The fearsome dictator: why did he spare Bulgakov?

Stalin’s favourite play, The White Guard, opens next week in London and it is magnificent. No, don’t worry, it’s not about tractors, or Stakhanovite workers, or even the glorious Red army. Quite the contrary. The play is an ode to the bourgeois intelligentsia destroyed by the revolution. The Bolsheviks come out very badly, described as men “with no name, no past, no love… born of loneliness and frustration.” So why did Stalin admire this play, watch it 20 times, insist it be revived at the Moscow Art theatre, and—most uncharacteristically of all—not order the murder of its anti-Soviet author?

Mikhail Bulgakov, best know for his magical realist novel The Master and Margarita, based the play on his own family: proud Russians, committed supporters of the old order, soldiers of the White Guard, loyal to the tsar. Bulgakov (1891-1940) was the eldest son of a liberal professor at Kiev’s theological seminary. Both his grandparents were priests. Educated, cultured, and middle class, the family enjoyed theatre, opera, and literature. War and revolution destroyed their world.

The play opens in the Turbins’ large and comfortable apartment as they and their friends eat, sing songs, drink vodka, flirt, philosophise, laugh at each others jokes, and fret about the future. Outside is chaos; inside, their old world is still alive. Bulgakov believed the intelligentsia was “the best social stratum in our country.” You cannot watch this play and not feel heartbroken at the destruction of the civilization of pre-revolutionary Russia.

When the play first opened to sell-out crowds in Moscow in 1926, the communist press denounced Bulgakov, suggesting the Soviet government “just bash him over the head with a basin.” Normally a play siding with the enemies of the revolution would have been shut down immediately, but “The Days of the Turbins” (as it was called then, the censors at the time naturally rejecting its original, politically incorrect, title) found an unlikely supporter in Stalin. It became the biggest hit of its era, playing almost 1000 times during the dark days of Stalinist terror.

I can understand why the theatre audiences of Moscow and Leningrad flocked to the play, which surely reminded them of the cultured lives they had lost, but why did the communist dictator? Some scholars say it “delighted the leader, apparently because in showing the Whites as a noble group, it demonstrated that the Bolsheviks had defeated a worthy opponent.”

Seeing the play, I don’t buy that explanation. The Turbins are wonderful, kind, brave, cultured; everything you and I hope to be on our best days. But a worthy opponent they are not. They are doomed, ineffectual, easily tossed by the currents of history. I think Stalin like the play because it reminded him of the world he aspired to in his youth. Yes, young Stalin was a revolutionary, a bank robber and a bandit, but the sophisticated life of the liberal intelligentsia was all around him. A young man from Georgia must have yearned to be a part of it, loved it when he was included in it, and I think that locked in the Kremlin, surrounded by brutish toadies, he missed the world of civilized conversation and deep friendship that that he and his comrades destroyed. In some part of his black heart, he wished it wasn’t gone.

The White Guard, directed by Howard Davies, is playing at the National Theatre until 15th June. It is brilliantly written, laugh-out-loud funny and profound. This is old-fashioned theatre, with no bells and whistles (although more than a few explosions). Go see it, and remember the preciousness and fragility of civilized life.

James Lovelock: not afraid to admit he's been wrong

The words of a nonagenarian may never have been so eagerly awaited as those of James Lovelock when he addressed a Royal Society dinner earlier this month. Lovelock, creator of the controversial Gaia hypothesis, is certainly still capable of original thinking, and it was his verdict on recent environmental controversies—such as the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia—that his audience wanted to hear.

The Gaia hypothesis, which made Lovelock the darling of the emerging green movement of the 1960s, proposes that life on earth is closely coupled with the surface, ocean and atmosphere. Each element co-operates to keep conditions relatively constant—at least in the absence of exceptional external forces. Initially, he was ridiculed: the idea that inanimate objects such as rocks are active participants in a super-organism was understandably controversial, and rejected by most scientists. But the idea that life exerts a strong influence on the environment has come to be widely accepted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lovelock has tended to be at the apocalyptic end of the climate change spectrum. He predicted in 2006 that average temperatures would rise by 8°C in temperate regions by the end of the 21st century, leading to billions of deaths and leaving only the polar regions habitable. In spite of this, though, he has never had much respect for green orthodoxy. In 2004 he shocked many of his disciples when he argued that nuclear power was the only realistic way to mitigate the impending ecological disaster. (Some cynics suggested that this was because he heard of plans for a wind farm which would spoil the view from his home.) He recently and rightly slated Ed Milliband, secretary of state for energy and climate change, for his ludicrous assertion that “opposition to wind farms should be as unacceptable as failing to wear a seatbelt,” describing this as political or environmental correctness veering towards fascism. He has also retreated considerably from his extreme position of 2006, just as he earlier disassociated himself from some of the weirder extensions of the Gaia hypothesis, like the idea that the Earth as a whole is part of a universal consciousness.

So when he stood up to speak at the Royal Society, nobody could be sure what he would say. Still, he surprised many in his audience by the apparent extent of his revisionism, describing climate sceptics as a “breath of fresh air” for exposing the flaws in current global forecasting models. Lovelock’s central point was that climate change models are not yet fit to make predictions even 40 years ahead. His position that continued release of carbon into the atmosphere constitutes a grave threat was unaltered, but he seemed to concede that the changes might not be as severe or rapid as he had earlier predicted.

It could be argued that Lovelock was over-hasty with his predictions of near extinction, but instead we should take heart that, almost half a century after developing his original hypothesis, he is still willing and capable of modifying his views on the basis of evidence. It is a good example not just for many younger scientists, but to everyone. On another level, it will perhaps raise hopes that some form of climate consensus can emerge out of the recent controversies. What we desperately need now is a more balanced and sustainable long-term energy strategy.

Have men had done better out of feminism than women?

For whatever reason, Laurie Penny seems to have misread my article in the March issue of Prospect, “Why Feminism Favours Men.”

I agree that feminism was supposed to be about liberating both sexes from traditional gender roles, and the point that I was making was that, to an extent, this has happened. Our increased sexual openness was one example. I certainly never said women were not interested in sex, although I do think that men and women who are not interested—at least not to the degree our sexualised society sometimes seems to demand—can be made to feel abnormal.

I gave some other examples in my original article of how these changes have benefited men: the right to be interested in our kids, the right not to have to put up shelves, and so on. For reasons of space these fell foul of the sub-editor’s red pen.

Suggesting that Fathers4Justice accurately describe the lot of men in Britain today is like citing the Taliban for their exemplary reading of Islam. Of more interest to me, since I write about it frequently, is male mental health. You could, as Laurie Penny does, claim that 37 per cent of men “admitting to feeling low or anxious much of the time” in a Mind report proves that men are still imprisoned in old gender roles. I’d argue that the fact that these men can now admit to such feelings proves the opposite. The shackle of the stiff upper lip is slowly losing its grip on us, even if we don’t know quite where to turn in our grief.

Some men may well be made miserable by the shifting sands of gender, which leave them feeling rootless and role-less. But the real reason for that 37 per cent figure has nothing to do with that. It is down to economics which, even before the current crisis, had massively increased job insecurity. This was, of course, the point of my original piece: that we should be talking about economics a little more and about biology, evolution and Barbie dolls a little less (fun though it is). In a world where women put in two-thirds of the working hours for less than one-tenth of the income, I stand by that.

Poland's Black Orpheus—a cinematic triumph, but will risk-averse distributors see it that way?

The cult novel from which Xawery Zulawski’s latest film Snow White, Russian Red was adapted has been hailed as “the Polish Trainspotting.” Yet this extraordinary piece of cinema, which was screened in early March as part of London’s 8th Polish film festival, is actually closer to the work of David Lynch and Gaspar Noé. Why, then, has it not found a distributor?

On its digitally-foliated surface, Snow White, Russian Red is a boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back-again tale. But looking closer we find ourselves caught in a hallucinatory, visceral, hilarious vision of the rotten core of post-communist, pre-EU Polish identity, seen through the dilated pupils of track-suited lovelorn yob, Silney.

With his bald head and child-like face, Zulawski’s protagonist resembles a fallen angel just landed on earth; as he steps from the murk into razor-sharp focus, sweating, it’s as if his scalp has been dipped in heated wax. The film’s exquisite high-definition photography is reminiscent of Michael Mann’s Collateral, with palettes of queasy greens and misty browns, or of Sophia Coppolla’s Marie Antoinette, as the harsh electric reds of the Polish flag cut through hazy landscapes.

Spurned by his true love, the drug-addicted Magda, Silney (Borys Szyc) descends into a downward spiral of sex, drugs and violence. Searching for salvation he encounters a succession of angels and demons (an anorexic virgin Goth, a speed-wrecked gangster) and his life becomes wound in an ever-tighter Gordian knot. Then he meets Dorota Maslowska, author of the cult novel upon which the film is based. She is a police station receptionist. “You’re not here, I’m not here, we’re not here,” she tells our anti-hero as the walls of her office slide away. And suddenly a different narrative emerges: Silny, it seems, is offered the chance to retrieve Magda from hell, or lose her through drug-fueled paranoia and doubt. It’s a Vertigo or Camus’s Black Orpheus. Or are these the death-dreams of the dying man; is this Odd Man Out transferred to 21st-century Poland? A social-realist Jacob’s Ladder? All of the above? As with most great films, there are no easy answers.

Yet as too often is the case, it is precisely the great strengths of Snow White, Russian Red—its twisted meta-narrative, its stylistic iconoclasm, and its refusal to offer an easy moral centre—that would make most distributors wary. Its message is certainly not a commercially palatable one: Silney’s fantasies of destroying the Russian black market are laced with xenophobia; the unregulated international free market is seen to be destroying Poland. But whether or not you agree with its politics, this film is a brilliantly inventive, shockingly funny, and strangely moving portrait of contemporary urban life, which makes most independent low-budget cinema look passé and bland by comparison. And most importantly, the questions it asks about identity in the postmodern age are pertinent to countless settings: it could equally take place on a South London estate. Forget the disappointment of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. This is the dark fairytale to watch. Let’s hope some distributor sees it that way.

Click here for more information on the 8th Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, which runs until 13th April.

Veteran adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has a few suggestions for the embattled president

The Israeli government’s slap in the face of visiting US Vice-President Joseph Biden—announcing 1,600 new homes in the contested territory of East Jerusalem during his stay—has heightened the perception that the foreign policy of the Obama administration is not going well.

The problem, some argue, is that there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Besides Biden, there are the powerful secretaries of defence and state, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton. There are the special troubleshooters for the middle east and Afghanistan, George Mitchell and Richard Holbrooke. There is the president’s own intimate staff. On top of that, the national security adviser is supposed to keep all these lions in harness. That is the job Henry Kissinger did for Nixon and Ford, that Zbigniew Brzezinski, who I interviewed for Prospect, did during the Carter presidency, and Brent Scowcroft did under George Bush Senior. This is not to say the present incumbent, General James Jones, is a weakling. He is not. It is just that the coterie he has to deal with is more experienced and better politically connected than he is.

But now Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of an influential think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, has thrown a firecracker into the ring by suggesting that Brzezinski be brought back in to take over as foreign policy adviser. Brzezinski, who is 81, was one of Obama’s early heavyweight supporters and a professor at Columbia University while the future president was an undergraduate there. Later, Obama sidelined him after he made remarks considered to be anti-Israeli.

As if on cue, Brzezinski wrote the cover story of the February issue of Foreign Affairs, the Council’s bi-monthly magazine, praising Obama for having upturned the world’s perception of America through improved relations with the Islamic world, reducing of nuclear weapons, and sharpening the focus on the environment.

But there are three urgent issues, he says, that the president has not got a proper hold on: the Israel-Palestine conflict, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and Afghanistan-Pakistan.

Obama has not taken on board the internationally-favoured blueprint for peace in Israel and Palestine, involving the sharing of Jerusalem, the resettling of refugees (duly compensated) in Palestine, and land swaps to make up for the Jewish settlements. If only he had embraced the consensus, writes Brzezinski, “he would have exerted enormous influence on both the Palestinians and the Israelis… So far the Obama team has shown neither the tactical skill nor the strategic firmness needed to move the peace process forward.”

On Iran, he compliments Obama for having downgraded the threat of an American military attack even as others are proposing one. Moreover, he has not fallen into the trap of imposing a tight deadline. Brzezinski believes it is impossible to persuade the Iranians to turn back the clock on what they have already done but that it should be possible to persuade them not to go to the next stage, which is weaponisation. (One might add that this is the longstanding US policy towards South Africa, Japan and Brazil, all of whom hold large stocks of enriched uranium.) At present, Iranian policy is complicated by the appointment of senior officials who favour policies designed to force an early confrontation with Iran, and even advocate joint military consultations with Israel on the use of force. They should be sidelined or told to resign.

Finally there is the Afghanistan-Pakistan predicament. Brzezinski writes: “Obama has moved toward abandoning some of the more ambitious, even ideological, objectives that defined the US’s initial engagement in Afghanistan—the creation of a modern democracy, for example.” Top generals have said that that the US army is not winning. There has to be an alternative strategy, and that could be talking with receptive elements of the Taliban. “The Taliban are not a global revolutionary or terrorist movement, and although they are a broad alliance with a rather medieval vision of what Afghanistan ought to be, they do not directly threaten the west,” adds Brzezinski.

Finally, the US also needs to assuage Pakistan’s security concerns. “Given that many Pakistanis may prefer a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan than a secular Afghanistan that leans towards Pakistan’s arch-rival, India, the US needs to assuage Pakistan’s security concerns in order to gain its full cooperation in the campaign against the irreconcilable elements of the Taliban.” To this, I would add that India—where I am currently based—needs to be cajoled into agreeing to the Kashmir peace plan of the former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf.  That will do much to cure the Pakistani obsession with Indian influence.

Despite the wisdom of his words, it seems unlikely that Brzezinski will be appointed national security adviser. Obama’s foreign policy team is already crammed with heavyweights. Nevertheless, Obama should listen carefully to what this long-serving veteran has to say.

Web exclusive: read Jake Wallis Simons on High noon in the middle east

Who would argue with the map?

In a perfect world, the trouble over Falklands oil would be resolved in an amicable, bipartisan fashion. Hillary Clinton appeared to hold that view during her recent visit to Buenos Aires, when she endorsed American-led talks on the issue. But for many in Britain her words were far too pro-Argentine; not least because she referred to the islands as las Malvinas. The motivation behind her words, however, was little more than pragmatism, and those who value our “special relationship” need not be perturbed. Far from slighting her country’s staunchest ally, the secretary of state was throwing a sorely-needed bone to a friend who could prove very helpful in furthering the anti-terrorism, anti-drugs agenda in South America.

Her remarks might have made more sense to British observers had they been reported prefaced with the disingenuous praise she heaped on President Kirchner for her handling of the economic crisis. The former First Lady deliberately didn’t mention the $6.5bn of foreign currency reserves that have recently been earmarked for the repayment of Argentina’s overseas debt, a policy that has galvanised popular opposition in Buenos Aires. A formidable trio of powers also opposes it: the former head of the Central Bank, a supreme court judge, and the leaders of the parliamentary opposition, all of whom view the allocation, bludgeoned through by presidential decree, to be illegal and poor policy besides.

This should make it abundantly clear that Clinton did not intend her proposal to be a belated quid pro quo for Britain’s release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi last August. She and her colleagues know that sovereignty can never be divided equally between two functional democracies—not even EU bureaucrats believe that any more. Her call for the two countries to “sit down at the table” was intentionally meaningless. The issue has already been decided, to the loss of 260 British lives, and the continued support of the island’s three thousand or so Marmite-eating inhabitants.

For these reasons, it is amazing that some British commentators have felt it necessary to suggest such insulting “solutions” to the “problem” as an “entrenched leaseback” or the outright sale of the territory, as one German tabloid recently suggested the Greeks do with Corfu. Not even the most bellicose Argentines would expect such a windfall, for in their hearts they know the cause to be utterly hopeless. Their passions are only aroused by the bitter aftertaste that still lingers some 30 years after General Leopoldo Galtieri took their conscript army into battle against a much more professional British taskforce. For hard-working citizens, the recent sabre-rattling has merely been an affordable way of showing solidarity with the barefoot veterans who hold constant vigil in the Plaza de Mayo.

If any positives can be taken from this latest chapter, it is the hope that the Argentines will eventually find their own oil in the South Atlantic, or at least offer the British companies working in the area a base for their operations. Such a change of attitude could provide much-needed cash for their ailing schools, hospitals and social housing.

For the time being, however, the government in Buenos Aires would be well advised to maintain a dignified silence on the issue. Desire Petroleum, the British company currently drilling in the Falklands, would not be the first natural resources company to be slightly too “optimistic” in its early soundings for oil. It could still be safer for investors to plump for Argentine bonds instead.

Sarko and Carla: a bona fide pair of "hot rabbits"?

When 24-hour licensing was introduced in 2005, the government said it wanted Britain to imitate the “continental” drinking culture, where everyone sipped half-pints at café tables and the virtues of moderation were imbibed with spritzer at the age of five. That is a complete fable, says Jim Pollard in the forthcoming issue of Prospect, available on 25th March. The drift has been in the opposite direction: in Paris, le binge drinking est bien arrivé—and it’s because the French are increasingly imitating us.

It’s only the latest, Pollard says, in a long line of English imports ranging from pop records to corporate brands to street slang. And this shift is beginning to affect people’s private lives too, wrote Lucy Wadham in a previous issue of Prospect. When his last marriage to the long-suffering Cecile broke down, Nicolas Sarkozy was attacked over his lack of “pudeur” (a word part-way between shame and modesty) as he pandered to the press: an Anglo-American tactic that went against the grain of the Fifth Republic’s Catholic origins.

However, all the French coverage of the recent alleged Bruni/Sarkozy dalliances isn’t necessarily a sign of the French media becoming more like the British in its appetite for celebrity scandal. Rumours that Sarkozy’s liaison with his ecology minister has been invented to salvage his reputation as a “sex dwarf” (in the face of being cuckolded by his man-eating wife) point to an undiminished gulf between French and English attitudes to sex.

We have no concept of the chaud lapin: the very idea of a prime minister sleeping with a member of his cabinet would make English blood run cold. But for the French, such news can be bundled together with Bruni’s liaison as “extramarital affairs” as a face-saving measure. Meanwhile, the English-speaking internet resounds to a dwarf joke about Sarkozy that David Cameron made in September. We’re not identical yet.

The Judas Tree: MacMillan's controversial ballet

Kenneth MacMillan triple bill
Royal Opera House, 23rd March-15th April, Tel: 0207 304 4000

In 1992 Kenneth MacMillan died, both tragically and fittingly, backstage at the Royal Opera House during a performance of his ballet Mayerling. Had he lived, he would now be celebrating his 80th birthday. Yet amid the tributes being paid—the publishing of a new biography (Different Drummer by Jann Parry), the performance of a dedicated triple bill—the nature of MacMillan’s legacy is still being debated.

Back in the 1960s MacMillan established himself as the angry young man of ballet. Frustrated by the art form’s lingering fairytale cuteness, he made it his mission to embrace the darkness and danger of real life. He could craft beautiful steps with the best of them, but he choreographed works that dealt with madness, brutality, war and loss, and tested the limits of the classical vocabulary.

In many ways the urgency of Macmillan’s quest made him the most important choreographer of his generation. But critics sometimes saw a muddle of means, and an incoherence of tone. His last ballet, The Judas Tree, was as controversial as any he made in its heated convergence of mysticism and gang rape. And the debate will be revived when it returns to the stage in the Royal Ballet’s tribute programme, alongside the more innocent, crowd-pleasing ballets Concerto and Elite Syncopations.

This article originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of Prospect

Matt Damon stars in this tense chase thriller

Green Zone
dir Paul Greengrass. On general release from 12th March

Last year, British production company Working Title strayed beyond its natural comfort zone with dramas—notably Frost/Nixon and State Of Play—that failed to enhance parent company Universal’s bottom line. Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone might have been another such case until costly reshoots in late 2008 (its release was bumped all the way to spring 2010).

This troubled business context may be a factor in the transition from the property Working Title acquired—Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s account of the blundering postwar provisional authority in Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City—into the film it has made. The marketers are trying hard to suggest a pulse-quickening military adventure from the director of The Bourne Supremacy, with a trailer that omits the words “Iraq” and “Baghdad”—and who can blame them? The Iraq war has proved toxic at the box office.

The surprise is that, for once, the marketing doesn’t lie. Green Zone really is a tense chase thriller, in which rogue CIA officer Brendan Gleeson sees the perils of Paul Bremer’s wholesale dismantling of Ba’ath power structures, and tasks American soldier Matt Damon with bringing in an Iraqi general the US authorities wish to eliminate. Happily, Greengrass’s signature gritty aesthetic—shaky handheld cameras, grainy night-vision footage—licenses the discerning cinemagoer to overlook the film’s bad faith to its source material and surrender to a big-screen guilty pleasure.

Broken, like its namesake. But is it worth mending?

Andrew Montford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion,” reviewed for Prospect by Matt Ridley, tells a story that will undoubtedly worry those who believe that our climate is warming—and infuriate critics (who are legion) of the book’s protagonist, Steve McIntyre.

If you haven’t come across him before, McIntyre was, in 2003, the first to publish a critique of the “hockey stick” temperature graph: the classic piece of evidence for man-made global warming used since 1998. McIntyre argued that the graph was fundamentally unsound by demonstrating, for example, that the model produced a “hockey stick” shape even when random data was put into it. There followed Montford’s story, of articles suppressed, data sets withheld and “warmist” malfeasance.

Since 2005 McIntyre has edited climateaudit.com, where he and a multitude of commenters dig for assumptions and oversights in every piece of climate science from a position of sceptical empiricism. His chief adversary is the Nasa climatologist Gavin Schmidt and his group of climate scientists at realclimate.org. (McIntyre has a maths degree, but no background in applied science.)

Climate science is one of the internet’s few debates (supposedly) to be based on hard evidence. Nevertheless, its participants contrive to misinterpret, bamboozle and irritate each other so successfully that they’re known to take leave of their data sets, as Gregory Norminton found out to his dismay when he tackled Lord Monckton in a debate at St Andrews University.

The British government, though, has made up its mind, and the Carbon Reduction Commitment, which aims to reduce CO2-equivalent emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, will begin charging £12 per ton for carbon emissions next year. And at the end of 2009, Prospect invited a number of leading thinkers to contribute their thoughts on climate change. For those concerned about global warming, and alarmed by the traction that the climategate and hockey stick stories have gathered, it’s worth looking back at Prospect’s climate change special to see how the climate change debate has brought attendant issues, such as waste, deforestation and resource geopolitics, into the public eye.