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Mostrando postagens com marcador The Guardian. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador The Guardian. Mostrar todas as postagens

quarta-feira, 28 de dezembro de 2022

Top 10 books about the iron curtain - Timothy Phillips (The Guardian)

Livros da Guerra Fria


Top 10 books about the iron curtain

The dividing line between capitalism and communism which descended across Europe after the second world war inspired spy writers and historians, polemicists and memoirists


Timothy Phillips

The Guardian, Wed 28 Dec 2022 12.00 GMT


The iron curtain bisected Europe from north to south between 1945 and 1989. It defined the continent, and in many ways the entire world, because of the ideological battles that raged across it. The realm of capitalism and representational democracy dominated to the west; the realm of communism and one-party rule to the east.

Crossing the curtain in either direction was always an undertaking, and for millions was both illegal and impossible. The nuclear might and conventional armed forces of all major powers were focused on that dividing line, the most likely place for a third world war to start.


I was just 11 when the iron curtain collapsed. I remember watching news of the Berlin Wall falling. Ever since, the divide has been a ghost in my mind. I started learning Russian the following year and my textbooks came from the Soviet era. I visited eastern Europe from 1995 onwards and found countries reeling from the end of its version of socialism.

I also discovered early how the iron curtain had inspired writers. From tense cold war thrillers to passionately argued treatises blaming one side or the other for the stalemate, from historians trying to make sense of how Europe became so riven to memoirists committing their own, often tragic tales to print: the iron curtain has been the source of some amazing books.

Just before the pandemic, I travelled the length of the iron curtain, from the Arctic where Norway and Russia meet to the frontier of Turkey and Azerbaijan, the most southerly place where Nato touched the Warsaw Pact countries. The result was the trip of a lifetime and a book, The Curtain and the Wall: A Modern Journey along Europe’s Cold War Border. It is my attempt to capture what survives of the old divide both on the ground and in people’s heads. I read widely during the journey. It is one of the pleasures of solo travel. Here I share 10 books that reveal the essence of the most menacing border the world has yet seen.


1. Eight Days at Yalta:by Diana Preston

Even once the second world war was under way, it was by no means inevitable it would end in a divided Europe. Preston’s 2020 book is a vivacious account of how the Big Three allied leaders gathered on the Crimea to thrash out an uneasy agreement about the continent’s future and their countries’ respective spheres of influence. The Yalta Conference of February 1945 was a supremely important political event. But Preston also focuses on the personal preferences and foibles of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, and how they navigated one another’s red lines.

2. The Third Man by Graham Greene

When people think of the iron curtain, they tend to think of two European cities particularly – Berlin, itself divided, and Moscow, from where the USSR government effectively ran its satellites. However, until 1955, Vienna was divided much like Berlin into American, British, French and Soviet sectors. Greene’s The Third Man (1950) and the earlier film of that name conjure the period better than anything. The investigation of Harry Lime’s death shows the City of Dreams in a seedy postwar light. Greene also foregrounds one of the greatest cold war oddities, Vienna’s Inter-Allied Military Patrol, which required one soldier from each occupying power to share a jeep and travel to crime scenes together.


3. Alex von Tunzelmann’s Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary and the Crisis That Shook the World


This rare gem focuses on two of the biggest events of the period, the Suez crisis and the Hungarian Revolution. Both reached their culmination at the same time in 1956. More often treated separately, in Von Tunzelmann’s hands the twin crises regain their full geopolitical force. She has an eye for illuminating detail; the action often unfolds hour by hour. It reads like a thriller.


4. Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth byFrederick Kempe

The year 1961 was when the cold war had one of its “hot” moments. Kempe takes the reader on a journey into the conflict, as Soviet and East German authorities attempt to solve the problem of West Berlin. An island of western capitalism marooned inside the GDR, West Berlin was also a major escape route for unhappy East Germans. More than 2.5 million had fled by 1961. Khrushchev and the East German regime were determined to end this embarrassment. For a time, it looked as if they might seize West Berlin, but in the end the Wall was their chosen sticking plaster, a monstrous imposition on Germany’s capital, but one that largely worked to trap East Germans inside for the next 28 years.


5. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

No iron curtain book list would be complete without Le Carré, and this is the book of his that sticks closest to the iron curtain. It is dark, cynical and, even after six decades, gripping. Ultimately, the hero, British agent Alec Leamas, is compelled to confront the reality of the Berlin Wall at close quarters.


6. Red Love: The Story of an East German Family by Maxim Leo

Leo explores what it was like to grow up in the GDR in one of my favourite memoirs. He writes beautifully and his words are deftly rendered in English by the much-missed translator Anthea Bell. The good, the bad and the ugly of East German life are before us. For me, the most affecting passage describes Leo’s first visit to a huge East German road checkpoint. “How barricaded our country is,” he thinks. “What became of a dream of socialism?”


7. Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena

The USSR had iron curtain land borders with three countries – Norway, Finland and Turkey – but also a maritime border with the west on the Baltic Sea. Latvia was one Soviet republic with a long Baltic coastline. This ended up punctured with missile bases and barbed wire. Latvian writer Ikstena’s 2015 novel takes a harshly ironic look at life there, through the eyes of a doctor who is banished to a remote village only to find herself contemplating the absurdities and injustices of so-called ”mature socialism”. There is a wonderful passage where characters watch the televised state funeral of Leonid Brezhnev and see the men lowering him into the grave lose grasp of his coffin; it falls with a loud crash – I can reveal this is not fiction.


8. Along the Edge of the Forest: An Iron Curtain Journey by Anthony Bailey

Bailey’s book was one inspiration for my own iron curtain journey. He travelled the line while the divide was still in place, going from the top of the inner German border to Trieste. He is restricted in his ability to enter the east. Nonetheless, the book contains much fascinating reportage. The author really manages to get under the skin of what the frontier meant to ordinary people.


9. Enver Hoxha: The Iron Fist of Albania by Blendi Fevziu

Nowhere in Europe was more mysterious during the cold war than Albania. The country was isolated even from other communist states and the dictator Enver Hoxha effectively immured his nation on all sides. Fevziu’s biography is shocking reading. As a young man, Hoxha “slept till noon, stayed up late at night and had no particular interests”. But once he hit his stride, he imposed bizarre laws on Albanians and outlasted six ministers of the interior, the first five of whom he executed.


10. Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny by Witold Szabłowski

What has the iron curtain left behind? There are physical remnants, some large and celebrated, others small and neglected. There is also a legacy in millions of minds. Many pine for their lost lives in the Eastern Bloc. My own journey found people missing not just the good parts but also sometimes the bad, including the impassable borders and the state intrusion into daily life. Szabłowski, a Polish journalist, travelled across central Europe to write this tender and opinionated book. It is a delight from beginning to end.


quarta-feira, 10 de agosto de 2022

Russia-Ukraine war: what we know on day 168 of the invasion - Jordyn Beazley (The Guardian)

Russia-Ukraine war at a glance

Russia-Ukraine war: what we know on day 168 of the invasion

Zelenskiy vows to ‘liberate’ Crimea as Kyiv denies responsibility for deadly attack on Russian airbase in the annexed peninsula 

Smoke rises after explosions near a Russian airbase in Crimea.
  • A Russian airbase deep behind the frontline in Crimea has been damaged by several large explosions, killing at least one person. It was not immediately clear whether it had been targeted by a long-range Ukrainian missile strike. In his nightly address, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, did not discuss who was behind the attacks but vowed to “liberate” Crimea, saying: “This Russian war against Ukraine and against the entire free Europe began with Crimea and must end with Crimea – with its liberation.” An adviser to the president, Mikhail Podolyak, said Ukraine was not taking responsibility for the explosions, suggesting partisans might have been involved.

  • The head of Ukraine’s state nuclear power firm warned of the “very high” risks from shelling at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in the Russian-occupied south and said it was vital Kyiv regains control over the facility in time for winter. Energoatom’s chief, Petro Kotin, told Reuters in an interview that last week’s Russian shelling had damaged three lines that connect the Zaporizhzhia plant to the Ukrainian grid and that Russiawanted to connect the facility to its grid.

  • Russian forces occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant are reorienting the plant’s electricity production to connect to Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, according to Ukrainian operator Energoatom. “To do this, you must first damage the power lines of the plant connected to the Ukrainian energy system. From August 7 to 9, the Russians have already damaged three power lines. At the moment, the plant is operating with only one production line, which is an extremely dangerous way of working,” Energoatom president Petro Kotin told Ukrainian television. The plant, located not far from the Crimean peninsula, has six of Ukraine’s 15 reactors, and is capable of supplying power for four million homes.

  • The leaders of Estonia and Finland want fellow European countries to stop issuing tourist visas to Russian citizens, saying they should not be able to take holidays in Europe while the Russian government carries out a war in Ukraine. The Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, wrote on Tuesday on Twitter that “visiting Europe is a privilege, not a human right” and that it was “time to end tourism from Russia now”, the Associated Press reported.

  • US president Joe Biden on Tuesday signed documents endorsing Finland and Sweden’s accession to Nato, the most significant expansion of the military alliance since the 1990s as it responds to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Reuters reports.

  • The US state department has approved $89m worth of assistance to help Ukraine equip and train 100 teams to clear landmines and unexploded ordnance for a year, Reuters reported.

  • The total number of grain-carrying ships to leave Ukrainian ports under a UN brokered deal to ease the global food crisis has now reached 12, with the two latest ships which left on Tuesday headed for Istanbul and Turkey.

  • Russia’s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad has been struggling with quotas imposed by the EU for sanctioned goods that it can import across Lithuania from mainland Russia or Belarus, the region’s governor admitted.Lithuania infuriated Moscow in June by banning the land transit of goods such as concrete and steel to Kaliningrad after EU sanctions on them came into force, Reuters reported.

  • Russia has launched an Iranian satellite from Kazakhstan amid concerns it could be used for battlefield surveillance in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Iran has denied that the Khayyam satellite, which was delivered into orbit onboard a Soyuz rocket launched from Baikonur cosmodrome, would ever be under Russian control. But the Washington Post previously reported that Moscow told Tehran it “plans to use the satellite for several months, or longer, to enhance its surveillance of military targets” in Ukraine, according to two US officials.

I write from Ukraine, where I've spent much of the past six months, reporting on the build-up to the conflict and the grim reality of war. It has been the most intense time of my 30-year career. In December I visited the trenches outside Donetsk with the Ukrainian army; in January I went to Mariupol and drove along the coast to Crimea; on 24 February I was with other colleagues in the Ukrainian capital as the first Russian bombs fell.

This is the biggest war in Europe since 1945. It is, for Ukrainians, an existential struggle against a new but familiar Russian imperialism. Our team of reporters and editors intend to cover this war for as long as it lasts, however expensive that may prove to be. We are committed to telling the human stories of those caught up in war, as well as the international dimension. But we can't do this without the support of Guardian readers. It is your passion, engagement and financial contributions which underpin our independent journalism and make it possible for us to report from places like Ukraine.

If you are able to help with a monthly or single contribution it will boost our resources and enhance our ability to report the truth about what is happening in this terrible conflict.

Thank you.

Luke Harding

Foreign correspondent


domingo, 3 de julho de 2022

Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short - book review - Angus Macqueen (The Guardian)

 Uma biografia que tenta capturar Putin nos seus próprios termos. Só que estes são os do Império czarista, não os de uma democracia liberal. O Império americano tem muita culpa em sua hipocrisia, mas em última instância defende tais valores e princípios liberais, ainda que por vezes brutalmente.

Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short is published by Bodley Head (£30). 

Vladimir Putin in 2004


Philip Short’s meticulous new biography forces us to look at Vladimir Putin’s most appalling acts from a Russian perspective

In his speech on the night of the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, which Philip Short describes as “pulsating with anger and resentment” at 30 years of Russian humiliation, Putin seethed: “They deceived us… they duped us like a con artist… the whole so-called western bloc, formed by the United States in its own image is… an empire of lies.” For those who dismiss the speech and the invasion that followed as the words and actions of a man gone mad, dying or out of contact with reality due to Covid isolation, this new biography should be compulsory reading.

As Short observes, however authoritarian and corrupt modern Russia may be, “national leaders invariably reflect the society from which they come, no matter how unpalatable that thought may be to the citizens”. While his people may have been as surprised as the rest of the world at the timing, the invasion hardly came out of the blue and many Russians, not all blinded by propaganda, support it. For as the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, commented a couple of weeks later: “This is not actually, or at least primarily… about Ukraine. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like. Will it be a world in which the west will lead everyone with impunity and without question?”

Running through all Putin’s thinking was a clear belief that 1991 was a catastrophe for Russia

Refreshingly, Short, in this meticulous biography of a man portrayed elsewhere as a 21st-century monster, refuses to moralise, opting instead to lay out how Putin’s recent actions can be seen as the consequence of the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The former BBC correspondent is at his best when pushing us to see the world from a Russian perspective. The importance of this is neatly illustrated in the publisher’s own claims for the book: “What forces and experiences shaped him [Putin]? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the cold war?” Short relentlessly traces the journey Putin has taken in rejecting that “peace”, the Pax Americana, the unipolar world in which, according to Russia expert Strobe Talbott, then US deputy secretary of state, “the US was acting as though it had the right to impose its view on the world”. From Moscow, Putin watched the US openly intervene in elections whenever it chose, encourage the break-up of the sovereign state of Serbia using bombs, invade Iraq on a tissue of falsehoods and then overthrow Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi without any UN resolution. As Putin commented in one of his acid asides that pepper Short’s account, when it came to concocting fables “those of us in the KGB were children compared to American politicians”. No wonder Xi Jinping of China and much of the world demur at the west’s claim to have done nothing to provoke the nightmare that has descended on Ukraine.

For all his recent whitewashing of Stalinism and Soviet history, in the early 1990s Putin understood the 1917 revolution had taken the country to an economic and political dead end. In his words, “the only thing they had to keep the country within common borders was barbed wire. And as soon as this barbed wire was removed, the country fell apart.” Yet running through all Putin’s thinking was a clear belief that the break-up of the Union in 1991 was a catastrophe for Russia; what was lost was not the Soviet dream but a country that physically stretched from Poland to the Pacific and historically back to Peter the Great and before. Putin mourned: “It was precisely those people in December 1917 who laid a time bomb under this edifice… which was called Russia… they endowed these territories with governments and parliaments. And now we have what we have.” Except we do not. For Putin and many of his fellow Russians have never understood how a country they believe saved the world from fascism at staggering personal cost just 50 years before dissolved in a matter of weeks.