Anne Applebaum's Blog, page 50

Everyone remembers the whitewashing scene in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." But how many recall the scene that precedes it? Having escaped from Aunt Polly, Tom is "playing hooky" and teaching himself to whistle when he spies a "newcomer" in his village — a newcomer with "a citified air." Their conversation unfolds like this:

"I can lick you!"

"I'd like to see you try it."

"Well, I can do it."

"No you can't, either."

After that, the encounter deteriorates further ("Can! Can't!") until finally the two boys are wrestling in the dirt. Tom wins the battle — the citified newcomer is made to shout "Nuff!" — but returns home late and is thus commanded to whitewash the famous fence.

After this incident, the reader's sympathies are meant to lie with Tom. But try, if you can, to strip away the haze of nostalgia and sentiment through which we generally perceive Mark Twain's world, and imagine how a boy like Tom Sawyer would be regarded today. As far as I can tell, that fight is not just "inappropriate behavior," to use current playground terminology, but is also one of the many symptoms of "oppositional defiant disorder" (ODD), a condition that Tom manifests throughout the book.

And Tom is not merely ODD: He clearly has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well, judging by his inability to concentrate in school. "The harder Tom tried to fasten his mind on his book, the more his mind wandered," Twain writes at one point. Unable to focus ("Tom's heart ached to be free") he starts playing with a tick. This behavior is part of a regular pattern: A few days earlier in church (where he had to sit "as far away from the open window and the seductive outside summer scenes as possible"), Tom had been unable to pay attention to the sermon and played with a pinch bug instead.

In fact, Tom manifests many disturbing behaviors. He blames his half-brother for his poor decisions, demonstrating an inability to take responsibility for his actions. He provokes his peers, often using aggression. He deliberately ignores rules and demonstrates defiance toward adults. He is frequently dishonest, at one point even pretending to be dead. Worst of all, he skips school — behavior that might, in time, lead him to be diagnosed with conduct disorder (CD), from which his friend Huck Finn clearly suffers.

I am not being entirely sarcastic here: I have reread both "Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" several times in recent years, precisely because Twain draws such fascinating portraits of children whose behavior is familiar, even if we now describe it differently. As a mother of boys, I find this weirdly reassuring: Although ADHD and ODD are often dismissed as recently "invented" disorders, they describe personality types and traits that have always existed. A certain kind of boy has always had trouble paying attention in school. A certain kind of boy has always picked fights with friends, gone smoking in the woods and floated down the river on rafts.

In previous eras, such behavior was just as problematic for adults as it is today. Poor old Aunt Polly — how many times does she "fall to crying and wringing her hands"? To cope with Tom, she seeks names for his disorder — he is "full of the Old Scratch," meaning the devil — and searches for ways to control him ("Spare the rod and spile the child," she tells herself).

But if the behavior or actions of the children and the parents are familiar, the society surrounding them is not. Tom Sawyer turns out fine in the end. In 19th-century Missouri, there were still many opportunities for impulsive kids who were bored and fidgety in school: The very qualities that made him so tiresome — curiosity, hyperactivity, recklessness — are precisely the ones that get him the girl, win him the treasure and make him a hero. Even Huck Finn is all right at the end of his story. Although he never learns to tolerate "sivilization," he knows he can head out to "Indian territory," to the empty West, where even the loose rules of Missouri life won't have to be followed.

Nothing like that is available to children who don't fit in today. Instead of striking out into the wilderness like Huck Finn, they get sent to psychologists and prescribed medication — if they are lucky enough to have parents who can afford that sort of thing. Every effort will rightly be made to help them pay attention, listen to the teacher, stop picking fights in the playground. Nowadays, there aren't any other options.

Historical amnesia is at once the most endearing and the most frustrating of American qualities. On the one hand, it means that — F. Scott Fitzgerald notwithstanding — there really are second acts in American lives. People can move somewhere else, reinvent themselves, start again.

On the other hand, our inability to remember what our policy was last week, never mind last decade, drives outsiders crazy. We forget that we supported the dictator before we decided to destroy him. Then we can't understand why others, especially the dictator's subjects, don't always believe in the goodness of our intentions or the sincerity of our devotion to democracy.

Domestic policy is no different, as I learned from readers who wrote to denounce my column of two weeks ago. I argued that Americans on both the left and the right have, for the past decade, consistently voted for high-spending members of Congress, and consistently supported ever-greater government intervention and regulation at all levels of public life. As a result, the federal government expanded under George W. Bush's administration at a rate that was, at least until President Obama came along, unprecedented in American history.

Alas, historical amnesia appears to have affected some readers, many of whom are under the impression that President Bush actually believed in small government and that recent Republican congressional leaders actually opposed federal spending.

Here is a more accurate assessment: "President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ." I didn't write that: The astute libertarian economist Veronique de Rugy did. She also points out that during his eight years in office, Bush's "anti-government" Republican administration increased the federal budget by an extraordinary 104 percent. By comparison, the increase under President Bill Clinton's watch was a relatively measly 11 percent (a rate, I might add, lower than during Ronald Reagan's). In his second term, Bush increased discretionary spending — that means non-Medicare, non-Social Security — 48.6 percent. In his final year in office, fiscal 2009, he spent more than $32,000 per American, up from $17,216.68 in fiscal 2001.

But Bush is not the only culprit: The federal government usually spends money in response to state demands. Look, for example, at Alaska, a state that produces a disproportionate quantity of anti-government rhetoric, that has had Republican governors since 2002 and whose congressional delegation is dominated by Republicans as well. For the past decade, Alaska has been among the top three state recipients of federal funding, per capita. Usually, Alaska is far ahead — sometimes three times as far ahead — of most other states in the union.

Largely, this is because of one famous Alaskan, Republican Ted Stevens, who devoted himself to securing federal funding for his state during more than four decades in the Senate. Not only were his efforts extremely popular among his Republican constituents — he was reelected multiple times — they won him many, many imitators. Slate's Timothy Noah long ago pointed out that as mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin hired a former Stevens chief of staff to be a Washington lobbyist. As a result, the 6,700 inhabitants of Wasilla enjoyed $27 million in federal earmarks over a four-year period.

Please note, angry readers, that I am not citing these figures to claim that the Obama administration has done any better: On the contrary, the Obama administration is far more profligate than Clinton or Bush, terrifyingly so. After Obama's first budget, De Rugy predicted "unprecedented and sustained levels of debt for the American people, their children and grandchildren." But then, the Democratic Party does not call itself the party of small government. The GOP does.

Parties, of course, can change; politicians can see the light; lessons can be learned; and perhaps some Republicans have learned them. But you cannot start from scratch. You cannot forget history. You cannot pretend that the Republican Party has not supported big and wasteful spending programs — energy subsidies, farm subsidies, unnecessary homeland security projects, profligate defense contracts, you name it — for the past decade. Before the GOP can have credibility on any spending issues whatsoever, Republican leaders need to speak frankly about the mistakes of the past.

They also must be extremely specific about which policies and programs they are planning to cut. What will it be? Social Security or the military budget? Medicare or the Transportation Security Administration? Vague "anti-government" rhetoric doesn't cut it anymore: If you want a smaller government, you have to tell us how you will create one.

Thank you, WikiLeaks.

I didn't think it was possible, but Julian Assange has done it: By releasing 92,000 pages of intelligence documents relating to the Afghanistan war onto the laptops of an unsuspecting public, the proprietor of WikiLeaks has made an iron-clad case for the mainstream media. If you were under the impression that we no longer need news organizations, editors or reporters with more than 10 minutes' experience, think again. The notion that the Internet can replace traditional newsgathering has been revealed as a myth.

To see what I mean, try reading this: "At 1850Z, TF 2-2 using PREDATOR (UAV) PID insurgents emplacing IEDs at 41R PR 9243 0202, 2.7km NW of FOB Hutal, Kandahar. TF 2-2 using PREDATOR engaged with 1x Hellfire missile resulting in 1x INS KIA and 1x INS WIA. ISAF tracking #12-374."

Did you get that? I didn't, at least not at first. I understand it somewhat better now, however, because the New York Times helpfully explains on its Web site that this excerpt from one of the WikiLeaks documents describes a Predator drone firing a missile at men who were planting roadside bombs.

How about this? "At 1635z TF 2Fury reported a Green on Green event at the Giro DC, VB 3591 6240. An element at the Giro DC reported that that two of the OPs IVO of the Giro DC were under SAF and DF attack." That one is tougher, but fortunately the Guardian informs us that it's an excerpt describing a shootout between units of the Afghan police.

Reading through the documents, you do begin to pick up the code. FOB is a forward operating base; BDA is a battle damage assessment. Yet after a while, even the summaries don't make that much sense. Was that Predator operation crucial? Was that Afghan police battle ordinary friendly fire, or did it reflect a larger conflict? Here the Times and the Guardian can help a little, as they have reviewed the documents, passed them quickly by experts and done a bit of comparing and contrasting. This is because Assange, despite his insistence on the value of raw data, knew perfectly well that the public wouldn't be able to make much of this stuff and gave the documents to three news organizations in advance.

Nevertheless, even these newspapers were operating under a major handicap. Because WikiLeaks imposed a deadline for publishing the material, they had no time to do any proper newspaper reporting. Had journalists been on the ground when those Afghan police were shooting at one another, or investigated even a year later, they might have discovered something interesting — perhaps that this was really a story about clan warfare, or about poor training or about nothing at all. When such a report is placed in a long list with other equally enigmatic, equally out-of-context documents, it isn't easy to say.

But there weren't any reporters, or any time to do real journalism, and thus the deeper context for these documents will have to be acquired in some other fashion. Eventually, historians or good investigative reporters will make sense of them, using interviews, memoirs, documentation from other sources. That will take time, money and possibly the support of the mainstream media — a magazine, a newspaper — or even an "elite" institution like a university.

Until then, the documents are nothing more than raw data. They provide "color." They provide details. They help reinforce existing biases: The Guardian's interactive map of the "significant incidents" revealed by these documents shows only military failures — civilian casualties, accidents — and its key has no label for any sort of success.

They give newspapers a chance to pretend they've got scoops. The documents might even help bring in advertising revenue. By my extremely rough count, the New York Times has mentioned the relationship between the Pakistani secret service (the ISI) and the Taliban several dozen times over the past decade. (Last September, a Times report described the ISI as "the Taliban's off-again-on-again benefactor for more than a decade.") Yet the Times got away with running the headline "Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert" over the weekend — as if that were news.

But without more investigation, more work, more journalism, these documents just don't matter that much. To argue, as James Fallows has, that they are significant because they will inform an ignorant public is ludicrous: If you don't know by now that the ISI helped create the Taliban, or that civilian casualties are generally a problem for NATO, or that special forces units are hunting for al-Qaeda fighters, all that means is that you don't read the mainstream media. Which means that you don't really want to know.

I've listened to Sarah Palin's "Mama Grizzlies" video. I've watched the Tea Party movement evolve from a joke into a political force. I've read up on the primary candidates who want to take back government, take down government, burn down Washington.

I've seen all of it, I hear all of it and I don't believe any of it. A rose is a rose is a rose — and hypocrisy is hypocrisy, whether it takes the form of champagne socialism or mama grizzlies who would go on the rampage if, God forbid, their mortgage tax relief were ever taken away.

If you don't live in this country all of the time, and I don't, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans — with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs — demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don't simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

When, through a series of flukes, a crazy person smuggled explosives onto a plane last Christmas, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible. When, because of bad luck and planning mistakes, an oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the public bayed for blood and held the White House responsible again.

In fact, the crazy person was stopped by an alert passenger, not federal officials; and if the oil rig disaster is ever fixed, it will be through the efforts of a private company. Nevertheless, these kinds of events set off a chain reaction: A government program is created, experts are hired, new machines are ordered for the airports or new monitors sent beneath the ocean. This is how we got the Kafkaesque security network that an extraordinary Post investigation this week calls, quite conservatively, "A hidden world, growing beyond control."

For this hidden world, with its 1,271 security and intelligence organizations and its 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, is not the creation of a secretive totalitarian cabal: It has been set up in response to public demand. It's true that the French want to retire early, and that the British think health care should be free, but when things — any old things — go wrong, Americans also write to their congressional representatives and their commander in chief, demanding action. And precisely because this is a democracy, Congress and the president respond, pass a law, build a building.

The mechanism works the same way even when there isn't an emergency. To put it bluntly, middle-class Americans of the right, left and center have come to expect a level of personal financial security that — despite the stereotypes — most people around the world would never demand from their governments. In a book review this month, Brink Lindsey, vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute — a man who knows what he is up against — reported some extraordinary statistics. The majority of Americans are wary of global trade, don't trust free markets and also think that "the benefits from . . . Social Security or Medicare are worth the costs of those programs." And when the sample is restricted to people who support the Tea Party movement? The share is still 62 percent.

Yet it is Social Security, Medicare and the ever-expanding list of earmarks — federal grants — that are going to sink the American budget in the next few decades, not President Obama's health-care reform (though that won't help). Yet in Washington, these expenditures are known as "third rails": If you touch them, you're dead. President George W. Bush talked a little about making individuals more responsible for their retirement, and then he gave up. The "privatization" of Social Security, as it was sneeringly described, was too unpopular, particularly among his supporters.

Look around the world, and we don't look as exceptional as we think. Chileans are willing to save for their own retirement. Most Europeans are reconciled to the idea that not everybody, at any age and in any condition, is entitled to the most expensive medical technology. A secretary of state or defense traveling with dozens of cars and armed security guards would seem absurd in many countries, as would the notion that the government provides a tax break if you buy a house or that schools should close if there is ice on the roads. Yet we not only demand ludicrous levels of personal and political safety, we also rant and rave against the vast bureaucracies we have created — democratically, constitutionally, openly — to deliver it.

Politics and the Novel During the Cold War

by David Caute

Transaction, 403pp, £42.50

In 1948, Poland's new communist government was badly in need of legitimacy and desperate for international recognition. So they did what any self-respecting left-wing government would do, back in those days, in order to win a bit of respect; they held a cultural Congress. They invited Picasso, A. J. P. Taylor, Aldous Huxley, a host of prominent Soviet literary bureaucrats and whichever left-leaning writers they could dredge up from anywhere else. They put them all up in the best hotel in the war-damaged city of Wroclaw (Picasso got the suite Hitler had recently used). They produced all kinds of normally scarce luxuries for the buffet table, and then sat back to bask in the reflected glory.

At first, everything seemed to go well. One account from the time describes the mesmerising effect of Picasso's entrance:

Hundreds of artists, writers, composers from Africa, India, Ceylon, South America . . . all of them turned their gaze on the Spanish painter in the colourful ripped shirt, walking into the hall.

Alas the affair quickly went sour, as these things tend to do. Scarcely had the Congress begun when one of the Soviet bureaucrats, apparently under instructions to ensure that the Polish comrades didn't become too pleased with themselves, walked up to the podium, pulled out a thick speech and began to denounce Jean-Paul Sartre.

Picasso ripped off his headphones. Taylor and Huxley conferred furiously. The Polish hosts went about wringing their hands, for they knew that this meant the Congress was ruined. Sartre was then the left-wing intellectual par excellence, a fellow-traveller who was idolised by communist writers around the world; if the Soviet Union no longer tolerated even him, that meant that no literary middle ground was possible, that the Cold War had divided the European literary world as surely as it had divided European politics.

In fact the story of this particular Congress is not in David Caute's fascinating book, but I am telling it so that those who might be inclined to read Politics and the Novel have a taste of the atmosphere of that time, for there is no contemporary equivalent of that bitter literary divide. At least in Europe and North America, writers of fiction are no longer important pawns in political games. Neither the choice of literary subjects nor the choice of literary styles is necessarily thought to reflect anybody's political views, and the views of the President of the Writers' Union of any country are no longer sought for any reason.

But in the Europe of the 1940s and 1950s, literary modernists, like abstract expressionists, were banned in the Soviet Union. Proust, Joyce, Musil and Beckett were dismissed as 'carriers of decadence' — and thus any Soviet pronouncement concerning their works had political significance. Kafka was taboo in his native Prague until the early 1960s, when the first, tentative public discussions of his work heralded the Prague Spring. After the Soviet invasion of 1968, Kafka metamorphosed, so to speak, back into an enemy of the state.

Caute is at his sharpest when he focuses on these critical disputes and the pompous literary politics which were so emblematic of the era. He has a harder time making a clear argument when writing directly about the political novels of the period. One cannot, in fact, easily line up 'democratic' literature against 'communist' literature because in the West, literary fiction is not primarily written to convey political ideas. Writers such as Orwell and Koestler did describe the struggle between communism and liberal democracy, but they were exceptions. By contrast, writers on the other side of the iron curtain were almost exclusively obsessed by their own politics, dividing into 'official' writers who worked within the social realist canon and 'dissidents' who struggled against it.

What is missing, curiously, from the literary fiction of the period — and thus from this book — are tales of the Cold War itself: the skullduggery, the espionage games, the violence and drama then unfolding in the eastern half of Europe, then newly occupied by the Red Army. Outside of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, those subjects mostly fell to spy novelists like John le Carré, writers whose works were below the radar of the literary bureaucrats. Which explains, perhaps, why their books are still so readable, to this very day.

In 1948, Poland's new communist government was badly in need of legitimacy and desperate for international recognition. So they did what any self-respecting left-wing government would do, back in those days, in order to win a bit of respect; they held a cultural Congress. They invited Picasso, A. J. P. Taylor, Aldous Huxley, a host of prominent Soviet literary bureaucrats and whichever left-leaning writers they could dredge up from anywhere else. They put them all up in the best hotel in the war-damaged city of Wroclaw (Picasso got the suite Hitler had recently used). They produced all kinds of normally scarce luxuries for the buffet table, and then sat back to bask in the reflected glory.

At first, everything seemed to go well. One account from the time describes the mesmerising effect of Picasso's entrance:

Hundreds of artists, writers, composers from Africa, India, Ceylon, South America . . . all of them turned their gaze on the Spanish painter in the colourful ripped shirt, walking into the hall.

Alas the affair quickly went sour, as these things tend to do. Scarcely had the Congress begun when one of the Soviet bureaucrats, apparently under instructions to ensure that the Polish comrades didn't become too pleased with themselves, walked up to the podium, pulled out a thick speech and began to denounce Jean-Paul Sartre.

Picasso ripped off his headphones. Taylor and Huxley conferred furiously. The Polish hosts went about wringing their hands, for they knew that this meant the Congress was ruined. Sartre was then the left-wing intellectual par excellence, a fellow-traveller who was idolised by communist writers around the world; if the Soviet Union no longer tolerated even him, that meant that no literary middle ground was possible, that the Cold War had divided the European literary world as surely as it had divided European politics.

In fact the story of this particular Congress is not in David Caute's fascinating book, but I am telling it so that those who might be inclined to read Politics and the Novel have a taste of the atmosphere of that time, for there is no contemporary equivalent of that bitter literary divide. At least in Europe and North America, writers of fiction are no longer important pawns in political games. Neither the choice of literary subjects nor the choice of literary styles is necessarily thought to reflect anybody's political views, and the views of the President of the Writers' Union of any country are no longer sought for any reason.

But in the Europe of the 1940s and 1950s, literary modernists, like abstract expressionists, were banned in the Soviet Union. Proust, Joyce, Musil and Beckett were dismissed as 'carriers of decadence' — and thus any Soviet pronouncement concerning their works had political significance. Kafka was taboo in his native Prague until the early 1960s, when the first, tentative public discussions of his work heralded the Prague Spring. After the Soviet invasion of 1968, Kafka metamorphosed, so to speak, back into an enemy of the state.

Caute is at his sharpest when he focuses on these critical disputes and the pompous literary politics which were so emblematic of the era. He has a harder time making a clear argument when writing directly about the political novels of the period. One cannot, in fact, easily line up 'democratic' literature against 'communist' literature because in the West, literary fiction is not primarily written to convey political ideas. Writers such as Orwell and Koestler did describe the struggle between communism and liberal democracy, but they were exceptions. By contrast, writers on the other side of the iron curtain were almost exclusively obsessed by their own politics, dividing into 'official' writers who worked within the social realist canon and 'dissidents' who struggled against it.

What is missing, curiously, from the literary fiction of the period — and thus from this book — are tales of the Cold War itself: the skullduggery, the espionage games, the violence and drama then unfolding in the eastern half of Europe, then newly occupied by the Red Army. Outside of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, those subjects mostly fell to spy novelists like John le Carré, writers whose works were below the radar of the literary bureaucrats. Which explains, perhaps, why their books are still so readable, to this very day.

Children of the Gulag

By Cathy A. Frierson and Semyon S. Vilensky

(Yale University Press, 496 pp., $55)

Several years ago, a friend who helped me to find my way around the Russian State Archives in Moscow asked if I would like to meet another woman who was also working there. She was not doing research for a book, and she was not a scholar. Instead, she was indulging her curiosity and her nostalgia. Forty years earlier, she had worked as a baby nurse in a children's home inside one of...

The Betrayal

by Helen Dunmore

Fig Tree, 330pp, £18.99

It has taken more than half a century, but at last the Anglophone world has woken up to the fact that 20th-century communist history makes a superb backdrop for fiction. So extreme and dramatic were the Russian revolution, the arrests and the purges, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union and the imposition of Stalinism on the eastern half of Europe that all you have to do is write down what really happened and it sounds like fiction anyway. English historians such as Catherine Merridale (Night of Stone) and Simon Sebag-Montefiore (The Court of the Red Tsar) have known this for a while now. Now English novelists, from Martin Amis to Sebag-Montefiore himself, are finally catching up.

The Betrayal is Helen Dunmore's most recent contribution to this general awakening. It is the sequel to The Siege, Dunmore's widely admired account of one family's experience of the siege of Leningrad, and it follows the same characters into the post-war era. Dunmore, who is extremely well-versed in the nuances of Russian history, has again chosen her historical moment well. The Betrayal is set in 1952, the last year of Stalin's life. In those final months, the dictator's paranoia reached a new zenith, fixing itself on doctors, Jewish doctors in particular.

This story is essentially that of a couple, Andrei and Anna, who are accidentally caught up in that final wave of suspicion. In the book's first scene, Andrei, a pediatric surgeon, is asked by a nervous and sweaty colleague if he will give a second opinion on a child patient. The twist: the child, who is the son of Volkov, a powerful secret police boss, appears to have a malignant tumor, and everyone in the hospital knows that his death might also be fatal for the doctor who attempts to treat him.

Andrei is unable to wriggle out of the case — though his sweaty colleague manages to do so — and is stuck with the child's tragedy, and with the predicted consequences. Unwittingly, he drags down some others, most notably a Jewish surgeon, the best in the hospital. She amputates the boy's leg — professionally, expertly — but the surgery does not save him and the cancer returns. As a result, she ends up dying in prison.

Andrei is also arrested and eventually interrogated by Volkov himself. But even this dramatic narrative isn't the only one Dunmore offers. She also tells the story of Anna, whose months of starvation during the siege of Leningrad have made it difficult for her to conceive a child; of Anna's pushy boss at a children's nursery, a woman who wants to tick every box and win every medal on her way to the top of the Soviet bureaucracy; of Kolya, Anna's much younger brother, who is showing the first signs of adolescent, and maybe anti-government, rebellion; of Julia, Anna's childhood friend, who has already spent time in prisons and camps but has saved herself through marriage to a prominent film director.

Dunmore's genius lies in her ability to convey the strange Soviet atmosphere of these very Soviet stories using the most subtle of clues. We know Volkov is powerful because, unlike the ordinary patients in the crowded Soviet hospital, he meets Andrei in a specially cleared and recently cleaned room: 'It smells of polish, and someone has deposited a fresh vase of tulips on the desk. Extraordinary.' We know Anna's boss is an ambitious party member because she

is finished and perfect in her tailored cream blouse and a dark skirt and jacket . . . they tell the world that while the nursery has to be a place of overalls, mopped floors and the smell of children sleeping in the afternoons, it is also a proper, scientifically managed workplace with targets to meet and an impressive reputation in the wider pedagogical world.

Every so often, the dialogue did ring slightly untrue to me. People in this novel are far more polite to one another than people in the Soviet Union generally were — though there is a wonderful series of rude exchanges with the neighbours in the communal flat. But the scenery is pitch-perfect: the shabby Leningrad streets, the primitive dacha, the stiff office party, the crowded prison cell, even Julia's elegant flat, so surprising to Anna, who has grown accustomed to ugly interiors.

By the time I got to the end of the novel, I was also impressed by the intelligence of its title. The Betrayal implies that one of the characters will do something awful to someone he loves, and part of the novel's tension is created by that expectation. Will Andrei betray Anna under interrogation? Will Anna betray Andrei by denouncing him after he is arrested? I won't give away the plot, except to say that the true 'betrayal' in this story turns out to be a broader one: the Soviet Union's betrayal of its own citizens.

Anna, Andrei and Kolya struggled through the war. Like other Leningraders, they valiantly fought Hitler, they watched their family members die, they worked hard to keep others alive. After the war, they thought they were owed something more, perhaps a bit of prosperity, perhaps some more freedom. Instead, there was more hardship, more silence, and more pain. Doctors who thought they were working on behalf of society found themselves the targets of a vicious political campaign. Young people who worked and studied suddenly found themselves stymied by a political elite which favoured its own. Life did not get 'merrier' as Stalin once promised, but more tragic.

'I remember when we were students, your mother and me,' an old friend tells Anna:

You would get old women coming in with terrible prolapses that had never been repaired, and ulcers all over their legs. They could barely walk. They believed in the next world, and no wonder, when this one had given them nothing. But we believed in making this world a better place. Of course things went wrong — mistakes were made.

Mistakes were made, and that hope for a better world died as a result. It never revived — not in Stalin's lifetime, and not afterwards either.

Molotov's Magic Lantern

By Rachel Polonsky

Faber, 416 pp.

Above all, it is the inhuman scale of things which impresses the visitor to Moscow: the vastness of Red Square, the width of the uncrossable streets, the implacability of the traffic. The city's history seems equally inhuman, haunted as it is by centuries of tyrants, millions of political prisoners, countless wars. Impossible to navigate and impossible to know, Moscow doesn't exactly embrace the casual tourist.

But Rachel Polonsky was n...

WARSAW - Last Saturday, the Polish president, the Polish national bank chairman, the chief of the Polish general staff and a host of other military and political leaders, some of whom were my friends and my husband's colleagues, died in a tragic plane crash in the forest near Smolensk, Russia, not far from where 20,000 Polish officers were secretly murdered by Joseph Stalin 70 years ago. Yet this time around, nobody suspects a conspiracy.

Of course a few fringe Web sites might make that...

In this era of commerce and trade, it often happens that countries that might once have gone to war play out their antagonisms through other means. The immigration debate plays this role in Mexican American relations. For a time, the trade dispute over soft wood lumber (yes, really) fulfilled this function in Canadian American relations: At stake were different attitudes toward the role of government in industry, Canada's sensitivity to American economic power and many other issues, though...