Stalin

Why increase the number of suicides? Better to increase the output of ink! wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1926 in response to the death of a fellow poet. Four years later, aged 36, he shot himself. What drove the successful author, popular with the public and recognised by officialdom, to suicide? Bengt Jangfeldt provides some clues to this question in his detailed, source-rich biography. Mayakovsky came to poetry as a Futurist, co-authoring the 1912 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which granted poets the right ‘to feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time’. That the new era demanded a new language was a principle

‘If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it.’ Bruno Ganz, who not so much portrays Hitler as becomes him in Bernd Eichinger’s 2004 film Der Untergang (Downfall), spits the Führer’s nihilist venom so convincingly that the fundamental insanity of Nazism is at once laid bare, even to his closest collaborators. The madness of Nazism is now merely Hitler himself, and when on 30 April Ganz/Hitler, entombed in the Führerbunker, shoots himself, the film’s tension is at once gone. What follows is just rats fleeing the hole; and the rest, as it were, is silence. But it was not. VE

Tove Jansson’s father was a sculptor specialising in war memorials to the heroes of the White Guard of the Finnish civil war. He did not like women. They were too noisy, wore large hats at the cinema and would not obey orders in wartime. Tove used to hide to spy on his all-male parties, where everybody got astoundingly drunk and attacked chairs with bayonets. ‘All men are chums who will never leave each other in the lurch,’ she concluded. ‘A chum doesn’t forgive, he just forgets — women forgive everything but never forget. Being forgiven is very unpleasant.’ Father and daughter had such a strained relationship that she sometimes had

‘No, we must go our own way,’ said Lenin.  The whole world knows him as Vladimir, while he was in fact Nikolai. ‘Nikolai Lenin’ was the party alias of Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov, a terrorist leader and psychopath whose ideas changed the history of the greater part of the 20th century. This era ended on 26 December 1991 with the collapse of the 74-year-old Soviet Union, founded by Lenin, who seven years after the Bolshevik revolution died of syphilis, only to be succeeded by Stalin. ‘Stalin’ was also an alias. The Soviet dictator’s real name was Ioseb Vissarionovich Jugashvili, born into the family of a Georgian cobbler. His education, which he

For most Russians, Boris Pasternak is one of their four greatest poets of the last century. For most Anglophone readers, he is the man who won the Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago. The first four chapters of The Zhivago Affair give a full picture of Pasternak’s life and the Soviet literary world up until the early 1950s, when Zhivago was nearing completion. Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890, into an assimilated and highly cultured Jewish family. His father was a painter, his mother a concert pianist; among the family’s friends were Leo Tolstoy, Sergey Rachmaninov and Rainer Maria Rilke. Pasternak wanted first to be a composer, then a philosopher

When this extraordinary book was about to come out in French four years ago its author was told by his editor that it was likely to fail miserably. As Mariusz Szczgieł explains, the doubts were reasonable. No one was sure if anybody in the west would be interested in what a Pole had to say about the Czechs: ‘A representative of one marginal nation writing about another marginal nation is unlikely to be a success.’ But in 2009 Gottland won the European Book Prize (a serious award; the late Tony Judt’s Postwar won it the previous year) and it has been well received throughout the continent. There must have been

Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in the house in Mexico City where his grandfather was murdered in 1940 with an ice-pick. Volkov had grown up in that house surrounded by 20-foot garden walls and watchtowers with slits in them for machine-guns. The protection was no defence against Trotsky’s eventual assassin, the Spanish-born Stalinist Ramón Mercader, who very ably infiltrated Trotsky’s Mexico circle and, on 20 August, struck the revolutionary on the front of his head with that gruesome weapon. Trotsky bellowed in pain but managed to fend off his assailant before collapsing. His bodyguards hurried in

A building bearing testimony to the power of eternal Russia; a timeless symbol of the Russian state; a monument to Russian sovereignty. To the modern eye, the Kremlin fortress seems as if it had always been there, as if it had never changed and never will. All of which is utter nonsense, as Catherine Merridale’s fascinating history reveals: the story of this famous compound is not one of continuity, but of construction, destruction and reconstruction. Every reincarnation of the Russian state over the centuries — and there have been many — has been accompanied by a corresponding reincarnation of the Kremlin. Its history is thus a metaphorical history of Russia,