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Atlantic
3 hours ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
How Scientific Empires End
Roald Sagdeev has already watched one scientific empire rot from the inside. When Sagdeev began his career, in 1955, science in the Soviet Union was nearing its apex. At the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, he studied the thermonuclear reactions that occur inside of stars. A few lab tables away, Andrei Sakharov was developing the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet space program would soon astonish the world by lofting the first satellite, and then the first human being, into orbit. Sagdeev can still remember the screaming crowds that greeted returning cosmonauts in Red Square. But even during those years of triumph, he could see corruption working its way through Soviet science like a slow-moving poison. The danger had been present from the U.S.S.R.'s founding. The Bolsheviks who took power in 1917 wanted scientists sent to Arctic labor camps. (Vladimir Lenin intervened on their behalf.) When Joseph Stalin took power, he funded some research generously, but insisted that it conform to his ideology. Sagdeev said that his school books described Stalin as the father of all fields of knowledge, and credited the Soviets with every technological invention that had ever been invented. Later, at scientific conferences, Sagdeev heard physicists criticize the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics on the grounds that it conflicted with Marxism. By 1973, when Sagdeev was made director of the Soviet Space Research Institute, the nation's top center for space science, the Soviets had ceded leadership in orbit to NASA. American astronauts had flown around the moon and left a thousand bootprints on its surface. Sagdeev's institute was short on money. Many people who worked there had the right Communist Party connections, but no scientific training. Eventually, he himself had to join the party. 'It was the only way to secure stable funding,' he told me when we spoke in June. In 1985, Sagdeev briefly gained the ear of power. Mikhail Gorbachev had just become general secretary at 54, young for the Soviet gerontocracy. He promised broad reforms and appointed Sagdeev as an adviser. The two traveled to Geneva together for Gorbachev's first arms talks with Ronald Reagan. But Sagdeev's view of Gorbachev began to dim when the premier filled important scientific positions with men whom Sagdeev saw as cronies. In 1988, Sagdeev wrote a letter to Gorbachev to warn him that the leaders of the Soviet supercomputer program had deceived him. They claimed to be keeping pace with the United States, but had in fact fallen far behind, and would soon be surpassed by the Chinese. Gorbachev never replied. Sagdeev got a hint as to how his letter had been received when his invitation to join a state visit to Poland was abruptly withdrawn. 'I was excommunicated,' he told me. Sagdeev took stock of his situation. The future of Soviet science was looking grim. Within a few years, government funding would crater further. Sagdeev's most talented colleagues were starting to slip out of the country. One by one, he watched them start new lives elsewhere. Many of them went to the U.S. At the time, America was the most compelling destination for scientific talent in the world. It would remain so until earlier this year. I thought of Sagdeev on a recent visit to MIT. A scientist there, much celebrated in her field, told me that since Donald Trump's second inauguration she has watched in horror as his administration has performed a controlled demolition on American science. Like many other researchers in the U.S., she's not sure that she wants to stick around to dodge falling debris, and so she is starting to think about taking her lab abroad. (She declined to be named in this story so that she could speak openly about her potential plans.) The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. 'It's very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,' Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University's undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now. Foreign researchers have recently been made to feel unwelcome in the U.S. They have been surveilled and harassed. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for research institutions to enroll them. Top universities have been placed under federal investigation. Their accreditation and tax-exempt status have been threatened. The Trump administration has proposed severe budget cuts at the agencies that fund American science—the NSF, the NIH, and NASA, among others—and laid off staffers in large numbers. Existing research grants have been canceled or suspended en masse. Committees of expert scientists that once advised the government have been disbanded. In May, the president ordered that all federally funded research meet higher standards for rigor and reproducibility—or else be subject to correction by political appointees. Not since the Red Scare, when researchers at the University of California had to sign loyalty oaths, and those at the University of Washington and MIT were disciplined or fired for being suspected Communists, has American science been so beholden to political ideology. At least during the McCarthy era, scientists could console themselves that despite this interference, federal spending on science was surging. Today, it's drying up. Three-fourths of American scientists who responded to a recent poll by the journal Nature said they are considering leaving the country. They don't lack for suitors. China is aggressively recruiting them, and the European Union has set aside a €500 million slush fund to do the same. National governments in Norway, Denmark, and France—nice places to live, all—have green-lighted spending sprees on disillusioned American scientists. The Max Planck Society, Germany's elite research organization, recently launched a poaching campaign in the U.S., and last month, France's Aix-Marseille University held a press conference announcing the arrival of eight American ' science refugees.' The MIT scientist who is thinking about leaving the U.S. told me that the Swiss scientific powerhouse ETH Zurich had already reached out about relocating her lab to its picturesque campus with a view of the Alps. A top Canadian university had also been in touch. These institutions are salivating over American talent, and so are others. Not since Sagdeev and other elite Soviet researchers were looking to get out of Moscow has there been a mass-recruiting opportunity like this. Every scientific empire falls, but not at the same speed, or for the same reasons. In ancient Sumer, a proto-scientific civilization bloomed in the great cities of Ur and Uruk. Sumerians invented wheels that carried the king's war chariots swiftly across the Mesopotamian plains. Their priest astronomers stood atop ziggurats watching the sky. But the Sumerians appear to have over-irrigated their farmland—a technical misstep, perhaps—and afterwards, their weakened cities were invaded, and the kingdom broke apart. They could no longer operate at the scientific vanguard. Science in ancient Egypt and Greece followed a similar pattern: It thrived during good times and fell off in periods of plague, chaos, and impoverishment. But not every case of scientific decline has played out this way. Some civilizations have willfully squandered their scientific advantage. Spanish science, for example, suffered grievously during the Inquisition. Scientists feared for their lives. They retreated from pursuits and associations that had a secular tinge and thought twice before corresponding with suspected heretics. The exchange of ideas slowed in Spain, and its research excellence declined relative to the rest of Europe. In the 17th century, the Spanish made almost no contribution to the ongoing Scientific Revolution. The Soviets sabotaged their own success in biomedicine. In the 1920s, the U.S.S.R. had one of the most advanced genetics programs in the world, but that was before Stalin empowered Trofim Lysenko, a political appointee who didn't believe in Mendelian inheritance. Lysenko would eventually purge thousands of apostate biologists from their jobs, and ban the study of genetics outright. Some of the scientists were tossed into the Gulag; others starved or faced firing squads. As a consequence of all this, the Soviets played no role in the discovery of DNA's double-helix structure. When the ban on 'anti-Marxist' genetics was finally lifted, Gordin told me, the U.S.S.R. was a generation behind in molecular biology and couldn't catch up. But it was Adolf Hitler who possessed the greatest talent for scientific self-harm. Germany had been a great scientific power going back to the late 19th century. Germans had pioneered the modern research university by requiring that professors not only transmit knowledge but advance it, too. During the early 20th century, German scientists racked up Nobel Prizes. Physicists from greater Europe and the U.S. converged on Berlin, Göttingen, and Munich to hear about the strange new quantum universe from Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein. When the Nazis took over in 1933, Hitler purged Germany's universities of Jewish professors and others who opposed his rule. Many scientists were murdered. Others fled the country. Quite a few settled in America. That's how Einstein got to Princeton. After Hans Bethe was dismissed from his professorship in Tübingen, he landed at Cornell. Then he went to MIT to work on the radar technology that would reveal German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. Some historians have argued that radar was more important to Allied victory than the Manhattan Project. But of course, that, too, was staffed with European scientific refugees, including Leo Szilard, a Jewish physicist who fled Berlin the year that Hitler took power; Edward Teller, who went on to build the first hydrogen bomb; and John von Neumann, who invented the architecture of the modern computer. In a very short time, the center of gravity for science just up and moved across the Atlantic Ocean. After the war, it was American scientists who most regularly journeyed to Stockholm to receive medals. It was American scientists who built on von Neumann's work to take an early lead in the Information Age that the U.S. has still not relinquished. And it was American scientists who developed the vaccines for polio and measles. During the postwar period, Vannevar Bush, head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development under FDR, sought to make America's advantage in the sciences permanent. Bush hadn't liked the way that the U.S. had to scramble to staff up the radar and atomic-bomb projects. He wanted a robust supply of scientists on hand at American universities in case the Cold War turned hot. He argued for the creation of the National Science Foundation to fund basic research, and promised that its efforts would improve both the economy and national defense. Funding for American science has fluctuated in the decades since. It spiked after Sputnik and dipped at the end of the Cold War. But until Trump took power for the second time and began his multipronged assault on America's research institutions, broad support for science was a given under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump's interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science at the University of York. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: 'This is an unparalleled destruction from within.' I reached out to the office of Michael Kratsios, the president's science and technology adviser, several times while reporting this story. I asked whether Kratsios, who holds the role that once belonged to Vannevar Bush, had any response to the claim that the Trump administration's attack on science was unprecedented. I asked about the possibility that its policies will drive away American researchers, and will deter foreigners from working in American labs. I was hoping to find out how the man responsible for maintaining U.S. scientific dominance was engaging with this apparent slide into mediocrity. I did not receive a reply. All is not yet lost for American science. Lawmakers have already made clear that they do not intend to approve Trump's full requested cuts at the NIH, NSF, and NASA. Those agencies will still have access to tens of billions of dollars in federal funds next year—and blue-state attorneys general have won back some of this year's canceled grants in court. Research institutions still have some fight left in them; some are suing the administration for executive overreach. Universities in red states are hoping that their governors will soon summon the courage to take a stand on their behalf. 'Politically speaking, it's one thing to shut down research at Harvard,' Steven Shapin, a science historian at the school, told me. 'It's another thing to shut down the University of Arkansas.' The U.S. government doesn't bankroll all of American scientific research. Philanthropists and private companies support some of it, and will continue to. The U.S. shouldn't face the kind of rapid collapse that occurred in the Soviet Union, where no robust private sector existed to absorb scientists. But even corporations with large R&D budgets don't typically fund open-ended inquiry into fundamental scientific questions. With the possible exception of Bell Labs in its heyday, they focus on projects that have immediate commercial promise. Their shareholders would riot if they dumped $10 billion into a space telescope or particle collider that takes decades to build and generates little revenue. A privatized system of American science will be distorted toward short-term work, and people who want to run longer-term experiments with more expensive facilities will go elsewhere. 'American science could lose a whole generation,' Shapin said. 'Young people are already starting to get the message that science isn't as valued as it once was.' If the U.S. is no longer the world's technoscientific superpower, it will almost certainly suffer for the change. America's technology sector might lose its creativity. But science itself, in the global sense, will be fine. The deep human curiosities that drive it do not belong to any nation-state. An American abdication will only hurt America, Shapin said. Science might further decentralize into a multipolar order like the one that held during the 19th century, when the British, French, and Germans vied for technical supremacy. Read: 'This is not how we do science, ever' Or maybe, by the midway point of the 21st century, China will be the world's dominant scientific power, as it was, arguably, a millennium ago. The Chinese have recovered from Mao Zedong's own squandering of expertise during the Cultural Revolution. They have rebuilt their research institutions, and Xi Jinping's government keeps them well funded. China's universities now rank among the world's best, and their scientists routinely publish in Science, Nature, and other top journals. Elite researchers who were born in China and then spent years or even decades in U.S. labs have started to return. What the country can't yet do well is recruit elite foreign scientists, who by dint of their vocation tend to value freedom of speech. Whatever happens next, existing knowledge is unlikely to be lost, at least not en masse. Humans are better at preserving it now, even amid the rise and fall of civilizations. Things used to be more touch-and-go: The Greek model of the cosmos might have been forgotten, and the Copernican revolution greatly delayed, had Islamic scribes not secured it in Baghdad's House of Wisdom. But books and journals are now stored in a network of libraries and data centers that stretches across all seven continents, and machine translation has made them understandable by any scientist, anywhere. Nature's secrets will continue to be uncovered, even if Americans aren't the ones who see them first. In 1990, Roald Sagdeev moved to America. He found leaving the Soviet Union difficult. His two brothers lived not far from his house in Moscow, and when he said goodbye to them, he worried that it would be for the last time. Sagdeev thought about going to Europe, but the U.S. seemed more promising. He'd met many Americans on diplomatic visits there, including his future wife. He'd befriended others while helping to run the Soviet half of the Apollo-Soyuz missions. When Carl Sagan visited the Soviet Space Research Institute in Moscow, Sagdeev had shown him around, and the two remained close. To avoid arousing the suspicions of the Soviet authorities, Sagdeev flew to Hungary first, and only once he was safely there did he book a ticket to the U.S. He accepted a professorship at the University of Maryland and settled in Washington, D.C. It took him years to ride out the culture shock. He still remembers being pulled over for a traffic infraction, and mistakenly presenting his Soviet ID card. American science is what ultimately won Sagdeev over to his new home. He was awestruck by the ambition of the U.S. research agenda, and he liked that it was backed by real money. He appreciated that scientists could move freely between institutions, and didn't have to grovel before party leaders to get funding. But when I last spoke with Sagdeev, on July 4, he was feeling melancholy about the state of American science. Once again, he is watching a great scientific power in decline. He has read about the proposed funding cuts in the newspaper. He has heard about a group of researchers who are planning to leave the country. Sagdeev is 92 years old, and has no plans to join them. But as an American, it pains him to see them go.
Chicago Tribune
17-07-2025
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Today in History: Disneyland opens
Today is Thursday, July 17, the 198th day of 2025. There are 167 days left in the year. Today in History: On July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, after its $17 million, yearlong construction; the park drew a million visitors in its first 10 weeks. Also on this date: In 1862, during the Civil War, Congress approved the Second Confiscation Act, which declared that all slaves taking refuge behind Union lines were to be set free. In 1902, Willis Carrier produced a set of designs for what would become the world's first modern air-conditioning system. In 1918, Russia's Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began as right-wing army generals launched a coup attempt against the Second Spanish Republic. In 1944, during World War II, 320 men, two-thirds of them African-Americans, were killed when a pair of ammunition ships exploded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California. In 1945, following Nazi Germany's surrender, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of World War II. In 1975, an Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower link-up of its kind. In 1981, 114 people were killed when a pair of suspended walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed during a tea dance. In 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Europe-bound Boeing 747, exploded and crashed off Long Island, New York, shortly after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people on board. In 2014, all 298 passengers and crew aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 were killed when the Boeing 777 was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine; both Ukraine's government and pro-Russian separatists denied responsibility. In 2020, civil rights icon John Lewis, whose bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in 1965 helped galvanize opposition to racial segregation, and who went on to a long and celebrated career in Congress, died at age 80. In 2022, a report said nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to a mass shooting that left 21 people dead at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, but 'egregiously poor decision-making' resulted in a chaotic scene that lasted more than an hour before the gunman was finally confronted and killed. Today's Birthdays: Former sportscaster Verne Lundquist is 85. Queen Camilla of the United Kingdom is 78. Rock musician Terry 'Geezer' Butler is 76. Actor Lucie Arnaz is 74. Actor David Hasselhoff is 73. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel is 71. Film director Wong Kar-wai is 67. Television producer Mark Burnett is 65. Singer Regina Belle is 62. Country music artist Craig Morgan is 61. Rock musician Lou Barlow is 59. Actor Bitty Schram (TV: 'Monk') is 57. Actor Jason Clarke is 56. Movie director F. Gary Gray is 56. Country singer Luke Bryan is 49. Film director/screenwriter Justine Triet is 47. R&B singer Jeremih is 38. Actor Billie Lourd is 33. NHL center Connor Bedard is 20.
Boston Globe
16-07-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Today in History: Disneyland's opening day
In 1902, Willis Carrier produced a set of designs for what would become the world's first modern air-conditioning system. Advertisement In 1918, Russia's Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began as right-wing army generals launched a coup attempt against the Second Spanish Republic. In 1944, during World War II, 320 men, two-thirds of them African-Americans, were killed when a pair of ammunition ships exploded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California. In 1945, following Nazi Germany's surrender, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of World War II. Advertisement In 1955, Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, after its $17 million, yearlong construction; the park drew a million visitors in its first 10 weeks. In 1975, an Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower link-up of its kind. In 1981, 114 people were killed when a pair of suspended walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed during a tea dance. In 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Europe-bound Boeing 747, exploded and crashed off Long Island, New York, shortly after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people on board. In 2014, all 298 passengers and crew aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 were killed when the Boeing 777 was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine; both Ukraine's government and pro-Russian separatists denied responsibility. In 2020, civil rights icon John Lewis, whose bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in 1965 helped galvanize opposition to racial segregation, and who went on to a long and celebrated career in Congress, In 2022, a report said nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to a mass shooting that left 21 people dead at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, but 'egregiously poor decision-making' resulted in a chaotic scene that lasted more than an hour before the gunman was finally confronted and killed.
New York Post
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Descendant of ‘God of War' who once ruled Mongolia is a TikTok influencer who carries ‘burden' of his name: ‘Just a girl who drinks matcha'
A TikToker has revealed she is directly descended from one of the 20th century's most brutal warlords, dubbed 'the Bloody Baron' — but she says she'd rather drink matcha than reclaim her historic throne. Leonie von Ungern-Sternberg, 29, an MBA student in Spain, often shares fun posts of her life as a matcha-sipping millennial on TikTok. But her family tree has been been watered with the blood of countless suspected communists. Advertisement 8 Leonie von Ungern-Sternberg often shares fun posts of her life as a matcha-sipping millennial on TikTok. Instagram/@leonievungern Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a violent Russian nationalist whose savagery in battle in the 1910s and '20s earned him the nicknames the 'God of War' and 'the Mad Baron.' A military leader on the losing side in Russia's 1917 communist revolution, Ungern later invaded Mongolia and established a kingdom with the help of soldiers loyal to the tsar — along with mercenaries from Japan and Mongolia. Advertisement He attempted to form a new Mongol empire that could march on Moscow and overthrow the Soviet government, while hunting down and exterminating anyone suspected of being a red communist. 8 Roman von Ungern-Sternberg was a violent Russian nationalist. Instagram/@leonievungern For Leonie, more than a century on from Ungern's 1921 execution by the Bolsheviks, sharing his surname has become something of a curse. Admitting the 'burden' that comes with her 'unusual surname,' Leonie explained that 'the Mad Baron' is far from her only prominent relative. Advertisement 'If a family is almost 1,000 years old, there is a chance that one or the other is going to … have done negative things throughout history,' Leonie told The Post. 8 For Leonie, sharing Roman von Ungern-Sternberg's surname has become something of a curse. Instagram/@leonievungern 'We were always raised in a very humble way … I've been working since I was 18,' she said. 'It's not like I have this super-glamorous life and I'm a baroness … No, it's just a name that in that context doesn't mean anything,' she said. Advertisement Leonie admits she 'didn't know much' about Ungern growing up, but after posting TikToks and vlogs for her friends, her link to one of the early 20th century's bloodiest conquests went viral. 8 Roman von Ungern-Sternberg was a military leader on the losing side in Russia's 1917 communist revolution. Pictures from History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images The Mad Baron is credited by some historians of helping to liberate Mongolia from Chinese occupation, but his madness and brutality were also legend. He became obsessed with Eastern religions, and his forces were less an army than a heavily armed cult. In addition to hating communists, he was also virulently antisemitic and he devised sadistic tortures and painful deaths for his enemies — and even his own followers who disobeyed him. 8 Leonie admits she 'didn't know much' about Ungern growing up. Instagram/@leonievungern He was said to have burned victims alive, left them out in the cold to be torn apart by wolves, crucified them by rusty nails and forcing them to stay in treetops until they fell out and were shot, or died of exposure. 'All these people telling me I should reclaim the throne to Mongolia but I'm literally just a girl who drinks matcha,' Leonie quipped in one TikTok video which racked up more than 2 million views since being posted on June 30. Advertisement 'I posted that video and I went to sleep,' Leonie told The Post. 'And the next day I woke up and I had a million views, which for me was surreal.' 8 Young Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg in traditional clothing. Pictures from History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images While much of the attention was lighthearted, some of it was extreme. That included far-right fanatics aligned with Roman's ultra-nationalist ideology, and those condemning her as guilty by association for Ungern's crimes. Advertisement 'I feel like I'm a case study on how a viral video can bring unwanted attention from ideologies that I personally don't align with,' she said. 8 'All these people telling me I should reclaim the throne to Mongolia but I'm literally just a girl who drinks matcha,' Leonie quipped in one TikTok video. Instagram/@leonievungern 'I've gotten a lot of comments … a lot of sexism … racism,' she added. Despite the 'scary' experience, Leonie still carries her name with 'pride and honor,' because of her 'amazing family members,' she said. Advertisement 'My great-grandparents got murdered by the Nazis for helping Jews flee the country,' she said, adding how 'shocking' and 'hurtful' it was to see her name taken up as a cause by extremists. Leonie's video also got comments from users in Mongolia, where attitudes toward Ungern are mixed. 8 'I feel like I'm a case study on how a viral video can bring unwanted attention from ideologies that I personally don't align with,' she said. Instagram/@leonievungern 'A lot of Mongolians say, 'In our home, [Ungern's] a hero.' There are some that say, 'Without [Ungern], we would possibly belong to China right now,'' she said. Advertisement 'On the other hand, there are also a lot of Mongolians that say, he was brutal … an outsider … He had no business to even hold that much power.' Leonie wants to use the attention her videos have brought on Ungern to delve into her family's archives and learn more. 'He's such a complex historical figure that you can't just box him up and make him out to be one person,' she said. 'He's more complex than that.'
New Statesman
09-07-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Six journeys that changed the world
Lenin spent most of his life travelling and had to be careful about his security. As a result he left behind few traces of his movements. No diaries, no train tickets stored in his filing cabinet. He made three journeys of importance in 1917. In April he crossed wartime Germany to Petrograd on a sealed train where he not only wrote out the rationale to oust Russia's post-tsarist provisional government but also scribbled rules on when fellow passengers could use the carriage toilet. In July, when he fled from the government's police to Finland, he wore a mask as a disguise. In Helsinki he hid in one of the police chief's residences. After secretly returning to Petrograd in October, he donned a wig and wrapped a towel round his head before jumping on a tram to join fellow communists and cajole them into hastening their seizure of power. Truly the journeyman of revolution. In his account of the 'epic journeys' that lay behind three of the 20th century's most significant revolutions, Simon Hall picks only the April journey for treatment. As with the other two leaders in the book – Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro – he follows the track of the accessible literature and avoids accounts that raise tricky questions. He regards Lenin as a strategist of genius. But was he? Throughout the long summer in Helsinki, Lenin had raged for an immediate insurrection. If the other leading Bolsheviks had followed his demands, they would have gone down to a heavy defeat. Lenin was exasperated by the delay. Luckily for his cause, action was put off until October and it was only then, when the time was ripe, that his repertoire of ranting and raving eased the Bolsheviks into power. Hall is soft on all his three chosen leaders by alighting on episodes that reflect them in a good light. Crazily, he makes the case that none of them could possibly have known what the future held if they pressed forward with state communist objectives. But in Russia the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries throughout 1917 had told the Bolsheviks that if they tried to establish a proletarian dictatorship, a bloody civil war rather than a citizens' utopia would result – and the dictatorship would have to be bloody in the extreme in order to survive. Hall, though, says that Lenin was proved 'spectacularly right' about the practicability of a proletarian government. He gives no mind to the mountain of evidence of the repression of working-class political dissent which began in the weeks of the October Revolution, preferring the science fiction writer China Miéville as his guide to history. Likewise the book overlooks the savagery that Mao meted out as punishment to dissenting or delinquent comrades on and after the Long March to northern China to escape annihilation by Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang. His account of the People's Liberation Army is hopelessly outdated. Nor is there any indication of the geopolitical factors that in 1949 led to the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. It was only after Chiang's National Army had exhausted its efforts against the Japanese occupiers that Mao's Red Army could return in full force to the military struggle for supremacy and, using weaponry transferred to it by Stalin, complete its path to power in Beijing. The book starts from the intriguing idea of focusing on journeys of Lenin, Mao and Castro before they were in government. Each journey is twinned with one made by a leading foreign reporter who wrote about each respective revolution – John Reed in Russia, Edgar Snow in China and Herbert Matthews in Cuba. None were communist sympathisers before they arrived in the country but each developed close relations with the uppermost level of the communist leadership. They loved adventure and, in the case of Reed and Snow, were undaunted by their flimsy grip of the national language. They were swept away by the thought that they were living and working in a time when history was turning on its axis. Hall rightly emphasises that the revolutions were hungry for the world to know about them. In Russia, so-called Soviet power was precarious. Leading Bolsheviks were so beleaguered in 1917-18 that they kept their suitcases packed in case they had to run from a German invasion. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World was a global bestseller and Lenin himself penned the introduction to the first edition. Lenin's willingness to do this is no surprise because Reed wrote nothing about the terror, prisons or bloodthirsty threats to the enemies of Bolshevism. Reed was blithely innocent too about the diplomatic shimmying the Bolsheviks performed with the Western Allies before they succumbed to the notorious Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Germans in March 1918, which saw Russia withdraw from the war. As Reed acknowledged, he was penning a partisan account. He even prepared a memorandum for the US State Department stating that only the Bolsheviks had any followers in Russia. Did he know enough about politics in Russia or about the party he was eulogising? Because his Russian was so poor he had to rely on interpreters supplied by the Bolsheviks – as Trotsky, a master linguist, condescendingly noted. The best bits of Reed's story were always about the events he witnessed – not the spoken or written words but the visual scenes. But how he exaggerated! Hall fails to mention that more deaths of hired extras occurred in the making of Sergei Eisenstein's film October about the seizure of the Winter Palace than in the event itself on 25 October 1917. Edgar Snow, unlike John Reed, had the honesty to note that he was treated unusually well. This is to take nothing away from Snow's courage in following the trail of the Long March in 1934-35. But Mao had ordered his subordinates to be guided by 'security, secrecy, warmth and red carpet' in welcoming Snow northwards. Snow fell hook, line and sinker for Mao's manipulative charm. Despite seeing himself as a journalist of independence and integrity, he submitted his drafts for Mao to edit – not even Reed stooped to this level of servility. Red Star Over China had influence on some sectors of US public opinion, but after the Second World War, Snow was treated as at best a fellow traveller. Whereas Reed died of typhus and was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Snow took himself off to peace and security in Switzerland – and his journey there was a lot less hazardous than the one that brought him fame. Herbert Matthews followed Reed and Snow in telling the world to take the revolutionaries seriously. He shared the itch for a scoop and in 1957 organised an arduous trip from east to west across Cuba to Castro's guerrilla headquarters in the mountains. Castro appreciated the willingness of an American to record and believe his every word. At that time Castro was not a communist. However, Matthews continued to reject the evidence that Castro soon developed undeniable links with the 'world communist movement' under Moscow's tutelage. By then he was being feted as a favoured visitor to Havana. This caused a sharp dip in his popularity at home in the US, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when Nikita Khrushchev brought the world to the edge of a Third World War. Castro, it was later revealed, was utterly reckless about the global danger that arose. He wanted Khrushchev to bomb New York. The book's three revolutions are among the most consequential in modern history. The 1917 October Revolution led to the invention of a communist one-party state that threw down a challenge to the entire world order. After Lenin and the Bolsheviks survived the ensuing civil war, the global political right had to reorganise itself – and the rise of fascism was one of the consequences. By the end of the Second World War, two superpowers bestrode the globe. The Chinese Revolution of 1949, led by Mao Zedong, aligned itself at first with the Soviet Union but then shook off the reins and challenged the bipolar world order while insisting that its variant of communism was superior to any other. In 1959 Fidel Castro achieved the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista's government in Cuba. When he subsequently adopted communist doctrines and structures, his island fortress became a threat to US security and an example to anti-imperialist movements in Africa. Simon Hall tells us that his chosen six journeys 'changed the world'. The trips made by the three revolutionary leaders unquestionably helped to build platforms for subsequent revolutions. But the case he makes for the trio of reporters is poorly presented. They had some impact on segments of international opinion but the accuracy of their reportage leaves a sour taste in the mouth when we think of the destitute and oppressed Russians, Chinese and Cubans who had to live with the consequences. For basic information on travelling to Russia, China and Cuba in the 20th century, the Baedeker travel books of the time still have a lot to recommend them. Robert Service's books include 'Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924' (Picador) Three Revolutions: Russia, China, Cuba and the Epic Journeys That Changed the World Simon Hall Faber & Faber, 464pp, £35 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Angela Rayner's forward march] Related
