My Review of Joseph Kanon's "Shanghai"

 Shanghai Dreams, Shanghai Nightmares

 

This is the third historical novel by Joseph Kanon I have reviewed. (See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Joseph Kanon's "Defectors: A Novel" and Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Joseph Kanon's "Leaving Berlin: A Novel" )  Here the scene shifts from Europe to Asia where journalist Daniel Lohr is escaping 1939 Berlin via first class passage from Trieste to Shanghai. We learn later that Lohr had ties to the Comintern which would become useful. On the ship he as an affair with Leah Auerbach, another Jewish escapee from Vienna. Auerbach is received in Shanghai by a Jewish welfare agency aiding refugees from Europe. Also, on the boat was a Col. Yamada, a member of the Japanese secret police. We will see much more of him as the novel progresses.

 

Lohr’s trip was financed by his Uncle Nathan, a mobster from Berlin and the United States. He bailed from the U.S. after crossing the Mafia. Uncle Nathan puts Daniel in charge of running his new casino, The Gold Rush. He soon realizes that Nathan has partnered with two rival Chinese gangs in this venture that would ultimately put him in a crossfire.

 

As with his other novels Kanon gives us a real feel for the smells and the depravity of Shanghai as the international concessions await the full occupation of the Japanese. We also get a sense of the intrigue between the Japanese, the gangs, Chiang Kai-Shek’s government, and the rising communist movement. As with his other novels, Kanon tells the story with style and grace.

My Review of Maurice Isserman's "Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism"

Original Sin

Maurice Isserman, a man of the Left and a history professor at Hamilton College, has written an important history of the American Communist Party. Isserman tells two stories: one of misplaced idealism of those who supported labor rights and civil rights in support of a socialist America and the other of a group of Americans who bowed to every wind coming out of Moscow. The latter is the original sin of American communism by blindly following the party line coming out of Moscow which twisted its members into pretzels.

 

From the beginning in 1919 the American Communist Party was subsidized by “Moscow gold” to 1989 when Gorbachev finally cut them off. Isserman thoroughly recounts the changes in the party line from calling for outright revolution, supporting existing trade unions to supporting dual unionism, and with the rise of fascism in Europe working in a broad coalition of leftists to form the popular front. All that would come to an end with the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 calling World War II a capitalist war until the Soviet Union was invaded in 1941.  Of course, during the 1930’s American communists refused to believe that there was mass starvation in Ukraine and looked the other way as the purge trials in Moscow led to the deaths of their former heroes. Along the way we meet Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson and Dashiell Hammett, among others affiliated with the party.

 

If there are heroes in the book, they are those communists who helped build the CIO, Earl Browder, and Dorothy Healey.  Browder, who as leader of the party, actually changed the party to a political association to make it easier to participate in the normal political processes. However, his reforms went array when Moscow criticized him via what was called the Duclos letter in 1945. Within a year he was expelled. Isserman underplays the Duclos letter because it was a harbinger of the Cold War to come. His other hero was Los Angeles communist Dorothy Healey who was also a reformer, be she stayed with the party through Khrushchev’s 1956 speech condemning Stalin, the Hungarian revolt, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. She wouldn’t leave the party until 1972. This highlights the fact how hard it was for long-term members to quit; their whole lives were bound up in it. As an aside I was once acquainted with Healey.

 

I have three criticisms of Isserman. The first is that although he discussed the use of party members in the Soviet spying apparatus, he doesn’t show how deep the penetration was in the New Deal and in the role of the Rosenberg spy ring. He wrote that rank and file members were oblivious to the secret work those communists were involved in. I don’t think they were that naïve.

 

My second criticism is that he underplays the role of the Comintern’s American Commission which Stalin actually chaired. Theodore Draper, in his “American Communism and Soviet Russia” highlighted its importance. Simply put, under the orders of Stalin, such leading communist officials as Jay Lovestone, Benjamin Gitlow, and Bertram Wolfe were purged. That sent a message to the American party that the knee must be continually bent towards Moscow. Thus, there would be no Titoist party in America, meaning the party could not adapt to the unique conditions in America.

 

Third he doesn’t fully cover the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948, a campaign that run entirely by the Communist Party. ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Benn Steil's "The World that Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century" ) Today we would call that foreign election interference.

 

Those criticisms aside, Isserman has written an important book about a movement that enthralled more than a few Americans and far more fellow travelers. In a very real sense, the taint of Soviet Russia has haunted the American Left for decades. Isserman tells us in a very interesting way what went wrong. 

My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Germany 1923: Hyper Inflation, Hitler's Putsch and...."

 Weimar’s Trial by Fire

I previously reviewed Volker Ullrich’s two volume biography of Adolf Hitler. ( See: Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939" and Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Volker Ullrich's "Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945 )                                      Here the distinguished German historian focuses in on the critical year of 1923 which almost brought with it the premature death of the then five-year year-old Weimar Republic. His hero is the grand coalition prime minister, Gustav Stresemann, who manages to hold it together long enough so that the nascent republic survives its first trial by fire. It won’t be so lucky the next time.

 

What Stresemann faces is a hyper inflation that brings the Mark’s valuation down to 4.2 trillion to the dollar, the French occupation of the Ruhr for nonpayment of reparations, the Hitler Putsch in Munich, and a communist rising ordered by the Comintern in Moscow in Saxony, Thuringia, and Hamburg.  If this weren’t enough a separatist movement arose in the Rhine Valley where one of the leading figures was Cologne mayor Konrad Adenauer. As Keynes noted in his “Economic Consequences of the Peace,”  

       “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

 

Indeed, it was this inflation that destroyed the relationship between debtors and creditors, wiped out middle-class savings and immiserated huge swaths of the hitherto prosperous middle-class. Although not fatal at the time, when hard times returned to Germany in 1930, it happened with a vengeance.

 

Yet through it all, with all of its inherent faults, parliamentary democracy survived in Germany. By the end of the year the introduction of the Rentenmark, stabilized the currency which created the precondition for a substantial economic recovery in the late 1920’s. Working very effectively behind the scenes was U.S. Ambassador Alanson Houghton who worked tirelessly with Stresemann to get German acceptance of what was to become the Dawes Plan that enabled American loans to Germany. Later when American credit dried up, the roof fell in.

 

All the while Germany was in political and economic crisis the arts were flourishing. Germany became the second largest producer of motion pictures with such luminaries as Emil Jennings, Fritz Lang, and Conrad Veidt. Veidt would go on to play Major Heinrich Strasser in “Casablanca.” There was also the artist George Grosz, the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius.

 

Underneath it was a far right that never accepted democracy, industrialists who sought to undo the labor reforms of 1918, a judicial system that punished the Left far mor more severely than the Right.  Through it all Stresemann, originally a man of the Right, ended up being one of Weimar’s biggest supporters and by 1925, as foreign minister, he negotiated the Locarno Treaty with France confirming Germany’s western borders.

 

After reading this book I became more optimistic about the future of America. If the fledgling Weimar democracy could survive the challenges discussed above, certainly the 250-year-old democracy of the United States can survive our current dyspepsia. Germany faced far worse and came through it.

For the full Amazon URL see: Weimar's Trial by Fire (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Jonathan Haslam's "The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II"

 

The Long Shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution

 

Jonathan Haslam, a professor at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies, confirms Ian Kershaw’s thesis that the Bolshevik Revolution was the most significant event of the 20^th century. As I noted in my review of Kershaw’s “To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949” the Bolshevik Revolution hardened the Right and divided the Left. (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Ian Kershaw's "To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949" ) This theme plays out throughout Haslam’s very academic book that views the interwar period through the prism of the Soviet Union, but nonetheless a history nerd like me can enjoy.

 

The Russian Revolution scared the daylights out of capitalist Europe and the actions of the Comintern in the 1920’s and early 1930’s reinforced those fears. Haslam discusses the Comintern’s activities in China in support of the local Communist Party in interfering with the huge British interests there, in supporting the Indochinese Communist Party in attacking French interests and in its funding of the 1926 British general strike. The Soviet Union was not acting as rational state, but rather as a revolutionary power.

 

The fear of Communism enabled the usually cautious German establishment to support the rabble-rousing Nazis and it would prevent all too many British conservatives from supporting an alliance with Russia against Hitler. This was especially true of Chamberlain. In fact, many of those conservatives were actually pro-Hitler in viewing him as a bulwark against communism from the east. They worried that should Hitler fall, the communists would pick up the pieces. In essence they viewed Hitler as rational and Stalin as irrational.

 

With the respect to the Left, socialist parties split all over Europe into social democratic and communist factions. To Stalin and the Comintern the social democrats, not the Nazis were the true enemy up until 1934. The social democrats were called “social fascists” and the German communists worked hand-in-glove to bring down the Bruning government in 1932 thereby opening the way for Hitler

 

When the party-line shifted in 1935 to support the “Popular Front,” for the first time the Left was united. Popular Front governments were formed in 1936 in Spain and France thereby triggering the Spanish Civil War and further frightening the anxious conservatives in both France and Britain. At last, the Soviets were acting as rational state in trying to form an alliance with the capitalist powers against Hitler.

 

However, because the British were not of one mind with respect to an alliance, Stalin made his infamous deal with Nazi Germany in 1939. Stalin’s gamble was that the West would bleed itself white and he would then be able to pick up the pieces. However, when France quickly fell, Stalin was foisted on his own petards as a seemingly rational move became undone.

 

Haslam makes a compelling case that had the Bolshevik Revolution not happened European history would have been radically altered. Hitler likely would not have risen to power and the world would have been in a much better place.

For the full Amazon URL see: The Long Shadow of the Bolshevik Revolution (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Karl Schlogel's "Moscow, 1937"

Darkness at Noon*

German historian Karl Schlogel has given us an encyclopedic history of Moscow in the pivotal year of 1937. Unfortunately for the lay reader this 650 page book in the print edition is long march into way too much detail. That said if you get through it, the reader will learn much about Stalin’s Russia.

He presents history starting from the “1936 Directory of all Moscow;” a tourist guide of sorts to the city. Many of its authors would be dead by 1938. On the surface all is well with Moscow being a construction zone for above ground and below ground projects. International conventions of architects and geologists are taking place and there is a great fascination with aviation. I learned that Russian pilots flew over the pole to the United States, a heroic feat. As a result Russian advances in postwar aviation should not have come as a surprise to the West.

However beneath the surface there is terror. Much of the public works are constructed with prison labor. Stalin is staging a coup against the party by rounding up the old Bolsheviks and placing them in the dock at show trials presided over dramatically by Andrei Vishinskii, later the Soviet’s U.N. ambassador. Under the auspices of the NKVD 350,000 people are killed in 1937 and nearly that much in 1938 with mass graves just outside of Moscow. Along the way two NKVD directors Iogoda and Yezhov are killed until Beria consolidates his power that will last through 1953.

Everywhere the cry is to smash the Troskyite-Zinovievite plot against the Soviet state. The wily Stalin plays the fears about Germany and Japan to attack his domestic enemies. Tellingly most of the Comintern is liquidated during 1936-38, well before its official demise in 1943.  We also see a very naïve U.S. ambassador Joseph Davies accepting the Stalin line on the purge trails. Too bad William Bullitt, his predecessor wasn’t there at the time.

The book ends with the Nikolai Bukharin show trial. Surprisingly Bukharin asks Stalin to send him to the U.S. to highlight the dangers of Trotskyism. He is shot instead. Schlogel tells a horror story and it ends with Stalin in full power in 1939 with a host of new apparatchiks totally beholden to him.

·        *With apologies to Arthur Koestler.

  For the complete Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RO6XGKMROJLZF/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

  

My Amazon Review of Owen Matthews' "An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin's Master Agent

The Greatest Spy of the 20^th Century

Utilizing new Russian and Japanese sources journalist Owen Matthews has given us the best biography of Richard Sorge, perhaps the greatest spy of the 20^th Century. Born in Baku of German parents in 1895 Sorge becomes a communist after his World War I service and is recruited to become a spy for the Comintern in 1924. While in Moscow in the late 1920s he meets such Comintern big hitters as Zinoviev, Radek and Bukharin, all of whom would later be executed by Stalin. He is then recruited by the Red Army’s 4^th Department that has since been relabeled as the GRU. Yes, the same folks who released the DNC emails in 2016.

What makes Sorge so interesting is that he takes great risks as a spy. He drinks to excess and is a notorious womanizer including having affairs with his friends’ wives. But he is such a charmer that the wronged husbands continue to befriend him even after they find out about his affairs. He also was reckless on a motor cycle which caused a major hospitalization while he was carrying incriminating documents. You can hear the James Bond music in the background.

The 4th Department first sends him to China, but he makes his real bones in Japan. There he works as a correspondent for the Frankurter Zeitung and as an agent for the Reich. His reports to Berlin are vetted at the highest levels and he is regarded as the most informed foreigner in Japan. With his German connections he befriends Eugen Ott, the German military attaché who ultimately becomes ambassador. Sorge beds his wife. His information is so good that in the spring of 1940 he warns his masters in Moscow that Hitler was about to invade Russia and by June he knows the exact date. Stalin, of course, ignores Sorge’s and other warnings of the coming invasion.  

Sorge recruits Japanese journalist and leading intellectual Hotsume Ozaki into his ring. Ozaki becomes a leading member of Prime Minister Konoe’s brain trust. Indeed he becomes one of the inventors of Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. His motive is not benign, because the main purpose of Sorge’s ring at the time was to prevent Japan from invading Siberia triggering a two front war for Stalin. Their goal was for Japan to move south not north. That is ultimately decided by America’s oil embargo which forces action on Japan’s part to seize the Indonesian oil fields. It was information from Ozaki in August 1941 of the Japanese decision to go south that enabled Stalin to transfer troops from Siberia to Moscow and Stalingrad that helped turn the tide of war.

Another interesting piece of information is that the German embassy in Japan using a sand table to map topography came up with a plan for Japan to attack the British naval base in Singapore on land via the Malay Peninsula. That information was relayed to Ozaki and it became the basis for the Japanese attack in 1942.

There are also tidbits as to how Sorge financed his operation and paid for all of his mistresses. It wasn’t only Moscow gold that financed the operation. Sorge’s radio operator Max Clausen set up a very successful blueprint business that generated profits above and beyond what Moscow was sending.

Sorge’s game ends when lower levels of his ring get caught and one by one his ring is rolled up by the Japanese police. Sorge, suffering from acute alcoholism, is arrested in October 1941 and after a lengthy trial he was hanged in 1944.

Matthews tells the story with great verve and drama and even though he goes into great detail, a reader will not lose interest. From the point of view of pure spy craft, Sorge was the greatest.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RHRM5FPTQYGVF/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv