers of this blog are likely to be unfamiliar with the story. Written by Stephen King as Richard Bachman in 1982 it is set in the early 2000s in a dystopian world where poverty and lawlessness are endemic and the US state manages its citizens through a combination of violent repression and distracting TV programmes that offer tantalising prizes to the poor while offering viewers the voyeristic chance to see the players die horribly. What twisted mind could imagine such a future one asks?

This is familiar territory. The 1987 film turned the idea of a man hunted for dollars, risking his life to a massive prize into a gameshow and the trope is now a realtively common one. But, and its a big but, leaving that aside I want to recommend King's book very highly indeed. Because what King does is to turn the story into one about an ordinary, poverty stricken working class man whose daughter desperately needs medication that they cannot afford, into a story about class, power and revenge.

Ben Richards is the titular running man. He's a working class bloke who has been almost broken by the system. Blacklisted for punching a foreman, he has nearly destroyed his health working casual, manual work. His wife is a sex worker whose earnings keep the family afloat. Richards enters the running man because he has to make some money to pay for medicine. But he enters as an embittered and angry man whose frustrations are aimed much higher than those out to hunt him down. When the gameshost is waiting with Richards for a lift to go to the ground floor of the games building, Richards has feted with wealth and power. As he steps into the lift he asks the host of the Running Man, but "who could I kill if I went up?" A good question. Class runs through this book like a red thread. One good piece of advice Richards gets from the games host is "stay with your own". Because what Richards finds is solidarity - from people who look after him, to people who turn their eyes the other way.

As Richards travels he learns more, and in the most powerful bit of the book he finds himself protected by a group of Black radicals who have taught themselves in the libraries about the world they live in. They've uncovered a conspiracy by the state to hide the fact that millions are dying from appalling pollution, but that the rich have all been given nose filters to protect them. The deaths of millions of children like Richard's daughter are the result of a greedy government, not poverty. Richard's attempts to use his position on the show to expose the reality. But his urging of people to "read about pollution", "go to the library" are drowned out by mocking, middle class audience jeers. As Richards flees further he argues with a woman he kidnaps, showing her that her reality is the unreal one. Soon it becomes clear to the network that Richards is actually quite dangerous.

I have always enjoyed Stephen King's books for their insights into the dark underbelly of US history. The Running Man is perhaps the book of his I've read that is most clearly about class, poverty and resistance. There's no collective action here (though a few strikes are mentioned) but Richards is supported by a lot of people. At one point a couple of cops watch his car escape and they mutter to each other - I hope he wins says one. The ending is much more radical and satisfying than the sanitised pseudo super-hero film that Schwarenegger stars in. I've heard that the remake is closer to the original novel. But read the book - its a remarkable novel that speaks a great deal to modern times.