A publisher I know used to say that if you want to sell more books, put “Hitler” in the title. In this case, someone may have been taking his advice. It was not Hitler who…Read more…
Review: The Obstacle is the Way, by Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday is a young-ish American marketing executive who seems to have stumbled upon stoicism and turned the philosophy of the ancient Greeks into a real money spinner. His books are fast reads and mega-best-sellers,…Read more…
Third Period, First Republic: The use and mis-use of symbols
Rough sleepers have returned to Finsbury Park and their various belongings lay pressed against the walls of a railway bridge. Just above where they sleep, the walls are plastered with posters asking “Are you a…Read more…
From Madrid to Kyiv
A little more than 85 years ago, on 28 March 1939, the Spanish civil war ended. The fascist forces under the command of General Franco entered the capital, Madrid, and it was all over. Spain…Read more…
Review: Boris Savinkov: Renegade on the Left, by Richard B. Spence
Writing a biography of a man as complex — and elusive — as Boris Savinkov is not an easy task. But Richard Spence has done an exemplary job of this. HIs 1991 book is comprehensive…Read more…
Boris Savinkov: Forgotten revolutionary
While there have been countless books and articles about V.I. Lenin, whose death in 1924 has been marked in this newspaper and elsewhere, there are some Russian revolutionaries of that time who have long been…Read more…
Gaza and the Left, Here and There
Something strange is happening in American and British politics this year. According to a report in this week’s Sunday Times, the Labour Party under the leadership of Keir Starmer seems on course not just to…Read more…
Review: The Ochrana – The Russian Secret Police, by A.T. Vassilyev
This 1930 book is not about that Russian secret police — the one that comes to mind — but about an earlier one, the one which author A.T. Vassilyev commanded until the collapse of the…Read more…
Textile workers strike in Egypt
The 3,700 female workers in the Mahalla textile factories were furious. The Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, had earlier in the month raised the minimum wage to 6,000 Egyptian pounds — the equivalent of just…Read more…
Review: Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Movement – The SR Party, 1902 -14, by Nurit Schleifman
The Socialist Revolutionary Party, like other groups working in opposition to the autocratic regime that ruled Russia until 1917, was rife with secret police agents. The most famous of these, Ievno Azef, rose to become…Read more…
Antisemitism and Israel
For sixty years, the Anti-Defamation League has been profiling Americans to try to monitor antisemitic beliefs. For the first half century of doing that, they found a fairly steady and ongoing decline in anti-Jewish sentiment….Read more…
Review: Pale Horse, by Boris Savinkov
This novel by Russian terrorist icon Boris Savinkov is remarkably similar to his final work, Black Horse, leading one to believe that he chose the titles deliberately. The format is the same: short, dated entries…Read more…
Subversive women, subversive films – rediscovering Dorothy Arzner
Dorothy Arzner is someone I had never heard of before, and maybe you haven’t either. Arzner was the only director of films in Hollywood under the studio system of the 1930s and 1940s and she…Read more…
Review: The Black Horse, by Boris Savinkov
Boris Savinkov was possibly the most dangerous man in Russia. A leading figure in the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Combat Organisation, he was the scourge of the Romanovs in their final years. When the tsarist regime…Read more…
“Putin has murdered Navalny”
When I studied at university, I had access to reprinted editions of many American left publications. Among them was Labor Action, the weekly newspaper of Max Shachtman’s Workers Party. I have never forgotten the headline…Read more…
“Someday this war’s gonna end”
One of the great speeches in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” is made by Robert Duvall, playing a somewhat insane U.S. Army colonel in Vietnam. After delivering his oft-quoted “I love the smell of napalm…Read more…
Review: Aseff: The Russian Judas, by Boris Nicolaievsky
By the time this book was published in 1934, the name of Ievno Azef had already faded from popular memory. But a quarter century earlier, he had achieved infamy as the most dangerous man in…Read more…
Stalin and the angels
Keke would have been so proud. When her son Joseph was growing up in the small, dusty town of Gori, she dreamed that one day he would be a priest. He did eventually study at…Read more…
Review: Comrade Valentine, by Richard E. Rubenstein
Sixty years after Boris Nicolaevsky wrote his account of the notorious Ievno Azef — the most infamous police agent to ever infiltrate a revolutionary organisation — Richard E. Rubenstein took a crack at the same…Read more…
Review: The Rumor Game, by Thomas Mullen
Last year, I read Thomas Mullen’s Blind Spots, a novel set in the near future with an intriguing premise. I enjoyed it, and looked forward to reading The Rumor Game. This book is set in…Read more…