Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit.

If it’s a criticism of religion, it’s one done without the malice and flattening incuriosity of the New Atheists. A novel about a woman growing up in her adopted family, autobiographical to some degree but with a dreaminess that makes it feel like fantasy, though nothing is strictly unbelievable.

She needed eggs, the Lord had sent them.
She had a bout of colic, the Lord took it away.
She always prayer for two hours a day;
once in the morning at seven a.m.
and once in the evening at seven p.m.
Her hobby was numerology, and she never read the Word without first casting the dice to guide her.
‘One dice for the chapter, and one dice for the verse’ was her motto.
Someone once asked her what she did for books of the Bible that had more than six chapters.
‘I have my ways,’ she said stiffly, ‘and the Lord has his.’1

Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog.2

A charismatic dog is turned in to an uncharismatic man, at least that was my reading.

There is absolutely no necessity to learn how to read; meat smells a mile off, anyway. Nevertheless, if you live in Moscow and have a brain in your head you’ll pick up reading willy-nilly, and without attending any courses. Out of the forty thousand or so Moscow dogs, only a total idiot won’t know how to read the word “sausage.”3

Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.

The story of the radicals of the Left of the 1960’s and 1970’s: principally the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Liberation Army, and Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), a Puerto Rican independence group. The most striking summation of the book: “During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.”4 The reason they were tolerated to the degree that they were is that, with a handful of exceptions, no one was killed.

One exception, not associated with any of those groups, occurred in 1970 in Madison, Wisconsin:

Events beyond Weatherman’s control, meanwhile, had dealt the underground’s allure a severe blow. Early on the morning of August 24, three weeks before the [Timothy] Leary [prison] escape, four militants in Madison, Wisconsin, packed nearly a ton of explosives into a stolen Ford Econoline van and parked it beside the University of Wisconsin’s Sterling Hall, which housed the Army Mathematics Research Center [(A.M.R.C.)]; it was the same building Jeff Jones, during a campus appearance, had urged “trashing” a year before. The resulting explosion, exponentially larger than anything Weatherman ever attempted, could be heard thirty miles away. It gutted the six-story building. Damage was put at $6 million; at the time, it was the single most destructive act of sabotage in U.S. history. Worse, a postdoctoral researcher named Robert Fassnacht, working inside the building, was killed. He left a wife and three children.5

Karl Armstrong, one of the bombers, would continue to have some support locally. Eighteen months later there were posters around town:

THE RUBBLE HAS BEEN CLEARED; THE A.M.R.C. CONTINUES TO MASTERMIND KILLINGS IN S.E. ASIA AND AROUND THE WORLD

AND THE REAL MURDERERS ARE STILL AT LARGE

KARL- Whether or not you did what they say you did, we’re with you.6

Nearly everywhere else, the reception was negative:

Literally overnight, the Madison bombing transformed the national conversation from a focus on Nixon’s misdeeds—Cambodia, Kent State—to those of self-styled revolutionaries. Midnight bombings that until that point seemed brave or romantic or even heroic suddenly appeared callous and uncaring at least, murderous at worst. For the first time a generation of militants comfortable with revolutionary rhetoric were forced to confront its consequences. “It isn’t just the radicals who set the bomb in a lighted, occupied building who are guilty,” editorialized the Wisconsin State Journal. “The blood is on the hands of anyone who has encouraged them, anyone who has talked recklessly of ‘revolution,’ anyone who has chided with mild disparagement the violence of extremists while hinting that the cause is right all the same.” Reporters who sought reactions from young radicals found many not only chagrined but prepared to denounce the use of violence altogether.7

The bombers were met with some some combination of prison and professional success. “Many who escaped prosecution reentered conventional society, embarking on belated careers as doctors, lawyers, and especially educators.”8 Weather Underground leader Bernadine Dohrn, for example, who was “the most-wanted underground figure of the era”, suffered little (and was later rehabilitated as a law professor).

The excruciating irony that Bernardine Dohrn, the most-wanted underground figure of the era, could walk away virtually scot-free just weeks after two of her top FBI pursuers had been convicted of crimes against her was not lost on anyone involved. “The Weather Underground had done like a hundred bombings, and she was never prosecuted for one of them,” recalls Lou Vizi, the FALN investigator. “That’s amazing. I mean, absolutely amazing. You know who got prosecuted? Us. The FBI.”9

Karl Armstrong, the Madison, Wisconsin bomber, spent time in prison and then returned to Madison to run a juice cart called “Loose Juice” near the bombing site. After that, he took over operation of a deli, Radical Rye, and opened a bar, Che’s Lounge, above it. In 2010, he thought the bombing was “the right thing to do at the time.”10

Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.

A sequel of sorts to his The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It begins with a detailed account of the failure of the reactor at Chernobyl and all the cover-ups and prevarication that formed the initial official response to it. The reactor design at Chernoybl was the product of a push and pull between military and civilian uses for nuclear reactors which eventually was settled in the military’s favor. That was a source of problems:

If the military needed plutonium, on-line refueling would allow fuel rods to be removed early to maximize their bloom of military-grade plutonium. A safety containment structure around such a reactor, which would probably have prevented an accident like the one at Chernobyl, would have also greatly reduced its military value. Military needs thus competed with civilian needs in the choice of the RBMK design when the Soviet Union decided to greatly expand electricity production with nuclear power in the early 1970s; a competing light-water reactor design, the Soviet VVER, was safer but less suitable for the production of military-grade plutonium.11

The disaster at Chernobyl occurred in April of 1986, just over a year after Gorbachev had been selected general secretary.

In his acceptance speech immediately after his election he had called for open government and accountability: “I emphasized the need for transparency (glasnost) in the work of Party, Soviet, state and public organizations,” he wrote later.12

After opening on Chernobyl, the book traces a history of the nuclear arms race: forced collectivization and dekulakization leads to a history of Gorbachev, global nuclear developments after WW2 lead to stockpiling and the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty, through to Carter, Brezhnev. But the book is never far from Gorbachev: his response to Chernobyl, its effects on his efforts towards glasnost, state transparency, and perestroika, the restructuring of economic management, and, finally, his long talks with Reagan.

The last third of the book recounts those talks: in Vienna, in Reykjavík, at Washington. Gorbachev saw the nuclear arms race as something directly at odds with the development of the internal civilian economy:

The huge Soviet military-industrial complex, which insinuated itself into every corner of the Soviet economy and consumed at least 40 percent of the state budget, headed [Gorbachev’s] list for cutbacks, and in a letter delivered to President Ronald Reagan on 15 January 1986 he had broached a proposal without precedent across the four dangerous decades of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear-arms race: “A concrete program,” as he described it during a press conference in Moscow later that day, “…for the complete liquidation of nuclear weapons throughout the world…before the end of the present century.” Opening to such unprecedented initiative, 1986 had seemed a year of immense possibility.13

Reagan’s intense desire to get rid of nuclear weapons was inspired, fittingly, by his Christian faith and by film:

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he believed, fulfilled the prediction in Revelation of an army out of Asia of “twice ten thousand times ten thousand” routed by plagues of “fire and smoke and sulfur.” He added Chernobyl to his list when he learned that the name of the old town was the Byelorussian word for wormwood, fulfilling the prophecy of “a great star [that] fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water. The name of the star is Wormwood.”14

✦

“Columbus Day,” Reagan began a diary entry on Monday, 10 October 1983. “In the morning at Camp David I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running on Nov. 20. It’s called ‘The Day After’ in which Lawrence, Kansas, is wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done, all $7 million worth. It is very effective and left me greatly depressed. So far they haven’t sold any of the 25 ads scheduled and I can see why…. My own reaction: we have to do all we can…to see that there is never a nuclear war.”15

Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A Global History.

A broad history of the Cold War, with fascinating sections on the ideological collapse of the USSR as it came to term with Stalin’s failures and crimes:

[Khrushchev’s] opportunity came at the Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress in February 1956. It was the first such Congress since Stalin’s death, and Stalin had never bothered much with them—there had been no Congress between 1939 and 1952. Khrushchev had prepared a speech that would stun the Soviet and foreign Communists assembled there. The speech was held at the end of the Congress, to a closed session of delegates and high-ranking party members who had been released from Stalin’s prisons. It was therefore dubbed “the secret speech,” but there was little doubt that Khrushchev expected it to eventually be made public. He got up to speak just after midnight. “Quite a lot has been said about the cult of the individual and about its harmful consequences,” he began. “The negative characteristics of Stalin… transformed themselves during the last years into a grave abuse of power… which caused untold harm to our party.… Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this… was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation.”

[…]

But Khrushchev’s worst indictment was reserved for Stalin’s postwar behavior. Then, the new leader said, “Stalin became even more capricious, irritable, and brutal; in particular his suspicion grew. His persecution mania reached unbelievable dimensions. Many workers were becoming enemies before his very eyes.… Everything was decided by him alone without any consideration for anyone or anything.” The break with Yugoslavia was Stalin’s fault, as were the postwar purges. “You see to what Stalin’s mania for greatness led. He had completely lost consciousness of reality; he demonstrated his suspicion and haughtiness not only in relation to individuals in the USSR, but in relation to whole parties and nations.” In the audience, some fainted, though the majority cheered wildly.

The Polish party leader Bolesław Bierut had a heart attack and died when he read the text. Communists everywhere were profoundly shocked when they heard about the speech. Their whole lives they had been defending Stalin and the USSR against what they considered slander.16

It was a different world; Reagan on the Campaign Trail in 1976:

I believe God had a divine purpose in placing this land between the two great oceans to be found by those who had a special love of freedom and the courage to leave the countries of their birth. From our forefathers to our modern-day immigrants, we’ve come from every corner of the earth, from every race and every ethnic background, and we’ve become a new breed in the world. We’re Americans and we have a rendezvous with destiny.17

And in 1980, accepting the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Detroit:

Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe free? Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain; the boat people of Southeast Asia, of Cuba, and of Haiti; the victims of drought and famine in Africa; the freedom fighters in Afghanistan; and our own countrymen held in savage captivity.18

John LeCarré, A Perfect Spy.

This is the most autobiographical of LeCarré’s books and, I read, served as an outlet for many things about his father that he wanted to write for a long time but didn’t until his father had died. It is not quite a spy book, though it is about a spy.

The protagonist, Magnus Pym, telling his handler and boss Jack about his good friend Axel and their first meetings in Switzerland, gives us, among other things, some good advice on reading:

And yes, Jack, the other seeds were there, of course they were: a crash diet of Hegel, as much as they both could swallow at a time, a burst of Marx and Engels and the bad bears of Communism—for after all, said Axel, this was the first day of the world. “If we are to judge Christianity by the misery it has caused mankind, who would ever be a Christian? We accept no prejudices, Sir Magnus. We believe everything as we read it and only afterwards reject it. If Hitler hated these fellows so much, they can’t be all bad, I say.”19