Stacy Vlasits, Author at Not Even Past

Sarah’s Key (2011)

Just before dawn on July 16, 1942 the French Police began Opération Vent Printanier, or “Operation Spring Breeze.” That morning over 13,000 Jews were forcibly removed from their homes and trudged through the streets of Paris to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the Winter Bicycle Racetrack, on the rue Nélaton in the city’s fifteenth arrondisement. Situated next to the Bir-Hakeim métro, not far from the Eiffel Tower, the Vel’ d’Hiv’ (as it was commonly called) was the first indoor track in France that hosted numerous sport and cultural shows. But in July 1942 the Vel’ d’Hiv’ hosted a much different spectacle: the inhumane detainment of Jews before their deportation to concentration camps in Parisian suburbs, such as Drancy and Beaune-la-Rolande, that sent Jews directly to Auschwitz. Inside of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ the French Police denied Jews water, food, medical attention, and even lavatories, treating the prisoners worse than livestock. Despite the atrocities that took place at the Vel’ d’Hiv’ and later in the concentration camps where families were separated and eventually convoyed to Auschwitz for extermination, the French rarely acknowledged or spoke about the Vel’ d’Hiv’. It was not until 1995 that the French Government, under the leadership of Jacques Chirac, addressed Vichy French compliance in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup and the Nazis’ ultimate answer to the “Jewish Question.”

Philippe Pétain meeting Hitler in October 1940. (via Wikipedia)

Though a work of fiction, Tatiana de Rosnay’s poignant novel, Sarah’s Key, helps inform the reader about the lesser-known atrocities committed against French Jews under Nazi occupation and the Vichy government. Simultaneously set in July 1942 and sixty years later in July 2002, the novel alternates narratives between the lives of Sarah Starzynski, a ten-year old Jewish girl imprisoned with her parents in the Vel’ d’Hiv’, and Julia Jarmond, an ex-patriot American journalist writing a piece on the sixtieth anniversary of the Roundup. In researching her article, Julia begins to discover tragic secrets about Sarah’s life that have a devastating impact on Julia’s own life sixty years later.

Weaving together mystery, history, and intense emotion, de Rosnay provides an engrossing story. Though at times the plot can seem somewhat predictable this does not significantly undermine the book’s success. What is most significant and moving about the book is de Rosnay’s piercing criticism of France’s seeming ambivalence and long denial of involvement in the atrocities of the Holocaust including the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup. As one character poignantly remarks, “Nobody remembers the Vel’ d’Hiv’ children, you know… Why should they? Those were the darkest days of our country.” Despite the dedication of several sites in Paris to the memory of those deported during the war, such as the Mémorial de la Shoah and the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, there still remains a certain amount of unfamiliarity with Vichy France’s role in the Holocaust in France today. Sarah’s Key reminds readers that Vichy France’s compliance in the “Jewish Question” is not something to be forgotten or swept underneath the rug. It is a topic that deserves reexamination and further explanation.

Wikipedia on the round-up of French Jews
Mémorial de la Shoah website
A walking tour of the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation with informative pictures

Trailer for the new film version of Sarah’s Key

Photo credits:
Jewish women in Paris, just before the roundup
Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) via Wikimedia Commons

Samuel Pepys Tweets

by Jessica Luther

On August 29, 2011, Samuel Pepys (@samuelpepys) tweeted the following:

Took my wife, and Mercer, and Deb., to Bartholomew Fair, and there did see a ridiculous, obscene little stage-play, called “Marry Andrey.

While this may seem rather boring in content, it is extraordinary considering that Samuel Pepys originally wrote that in 1668. And now it is a tweet.

Pepys was a seventeenth-century English diarist, famous for the journal that he kept during the decade of the 1660s. He chronicled such events as the reestablishment of the monarchy under Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665 and 1666, the Great Fire of London in September 1666, the demolition of St. Paul’s cathedral in 1668, and the Second Anglo-Dutch War later in the decade. He also recorded the mundane activities of domestic life, squabbles with servants, and his extramarital affairs. Pepys was a Member of Parliament, a successful businessman, a Justice of the Peace, and a member of the Royal Society. (For more on Pepys’ biography)

The diary is an incredible resource for any historian studying early modern England but it is also an enjoyable read, especially in small 140-character bits delivered to your Twitter feed.

Since January 1, 2003, a website designer named Phil Gyford has been publishing an entry from the diary everyday, beginning with the first entry from Pepys’ diary on January 1, 1660. The main site always hosts the latest entries. Each entry is also annotated so that specific people, places, and events are easily explained by simply rolling your mouse over the highlighted term.

Pepys’ Twitter feed publishes one or two sentences from that day’s entry. It is refreshing among updates from Libya, the 2012 presidential race, and some actor’s latest scandal to see the seventeenth-century English prose of Pepys in this modern-day form of communication.

Sometimes the tweets simply serve as a reminder of the realities and lived experience of people in early modern England.

Tweeted on July 18, 2011 (which corresponds to entry for July 18, 1668):

My Lord Cornwallis did endeavour to get the King a whore, but she did get away, and killed herself, which if true is very sad.

Tweeted on July 12, 2011:

Betty Michell cries out, and my wife goes to her, and she brings forth a girl, and my wife godmother again to a Betty.

Tweeted on June 18, 2011:

I by little words find that my wife hath heard of my going to plays, and carrying people abroad every day, in her absence.

Tweeted on June 11, 2011: (Pepys’ trip to Stonehenge):

Find Stonage prodigious as any tales I ever heard of them. God knows what their use was! They are hard to tell, but yet maybe told.

Pepys’ final entry was on May 31, 1669. That means that Gyford’s online project of unveiling the diary over the course of nine years will end at the end of next May.

Image Credits:
H.B. Wheatley, ed, The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Pepysiana (London, 1899)
Anonymous, Great fire of London, 1666 (cropped and inverted)
both public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins (2002)

After a long career among both politicians and literary lights, Roy Jenkins perhaps found his ideal subject in his last great biography, Churchill. Fans of the reputation-blackening revisionism common to the genre will find little to love in this laudatory account. The political battles and courageous stands that typified Churchill take center stage over more personal details, though his literary achievements provide a constant subtheme. A former Labour Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jenkins brings an unparalleled level of Parliamentary knowledge to the recounting of his subject’s long political career. As a result, Churchill stands as not just a biography of an almost mythic figure but also a fascinating account of rough and tumble British politics from the end of the Victorian era to the dawn of the Cold War.

Jenkin’s depiction encompasses the whole of his subject’s extended and exciting life. The author ably navigates the uneven waters of Churchill’s early years, from his daring escape from an enemy prison during the Boer War to his role behind the disastrous Gallipoli raid in World War I. According to Jenkins, the young Member of Parliament (MP) attained high rank in governments under two parties despite repeated blunders because “He was too good a trumpet and too dangerous an adversary” to be omitted. Characteristic energy and outspokenness explain Churchill’s meteoric rise, but his impulsive style and conventional, imperialist sympathies led to marginalization when he failed to adapt to the dynamic politics of interwar England. During these “wilderness years,” Churchill bucked the pro-Chamberlain mood of the nation with calls for a more aggressive response to German rearmament. Such opinions, while contentious at the time, helped position the maverick politician for his return to power at the beginning of World War II. In this congruence of events, Jenkins finds the promise of Churchill’s personality and political career realized. The new prime minister’s strategic mind, Edwardian optimism, disdain for unnecessary slaughter, and enthusiasm for combat made him “the perfect man for 1940 and 1941.” The generous depiction of the wartime years clearly recounts the important political debates that helped define allied strategy, but it also makes room for amusing anecdotes – including Churchill’s use of a golden bathtub after his triumphal arrival in liberated Paris.

The biography examines the Cold War largely as a dénouement after the triumph of the mid-1940s, but Jenkins provides an interesting discussion of the politician’s preoccupation with nuclear weapons and his ambiguous approach to European unification. Thorough and expansive in scope, Churchill serves as a panoramic view of the first half of the twentieth century through the eyes of one of its most famous and colorful figures.

Erudite, astute, and clearly written, Jenkins’ work stands as a model for the epic life story. The biography excludes few details, but even the most complicated and tedious aspects of policymaking– including the balancing of the British budget – appear contentious and exciting in the author’s able hands. Jenkins invests his work with a level of dynamism and historical importance from its very first page, demonstrating how Winston Churchill’s life served to prepare him for the role of wartime leader. The result is a sterling biography of a truly impressive personality, whom Jenkins glowingly describes “as the greatest human being to ever occupy 10 Downing Street.”

Photo credit:

Churchill on the East Bank of the Rhine, south of Wesel, Morris (Sgt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Imperial War Museum Collection, via Wikimedia Commons

Reading is Hard: Should We Give it Up?

Here is an article by my friend and colleague, Russian historian Marshall Poe.

Death to the Reading Class

It says people don’t really like to read. They like to listen and watch. So we should stop making them read and give them something intelligent to listen to and watch. If you can bear to read the article, tell us what you think about it.

-Joan Neuberger

Order No. 227: Stalinist Methods and Victory on the Eastern Front

by Charters Wynn

Each nation understandably views World War II through the prism of its own experience. Americans widely believe it was the Western allies who won the war in Europe. But it was on the Eastern Front that Germany lost World War II. “It was,” in the words of Winston Churchill, “the Russians who tore the guts out of the German army.” But the Red Army was able to emerge victorious despite suffering truly catastrophic defeats at the beginning of the war. Within six months after Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Hitler’s forces had destroyed virtually the entire pre-war Red Army. For every German who was killed in 1941, 20 Soviet soldiers died. In 1942 things got still worse. By mid-September the Nazis occupied most of the European portion of the Soviet Union and the Wehrmacht entered Stalingrad, about 1000 miles inside the country from the western border.

One reason for the unexpected and decisive Soviet victory in the epic Battle of Stalingrad was the notorious Order No. 227, known as “Not One Step Backwards!” Officers who permitted their men to retreat without explicit orders were to be arrested and “treated as traitors,” while rank-and-file “panickers and cowards” were to be shot on the spot or forced to serve in penal battalions. On July 28, 1942, Stalin had concluded that the severest measures were needed to restore discipline and punish those who might flinch in the line of duty. Any further retreat would not be tolerated: “It is necessary to defend to the last drop of blood every position, every meter of Soviet territory, to cling to every shred of Soviet earth and defend it to the end.”

Order 227 called for dramatically expanding the number of penal battalions. Penal battalions were sent to the most dangerous sections of the front to perform semi-suicidal missions such as frontal assaults on the enemy or walking across minefields. If soldiers escaped injury they would remain in the penal battalions until they “atoned for their crimes against the motherland with their own blood.” Some 430,000 men served in these punishment units and about half of them were killed or fatally wounded. Order 227 also increased by nearly two hundred the number of blocking detachments. These units, which were up to two hundred men strong, were set up behind front-line troops and ordered to shoot anyone who lagged behind or attempted to desert. How many Soviet soldiers were killed by other Soviet soldiers in these blocking detachments remains unclear. The latest Russian estimates put the number at 158,000 men, including as many as 15,000 shot over a couple weeks in Stalingrad.

The main purpose of “Not a Step Backwards!” was not to punish offenders but to deter waverers and to reassure those who were determined to stand and fight that any of their fellow soldiers who broke discipline would be caught and dealt with harshly. Accounts of the effect of Order 227 on the Soviet armed forces are mixed, but the balance of the reports suggest that it was generally supported by those serving in the front lines, helping to boost morale at a critical moment in the war. One soldier later recalled his reaction, “Not the letter, but the spirit and content of the order made possible the moral, psychological and spiritual breakthrough in the hearts and minds of those to whom it was read.”

Unlike other orders, Order 227 was not published in the newspapers but instead was read out loud to every man and woman in the Soviet armed forces. The savage conditions prevailing inside the Red Army were successfully concealed for decades because they did not fit with the post-war master narrative of unquestionable Soviet heroism and self-sacrifice. Other factors contributed to the Soviet victory, but the draconian Order 227 played a key role in turning the tide on the Eastern Front, nearly one and a half years before the June 6, 1944 landing of the Western allies on the beaches of Normandy.

Order No. 227 translated into English

The Unknown War: WWII and the Epic Battles of the Eastern Front (20 episode TV series, 1978)

Photo Credits
Georgy Zelma, Preparing to throw a grenade, Stalingrad
Georgy Zelma, Center of Stalingrad after liberation, 1943
Anatoly Garanin, Recruits leaving for the front, Moscow (the sign reads: Our Cause is Just. The Enemy will be Defeated. Victory Will be Ours)
All RIA Novosti Archive via Wikimedia Commons

Gunter Demnig’s “Stumbling Blocks”

by David Crew

“Stumbling blocks” (in German, Stolpersteine) are unobtrusive reminders of the Nazi past.

These small squares of concrete (about 4 x 4 inches), covered with a thin brass plate, are embedded in the sidewalks of Berlin and hundreds of other German cities, as well as locations in other European countries. Each of these stones bears a simple inscription giving the name of an individual victim of the Nazi dictatorship who lived in the house or building in front of which the stone has been set as well as details about this individual’s fate. Most of the victims are Jewish but these stones also draw attention to the fate of Sinti and Roma, gay men and women, mentally or physically handicapped people, Jehovah’s witnesses, political opponents of the Nazis, and German soldiers who deserted at the end of the war.

These “stumbling blocks” are the result of a project started by a Cologne artist, Gunter Demnig, in the 1990s. Demnig wanted to bring the Nazi past out of the museum into the neighborhood and into the everyday lives of Germans and other Europeans. He thought the stones would encourage ordinary citizens to realize that Nazi persecution and terror had begun on their very doorsteps. By “stumbling” over the Nazi past of their own hometowns (metaphorically, not literally; the stones are actually not raised above the level of the surrounding pavement), ordinary citizens would be challenged to think about what it meant to live where victims of the Nazis had once also gone about their everyday lives. Inscriptions are short and can be brutal; one in Berlin reads “Paula Davidsohn (maiden name Katz) lived here. Born in 1905. Deported to Theresienstadt 1943. Murdered in Auschwitz.”

Demnig’s project asks Germans to take an active role in the reconstruction of the Nazi past of their own cities and localities. Demnig sets stumbling stones in the pavement only on the invitation of local organizations or groups of citizens who have developed an interest in his project and who have researched the histories of the victims who are to be remembered with these stones. Placing these stumbling stones has sometimes provoked controversy. Some homeowners argue that a stone in front of their property may lower its value, a few city governments have refused to give the necessary permission, and some Jews have questioned whether stepping on the names of the victims is an appropriate way to remember them. Yet, Demnig’s project is constantly expanding. In a recent YouTube clip, Demnig claims to have now set more than 23,000 stones in over 500 German communities. “Stumbling Blocks” has also become a European project; examples of this “decentralized monument” can now be found not only in Germany, but also in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Ukraine.

Compare the stumbling blocks to other Holocaust memorials:

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Information Portal to European Sites of Remembrance

Photo Credits

Stumbling block commemorating Alfred Wilhelm Algner
James Steakley, via Wikimedia Commons
Students cleaning the stumbling blocks
Sigismund von Dobschütz, via Wikimedia Commons

Life and Nothing But (1989)

By Judy Coffin

French historians love this film. It’s hard to convey the horrors of what was long called The Great War: the almost unimaginable losses at battles like Verdun and the Somme; the mobilization of whole economies, states, and societies to supply those battles and to replenish the men and material afterwards; the stench of rotting corpses (human and animal) in the trenches; and the grinding boredom of trench life – interrupted by terrifying bombardment or the dreaded command to go “over the top,” through the mud, barbed wire, and, further on, the machine gunners on the enemy side. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (with Kurt Douglas, 1957) captures some of the view from the trenches. So does PBS’s multi-disc documentary: The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century. Not surprisingly, though, the most popular films about World War I – like the brilliant Lawrence of Arabia — are set far from the un-cinematic slog of the western front. Life and Nothing But is set on the front, but after the war, where the French are trying both to tally their losses and commemorate their victory. Both projects are heartbreaking and, in some important sense, impossible. That’s the point, and the film captures one of the tragedies of war and a more specific tragedy of twentieth-century French history.

Philippe Noiret plays French Major Delaplane, charged with trying to discover the fates of the over 300,000 French soldiers missing at the end of the war. Most of them were dead, it would turn out. 1.4 million French soldiers were killed, out of 8.4 mobilized. Delaplane presides over a ramshackle, improvised office filled with clerks compiling lists of the dead and descriptions of the missing. In the psychiatric hospital next door, teams of doctors work with soldiers whose minds have been destroyed: trying to get them to walk, to speak, or to recover bits of memory that might help to identify them. In the surrounding countryside, crews dig in a tunnel that had been mined by the Germans, destroying a Red Cross train and the wounded it was carrying. On designated days families of the missing are permitted on site, and they comb through long tables of rings, watches, and occasionally photographs searching for bits and pieces of their loved ones’ lives.

Into this melancholy scene come two women. Irène de Courtil, (Sabina Azena) wealthy and beautiful, is looking for her missing husband and the much younger, middle-class Alice (Pascale Vignal) searching for her fiancé, whom she met while he was a soldier. Alice had taught school during the war, but then had to give up her post to a veteran returning from the front. (This is a nicely understated rendering of the government’s policy after World War I.) She now is working in a café in the area near Delaplane’s project, hoping for news.

No spoilers here, and the plot matters! But you will find love, of course, and deception, class resentments, and cynicism (softened by love). It’s not grim, but haunting. It’s hardly an action film –- I don’t want you to be disappointed — but then World War I was not usually an action war. It’s about a country whose past is mined, literally and figuratively, but which is compelled to return to that past. It’s about memory, a subject that has fascinated historians for decades now. It’s smart about commemoration: Tavernier makes us ask what the French state wants to commemorate and how, what the families want to remember, and what Delaplane, Irène, and Alice, respectively, are looking for. It’s acerbic about the politics of commemoration too. Delaplane has to produce a body for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. “Ah non,” the government’s representative says refusing one of the bodies that the major offers him: “certainly not a black!” Why not? Roughly half a million troops from France’s colonies fought in the war.

France’s victory cost more than the country could pay. Reparations would prove a dangerous illusion. We know this, and we know what happened in a few decades later. But this film doesn’t preach or offer general lessons: it looks closely at a grieving culture, trying to gather up the pieces and move on – to what we now know will be another war.

More great French war films:
François Truffaut, The Last Metro

Marcel Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity

Marcel Ophuls, Hotel Terminus: the Life and Times of Klaus Barbie

Jean-Pierre Melville, Army of Shadows

Joseph Losey, Mr. Klein

Louis Malle, Au Revoir les Enfants

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

by Michael Stoff

The Pacific is in vogue. After years of attracting little but scholarly attention, the Pacific Theater of the Second World War has captured the popular imagination in a string of books, feature films and an Emmy-award winning television series, aptly called “The Pacific” and written in part by University of Texas and Plan II graduate Robert Schenkkan. Now comes best-selling author Laura Hillenbrand with a new best seller, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.

Unbroken tells the story of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini’s ordeal as a Japanese prisoner of war. Captured in 1943 when his B-24, The Green Hornet, crashed in the South Pacific, Zamperini spent a then-record 47 days on a battered rubber raft in storm-tossed, shark-infested waters with two comrades, only to be plucked from the edge of extinction by a Japanese patrol boat and sent to the infamous Omori POW camp on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. Starved, beaten, and denied medical attention, Zamperini became the target of a sadistic guard nicknamed “The Bird.” The Bird was no tropical nestling but a vulture feeding off the pain of his helpless captives.

Miraculously, Zamperini survived. After months of recuperation, he returned to the embrace of his Italian-American family, married a debutante and, like many veterans, kept his story to himself. He devoted his days to regaining the athletic form that once made him a running prodigy but failed to win it back and spiraled into a well of depression and alcoholism. The saving grace of his faith, ignited by a fledgling evangelist named Billy Graham, sent him on a mission to spread the good news of the Christian Gospel and save others, among them young souls at risk of delinquency. That task suited Zamperini who had been something of a bad boy himself before the discipline of the track turned him from a would-be criminal into an Olympic competitor. Robust even in old age, draped in accolades, he rode skateboards, flew planes, carried an Olympic torch, and told of his ordeal in the Pacific to those in search of inspiration. In time, a reborn Zamperini returned to Japan and forgave his captors.

Hillenbrand has written a riveting tale of a terrible episode from a time when 132,000 Allied POWs, Americans but also British, Australian, Canadian and others, suffered unspeakable misery at the hands of the Japanese. More than one in four of them died. Their collective story has been told before, most notably in Gavan Daws’s Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs in World War II in the Pacific and Michael and Elizabeth Norman’s Tears of Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath. Instead, Hillenbrand gives us a single life depicted with verve and complexity.

In Hillenbrand’s deft hands, Louis Zamperini is all too human and so are some of his captors. The Japanese emerge not as a single type, cut only from the predictable cloth of the sadist Bird, but as men who behave in ways that complicate and at times contradict the cliché. To be sure, most are merciless, but a few are respectful and one even compassionate. Frequent digressions—on the development of the Norden bombsight, the Japanese code of Bushido, the psychology of prison guards, the fate of former Pacific POWs (who lost an average of 61 pounds and later died at a rate four times faster than other men their age)—put historical meat on Zamperini’s bones. The bulk of Hillenbrand’s prodigious research in the salient secondary sources and some key archival ones rests on hours of interviews with Zamperini and others. The outcome is a popular history with weight and mass.

What is missing for historians is the larger context of the story and the historiographical framework within which Zamperini’s experience unfolds. What does his story or the story of any Pacific POW mean beyond being a narrative of “survival, resilience, and redemption”? How much do Zamperini’s experiences reflect change and continuity over time for cultures and captives in other wars? For Japan in this war? For the United States? To answer those and other historically minded questions, readers can turn to the growing body of literature that is shifting our attention from the war in Europe to the war in Asia and the Pacific (listed below in the recommended reading). To criticize Hillenbrand for these omissions is to pick apart a book she did not intend to write. She chose to tell a different tale and does so masterfully. Historians might learn a thing or two about storytelling from reading it.

The Pacific is very much in vogue as what some have called “The Greatest Generation” passes from our midst, and Asia and the Pacific Rim grow in contemporary importance. Such a vogue serves as a welcome corrective to the Eurocentric view of the Second World War too often seen in the West. With the best-selling Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand brings a small but important part of the Pacific War to a popular audience in the fascinating story of a man who rose to Olympic heights, fell beneath the contempt of his captors, and found his purpose in a life both human and heroic. More power to her, for any book that spreads the good news of history written as well as Hillenbrand’s is good news indeed.

Related Reading:

Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific War, 1931-1945 (English translation, 1978)

John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1987)

Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs in World War II in the Pacific (1996)

Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman, Tears of Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath (2009)

Related Viewing:

Flags of Our Fathers (d. Clint Eastwood, 2006)

Letters from Iwo Jima (d. Clint Eastwood, 2006)

City of Life and Death (d. Lu Chuan, 2009)

The Pacific (d. Tim Van Patten et al., 2010)

Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary by Bertrand M. Patenaude (2009)

by Andrew Straw

Within the span of thirty years, Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (Trotsky) went from living as a revolutionary in exile to being one of the world’s most successful revolutionary leaders, only to spend the waning years of his life back in exile and on the run from the regime whose creation defined his life’s work. In Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary, Stanford Lecturer and Hoover Archives Fellow Bertrand M. Patenaude provides the definitive account of the events leading up to Trotsky’s assassination by a Soviet agent in August 1940 at his Mexican residence. Patenaude’s work highlights the paranoia, contradictions, ideological stubbornness, cultural intrigues, and violence that led to Trotsky’s eventual exile from the Soviet Union and his tense journey through European exile to Mexico, where Trotsky’s violent past caught up with him.

Few authors bring their extensive archival research to life in the way Patenaude does as he ushers the reader through the last years of Trotsky’s life as if writing a fictional thriller. While thoroughly examining the chronology of events during Trotsky’s exile, Patenaude takes strategic pauses in order reflect on Trotsky’s revolutionary career and give events both global and regional historical context. The author reminds readers how Trotsky lost the power struggle to Stalin, delves into family and sexual matters, addresses arguments made by earlier biographers and examines Trotsky’s influence among Communists and Socialists in the Americas and Europe.

Patenaude explores the tensions that Trotsky’s arrival in Mexico created for that country’s leftists and shows how much of his support in the later years came from American Trotskyites from New York to Minneapolis. His friendships with world-renowned artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera mix into the narrative alongside Trotsky’s rivalries with Soviet political contemporaries Stalin, Bukharin, and Kamenev. His relationship with wife Natalia and the sad story of his family both in and out of the Soviet Union is another constant thread. Some of the most intriguing parts of the book examine the assassins and GPU (Soviet secret police) infiltrators whose work eventually led, after one failed attempted, to Trotsky’s mortal wounds.

Pantenuade uses his story-telling skills to highlight both the contradictions of Trotsky’s ideological arrogance and portray his real human concerns and sensitivities. Trotsky was an ideologue so stubborn that he could barely agree with many Trotskyites, but he was also talented at seducing women and had a profound love for cactuses. The way in which Trotsky and those around him became increasingly paranoid leads up to the shock and horror of the assassination as it unfolded. One can easily picture oneself standing in the guard’s place and contemplating what steps might have been taken to prevent the inevitable.

Still, the humanization of Trotsky does not necessarily force the reader to sympathize with “the Old Man.” In fact, readers may even be agitated by how such an intelligent and human character could be so stubborn and un-recanting. After all, how could a man who pointed out the dangers in Lenin’s program of centralized terror before 1917 never once question the original Bolshevik revolution, even as the same ideas he once feared were actively hunting him down? Patenaude’s work gives the reader an enhanced understanding of Trotsky’s life and the relevant characters and events leading up to that paradoxical, and bloody fate.

More on Lev Trotsky:

Rare, high quality photographs of Trotsky in Mexico from the Hoover Archives
Bertrand Patenaude discussing his work on Trotsky’s life in Mexico (video)
Trotsky denouncing Stalin (in English) from Mexico (video)

Flickers of the Past

By Joan Neuberger

It’s no secret that the internet has made more images available to more people. Major libraries are digitalizing their visual collections and sites like Hulu and YouTube offer an enormous range of whole films and TV series. The quantity of visual resources is very exciting, and at the same time, daunting. Even if we only count collections of interest to historians, the sheer quantity of valuable images is increasingly hard to navigate. My goal is to point readers to interesting collections and websites (and books!) that might otherwise remain lost in the electronic thicket. And I invite readers to send in their own suggestions as well.

I want to begin by showing you a very early, full-color, Kodachrome film made by in 1922. It is a lovely little four-and-a-half minutes of pretty women gesturing for the camera. The color and lighting are exquisite, –all warm reds with flattering highlights– making it a purely enjoyable thing just to look at.

Historically it interests me for two reasons.

For all its technical achievements, Kodak hadn’t yet done away with the flicker that gave movies one of their earliest and enduring nicknames: flicks. I was all ready to explain the flickering as the result of the slow, hand-cranked cameras that produced variations in film speed. Then I read the post about this film clip on Kodak’s blog, A Thousand Words, and discovered two alternate possibilities. As someone who loves old films (like Georges Méliès’ Journey to the Moon pictured above), and old cameras (like Mikhail Kaufman‘s below), it’s always interesting to read about the ingenuity that went into solving mechanical problems that led to technical breakthroughs.

Even more interesting are the women’s gestures. We see fluttery, innocent modesty, maternal love, and in the longest sequence, sexy, puckered-lip vamping. The women’s movements and expressions, even more than their fashionable clothes, immediately mark them as interwar female types. Recently a Russian film scholar, Oksana Bulgakowa, has shown how various feelings and meanings were coded in Soviet film actors’ movements. Some of these seem are so unfamiliar, they seem like a foreign language today. You can see what she means in her own movie on the subject, The Factory of Gestures.

Today, when we watch TV or a movie, we see a wide diversity of acting styles and behaviors. A hundred years from now, which ones will be seen as defining our age?

Photo Credits:
Screen shot from A Journey to the Moon, by Georges Méliès
Mikhail Kaufman mounting camera on a train, 1929, via Wikimedia Commons, status unknown

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