The Ukrainian war has shown the seismic complexity of relations between Russia and the rest of Europe. These five recently published essays take us from very different perspectives to different geopolitical earthquakes of the last century.
Text: José Ángel LÓPEZ JIMÉNEZ
Sofia Casanova She has been a practically unknown figure until a few years ago in Spain, despite being considered the first war correspondent, who carried out her work since the beginning of the 20th century.
Intellectual, novelist, essayist, playwright, poet and journalist, during her ninety-six years of intense life, this polyglot Galician survived five wars (the two world wars, the Spanish civil war, the Russian revolution and the subsequent civil war and the Polish-Soviet conflict Married to the Polish diplomat and intellectual Lutoslawski, she was hired as a correspondent for the ABC newspaper in Poland in 1914. The work has just appeared Of War, Revolution and other articles (ed. La Umbría y La Solana, Los Libros de la Frontera-d) which contains around 150 articles out of the close to a thousand that it is estimated he wrote in his prolific professional life. Ordered by blocks that correspond to the aforementioned conflicts, they represent the scenarios that, to a large extent, devastated the European continent for more than half a century.
the author of At the court of the tsars portrays the horrors of the continuing carnage of the two world conflicts and its impact on the civilian population. “Comparative history is enjoyable,” he concluded in one of his chronicles sent in December 1917 from the heart of the Russian revolution. The comparison with the French revolution is very reminiscent of the work of Ivan Bunin – the first Russian Nobel Prize for Literature. His monarchical and conservative ideology -as indicated in the introduction- did not prevent him from denouncing the abuses of any type of totalitarianism and in this compilation we can enjoy a literary quality that has nothing to do with the contemporary figure of war correspondents. . Relevant work that rescues from oblivion an author who, like so many relevant women in history, have been overshadowed by much more mediocre masculine ones.
As happened with Sofía Casanova, in the dominant accounts in the historiography of conflicts, oblivion spreads its cloak over the nobodies. That is to say, the bulk of actors and protagonists -as well as their stories- who go completely unnoticed and ignored, except for their relatives, in the midst of global tragedies and the protagonist leaders of the respective sides. Francisco J. Leira has investigated and collected some of these stories in The Nobodies of the Spanish War (ed. Akal). This young historian, with a great generational distance from the conflict, advocates in his work not so much for equidistance but rather for reconciliation. And he does so by denouncing in these stories of anonymous characters – but with names, surnames, lives and families – the horror, barbarism and unreason of any conflict but, even more virulently, of an entire country against itself. For this he has not written a book on the history of the Spanish Civil War but “a book of stories of various people who have become History”. They are the stories of Francisco and Dorinda, of soldiers from both sides, of the religious repression in Fray Cándido Rial or of the Saturrarán dams; from the foreign ideological mobilization of the International Brigades or the Romanian Iron Guard; all selected to show that in violence, terror or solidarity and empathy was transversal during the civil conflict. Only from the vindication of the nobodies is Public History and its values recovered: democracy, human rights and denunciation of war. Something that does not come naturally and for which you have to work permanently.
precisely characters like Victor Serge portrays in his book men in prison (Gatopardo editions) the prison experience he suffered in the solitary confinement cells of La Santé and Melun in France for five years, beginning in 1912. Victor Lvovich’s pseudonym was a figure of socialism who participated in the Russian revolutionary process and who, disenchanted with the results of the same he dedicated his life in Mexican exile to denounce the excesses of Stalinism. Serge, from a Russian-Polish family although born in Belgian exile -because his father was an imperial official and member of the Land and Freedom group- dedicated his journalistic and literary work to criticizing the deviation from the revolutionary objectives of the Bolsheviks and the establishment of of a totalitarian regime. midnight in the century y The Tulayev case they constituted the first relevant works to raise the impossibility and cost of dissidence. In men in prison we are before a work previous to this period. But it is already clear that we are dealing with an author who, taking his values and principles to the last consequences of him (he refused to betray his anarchist comrades) assumed the cost of his decision to go to jail. The literary value of this book is very remarkable. Once again-as in the previous book-he focuses on nobodies, on anonymous characters: prisoners, officials, police officers and criminals who live in a separate universe: “men crushed in the darkest corner of society”. This work, with all the distances, reminds at times of The memories of the dead house de Dostoyevsky.
Putin’s black bookdirected by Stephane Courtois and Galia Ackerman (ed. Espasa) brings together a group of specialists on different Russian issues that come together around the figure of Putin. Courtois, author of the Black Book of Communism, develops in its first part the chronicle of an announced dictatorship. Or, what is the same, the conversion of a homo sovieticus in one post-sovieticus in which, however, his Chekist profile survives. In the second part of the book, different chapters analyze the aggressive deployment carried out since his accession to power to the Russian periphery (Chechnya) and to the former Soviet republics considered by Putin as his natural sphere of influence (Georgia), denying their historical rights to a existence as an independent state (Ukraine). In the third block of the work, an interdisciplinary analysis of the conversion of Putin’s Russia into an autocratic state with a pseudo-democratic wrapper is developed. Thus, for example, the role of institutions and their submission to Putin’s leadership are emphasized; the subjugation of civil society and the persecution of non-governmental organizations that are unruly to the regime; the connections and strategic alliances with the oligarchs or with the Russian Orthodox Church or the persecution of political dissent or freedom of information. The future scenarios in Russia, according to the directors of the work, depend on its reintegration into the international community, ending with an internal anomaly: the survival of Sovietism and authority in the hands of the KGB-FSB.
Serhii PlokhyUkrainian historian specializing in the post-Soviet space and author of such renowned works as the gates of europe y the last empirepublishes the book at Turner publishing house nuclear madness. Coinciding with the sixtieth anniversary of the missile crisis in Cuba, the author addresses in a monumental historical research work the events that took place during 1962 that put the international community on the brink of nuclear collapse. The highlight of this book, well documented with unpublished materials, is that one of its main theses insists on the inexperience of the political leaders of the moment (Kennedy and Khrushchev) and the accumulation of errors of appreciation that brought the world to the brink of the disaster. The management of the crisis revealed the lack of information on the part of the United States (the authentic deployment of Russian military personnel in Cuba was not known, for example), as well as the ignorance on the part of the CIA of the landing of nuclear warheads until the ramps were discovered. launching missiles on a military reconnaissance flight on October 16, 1962. The Khrushchev Soviet Union’s arms race tried to match its potential with that of the United States, acting in Cuba as an intermediary state. During two hectic weeks —full of actors, extreme negotiations, blockades and the shooting down of spy planes— Plokhy develops an authentic thriller that did not end up consummating the tragedy due to fear of the nuclear holocaust of both Cold War leaders. As this scenario reminds us of what has happened during the last year between the United States / NATO and Russia, with Ukraine as a scapegoat.
