Batter Together – A Political Cartoon

Scotland’s Referendum and Why ‘English Votes for English Laws’ is Unpalatable

Scotland voted on Thursday to remain within the United Kingdom – with 55% and 2,001,926 voting ‘No’ to Scottish independence, while 45% and 1,617,989 voted ‘Yes’ – after more than two years of heated debate, but also on the back of a late pledge by the three main Westminster parties to grant Scotland greater devolved powers as part of the UK. The pledge, signed by David Cameron, Nick Clegg, and Ed Miliband and published on the front page of the Daily Record at the beginning of the week, promised ‘extensive new powers’ to Scotland.

More devolution for Scotland in the case of a ‘No’ vote was always on the agenda, but the scope of these late-promised powers is a matter of debate between the three parties and between the parties and the SNP. The Scottish Parliament at Holyrood already legislates for Scotland’s health and social services, education, housing, transportation, agriculture, fisheries and forestry, environment, arts and sport, tourism, and economic development. The Scotland Act 2012 – which amended the Scotland Act 1998, which established the devolved Scottish Parliament – additionally gave Scotland’s Parliament the power to raise or lower the rate of income tax by 10p in the pound, uniformly across all tax bands; as well as some other minor powers relating to taxation and law and order. However the Act is not due to be fully realised before 2016, and is now likely to be superseded. At the moment the Scottish Parliament can alter the rate of income tax by 3p in the pound.

Maximum devolution for Scotland – ‘devo max’ – would imply allowing the Scottish Parliament to legislate on everything except foreign policy and defence. It is clear that any move to extend Scotland’s powers will fall some way short of this. So far, discussion around the pledge for extensive new powers for Scotland has centred upon three issues. The first is greater still Scottish authority over taxation. The SNP would like complete control over taxation within Scotland, including absolute control over income tax rates, corporation tax, and air passenger duty. The Conservatives appear ready to give complete control over income tax rates; while the Liberal Democrats would offer this and more. Labour, however, seem willing to allow the Scottish Parliament to increase tax rates as they see fit, but not to unilaterally cut the top rate of income tax.

Secondly, the pledge vowed to consolidate Scotland’s authority over its NHS. This is against a background of gesture from Westminster threatening cuts and further privatisations; but also in a context whereby the NHS in Scotland apparently faces a funding gap of £400 million. Thirdly, and related to the issue of the NHS, is the promise to retain the Barnett formula: a mechanism for allocating public expenditure levels in the United Kingdom’s four nations, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Based on population, the Barnett formula has resulted in Scotland maintaining a significantly higher expenditure per capita than England: as it stands today, Scotland spends £1,623 – 19% – more per head than England on public services.

Embellishing a timetable established several weeks ago by Gordon Brown, David Cameron announced yesterday morning in his post-referendum speech that Lord Smith of Kelvin – a former BBC governor, and chairman of the organising committee for Glasgow’s 2014 Commonwealth Games – will oversee the process towards greater devolution for Scotland. The timeline is short: detailed proposals are to be written up by October, and they should pass consultation by November before a draft bill is published in January. Any legislation will not be passed until after the general election in May, and the continued implementation of the Barnett formula is likely to prove a sticking point within the UK Parliament.

The promise of greater devolution for Scotland has brought a surge of attention to the West Lothian question, and the proposal for ‘English votes for English laws’. In short, the question – first raised back in 1977 by the West Lothian MP Tam Dalyell, in the build up to the failed Scottish referendum of 1979 – asks why Scottish MPs can vote on English laws, while English MPs cannot vote on Scottish laws as they have no access to the Scottish Parliament. The proposal suggests that where legislation only concerns England, only MPs from English constituencies should be allowed to vote.

It is easy to go back and forth over ‘English votes for English laws’. Superficially, the proposal sounds eminently reasonable; but when you realise that two of its main proponents over the past weeks and months have been Conservative MP John Redwood and UKIP leader Nigel Farage, suspicions grow in the mind as the body is immediately beset by revulsion. On the other hand on Thursday night, as the referendum results filtered through via the BBC, Ming Campbell – former Liberal Democrat leader and current MP for North East Fife – agreed that, with more powers promised to the Scottish Parliament, an end to the ability for Scottish MPs to vote on English laws is not only inevitable, but logical and fair.

In fact, the proposal was part of the Conservative manifesto for 2010; but the coalition government determined to set up a commission to investigate rather than act. The McKay Commission reported in March 2013, broadly supporting procedural change; but averring that ‘Under the Commission’s recommendations, no MPs would be prevented from voting on any bill, and the right of the House as a whole to make final decisions would be preserved’ and ‘Our proposals retain the right of a UK-wide majority to make the final decisions where they believe UK interests or those of a part of the UK other than England should prevail. We expect that governments will prefer compromise to conflict.’

English laws – as opposed to UK laws – would in theory cover the areas of health, education, transportation, and culture. Foreign affairs, defence, energy, and basic welfare provision and pensions are prominent among the realms which would then remain the concern of the UK Parliament. But with greater devolution for Scotland when it comes to taxation, it is unclear to what extent England might be allowed to set its economic policy independently from the rest of the United Kingdom. This is an intractable problem with the concept of ‘English votes for English laws’, because it is arguable that given the population of England and the size of the English economy, the decisions it makes economically will always have a disproportionate impact on its partners north and west of the border.

With Scotland voting to stay part of the UK and the focus turning to the West Lothian question, what also show through upon analysis are both the strengths of the union between Scotland and England, and the divisions within English society. ‘English votes for English laws’ is a populist proposal, and might well appeal to the vast majority of the English population. But it is hard to see how, in practise, it would benefit vast swathes of the country.

In the 2010 general election, Scotland returned 41 Labour MPs to the House of Commons from 59 contested seats. This amounts to 69% of Scotland’s seats won by Labour. In the North East of England, Labour won 25 from 29 seats. In the North West, Labour took 47 seats from a possible 75; and in Yorkshire and the Humber, they won 32 seats from 54. This means that in the north of England, Labour won 66% of seats. Yet in England as a whole, the Conservatives won 298 of 533 seats; giving them an election victory – although not a majority – in the United Kingdom with 307 seats out of 650.

When it comes to politics, the north of England is ideologically and economically closer to Scotland – and to Wales, where in 2010 Labour took 26 out of 40 seats, or 65% – than it is to London and the South East. However it is without its own parliament, and without the benefits brought about in Scotland by the Barnett formula. It suffers from a lack of representation in parliament and from a shortage of investment in jobs and in cultural life. And it seems perverse that one of the consequences of the close referendum in Scotland might be the further diminishing of the north. If ‘English votes for English laws’ becomes implemented – which may not require the passage of any new legislation – then the viewpoint of northern England will be increasingly marginalised as it loses the effective balance provided by Scottish MPs, and sees Labour struggle to attain a majority on English-only issues of legislation.

Other problems are posed by ‘English votes for English laws’. Would this change require a separate parliament building, which would be the preserve of English MPs and English matters of debate – and if so, where would an English Parliament be located? Otherwise an English Parliament could simply sit in the Commons on a rotational basis: sitting two or three days a week, with the UK Parliament sitting the rest of the time. Alternately, the UK Parliament could remain intact, with Scottish MPs even allowed to debate English laws, but voting limited to English politicians.

On Thursday night, the Times political columnist Daniel Finkelstein raised the notion that, more than an English Parliament, such a fundamental change to legislative procedure could require an English executive – a vast and unwieldy undertaking, which would have wide-ranging ramifications for governmental ministers and the civil service. Labour are advertising a constitutional convention to consider the future of political process in the United Kingdom, reluctant to accept ‘English votes for English laws’, especially as David Cameron seems set to bind further Scottish devolution to the enactment of the proposal. Meanwhile on Thursday night, Labour MP Jim Murphy took a pleasantly contrarian perspective and asked, given the breadth of powers enjoyed by the Greater London Authority, whether London’s MPs should also face a limited role when it comes to legislating for the rest of England.

This argument in particular raises the potential solution of greater devolution for England’s regions. The manner and the terms of such would be difficult to agree upon. Would the present tiered system of local councils remain; would a powerful layer of government emerge at regional level, between Westminster and the local councils over England’s nine regions; or would the concept of city-regions, experimented with in Manchester and Leeds, be spread out across the country? The powers handed over would be open to dispute. And where ‘English votes for English laws’ would seemingly benefit the Conservatives, there is the view that greater devolution for the regions would play into the hands of Labour. Any shift in powers could be complemented by a more representative voting system. But to accept that the strength of feeling shown in Scotland extends throughout the UK requires significant devolution to the regions – and the development of a genuine localised politics, a process which appears both viable and necessary in today’s globalised, interconnected world.

2014 Swedish General Election Results: With Whom will the Social Democrats Govern?

Following the 2014 Swedish general election, which took place yesterday, 14 September, Sweden is set for a new government and a new political leader. The results show the Social Democrats with 31.2% of the vote, while the incumbent Moderate Party’s share has fallen to 23.2% from the 30.1% they won back in 2010. The Social Democrat leader, Stefan Löfven, will become Sweden’s Prime Minister, and must look to form a coalition government in trying circumstances. Sweden’s far-right, anti-immigration party, the duplicitously named Sweden Democrats, have increased their vote from 5.7% in 2010 to 12.9%, which makes them the third largest party in the country; and it is such a share of the vote that it means a minority ruling government appears inevitable. Even with the support of their usual allies, the Social Democrats cannot reach a majority in the Riksdag.

Since 2006, Sweden has been governed by Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt of the Moderate Party, and the Alliance for Sweden: a four party coalition to the centre-right of Swedish politics, comprising the Moderate Party, the Centre Party, the Liberal People’s Party, and the Christian Democrats. After the general election of 2006 – and following twelve years of governments headed by the Social Democrats – the Alliance for Sweden had enough seats in the Swedish Riksdag to form a majority government. Retaining power in 2010 as they beat off opposition from the Red-Greens – a three party coalition on the left, comprised of the Social Democrats, the Green Party, and the Left Party – they fell two seats short of an overall majority, owing largely to the Sweden Democrats, who entered parliament for the first time and took twenty seats.

The Red-Greens had formed their coalition explicitly for the sake of the 2010 election, and when the gambit horribly failed, the coalition quickly broke apart. In the intervening years, the Swedish public have been moved by a series of scandals involving the privatisation of state welfare and schooling; by a persistently high unemployment rate, particularly amongst the young; by more rounds of tax cuts; and by the falling performance of the country’s students, as ranked by the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment. Hence it has proved time to restore the Social Democrats to government.

The Social Democrats have been the major party in Swedish politics throughout the last century. 1911 saw the first Swedish general election with universal male suffrage, and the emergence of a modern party and parliamentary system. In that election, the Social Democrats finished in third place, with 28.5 % of the vote: behind the General Electoral League – which, after a couple of name changes, would become the Moderate Party – with 31.2%; and the Free-minded National Association – a precursor of today’s Liberal People’s Party – which won the election with 40.2%. The Social Democrats would become the largest party in the Riksdag three years later in 1914, although Hjalmar Branting would not become the first Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden until 1920.

The general election of 1921 was the first in Sweden with universal suffrage, as women won the right to vote. Over the next decade, power shifted between the Social Democrats, the General Electoral League, and the Free-minded National Association in the Riksdag – which operated as a bicameral legislature from 1866, with the first chamber indirectly elected by county councils and municipal assemblies, and the second chamber directly elected by eligible members of the populace; until in 1970 the two chambers merged to form a unicameral assembly. From 1936 until 1976, the Social Democrats enjoyed forty years of unbroken power.

Set against this long background of Swedish politics, despite the Social Democrats’ achievement in being returned as significantly the country’s largest party, and with the ability to form a government, their polling percentage is still relatively small. At general elections from 1936 until 1970, they uniformly won over 45% of the vote. And from 1914 until 2006, their vote never dropped beneath 36%. In 2006, they managed only 35% of the vote, making them still the largest party in the country by some margin, but resulting in a loss of power up against the Alliance for Sweden. Then in 2010, as the Red-Greens coalition did its constituents more harm than good, their vote fell to 30.7%.

31.2% of the vote this time round is a minor increase, even if any increase was largely unexpected. It suggests that the Moderate Party have failed to consolidate their successes in 2006 and especially in 2010, rather than the Social Democrats reaffirming their traditional dominance. Indeed, from the same historical perspective, 23.2% of the vote is not at all bad for the Moderate Party: between 1932 and 2002, their vote never rose above 23.6%; and dropped as low as 11.5% in 1970, a year after they changed their name to the Moderates in response to the perception that they were too right-wing.

With the Social Democrats having lost their old hegemony, and a distrust of the political establishment almost as characteristic of Sweden as it is of the rest of Europe, the resulting vacuum has been largely filled by the Sweden Democrats. The other parliamentary parties have repeatedly asserted that they will not work with the Sweden Democrats; and they are likely to resist any engagement despite the Sweden Democrats now holding the balance of power between the left and centre-right. The party formed in 1988, with various connections among its early membership to overtly racist and neo-Nazi groups, including the Nordic Reich Party.

The Sweden Democrats are not alone in bearing uncomfortable former ties to Nazism: the affiliated youth wing of the General Electoral League in the 1920s was the National Youth League of Sweden, which became increasingly radicalised and began supporting the German Nazis in the early 1930s, before the General Electoral League’s leader Arvid Lindman severed the connection in 1934. The National Youth League would briefly form its own far-right political party, which received just 0.9% of the vote in the 1936 general election, before the movement fissured and fizzled out.

Still, the Sweden Democrats retained some of their old connections, along with the slogan ‘Keep Sweden Swedish’, until beginning a process of moderation in the late 1990s. Especially under the leadership of Jimmie Åkesson since 2005, the party has attempted to distance itself from the vestiges of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Indeed, the party has even argued that its opposition to extreme forms of Islam amounts to strong support for sexual equality. Nevertheless, after the success of 2010, three of the party’s MPs were were forced to stand down owing to racist incidents. And the party continues to court controversy through provocative advertisements: as in 2010, when a commercial depicted a horde of burqa-wearing women chasing down an elderly Swedish lady in a race for benefits. The Sweden Democrats continue to campaign predominantly on restricting immigration and encouraging immigrants to return to their countries of origin; bolstering this thrust with what are increasingly common right-wing policies across Europe, including the renegotiation of EU membership and increased spending on defence.

While yesterday’s results mark a surge in support for the Sweden Democrats since their emergence in the 2010 election, the newest party to feature prominently in the election were the Feminist Initiative. Founded in 2005, in Sweden’s European Parliament elections held earlier this year the Feminist Initiative won 5.5% of the vote – enough for one seat, making the party the first feminist party to hold a seat in the European Parliament. Yet despite this result and much media interest – with co-founder and co-leader Gudrun Schyman appearing on stage over the weekend with Pharrell – achieving only 3.1% of the vote in the general election leaves the party short of the 4% required for a seat in the Riksdag. It also means a significant number of wasted votes, in so far as the 3.1% of votes for Feminist Initiative candidates will play no part in the construction of Sweden’s new government. But the party is well placed to continue to grow, and if the Social Democrats look more secure come the next election, more voters on the left of the political spectrum will be inclined to opt for the Feminists.

Sweden’s party system and proportional representation tend to result in the need for coalition governments. The Alliance for Sweden’s rule as a minority in parliament after 2010 was hardly an exceptional case, and weaker minority governments have been commonplace. Yet the results of this general election make the constitution of Stefan Löfven’s new Social Democrat-led government difficult to gauge. Any collaboration with the Sweden Democrats has been firmly ruled out. It is plausible that the Social Democrats will ally once again with the Green Party and the Left Party. But this would still provide only 43.7% of the vote, and 158 seats in the 349-seat parliament. Löfven and his party would then have to seek support for their policies on a case-by-case basis.

On the other hand, Löfven has expressed his openness to the possibility of partnering with the Centre Party and the Liberal People’s Party. These could add another 11.5% of the vote and an additional 41 seats. However, on the chance that they do break up the Alliance, it is unlikely that these smaller centrist parties will work alongside the Left Party. The Left Party splintered from the Social Democrats back in 1917, and as the Communist Party of Sweden had a history of cooperation with the Soviet Union. While the Green Party’s anti-nuclear and environmental focus is reconcilable with the aims of the others, the Left Party’s strong views on foreign policy and taxation, and absolute opposition to privatisation, make them an uneasy bedfellow even for the Social Democrats.

So the Social Democrats may have to forego the Left Party if they want to entice the Centre Party and the Liberal People’s Party. The Centre Party and the Social Democrats were once close, working hand-in-hand as coalition partners between the 1930s and 1950s when the former went under the guise of the Farmers’ League; but the Centre Party has moved to consolidate itself on the centre-right of Swedish politics ever since. Any union between these two will have been made more difficult still after a televised spat between Löfven and the Centre Party’s leader, Annie Lööf, in the run-up to Sunday’s election.

Clotted Hinderparts and Privy Drains: Game of Thrones and a History of Death on the Toilet

The twentieth century saw an abundance of famous toilet-related deaths. Elvis died in 1977 at just forty-two years old, found on the bathroom floor of his Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee, apparently having fallen from the toilet seat. Obese, and struggling with glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage, and an enlarged colon, the cause of his death was given as cardiac arrhythmia: essentially an irregular then stopped heart, widely believed to have been a direct consequence of his abuse of prescription drugs. However, with Elvis theories abound, including the idea that he faked his death, that he succumbed to Hirschprung’s disease, and that – as recent DNA analysis has suggested – he suffered from genetic heart disease. Elvis is buried, alongside his mother, father, and grandmother, in Graceland’s Meditation Garden.

Comedian Lenny Bruce died at forty in 1966, having overdosed on morphine while seated on the toilet of his home in Hollywood Hills. Phil Spector, a close friend, paid $5,000 to the Los Angeles police department for a set of photographs taken of the scene of Bruce’s death, in order to keep them from the press – though he sold at least one of the photographs years later to the filmmakers of a documentary about Bruce. Spector also took out an advertisement in Billboard magazine, stating that Bruce – whose career was hampered by numerous arrests on charges of obscenity – had died owing to an ‘overdose of police’.

The architect Louis Kahn died in 1974, aged seventy-three, in the public lavatory of Penn Station in New York. Kahn – the creator of some of the most influential and starkly beautiful architecture of the century, including the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban, the parliament of Bangladesh – had just returned from a work trip to India, and was set to take the train home to Philadelphia. When he died – of a heart attack – he had with him a briefcase containing his final drawings for a memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt, to be located on the southern tip of the recently rechristened Roosevelt Island. While Kahn’s designs for the memorial park were retained, it was not until 2005 that the funds were raised to advance the project. Ground was broken in the spring of 2010, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park opened in October 2012. Back in 1974, Kahn died with little on his person in the way of identification; and it took his wife in Philadelphia two days to discover that her husband was deceased.

Don Simpson – the producer of films including Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, and The Rock, and well known in Hollywood for his drug use –  died in the toilet of his Bel Air home in 1996, of heart failure after taking a combination of cocaine and prescription drugs. And the writer Evelyn Waugh died in 1966 aged sixty-two, purportedly passing on the toilet on Easter Sunday having attended a Latin Mass earlier that morning. Waugh was a devotee of the Mass in Latin, lamenting the changes instigated by the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965, which allowed for the vernacular language to be used over Latin, and brought about the eventual replacement of the Tridentine Mass, celebrated in the Catholic Church since 1570.

Amidst the celebrity and the diversity of the above figures, there shows an important issue of classification. We may distinguish between those who die only within or in proximity of the toilet or bathroom, inevitably a fairly typical occurrence; and those who die asquat the toilet seat. Of course, even ‘seat’ may be a misnomer. In an episode from the fourth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, entitled ‘The Weatherman’, Larry David attempts to go to the toilet but – refusing to turn on the bathroom light – doesn’t realise that the toilet seat is up, and thus falls into a potentially perilous position. There are toilet-centric deaths too on the small and big screens. In The Sopranos episode ‘He Is Risen’, from the third season of the show, Gigi Cestone, capo of the Aprile crew under Tony Soprano, has a heart attack while struggling with his bowels on the toilet. However, in Pulp Fiction, Vincent Vega – played by John Travolta – finishes his business on the toilet, and is only shot and killed as he emerges from that dwelling place. The point is that we will consider here only those whom we can reasonably suspect to have passed away atop the toilet, in seated position.

More, toilet-based deaths seem to impel an inclination towards particularly obscene exaggeration and rumour. The fact of a death upon the toilet is taken as license for the promulgation of all manner of hearsay, and for the development of sordid addenda which come to furnish or replace initial accounts. There is, for instance, the scurrilous suggestion that – rather than owing to drug abuse or the affects of any disease or illness – Elvis died simply of constipation. Catherine the Great died at sixty-seven in 1796, having greatly expanded the Russian Empire throughout her thirty-four-year reign, winning control over Crimea from the Ottoman Empire, partitioning the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and beginning the Russian colonisation of Alaska. There is some dispute among historians as to whether she suffered the stroke which brought about her death only in her dressing room, or on the toilet seat. Robert. K Massie provides the following description:

The next morning, November 5, she rose at six, drank black coffee, and sat down to write. At nine, she asked to be left alone for a moment and went into her dressing room. She did not reemerge. Her attendants waited. Her valet knocked, entered the room, and saw no one. He waited a minute, then pushed on the door of the adjacent water closet. It was partially jammed. He and a maid forced the door open and discovered the empress unconscious on the floor against the door. Her face was scarlet and her eyes were closed […] thirty-six hours after she was stricken and without ever recovering consciousness, Catherine died. (Massie, chapter 73)

Whatever, the apparent relationship between Catherine’s death and the restroom soon resulted within Russia in the commonly held belief that she died after the toilet she was seated upon cracked and broke underneath her. This version of her death was alluded to in a poem by Alexander Pushkin, ‘Мне жаль великия жены’. Equally popular, and eschewing any notion of a stroke, became the story that Catherine suffered death squashed by a stallion: according to this tale, her attendants were lowering the horse onto her for the satiation of her sexual desires, when the harness broke, and the horse fell and saw her killed. Thus along with precision when it comes to identifying the site of these deaths, we must also allow for the tendency for such accounts to become overblown, or to show the considerable bias of their narrators.

The concluding episode of the fourth season of Game of Thrones  – ‘The Children’, which aired in June – showed Tyrion Lannister avenge a litany of abuse by killing his father, shooting him with a crossbow while Tywin sat in his dressing gown on the privy. Perhaps George R. R. Martin, the author of the A Song of Ice and Fire books upon which the television series is based, drew something in his depiction of Tywin’s murder from the infamous and untimely deaths of the last century. Yet for the sort of bloody political intrigue which defines both the novels and the show, we have to look further back in history, to a religious heretic, a number of English Kings, a Japanese feudal lord, and an American judge.

Arius (256-336) was a presbyter, apparently of Libyan descent, who ministered in Alexandria, which was in the beginning of the fourth century one of the centres of Christendom. Considered a heresiarch – someone who, more than a mere heretic, led a sect which opposed the accepted beliefs of the Church – the school of thought which he popularised, Arianism, has been described by Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, as ‘the archetypal Christian deviation, something aimed at the very heart of the Christian confession’. At a time when the precise nature of Jesus Christ was still being defined within Christianity, Arius argued that Christ was not co-eternal and equal with God the Father. Accepting that Christ was begotten, and came into existence before time, Arius nevertheless held that God was the only being without beginning.

Within the Christian world, this was seen as a divisive challenge to the conception of the relationship between Father and Son. In an attempt to settle what had become a pressing issue, particularly in the Greek-speaking east of the Church, the Roman Emperor Constantine – the first Christian ruler of the Empire – convened the First Council of Nicaea in 325. After heated debate, the Council of Nicaea decided firmly against Arius. A creed was established which determined Father and Son to be co-eternal and ‘homoousios’, which means of the same substance.

Arius was exiled from the Church. Yet his views and his charismatic presentation continued to exert a strong influence, and by 336 it seemed likely that he would be restored to communion, only for his death to preempt this conclusion. The circumstances of Arius’s death were first recounted by Athanasius, his chief ideological opponent, and the Bishop of Alexandria in six spells between 328 and 373. Despite Athanasius’s lack of impartiality, he affords us with the only allegedly eye-witness account of Arius’s demise; and his letter to Serapion was the source for all later retellings.

Ecclesiastical writers from Epiphanius to Sozomen elaborated after Athanasius on the manner of Arius’s death. Socrates Scholasticus’s account is the most explicit: affording details of the place of Arius’s death, which he depicts as Constantine’s Forum in Constantinople, today the site of Çemberlitaş Square in Istanbul; and describing in lurid imagery the ‘evacuations’ of Arius’s bowels, ‘followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood’. Yet it is Sozomen, who wrote following Scholasticus, who perhaps best summarises the occurrence of Arius’s death and its aftermath:

Late in the afternoon, Arius, being seized suddenly with pain in the stomach, was compelled to repair to the public place set apart for emergencies of this nature. As some time passed away without his coming out, some persons, who were waiting for him outside, entered, and found him dead and still sitting upon the seat. When his death became known, all people did not view the occurrence under the same aspect. Some believed that he died at that very hour, seized by a sudden disease of the heart, or suffering weakness from his joy over the fact that his matters were falling out according to his mind; others imagined that this mode of death was inflicted on him in judgement, on account of his impiety. Those who held his sentiments were of opinion that his death was brought about by magical arts. (in Schaff, 279)

Arius’s death on the toilet was recalled early in the twentieth century by James Joyce. In ‘Proteus’, the third episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus walks along Sandymount strand and considers to himself:

Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred heresiarch! In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts. (Joyce, Ulysses, 3.50-54)

In April 1016, King Æthelred II (Æthelred the Unready) of England died and his son, Edmund, gained the throne, becoming Edmund II (Edmund Ironside). A succession of Danish raids on the English coast since the 980s had forced Æthelred in 991 to pay a tribute to the Danish King, as a means of keeping the peace. Despite the repeated paying of the Danegeld, Danish raids continued until, in late 1013, King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark invaded and took the English crown. Æthelred was forced into exile in Normandy, but was restored the following year upon Forkbeard’s death. Soon Forkbeard’s son, Canute, began laying his claim to the English throne, and engaged in a series of battles on English shores, first with Æthelred, then with Edmund.

In contrast to his father, Edmund is widely considered to have been a brave and competent leader, but he was ultimately defeated by Canute at the Battle of Assandun in October 1016 – after being betrayed by Eadric Streona, the Ealdorman of Mercia. Respecting Edmund and realising he still had much support in London and Wessex, Canute agreed with Edmund that they would divide England between one another. Yet by the end of November, Edmund was dead. The cause of his death is debated, but writing in the 1120s, Henry Huntingdon offered the following version:

King Edmund was treasonably slain a few days afterwards. Thus it happened: one night, this great and powerful king having occasion to retire to the house for relieving the calls of nature, the son of the ealdorman Edric, by his father’s contrivance, concealed himself in the pit, and stabbed the king twice from beneath with a sharp dagger, and, leaving the weapon fixed in his bowels, made his escape. Edric then presented himself to Canute, and saluted him, saying, ‘Hail! thou who art sole king of England!’ Having explained what had taken place, Canute replied, ‘For this deed I will exalt you, as it merits, higher than all the nobles of England.’ He then commanded that Edric should be decapitated and his head placed upon a pole on the highest battlement of the tower of London. Thus perished King Edmund Ironside, after a short reign of one year, and he was buried at Glastonbury, near his grandfather Edgar. (in Forester, 196)

Other accounts of Edmund II’s death which posit murder suggest he was killed by a spear rather than a dagger; or indeed by a sort of crossbow, booby-trapped to fire when Edmund put his weight on the privy seat. And the specifics of Eadric’s subsequent demise at the hands of Canute also vary, with Florence of Worcester writing that it occurred at ‘the Lord’s Nativity’, the Christmas of 1017, with Canute ordering that Eadric’s body ‘be thrown over the wall of the city and left unburied‘. Such an analysis suggests that Canute had Eadric killed owing to concern over his treacherous nature,  and not as a direct response to the demise of Edmund II.

Edward II is alleged to have been murdered in 1327 by means of a red-hot poker shoved up his anus – gossip which gained traction through the Brut chronicles and Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon. While other interpretations of Edward’s death are more widely supported – including the view that he escaped death entirely in 1327, and lived out the rest of his life as a hermit on the continent – the image again calls to mind The Sopranos, and the murder of Vito Spatafore, who is sodomised with a pool cue in a brutal remark upon his homosexuality. James I of Scotland died trapped in a sewer in 1437; but we must move to Japan for our next enthroned death, and to the daimyo Uesugi Kenshin. Kenshin was a powerful feudal lord, who ruled Echigo province until his passing in 1578. His death while seated on the toilet has been attributed to a lifetime of heavy drinking, to stomach cancer, or to a ninja who rose from beneath the latrine before stabbing Kenshin with a spear. Kenshin’s downfall allowed Oda Nobunaga to initiate what would be the eventual unification of Japan, and the onset of the Edo period.

The spectacle returned to Britain in 1760, when George II – already blind in one eye and hard of hearing – passed away on his close stool aged seventy-six. The account is provided in the memoirs of Horace Walpole:

On the 25th of October he rose as usual at six, and drank his chocolate; for all his actions were invariably methodic. A quarter after seven he went into a little closet. His German valet de chambre in waiting, heard a noise, and running in, found the King dead on the floor. In falling, he had cut his face against the corner of a bureau. He was laid on a bed and blooded, but not a drop followed: the ventricle of his heart had burst. (Walpole, 302)

Webster Thayer was a judge of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, who achieved notoriety for his role presiding over the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born Galleanist anarchists, who were accused in 1920 of murdering two men during the armed robbery of a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts. At their trial the following year – despite apparently strong alibis, inconclusive ballistics evidence, and the dubious testimony of some prosecution witnesses – they were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Thayer was roundly criticised for his conduct during the trial. It was argued that he had shown consistent prejudice against the defence; and more, it emerged that in private he had referred to Sacco and Vanzetti as ‘Bolsheviki’, remarking that he was out to ‘get them good and proper’.

Supported by the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee – which in seven years raised $300,000, and hired legal professionals, organisers and publicists to aid the cause – a series of appeals ensued, but dismissing claims of evidence tampering and the confession of another man, Thayer repeatedly denied motions for a new trial. After a second appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court was rejected in early 1927, Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller – beset by calls for clemency – established an Advisory Committee to review the trial’s proceedings. When this committee determined that the trial had been fair and should stand, there was nothing left to be done, and Sacco and Vanzetti were executed by electric chair on August 23, 1927. Their case and their eventual demise was accompanied by a spate of demonstrations in cities across the world, and by letters from major international figures including Anatole France, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. In October 1927, Wells wrote in The New York Times:

The guilt or innocence of these two Italians is not the issue that has excited the opinion of the world. Possibly they were actual murderers, and still more possibly they knew more than they would admit about the crime…. Europe is not “retrying” Sacco and Vanzetti or anything of the sort. It is saying what it thinks of Judge Thayer. Executing political opponents as political opponents after the fashion of Mussolini and Moscow we can understand, or bandits as bandits; but this business of trying and executing murderers as Reds, or Reds as murderers, seems to be a new and very frightening line for the courts of a State in the most powerful and civilized Union on earth to pursue. (Wells, The New York Times, 16 October, 1927)

In rejecting Sacco and Vanzetti’s second appeal, the Supreme Judicial Court had declared, ‘It is not imperative that a new trial be granted even though evidence is newly discovered and, if presented to a jury, would justify a different verdict’. The extent of the ordeal and the ramifications of this statement ultimately brought about significant judicial reform, requiring that all capital cases be subject to review. Meanwhile, anarchists sought retribution. On 27 September, 1932, Thayer’s home in Worcester was destroyed by a bomb, which saw his wife and maid injured by falling debris. He lived the remainder of his life under guard at his private club in Boston, and died there of a cerebral embolism, aged seventy-five, on 18 April, 1933. The anarchist Valerio Isca commented on the rumour that Thayer had died on the toilet seat, adding ‘and his soul went down the drain’.

——————

Forester, T. (ed. and trans.) The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon (London: H. G. Bohn, 1853)

Joyce, J. Ulysses ed. Gabler, H. W. (New York: Bodley Head, 1986)

Massie, R. K. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Head of Zeus, 2012)

Schaff, P. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II, Volume 2 (New York: Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1886)

Walpole, H. Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second: Volume III (London: H. Colburn, 1847)

Wells, H. G. ‘Wells Speaks Some Plain Words to US’ The New York Times, 16 October, 1927

The World Cup in Wider Culture

While on the field, the 2014 World Cup saw the rise of new superstars, the decline of footballing philosophies, the interplay between varying formations, and appeared to demonstrate the narrowing of traditional power gaps in the international game – in the knockout stages, from the round of sixteen through to the final, only three of fifteen matches were won by a margin greater than one goal – this piece extends beyond the confines of the pitch and beyond the immediacies of the sport. It looks at the wider cultural aspects which informed or which emerged from the World Cup.

In turn, it considers how Brazilian society functioned towards and about the tournament, and the ways in which the mass media depicted Brazilians; views the psychology and sociology of individualism as it is increasingly made manifest throughout the game; analyses the rise and spurt of soccer in the United States, and Twitter’s role in soccer’s recent prominence; plays upon the nature and extension of World Cup chants; and contemplates the innovative and encompassing uses of technology which influenced and drew upon the month-long affair.

Brazilians: Competent Organisers, Not So Crazy About Football

The buildup to the 2014 World Cup was dominated in the Anglophone media by apprehension over Brazil’s capability to host the event. The issue at the forefront of the story was the building of Brazil’s World Cup stadiums. Countless articles suggested that stadiums would not be finished in time for the beginning of the World Cup. Posited problems covered everything from incomplete roofing, exposed wiring and concrete, loose scaffolding, and unstable staircases, to blocked exits, no internet, and insufficient catering and transportation. As NBC put it, ‘Brazil will welcome the players and fans to unfinished airports, drive them past uncompleted transport systems, through streets that have been clogged with rioters protesting the cost of the tournament and into stadiums that have cost lives to build and haven’t all been finished.’

Even FIFA delegates described the preparations as ‘hell’ and the ‘worst ever’ – allegations which have already been made regarding Rio’s progress towards the Summer Olympics in 2016. Across the couple of weeks immediately preceding the start of the World Cup, it was repeatedly asserted that Brazil was not yet ready to hold the tournament, with particular worry over the stadiums in Sao Paulo and Manaus. Manaus was the target of additional mockery when, just days before the venue was to host its opening match between England and Italy, it was claimed that ground staff had been painting the pitch green to hide the fact that it was dry and underfed.

There remain vital concerns over the extent of Brazil’s expenditure on World Cup stadiums – which is thought to have totalled $3.6 billion – and over the simultaneous lack of work completed on local infrastructure projects. Despite spending over €11 billion on infrastructure, half of the projects intended for completion back in 2007, when Brazil was awarded the World Cup, were subsequently scrapped. These included the proposed high-speed rail line between Rio and Sao Paulo; although a small number of projects did find happy conclusions, with a line of the Salvador Metro in Bahia finished just prior to the onset of competition after fourteen years under construction, and taking spectators to the Arena Fonte Nova. More, some of the stadiums are without top-level clubs and will struggle to be utilised beyond the World Cup, bringing into question the long-term legacy of the tournament.

At the same time, the World Cup itself appeared to suffer little from any architectural or infrastructural issues. The stadiums were ultimately all completed in time; few problems were reported with travel between airports or to and from stadiums; and even the pitch in Manaus held up for its four group games. Preparations for major sporting events tend to prove problematic. It must be remembered that the City of Manchester Stadium, built with two temporary stands for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, was still undergoing work in the days before the event’s opening ceremony, and a metro link between the stadium and the city went incomplete. The Athens Summer Olympics in 2004 saw soaring costs and a race to be ready amid numerous delays to construction. While the Olympic venues were completed well within schedule for Beijing 2008, the Games brought considerable controversy over forced relocations: which affected somewhere between the Chinese government’s suggested 6,000 families, and the 1.5 million residents predicted by human rights groups.

In fact, many quarters have acclaimed the organisational achievement on display in Brazil. A survey of foreign journalists suggests an overwhelmingly positive response to the travel provision, airport service, and level of personal security afforded during the World Cup, as well as towards Brazilian culture and nightlife. David Ranc of the Football Research in an Enlarged Europe project has argued that the World Cup in Brazil was better organised than the 2012 London Olympics, citing routinely full stadiums and relatively conservative large-scale security measures. The counter argument has also been made that – despite problems with the provision and construction of stadia and the continuing inequality which is characteristic of Brazilian society – Brazil’s hosting of the World Cup ought to be seen as a testament to the country’s growth, and to the significant improvements made in health and education over the last decade.

Beyond the headlines regarding unfinished or unfurnished stadiums, fears were expressed in bursts that the World Cup would be beset by riots. A wave of protests took place across Brazilian cities in June 2013, with the impetus being fare increases to public transportation, but feeling soon extending to encompass anger over other social issues, over perceived governmental corruption, and at the excessive police response to the protests, which included the use of rubber bullets. The protests became known inside Brazil as the ‘V for Vinegar Movement’, after groups of protesters were allegedly arrested for carrying vinegar, intended as a remedy against the police’s use of tear gas and pepper spray. The height of these protests intertwined with Brazil’s hosting of the 2013 Confederations Cup. With the protest movement and football linked, growing upset over the cost of the World Cup, and a sense of complicity between the Brazilian government and FIFA, belief built that the tournament was liable to see trouble on the streets and around the stadiums.

While there were clashes in Brazil’s major cities as the World Cup got underway – which saw the police again use tear gas on those demonstrating – these soon subsided. With little to report, conjecture arose that an early exit for Brazil would prove the catalyst for violent manifestations of unrest. Given the context, these fears were understandable, and aired by committed and talented journalists, including the BBC’s Tim Vickery. However, vague and concerned premonitions became, in the tabloid presses, scaremongering invoking the potential for widespread rioting and dirty bombs.

So as Brazil’s drubbing at the hands of Germany in the semi-finals was still being digested, speculation proliferated online and across social media as to whether it would provoke the Brazilian people into rioting. By late evening, sensationalised reports of rioting, flag-burning, and mass theft were being published. Such accounts were soon being tempered, however, with the Brazilian police suggesting that some disturbance on Copacabana beach had amounted to little more than fighting between opposing groups of supporters, and reports of theft and gunfire remaining unconfirmed. A number of photos eagerly circulated as evidence of renewed rioting turned out to be deceptive, with the images actually drawn from the Confederations Cup protests a year ago.

The argument persists that the response of the Brazilian police has been marked by aggression, and that their heavy-handed approach limited the capacity of demonstrators during the World Cup. Still, there appears a discrepancy between the notion of Brazilians set upon trouble – and distraught to the point of violence or insensibility upon the loss of a football match – and what actually occurred after their side’s capitulation. Instead of attacking or mourning, Brazilian supporters seemed models of magnanimity following the game against Germany, recognising the flaws of the Brazilian team, and praising the abilities of their competitors. Appreciative of good football rather than narrowly and viciously partisan, the positive atmosphere in Brazil around the game and around the teams of the World Cup remained for the duration of the competition.

A Surfeit of Individualism

Though individuals have found themselves the centres of attention at many previous World Cups – Diego Maradona in Mexico in 1986, for instance, and again for less savoury reasons eight years later at USA 94; while Ronaldo came to dominate the world’s focus in the buildup to the final of France 98, as he suffered a convulsive fit just hours before kickoff  – never before has a tournament been built so thoroughly upon individual players. Many of the top teams seemed structured round one player, whether by design or by necessity.

Brazil and Argentina, the two favourites going into the tournament, were – despite a divergence in experience and subtly differing gameplans – from the start orchestrated around their outstanding attacking players, Neymar and Lionel Messi. Though both players had strong tournaments, finishing with four goals apiece, Brazil floundered dramatically after Neymar suffered an injury in their quarter-final game against Colombia, while – despite leading Argentina to the final with an array of crucial goals and assists – the unduly critical perception shared by many was that Messi had failed to excel. After a lackadaisical close to the season with Barcelona, it was thought that he could go on to consolidate on the international stage his reputation as one of the world’s greatest ever players. He was awarded the Golden Ball, and so officially declared the tournament’s best player; but this decision was broadly derided, by figures including FIFA President Sepp Blatter and by Maradona, who triumphed with Argentina back in 86.

Elsewhere, with their striker Radamel Falcao out of action owing to a knee injury, and despite impressive performances by Cuadrado and their defensive players, James Rodriguez became the figurehead for Colombia and – though Monaco spent €45 million on him a season ago – the breakout star of the World Cup. Alexis Sanchez occupied a similar position for Chile, and was the standout from their side especially as Arturo Vidal struggled for fitness. Arjen Robben was clearly the Netherlands’ exceptional player, the impetus to their attack as Robin van Persie stuttered and Wesley Sneijder indicated a career on a steep decline. Uruguay were capable and committed with Luis Suarez on the pitch, but abject without him. Clint Dempsey for the USA and Tim Cahill for Australia – attacking midfielders or second-strikers for much of their careers – were tasked with leading the line and focusing their sides. And likewise Nigeria and South Korea were largely reliant on their wide attackers, Ahmed Musa and Son Heung-Min respectively.

While the focus on individual players was variously tactical it was also philosophical, and extended beyond the immediate contexts of the sport to reflect a wider sociological impulse. Even where facts on the pitch seemed to refute the reliance upon star men, still nations clung to individuals. Wayne Rooney continued, in the lead up to the tournament, to be regarded England’s best hope for success, and he continues to be considered the squad’s only world class player, quite ignoring a litany of mediocre performances at major tournaments and the emergence of youngsters who would seem to challenge his place in the team. Didier Drogba was restored to the Ivory Coast eleven for their decisive group encounter against Greece, despite looking his age and in spite of Wilfried Bony’s two goals in the two previous matches.

Most egregious, however, was the decision to interrupt the World Cup final itself with an individual awards ceremony for FIFA’s chosen players. Thus – before Germany were able to lift the World Cup – Manuel Neuer and a defeated and deflated Lionel Messi ascended to receive their awards for Golden Glove, as the tournament’s best goalkeeper, and Golden Ball. James Rodriguez, the winner of the Golden Boot with six goals, and Paul Pogba, decreed in association with Hyundai the tournament’s best young player, were not dragged out for the occasion; but postponing the celebrations of the victorious team in order to regale and reify the individual contribution seemed an error indicative beyond football, and especially absurd given that one of the awarded individuals had just lost arguably the most important game of his career.

Twitter and the Rise of Soccer in the United States

The World Cup final between Germany and Argentina was the most-watched football game in the history of American television. 26.5 million viewers tuned in overall to watch the match live on television, with 17.3 million following in English via ABC, while 9.2 million watched in Spanish over on Univision. The figure of 26.5 million compares with the 24.7 million who watched as Spain beat the Netherlands four years ago in 2010; with the 14.5 million who watched the final of the World Cup held in the USA in 1994; and with the average audiences of 15 million obtained by both this year’s NBA Finals and last year’s baseball World Series.

A further 1.8 million people viewed Germany vs. Argentina online using WatchESPN. Adding those online viewers via ABC and Univision, the total number of people on all devices watching the game live came to just over 29 million. And these figures remain restricted to those who watched within the confines of their own homes: the figures do not account for the people who packed America’s bars to watch, or attended viewing parties hosted in clubs, parks and cinemas, and in their potential thousands at local stadiums.

The 2014 World Cup averaged 4.557 million viewers in the US, in contrast to the 3.273 million who watched each match on average in 2010, the 2.321 million from 2006, and the 2.801 million who watched back in 1994. Such numbers do not guarantee that the game’s appeal will continue to grow, or that it will flourish inside America. Viewing figures this time round have been aided by the proximity of US time zones with those in Brazil; while for 2018, ESPN – who have led soccer coverage in the US and dedicated considerable television time to analysing the latest tournament – have lost the World Cup rights to Fox.

Domestically, the average attendance figure for the 2014 season of Major League Soccer so far has been 18,704: a slight increase on the previous season’s average, but still marginally down on the number from 2012, and leaving many stadiums well short of capacity. In fact, despite rising from a low of 13,756 in 2000, since the first season of Major League Soccer in 1996, match-day attendances have hardly boomed: then, a novelty and just two years after the 1994 World Cup, 17,406 people on average attended Major League Soccer games. If the trend is for more and more people in the United States to watch football on television, this does not appear to be translating into behinds upon stadium seats. Perhaps this will change in 2015, on the back of a World Cup which has been so popular – and which has been widely discussed as a turning point for the game in the US – and with new players, including Kaka, David Villa, and Frank Lampard, set to bolster the domestic league. Meanwhile NBC continues to invest time and effort in the English Premier League, having spent £250 million for the rights from 2012; and Fox have acquired the rights to the Bundesliga for five seasons starting next year. Major international football will return to the US in 2016, when it will host the Copa America Centenario: a special edition of the Copa America to celebrate its centenary, which will feature the ten South American teams plus the United States, Mexico, and four others from CONCACAF still to be determined.

The popularity of this summer’s World Cup in the US owes significantly to the rise of Twitter. In 2006, Twitter was just starting out, first being launched publicly that July. By the second quarter of 2010, it had grown to boast 40 million monthly active users. Yet four years on, that number has risen to 255 million. Over 62% of these active Twitter users live in the United States. And throughout the World Cup, Twitter was a prominent force for the spread of US soccer fervour. During the United States’ three group matches, over 15 million tweets were sent relating to the team’s progress. During the round of sixteen game against Belgium, Twitter recorded more than 9 million tweets sent. Major American companies took to Twitter to post images of themselves laying aside work to watch the games. Sites like Mashable came replete with postings which simply highlighted Twitter responses to the US team’s highs and lows.

Rihanna – who has the eighth most-followed Twitter account, with over 36.5 million followers – emerged as an ardent fan of the sport throughout the World Cup’s proceedings, tweeting photographs of herself at the final at the Maracana in Rio, and then with the German players as they celebrated their victory on into the night. Overall, Twitter reported that 672 million tweets were sent pertaining to the World Cup across its one-month duration. 35.6 million tweets were recorded as Germany beat Brazil 7-1; and a record 618,725 tweets were sent per minute as Mario Gotze scored Germany’s decisive, cup-winning goal against Argentina.

The Sacred and the Profane: The Extension of World Cup Chants

The 2014 World Cup saw innovations in the realm of football chants, as they became increasingly elaborate, frequently political, and transcended the sport to become part of the summer’s pop-culture. Spain’s early exit from the tournament – aside from damaging the prospects of national retailers grown accustomed to the team’s success – meant that short shrift was given to ‘Yo soy Español, Español, Español’, the chant which characterised Spain’s triumph in South Africa four years ago. England persisted at moments during their brief stay with the jocularly antagonistic ‘Two World Wars and One World Cup’, sung to the tune of the minstrel song ‘Camptown Races’; and Germany introduced a contemporary political perspective to proceedings when, in their match against the United States, their fans responded to shouts of ‘USA! USA!’ with ‘NSA! NSA!’. Algeria progressed to the round of sixteen with their famous chant ‘One, two, three – viva l’Algiré!’ – recited in English, and an emblem of the Algerian revolution against French rule. Hosts Brazil stuck with ‘Eu sou Brasileiro, com muito orgulho, com muito amor’ – ‘I am Brazilian, with a lot of pride, and a lot of love’.

Brazil were involved in one of the minor controversies of the tournament when their game against Mexico highlighted the Mexican supporters’ use of a contentious chant during opposition goal-kicks. In recent years, Mexicans have taken to shouting ‘puto’ just as an opposition goalkeeper makes contact with the ball. The endeavour to perturb an opposition goalkeeper is not unique, and similar goading occurs throughout football. Yet it has been strongly argued that ‘puto’ is a homophobic insult, more than simply an allegation of cowardice or an indistinct profanity. After Brazil faced Mexico, and at the instigation of the anti-discrimination group Fare, FIFA opened an investigation into both nations, who they ultimately cleared from any wrongdoing. Brazil had apparently retorted in kind to Mexico’s chants. For their part, Mexican supporters responded to this perceived mendacious and unnecessary meddling by subsequently changing the chant from ‘puto’ to ‘Pepsi’ – the leading competitor to Coca-Cola, who were one of the tournament’s main sponsors.

The White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’ can already claim a rich history upon football’s seating areas and terraces. The basic melody of the song – thought to be derived from Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony – was first appropriated back in 2003 by Club Brugge of Belgium, before being co-opted by AS Roma when they met Brugge in the 2005-06 UEFA Cup. By the summer of 2006 – and still known phonetically among Italian players and supporters as ‘Po-po-po’ – it had become the unofficial theme for the Azzurri, as Italy won the 2006 World Cup. The melody was a prominent facet of the celebrations, led by Francesco Totti, as the Italian squad arrived, triumphant, back in Rome.

Still sung for and most closely associated with the Italian national team, the melody has since extended throughout the world of sport. It was ubiquitous during the 2008 European Championships in Austria and Switzerland; and featured again four years later in Poland and Ukraine. In the United States, ‘Seven Nation Army’ has become a staple of college football and college basketball games, and has been utilised through the NBA and in the NFL, where it is especially favoured by the Baltimore Ravens. Emerging amidst the 2006 World Cup which was hosted in Germany, greeting the goalscorers of the 2013 Champions League final between Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, and becoming – in remixed form – an anthem of the Bayern side, ‘Seven Nation Army’ is also entwined with German football, and sometimes sung by Germany’s supporters – so that it remained present in Brazil even beyond Italy’s early elimination.

Germany’s World Cup final opponents Argentina are known for a vocal support and an ability to produce an array of innovative chants – which sometimes descend towards the bawdy. ‘Vamos, vamos, Argentina’ encodes a reference to a brothel; and at a previous World Cup Argentinians sang in memory of their Brazilian counterparts, ‘They’re all black, they’re all sexual deviants, everybody knows Brazil is in mourning’. For the occasion of a World Cup in the home of their fiercest rivals, Argentina’s supporters devised a brand new song, to the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’. Entitled ‘Brasil, decime qué se siente’, when translated into English, ‘Brazil, tell me how it feels’ reads:

Brazil, tell me how it feels

To have your Dad in your house,

I swear that even as years pass

We will never forget

That Diego tricked you

That Cani scored against you

You’ve been crying ever since Italy

You’re going to see Messi

The cup will be brought to us

Maradona is greater than Pele

The chant became so popular that it spread beyond the supporters to the centre of the Argentinian squad. Argentina’s players were videoed singing ‘Brasil, decime qué se siente’ in their changing room as they progressed towards their semi-final against the Netherlands.

The culturally outstanding chant of the tournament belonged to the Americans. With its beginnings over a decade ago in the United States Naval Academy – and in Navy football, American style – ‘I believe that we will win’ ascended rapidly throughout the World Cup, usurping the traditional three-syllable utterance ‘USA!’, to become one of the hallmarks not only of the US team but of the entire competition. Impelled by ESPN, who used it for its World Cup commercial, the chant soon grew to dominate in the bars of America and at public screenings. On the page, ‘I believe that we can win’ initially appears debased, a reduction of the football chant to absurdity: its words offering only the slightest of sentiments, a simple belief that the essence of sport – a physical competition in which the winner is uncertain – remains its essence. Yet when performed, the chant is both powerful and memorable, drawing from gospel music in its call-and-response and simple rhythms, which drive towards a crescendo.

Technical Innovations and The Time of the Game

Technological innovation – not usually one of association football’s bedfellows – abounded on the pitch for this World Cup. Goal-line technology was implemented for the first time, courtesy of the German company GoalControl – who beat off the challenge of rivals including Hawk-Eye, before their technology was implemented in competition at last year’s Confederations Cup. GoalControl’s setup involves fourteen cameras, each capable of taking five-hundred photographs per second. It thereby determines in real-time whether the ball has crossed the goal-line, and whether a goal should be awarded or play allowed to continue. Its decision incontrovertible, a message is passed wirelessly to a watch worn about the referee’s wrist. Despite working perfectly, the system caused hilarity when an irate BBC commentator Jonathan Pearce misunderstood its functioning and railed against being so deceived.

The other bold innovation of the World Cup has in fact already been a feature of Brazilian domestic football for eight years. This was the ‘vanishing spray’, a white foam which referees may use in an attempt to ensure that defenders remain the requisite ten yards from the ball upon attacking free-kicks. So during the tournament referees sprayed a white mark by the site of the stationary ball, then a horizontal line by the feet of defenders – meant to keep them at bay, and disappearing after a minute or so on the playing surface. Hitherto used in the domestic leagues of Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, there is no conclusive evidence that the spray contributes to more goals scored from free-kicks. Still an eminently sensible if only partial solution to a real problem, the spray has been ratified for the forthcoming seasons in Italy, Spain, and France, and will feature in the UEFA Champions League. While the English Premier League first proposed compiling a series of reports on the issue, and allowing the spray from 2015 at the earliest, it has ceded ground and will now introduce it too in 2014-15. The Germans are still contemplating whether to use it for the coming season.

Away from the pitch, The Time of the Game drew upon a variety of interconnected technologies – televisions, and the other screens through which we watch; cameras, which as facets of mobile phones and tablet computers have become extensions of ourselves, and allow us to share images seamlessly; and online social networks – to provide an interactive history of how the world saw the World Cup final. A collaborative project devised by the writer Teju Cole, and achieved alongside software artist Jer Thorp, and artist and developer Mario Klingemann, The Time of the Game describes itself as ‘a synchronized global view of the World Cup final’. Before Germany and Argentina kicked off, Cole asked his 160,000 Twitter followers to post photographs of their screens as they watched the game, noting the minute of action and their own location, and using the hashtag #thetimeofthegame.

Collecting all the submissions which used the hashtag – and those too which used the tag #timeofthegame – resulted in a body of over 2,000 images. The Time of the Game collates these images and shows them chronologically. Fixed and centred upon the viewing screen – most often a television, but also frequently a laptop or tablet – the photographs flash consecutively across the 120 minutes of football played. So The Time of the Game offers a unique perspective, a fractured collage of the World Cup final, and it can be viewed with an eye for the football on display: showing players’ expressions, decisive moments, even differences in coverage between broadcasters from different nations. But more than this, it provides the specifics of how people watched the World Cup – the devices which they used, their surroundings, the materiality of their lives – and a broader sense of a communal experience shared equally among people between different time zones, parts of different cultures, and living with differing circumstances.

As Cole wrote when introducing the project, ‘We live in different time zones, out of sync but aware of each other. Then the game begins and we enter the same time: the time of the game.’ While the images are ‘formally satisfying’ because the focus on the screen affords a ‘frame within a frame’, in an interview with The Atlantic Cole conceptualises the cumulative result as an investigation of ”public time’ […] which is the chronological equivalent of ‘public space’.’ Indeed, The Time of the Game plays thoroughly with the concepts of public and private. It seems to publicise the private space as much as it makes the public space intimate; and contrasts the public sphere of football – which moves beyond the playing of the game, and beyond its broadcasters and analysts, to the discussions we share about football with others – with the individual act of sitting, often alone, and staring and viewing. In addition to the full thread of pictures, it is possible to select via the site a range of images based on time or location: selecting all photographs taken, for instance, in Brooklyn, or in the 45th minute, or for the thirty-minute duration of extra time.

The Unknown Known: The Epistemologies of Errol Morris and Donald Rumsfeld

Errol Morris’s documentary The Unknown Known views the political career of Donald Rumsfeld and his time as US Secretary of Defence between 2001 and 2006. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival at the end of last August; was given a limited release in the United States on Wednesday; and has been showing at select Picturehouse Cinemas in the UK this week. Conceived as a companion piece to Morris’s 2003 documentary, The Fog of War – Morris has called the two works ‘salt-and-pepper shakers’ or ‘bookends’ – where that film explored the War in Vietnam, this focuses on the early days of the War in Iraq. Morris views these two wars as disastrous, unjustified and error-strewn, horrific episodes in American and world history. Yet where The Fog of War was a penetrating analysis of Robert McNamara’s decisions, considerations, and regrets regarding the Vietnam War, structured within a chronology of McNamara’s life, The Unknown Known is more amorphous.

McNamara had already shown a penchant for retrospection and reconsideration. His 1995 book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, and 2001’s Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century, co-authored by James G. Blight, were both impetuses for Morris’s film, and Morris drew from the former for the eleven lessons which serve as structural points in The Fog of War. Rumsfeld’s participation in such a project comes as more of a surprise. Morris has recounted that when he first contacted Rumsfeld’s lawyer, this lawyer assured him that Rumsfeld was never likely to speak to him on film. Rumsfeld eagerly chose to engage; yet at the close of the documentary, when asked by Morris the reason for his participation, Rumsfeld hesitates and offers only ‘I’ll be damned if I know’, his words accompanied by the grin which has become his trademark over the preceding hour and a half of footage.

Emerging from a closed subject, this grin comes to serve as a point of reference for the audience, appearing to offer some insight into the nature of the man. It can be read in a number of ways: as the sinister smirk of someone unwilling to reflect openly on his own failings or wrongdoings; as the connivance of a lifelong politician; as an attempt to disarm his interviewer; or more plainly as a genuine expression of engagement, of pleasure, or of well-being. For Rumsfeld himself, the smile seems both to challenge and to conciliate. With it, he affirms to his correspondent that they are engaged together in a battle of wits, while suggesting that this battle amounts to a game, to a play of language and personality, rather than to any deeper ideals or absolutes.

Morris interviewed Rumsfeld for 33 hours over the course of one year. The interviews followed the same filming technique which characterises The Fog of War and several of Morris’s other works: Morris utilised what he calls the Interrotron, which allows interviewee and interviewer to sit apart, but to look at one another via a screen while they talk. This enables Morris and his interviewee to maintain something approximating eye contact, while on the other hand providing the separation which Morris believes is conducive to revealing interviews. Morris thinks that subjects will say more to a camera than they will face-to-face with a person; and that with a camera in front of them, he can use pauses to encourage his subjects to fill in the blanks, speaking where they would otherwise remain silent. The Unknown Known centres entirely on Rumsfeld’s face: largely eschewing the archival footage that was a feature of The Fog of War, we are given Morris’s interview, and brief clips from Rumsfeld’s press conferences, while dictionary definitions of words circle against the dark background as Rumsfeld extends his own endeavours with language.

There is a brief recapitulation of Rumsfeld’s earlier political career. After opening in the midst of the Iraq War, and with the suggestive phrase which makes up the documentary’s title, we go back to the late 1960s and the 1970s, when Rumsfeld served first under the Nixon administration, then later under Gerald Ford. As Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity during Nixon’s Presidency, Rumsfeld appointed Dick Cheney and Frank Carlucci, then at the very beginning of their careers in politics. Serving as Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford from September 1974, a reshuffle the following year saw Rumsfeld become the 13th United States Secretary of Defence, with Cheney taking Rumsfeld’s previous position as Ford’s Chief of Staff. This reshuffle was dubbed the ‘Halloween Massacre’, and as Morris shows, Rumsfeld was widely fingered as its chief architect. While it effectively saw Rumsfeld and Cheney promoted – and made Rumsfeld, at 43, the youngest Secretary of Defence in US history – it saw several moderate Republicans fired, and made George H. W. Bush the Director of Central Intelligence, head of the CIA. While ostensibly a promotion for Bush too, the move has been seen as an attempt on the part of Rumsfeld to compartmentalise and therefore marginalise a political rival. Yet in 1980, it was Bush rather than Rumsfeld who Ronald Reagan chose as his Vice Presidential running mate.

Bush would succeed Reagan as President in 1989. Morris suggests to Rumsfeld that, had Reagan chose his Vice President differently, it would have been he rather than Bush in line for the Presidency. Rumsfeld’s response is one of the most revealing in the documentary: a terse, purse-lipped ‘That’s possible’. The prominent economist Milton Friedman once stated that he personally regarded Reagan’s selection of Bush over Rumsfeld as ‘the worst decision not only of his campaign but of his presidency’; and that had Rumsfeld been chosen, ‘I believe he would have succeeded Reagan as president and the sorry Bush-Clinton period would never have occurred’.

Overall, this section of Morris’s film is richly instructive, informing or reminding viewers of an able and precocious political career, and one characterised by maneuvering and ambition, plus some disappointment. After 1977 and the end of the Ford administration, Rumsfeld spent the next two decades developing a career in business, and continuing to take part-time political roles. The most significant of these saw him appointed Reagan’s Special Envoy to the Middle East: travelling to Baghdad in December 1983, he met with Saddam Hussein and Hussein’s deputy, and Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz. It was not until 2001 that Rumsfeld returned to the forefront of politics, when he was appointed Secretary of Defence in the administration of George W. Bush. Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx and Bush’s friend at Yale University, had been the newly elected President’s first choice for the post, but he turned the position down; and Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, forwarded the name of his old colleague, which Bush agreed to despite Rumsfeld’s differences with his father. So Rumsfeld became the 21st United States Secretary of Defence, and he would now become the oldest in US history.

Morris’s endeavour is to navigate the Iraq War perceived and conceptualised by just one of its predominant figures. He does not attempt an exhaustive account of the war, nor does he succeed in explaining its causes. Given the nature of Rumsfeld’s responses – by turns resolute and equivocal – the documentary poses more questions than it answers. It is one of Morris’s most provocative searches into his perennial themes: how we wilfully construct knowledge and how this constructed knowledge entangles with truth. We traverse the Iraq War amidst ‘snowflakes’: the name Rumsfeld embraced to refer to the memos he would send other officials and members of staff. He suspects he wrote and sent at least 20,000 of these during his six years as Secretary of Defence as part of the Bush administration: when he finally left the role at the end of 2006, a final memo sent to all Pentagon personnel declared ‘the blizzard is over’.

Morris displays some of these snowflakes on screen, and asks Rumsfeld to read several aloud. Some of the liveliest exchanges between the interviewer and his subject centre upon the two major controversies of the Iraq War: the decision to go to war itself, which implicates Iraq’s alleged but nonexistent weapons of mass destruction; and the abuses of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Yet even here, while Morris’s opposition to the Iraq War and his absolute disdain for its atrocities is clear, he does not attack Rumsfeld directly or attempt to hang blame heavily about his shoulders. There exists a memo, for instance, written by Rumsfeld on 27 November 2001, which appears to show him willing to concoct motivation for a war in Iraq, rather than responding honestly to intelligence:

Even on the day of 11 September 2001, Rumsfeld is reported to have asked for any evidence that might link the day’s terrorist attacks to Saddam Hussein, and thereby legitimise military action. Morris doesn’t include the above memo in his film. Rather than analysing the motivations for war, he prefers instead to contemplate Rumsfeld’s response once it had been concluded that Iraq did not, after all, possess weapons of mass destruction. He wants to allow Rumsfeld the space in which to express himself, to implicate himself or to reveal some pertinent detail as he sees it. Instead, Rumsfeld embarks on a rhetorical exercise, suggesting that ‘absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence’ – words which, applied to the context of Iraq and the devastating loss of life war has caused, Morris has subsequently called the most disturbing in his film.

Rather than open hostility, Morris expresses scepticism, and at certain moments allows his camera to linger on Rumsfeld after he has finished speaking in an attempt to achieve a sort of dramatic irony: viewers are supposed to understand the flaws in Rumsfeld’s arguments, and to see that his reflections upon and criticisms of others apply equally to himself. Speaking of his meeting in 1983 with Hussein and Aziz, and remarking that he continues to find it difficult to understand their respective states of mind, he reflects that they lived ‘pretend’ lives, fulfilling only their images of themselves. The lingering camera implies that this can be applied equally to Rumsfeld; but beyond the extent to which we all build our selves through images, it is not easy to conclude that there is anything especially counterfeit or deluded about Rumsfeld.

While expressing no remorse for his role initiating the Iraq War, readily chalking up points in his own favour when he feels he has bested Morris or uncovered a misleading interpretation of events, speaking sometimes directly and sometimes ambiguously, and appearing impervious to the lures of self-reflection, still there are few points in the film where Rumsfeld does not appear to be speaking candidly. Morris asks him about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Rumsfeld argues that the public opinion of Guantanamo Bay is grossly misguided; and describes it as one of the best-run prisons anywhere in the world. Of course, this lays aside concerns over the ideology behind the prison, and over the morality of the procedures which those who run it are required to carry out. Rumsfeld discusses authorising ‘Special Interrogation Plans’ for Guantanamo detainees in late 2002, but he depicts this as a procedural responsibility, in which he was essentially obliged to sign off from a list different levels of interrogative techniques.

Rumsfeld is adamant that Guantanamo Bay remains a legitimate institution; but he admits himself appalled by the abuses which took place at Abu Ghraib, the central prison twenty miles outside of Baghdad, in late 2003 and early 2004. Morris asks Rumsfeld whether the fact of Guantanamo Bay, its ‘Special Interrogation Plans’, and a lack of clarity within the military regarding these, together influenced events in Abu Ghraib, and after some hesitancy, Rumsfeld admits this possibility. It was his sense that, as Secretary of Defence, he was ultimately responsible for these wrongdoings which caused Rumsfeld to twice offer his resignation – which was twice declined by President Bush. On the other hand, pushed to admit a narrower responsibility for the Abu Ghraib abuses – which saw detainees stripped, tortured, raped, sodomised, and murdered – Rumsfeld declines. Regarding the ‘Torture Memos’ – sent by the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice in August 2002 and March 2003, and advising that ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, including waterboarding, might be permissable outside the United States – Rumsfeld states that he never read them, which prompts Morris’s most physical reaction: an immediate, incredulous ‘Really?’.

As with others who were part of the Bush administration, it is difficult to discern whether Rumsfeld is a deep thinker or instead a quick thinker, whose strength lies in thinking on his feet and making points firmly and effectively. Still – even for someone who disagrees wholeheartedly with Rumsfeld’s militarist ethos and with so many of his conclusions – The Unknown Known suggests Rumsfeld as a ready intellectual, who might be guilty of intellectual error more than moral malevolence. There is much philosophical interest in how Rumsfeld conceptualises power and its responsibilities, and in many of the things he says – even in his most notorious soundbites.

The film’s title derives from a Department of Defence briefing given in February 2002. Rumsfeld was discussing the lack of evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Utilising a form of tricolon, he said:

‘Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.’

The idea of ‘unknown knowns’ emerged as the logical fourth part of this series. Yet what ‘unknown knowns’ actually are remains a point of contention throughout the documentary, as Rumsfeld himself fluctuates between opposing definitions. At the beginning of the film, he defines them as ‘things that you think you know, that it turns out you did not’. This is a reading whose sense has precedents, for instance in the phrase attributed to Mark Twain that, ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so’. However, Rumsfeld’s initial definition does not follow the grammar of the earlier three; and at the end of the film, he redefines ‘unknown knowns’ accordingly as things that we do not know that we know. As Morris points out, the difference here is polarising: according to the first definition, we know less than we think; whereas according to the later definition, we know more. So do we know more than we think we know, or do we know less? Or is it not both?

Rumsfeld believes that all policy, but foreign policy most of all, requires imagination. This imagination is not cast as empathetic, and it does not, in the view of Rumsfeld, extend directly from knowledge. Elaborating on his quote, he locates ‘unknown unknowns’ as the sites of fundamental, world-altering change – which is to say that, for Rumsfeld, the most important events which occur are often those of which we have not even conceived, never mind expected. For Rumsfeld, Pearl Harbor and September 11 are the defining moments in American history, and they were allowed to come about through a complete vacuum of knowledge: America had not conceived of such attacks, and did not appreciate that such attacks were possible: the possibility of such attacks was unknown and had been unthought. So for Rumsfeld it is in the area of ‘unknown unknowns’ that we must imagine. He believes that the imagination must be harnessed to give the best sense of what is possible, thereby allowing not only for preparation, but for action. This sense of what constitutes an ‘unknown unknown’ may be debated: was there not a store of knowledge out of which Pearl Harbor and September 11 could have been conceived? And at the same time, Rumsfeld’s series raises interesting epistemological questions regarding how we build and access knowledge: to what extent is imagining and thinking through an ‘unknown unknown’ possible, and to what extent is all thought merely a reconfiguration of existing knowledge? Should ‘known unknowns’ be the realm and starting point of the imagination rather than ‘unknown unknowns’?

Whatever, we can allow even extreme or apparently absurd hypotheses as important facets of scientific and philosophical methodology; and we can allow hypotheses an important place too in political thinking. Yet to embrace the unfettered imagination as a source of potential knowledge, which can and ought to then be acted upon, seems profoundly dangerous in the political sphere. Rumsfeld’s philosophy allowed him a justification for war in Iraq regardless of all evidence – essentially on the basis of what might exist, and what, if we stretch thought to its limits, might occur. It is a chain of reasoning which results in militarisation, preemptive military action which in fact initiates rather than counters conflict, and a marked lack of proportionality in all military endeavour.

So in Rumsfeld there is a peculiar compound of narrow accountancy when it comes to analysing military might (as Secretary of Defence in the 1970s he was concerned at trends in comparative US-Soviet military strength, and ordered the development of new weapons and machinery in order to restore the balance in the Americans’ favour) and of free thought when it comes to evaluating the justifications for military action. Errol Morris’s friend and sometime collaborator Wernor Herzog has spoken with regard to his own documentaries about foregoing an accountant’s truth for the ‘ecstatic truth’ of the cinema: but aside from their widely different mediums, Herzog seeks in his films to reveal the full consciousness of individual human beings, while Rumsfeld too readily forgets the lives of others and asserts his own psychology in place of matters of fact. So too when it comes to language, Rumsfeld at once understands how words are used as tools, with nuanced and changeable meanings, yet seeks to fix their power by restricting and defining their application. He is an adroit and entertaining communicator, but his numerous memos seeking after dictionary definitions of words make it clear that he does not feel himself their master. He was content enough with his speech on knowns and unknowns that he incorporated it as the title of his autobiography, Known and Unknown: A Memoir, published in 2011. Considering the aftermath to September 11 and the path towards war in Iraq, Rumsfeld writes:

‘It was a time of discovery–of seeking elusive, imperfect solutions for new problems that would not be solved quickly. There was no guidebook or road map for us to follow.’

In fact, it was Slavoj Žižek, in a May 2004 article entitled ‘What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib’, who first theorised the missing term in Rumsfeld’s series. Žižek argued about Rumsfeld that:

‘What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know—which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.

If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns”—the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.’

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A transcript of an interview with Errol Morris, in which he discusses the film, at Democracy Now!: http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/27/the_unknown_known_errol_morris_new

Another interview with the director via Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/01/us-donaldrumsfeld-idUSBREA300TM20140401

Two insightful reviews of The Unknown Known, by The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/movies/deciphering-donald-h-rumsfeld-in-the-unknown-known.html?hpw&rref=movies&_r=0 and The Spectator: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/culturehousedaily/2014/03/the-unknown-known-errol-morris-tries-to-trip-up-donald-rumsfeld-and-fails/

A 2003 article in The Atlantic on Rumsfeld’s early political career: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/close-up-young-rumsfeld/302824/

Slavoj Žižek’s piece ‘What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib’, from In These Times, 21 May 2004: http://inthesetimes.com/article/747

The Unknown Known Trailer:

The Crimean Referendums of 1991 and 1994

Yesterday was an eventful day in the uneventful life of this site. The piece I published last Thursday, ‘Crimea: A Literary Perspective‘, was linked to in an article by Gary Brecher of PandoDaily. Owing to this, my site more than doubled its previous best view count for a single day.

Gary Brecher writes a regular column for PandoDaily, entitled ‘War Nerd’. The excellent piece he published on Monday covers the situation in Crimea, and takes the full title ‘War Nerd: Everything you know about Crimea is wrong(-er)‘. It elucidates the response to the situation of US journalists and politicians, and identifies the vital role that Russian oil will continue to play amid talk of sanctions and other consequences. It builds a picture of international relations following the end of the Cold War. More, it provides a suggestive history of Ukraine across the twentieth century, and gives a concise reading list towards a fuller understanding of the region.

Brecher noted in his piece – for the sake of comparison with the referendum which took place on Sunday – a Crimean referendum of 20 January 1991. The referendum asked Crimeans whether they wanted to restore autonomy to the region, and just over 93% of voters approved. I disagree with Brecher’s analysis of that referendum; and responded in the comments below his piece. I am quoting my response in full here, because it considers more deeply some of the recent political history of Crimea touched on in my previous two articles. In short, it looks at how Crimea reemerged as an Autonomous Republic during the latter days of the Soviet Union; and at how events in the years immediately following Ukrainian independence continue to influence developments in Crimea today. My response to Brecher’s piece:

In an insightful, informative, engaging and entertaining article, the interpretation of the Crimean referendum of January 1991 is one of the few points on which I disagree with you, Gary. I think there’s just about room for the interpretation – and it is very difficult to capture the full and convoluted complexity of the various shifts in Crimea’s modern political history, certainly without writing at vast length – but I wouldn’t depict the January 1991 referendum as Crimeans voting ‘to restore their ties with Russia’.

Crimea was governed as an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic from the end of the Russian Civil War until 1945, when it lost its autonomous status, and was made an Oblast, essentially a region of Soviet Russia. In 1954, the Crimean Oblast was transferred to the authority of Soviet Ukraine. Whether this was simply a gift, or whether it served a richer political purpose is debatable; but it wasn’t of profound significance at the time, because power in the Soviet Union was so centralised in Moscow.

The referendum of January 1991 asked Crimeans whether they wanted Crimea to regain autonomy. The vote has to be viewed in its immediate context. The Soviet Union was breaking down owing to separatist movements in numerous Soviet Republics. Through 1990, Gorbachev proposed to reform the Soviet Union, hoping that he could keep the political structure together by significantly decentralising power. Meanwhile Soviet Ukraine held parliamentary elections, and its parliament declared in July 1990 the sovereignty of the state. This was an assertion of Ukraine’s right to govern itself; but Ukraine still remained a Soviet Republic, and it was one of the Republics which began negotiating towards the end of the year Gorbachev’s new Union Treaty.

Crimea asking for a referendum on autonomy, and voting decisively in January 1991 for the ‘restoration of the Crimean ASSR as a subject of the USSR and as a party to the Union Treaty’, can be read as a response to the Ukrainian parliament’s declaration of state sovereignty. On the other hand, as an Autonomous Republic after January it was still part of Soviet Ukraine. Autonomous Republics in the Soviet Union were parts of Soviet Republics, granted much more autonomy than that possessed by mere regions. So the referendum didn’t mark Crimea severing ties with Ukraine and rejoining Russia; but it did imply a willingness to remain part of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev’s new Union Treaty was never implemented: Ukraine couldn’t agree its terms, and by late 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolving. On 1 December, Ukraine held a referendum and Ukrainians voted for independence. This essentially marked the end of the Soviet Union. 54% of Crimean voters opted for Ukrainian independence, with the turnout in Crimea placed at 60%. Thus Ukraine became independent, and Crimea remained part of the newly independent Ukraine, retaining its autonomous status. Throughout 1992, the Crimean parliament made gestures towards full Crimean independence, but really sought to secure only greater autonomy from Kiev.

Perhaps more controversially – and as the refworld.org link details – in May 1992 the Crimean parliament established a Crimean constitution, and in September-October 1993 it established the post of President of Crimea. But in early 1994, after a polarising election campaign, Crimeans elected as their President a strongly pro-Russian candidate, Yuriy Meshkov. A power struggle between the Ukrainian parliament and the Crimean parliament commenced. Another Crimean referendum in March 1994 asked three questions: ‘1.3 million voted, 78.4% of whom supported greater autonomy from Ukraine, 82.8% supported allowing dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship, and 77.9% favored giving Crimean presidential decrees the force of law’. Yet after more political turbulence – with the Crimean parliament voting to oust Meshkov in September – in March 1995 the Ukrainian parliament unilaterally abolished the post of President of Crimea, and scrapped the Crimean constitution. The Crimean parliament was forced to define a new constitution, which the Ukrainian parliament finally ratified in 1998.

So when the interim Ukrainian government today talks about the Crimean parliament’s lack of legislative power – when it comes to appointing a Prime Minister, and when it comes to calling a referendum – there is an argument that this power was taken from Crimeans by Kiev in an underhand, undemocratic, if not entirely illegitimate manner back in 1995.

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The refworld.org link referred to above, which Brecher cites in his piece, is: http://www.refworld.org/docid/469f38ec2.html

Crimean Referendum: What Comes Next?

The referendum in Crimea which took place yesterday resulted – according to Mikhail Malyshev, the head of the Crimean referendum commission – in 96.77% of voters opting for Crimea’s integration with Russia. The referendum was dismissed and decried by the interim government in Kiev as a ‘circus performance’; by British Foreign Secretary William Hague as a ‘mockery of proper democratic practise’; while President Barack Obama restated that the US would never accept the validity of the referendum, and stressed that sanctions upon Russia were now imminent.

Malyshev also placed the turnout for the referendum at 83.1%, with 1,274,096 of the eligible population voting. 1,233,002 Crimeans voted for integration with the Russian Federation. 31,997 voted for the other option on the ballot, which would have seen the region remain part of Ukraine, but with the greater autonomy which it possessed back in 1992 when, following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Crimean parliament struck a hard bargain before confirming its unity with the newly independent Ukrainian state. 9,097 ballot papers were declared spoilt.

A turnout of 83.1% appears impressive, and suggests a weight of feeling within the region. Nevertheless, without independent verification – the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe) rejected an offer to observe the referendum in some capacity – these figures will be disputed; and the legality of holding a referendum without Kiev’s consent, amidst the strong presence of the Russian military, will continue to be called into question wherever it is not rejected outright. To the Crimean parliament and the city council of Sevastopol, the referendum was valid in so far as neither body accepts the legitimacy of the change of regime in Kiev: with an elected President overthrown in what they and the Russians regard as a coup, they argue that it was necessary to consult the people of their region regarding the region’s future political status. To Ukraine, and all those states across the EU and in North America who support the interim government and the impeachment of President Yanukovych, the calling of any referendum in Crimea would require parliamentary approval from Kiev.

The result of the referendum and the apparently high turnout call into question the status of Crimea’s Tatars, frequently referred to and given primacy in reports on the region both because their leadership strongly opposes integration with Russia, and because of their long and complex history within Crimea. This history is recounted more fully in the literary history of the region I published last week. Concisely, it extends back to the time of the Golden Horde in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the establishment of the Crimean Khanate, ruled by Crimean Tatars, in 1441. The Crimean Khanate existed, as a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire, until the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774; which saw Crimea become nominally independent before being annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783. From this point in time, Crimea experienced rapid and fundamental political and demographic change. The Tatar capital of Bakhchysarai and other major Tatar cities and settlements were replaced, as the modern cities of Sevastopol and Simferopol were built and established. With an influx of Russians, and with the resorts of Yalta and nearby Odessa becoming increasingly international, the Crimean Tatars lost influence in Crimea; and with the continuance of the Russo-Turkish Wars, culminating in the Crimean War (1853-1856), many of the Tatar populace left the region. By the end of World War I, the Crimean Tatars still made up about a third of Crimea’s population; but during World War II their number was decimated, as 200,000 Tatars were forcibly deported on Stalin’s orders, 46% of these people dying during deportation.

Today, the Crimean Tatars number just over 12% of Crimea’s population: comprising about 250,000 of a population of little over two million. The Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People acts as the representative of the Tatar population in Crimea, and is currently led by Refat Chubarov, who has called the referendum a ‘clown show’ and the results ‘predetermined’. The Crimean Tatars were encouraged to boycott the referendum, and it appears that many did so; but the results imply significant support for integration with Russia among not only ethnic Russians but among ethnic Ukrainians too. The dissenting position of Crimea’s Tatars ought not overshadow the extent of the present-day Crimean population who evidently desire some form of close attachment with Russia, whether owing to cultural feeling or to perceived economic necessity. Opposition to the referendum must reside in the lack of proper political process and in the overt Russian military presence, rather than in the attitude of a prestigious minority group. While the history of the Tatars in Crimea is long and of undoubted importance, and their deportation during World War II tragic, the region saw centuries of rule before the establishment of the Crimean Khanate, and became something different again as part of the Russian Empire; there is little sense in positioning the Crimean Tatars as the arbiters of Crimean morality.

The Crimean Prime Minister Sergey Aksyonov – installed at the end of last month – and the Crimean parliament today formally applied for Crimea to become part of the Russian Federation, ‘as a new subject with the status of a republic’. Aksyonov has also announced plans to introduce the Russian ruble as the region’s second official currency, alongside the Ukrainian hryvnia; while scheduling for Crimea to turn its clocks forward two hours, to Moscow time, on 30 March. For their part, the Russians seem ready to push integration through both houses of their Federal Assembly: stating that the move would require no new legislative basis, it may be passed by the lower house, the State Duma, within days.

Still, what this will mean in practise – whether it will in fact prefigure a period of genuine political and economic transition – remains unclear. The Russians on the one hand continue military exercises with around 8,000 troops plus vehicles close to the Ukrainian border; while the Ukrainian press reported on Saturday a Russian military incursion into Kherson Oblast, just north of Crimea, with Russian military personnel apparently lowered by helicopter before seizing a natural gas plant. The Ukrainian parliament – who accuse the Russians of now amassing more than 20,000 troops in Crimea – have responded with the creation of a 60,000-strong National Guard, and by calling up as many as 40,000 reservists. On the other hand, all parties appear eager to keep diplomatic channels open: Vladimir Putin engaging on Sunday in talks with Barack Obama and Angela Merkel; and Russia and Ukraine agreeing a truce in Crimea until Friday, with Ukrainian military facilities allowed to replenish their reserves. Russia and the Crimean authorities have guaranteed Ukrainian military personnel safe passage from the region should it secede and confirm a new union with Russia. This, of course, depends on the Ukrainians being willing to leave.

Since Ukrainian independence in 1991, Russia has repeatedly voiced its support for Crimea to separate from Ukraine and embrace closer ties with Moscow. The integration of Crimea with Russia may therefore be seen as a fait accompli, a coming to fruition of one of Russia’s deepest wishes, securing for it economic and military access to the region and to the Black Sea. We could take the question asked by the referendum and the application made by the Crimean parliament at face value; and Russia may simply welcome Crimea as an autonomous republic as part of the Russian Federation, and set about entrenching the economic, cultural, and ideological links between the two, regardless of the costs.

Yet the costs of a perceived annexation of Crimea will be significant. Russia perhaps assumes that any sanctions imposed by the international community will not prove too severe or long-lasting, given the size of the Russian economy, their key role in the supply of European gas, and the desire to prevent anything approaching a second Cold War. A first wave of proposed sanctions proved hard to conclude, given differences within the international community regarding whether they should cover only Crimean politicians, or extend to those within Putin’s circle (the interim Ukrainian Prime Minster, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has vigorously expressed his resolution to try the politicians involved in the referendum as separatist criminals). The sanctions announced today against 21 officials went a little further than the Russians may have expected, as they will extend to senior Russian politicians, including a deputy Prime Minister and the Chairman of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house. Nevertheless, they have been quickly denounced as weak and insufficient in scope. But aside from the threat and imposition of sanctions, and the broader damage to Russia’s international relationships, the anger the loss of Crimea would cause in Kiev and the absence of the Crimean voting block could wrench Ukraine decisively from Russia’s influence, turning an uncertain ally into a determined foe.

Trouble in eastern Ukraine – which remains economically bound with Russia – centring on the cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv has encouraged some analysts, and some within the interim Ukrainian government, to suggest that Russia’s military presence might now extend to encompass these areas. This logic assumes that Russia would hope for a repeat of the Crimean outcome in the east of the country, with the major cities demanding independence from Kiev in order to redefine their links with Russia. However, the populace of the east is more evenly divided between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. Any extra-political endeavour to encourage secession would be met with fierce internal opposition; Russian military progress would likely be countered by the enlarged Ukrainian army, perhaps with the support of international forces; and the situation in the east could become both protracted and bloody.

There are alternatives to a clearly defined, fully legislated integration between Crimea and Russia, and the more extreme scenario of further Russian military aggression across eastern Ukraine. The murkier possibilities for Crimea’s political future are that it operates as an autonomous republic in name, but as essentially a Russian puppet state in practise, focused solely on Moscow’s interests; or else that Russia is using the region more as a bargaining tool than with any determinate end in mind. Still other analysts have argued that the motive for Russian intervention in Crimea is a weak Russian economy, with Putin seeking first and foremost to bolster his image back home and to rouse Russian nationalist sentiment. Even at this stage, it remains possible that Russia has acted in Crimea primarily to secure its military bases and access to ports, without much thought for its long-term governance; and that the region will continue with some autonomy from Ukraine and from Russia without any fundamental change in political structure. The future of the region – if this is not to be the future of eastern Ukraine – could be as the ground of fraught negotiation and compromise between Russia, Ukraine, and the EU.

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A selection of news sources:

RT details the Crimean referendum results: http://rt.com/news/crimea-referendum-results-official-250/

Reuters and CBC reports: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/16/us-ukraine-crisis-idUSBREA1Q1E820140316, http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/crimea-crisis-u-s-eu-freeze-assets-of-russian-officials-1.2575297

The Guardian details Crimea’s application to become part of the Russian Federation: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/17/ukraine-crimea-russia-referendum-complain-result

A DW interview with Refat Chubarov, leader of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People: http://www.dw.de/tatar-leader-referendums-results-predetermined/a-17500078

Crimea: A Literary Perspective

The situation in Crimea continues to develop agallop. Following events in Kiev, unidentified Russian troops have taken control of Crimea’s airports, public buildings, military installations, and ports. Amid claim and counterclaim – the apparent defection of the chief of the Ukrainian Navy, the claimed defection of thousands of Ukrainian armed forces, and allegations that the human rights of UN envoys and journalists are being abused – and with occasional clashes between opposition groups – notably that which took place on 9 March, as the anniversary of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko was commemorated – a referendum has been scheduled which would decide the region’s future.

Initially proposed for May, brought forward by the Crimean parliament and the city council of Sevastopol (one of two cities – along with Kiev – with special status in Ukraine) to 16 March, the referendum will ask the populace of Crimea whether the region should unify with Russia. The referendum has been declared unconstitutional and therefore illegal by the interim Ukrainian government and by governments throughout Europe and in the United States. For a richer exploration of the contexts involved as the sequence of things shifts and continues in Crimea, it is necessary to provide some detail regarding the wider situation in Ukraine.

Amidst a political background of economic uncertainty and reliance on Russian oil, and with growing allegations of governmental corruption, the protest movement in Ukraine began in earnest on the evening of 21 November 2013. Earlier that day, the Ukrainian parliament had rejected a series of measures which called for imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to be allowed medical treatment abroad; and the Ukrainian government, and President Viktor Yanukovych, issued a decree suspending the signing of an Association Agreement with the EU. This agreement, some aspects of which have been under discussion as far back as 1999, would mean closer political and economic integration between Ukraine and the EU. It includes policy on a ‘deep and comprehensive free trade area’, on visa-free movement between Ukraine and the EU (which at the moment extends only one way, with Ukrainian citizens required to possess a visa to visit EU states), and emphasises the ‘European identity’ of Ukraine.

It is worth noting that the agreement which was to be signed represented a certain amount of progress made during Yanukovych’s Presidency. Attempts towards closer integration had largely stalled under the Presidency of Viktor Yuschenko and the twin governments of Tymoshenko. More, in suspending the signing of the agreement, Yanukovych and the government underneath him – headed by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov – were not explicitly rejecting it, and at first they continued to negotiate with the EU. However, the EU had asked Ukraine to sign the Association Agreement during the EU summit in Vilnius, on 28-29 November. That this would not now occur was taken by many pro-European Ukrainians to indicate the implicit rejection of closer EU ties, in favour of a strengthening of bonds with Russia. Russia had previously indicated that the signing of the Association Agreement would negatively impact Russia-Ukraine trade relations.

Thus, on 21 November, utilising social media and encouraged by several opposition politicians, protesters began to gather at Maidan Nezalezhnosti (‘Independence Square’), the central square in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, and one which has been used for political rallies since Ukrainian independence in 1991. The number of protesters swelled from 2,000 to as many as 100,000 over the course of the next week, with tensions rising as the Vilnius summit drew to a close: Ukraine had attended, and Azarov continued to assert the government’s desire to reach some deal with the EU, but no agreement had been signed.

Throughout the following two weeks, the protests spread to other cities – notably to Lviv, close to the border with Poland – and began calling for the resignation of the President and the government. Public buildings, including the Kiev city hall, were occupied by groups of protesters. What had began relatively peacefully became increasingly confrontational. The police commenced using batons, stun grenades and tear gas, at first to halt those protesters trying to access governmental buildings, then increasingly to break up all large-scale demonstrations. The police for their part would claim that the protesters initiated these escalations by using tear gas and other explosives. The Azarov government survived a vote of no confidence in parliament on 3 December. On 8 December, the third Sunday of the protests, the number of protesters in Kiev reached at least 500,000; but a few days later the police coordinated their efforts to clear protesters from the Maidan.

Then on 17 December, President Yanukovych and President Putin signed a treaty which saw Russia buy $15 billion of Ukrainian debt, and significantly reduce the price it charged Ukraine for natural gas. The treaty also apparently gave the Russian Navy increased access to the Kerch Peninsula in eastern Crimea. Prime Minister Azarov asserted that the deal had saved Ukraine from potential bankruptcy; while suggesting that the Association Agreement with the EU was still being considered, but some way from being signed. EU ministers stated that the treaty with Russia would not prevent the signing of the Association Agreement; still, the treaty was roundly denounced by the Ukrainian opposition.

Despite this – and despite the attack on Tetiana Chornovol, a journalist and prominent leader of the protest campaign, on 25 December – the protests remained relatively peaceful from the middle of December until the middle of January. On 16 January, a series of draconian anti-protest laws were pushed through parliament. These decreed lengthy jail terms for those engaging in ill-defined ‘extremist activity’, and introduced provisions for the censorship of the internet and social media; and quickly became referred to as the ‘dictatorship laws’. In the aftermath to the passing of these laws, the protests and the response of the authorities intensified. Three protesters were killed between 21-22 January, one shot to death by the police; prominent protest leaders Ihor Lutsenko and Yuriy Verbytsky were abducted, the latter soon found dead; and police began using water cannon on protesters despite the freezing temperatures.

On 28 January, Prime Minister Azarov tended his resignation, which was accepted. He flew first to Austria, later moving on to Russia. In early February, meetings between Yanukovych and leaders of the opposition saw some movement towards compromise and constitutional reform. However, the rhetorical confrontation engaged in by both sides continued apace. On 14 February, the 234 protesters arrested since the beginning of the protests were released from custody; and on 16 February, protesters relinquished their occupation of the Kiev city hall. But on 18 February, around 20,000 protesters began to march on the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament; and in the fighting which followed, with both protesters and the police firing automatic weapons and utilising explosive devices, 20 people were killed with more than a thousand injured. A brief truce held on the evening of 19 February, but the following morning the fighting resumed. With reports of police snipers targeting civilians and leaders of the opposition, a further sixty people were killed, the vast majority from the numbers of the protesters. 21 February saw a deal reached between President Yanukovych and opposition leaders, brokered by the Foreign Ministers of Poland, Germany, and France. Yet this deal too did not hold; Yanukovych fled from Kiev; parliament impeached him and formed an interim government; and the situation in the Crimea began to escalate.

Russia – alongside ministers from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions – has consistently alleged that the violence which has marked the protests has been initiated by the protesters. It argues that the protest movement has been infiltrated by or has contained within and enabled far-right nationalists, quick to adopt violent measures. The symbols and signa of nationalists have been apparent during some of the protest’s fiercest clashes; the Right Sector collective have been implicated in some of the protest’s most critical – and bloodiest – battles. In contrast, the protest movement and opposition leaders have squarely blamed a brutal and reactionary police force for the number of injured and dead; arguing that they were ordered by governmental ministers fighting to remain in power whatever the cost. In particular, the Minister for Internal Affairs, Vitaliy Zakharchenko, has been labelled a criminal for supporting the use of deadly force by the Berkut, the special police force governed by his Ministry. Immediately following the deal struck on 21 February, the Ukrainian parliament voted unanimously to suspend Zakharchenko; also voting to restore the amendments made to the Ukrainian constitution in 2004, which sought to weaken the powers of the President. Zakharchenko’s successor, the acting Minister for Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov, has since dissolved the Berkut.

In tune with their allegations regarding the involvement of far-right nationalists, Russia calls the impeachment of Yanukovych and the formation of a new government illegal, an anti-constitutional coup achieved by force. They point to the cabinet positions the interim government – led by interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk – has afforded three protest leaders, along with four members of the controversial nationalist party Svoboda. To the protesters and to the politicians of the opposition, this marks instead the success of a popular uprising, and the deposition of a Presidency and a government who had rendered themselves illegitimate. It could certainly be argued that – disregarding any prior instances of corruption – the grotesque actions of the Berkut were sufficient to delegitimise Yanukovych’s regime. The view of the opposition is the view which appears predominant in Western Europe and North America, and it is the view strongly forwarded by the governments of these countries. One of the problems with this view, however – and preventing any clear delineation of right and wrong – is the apparent lack of political process, the apparent absence of diplomacy, which has marked events in Kiev in the aftermath of 21 February.

The deal signed by Yanukovych and opposition leaders and impelled by the Foreign Ministers of Poland, Germany, and France called for a restoration of the 2004 constitution to prefigure further constitutional reform; the formation of a new unity government; amnesty for protesters arrested from 17 February; and presidential elections to be held no later than December. Yet in the twenty-four hours following its agreement, protesters – who condemned the deal – continued to rally and to occupy public buildings across Ukraine. Police officers abandoned the capital, whether recalled from Kiev to face protests in their home cities, fearful of riots, or refusing to uphold Yanukovych’s position any longer. Presidential buildings became unguarded; Yanukovych hurried to Kharkiv, in the north east of the country; and the Euromaidan protesters entered peacefully and unfettered the governmental buildings of the capital. With around 40 Party of Regions MPs leaving their posts or defecting, and with the tenor in the Verkhovna Rada having fundamentally altered, a new coalition was formed and parliament voted to impeach Yanukovych. Disembodied in the east, Yanukovych responded by asserting the legality of his position as Ukraine’s lawfully elected president, and denouncing events in Kiev as a coup.

Russia had already, during the course of the protests, accused Western governments – particularly the United States – of funding the opposition. But the breakdown of diplomacy immediately following the 21 February agreement increased the sense of Western meddling and Western hypocrisy, and made Russian intervention in some form all but inevitable. Russia undoubtedly perceives the hands of the West behind the ultimate ousting of Yanukovych; and considers that attempts to reach a political compromise were abandoned once the EU and the US saw their preferred outcome emerge via extra-political means. If the West portrays itself as upholding the right for Ukrainians to decide how and by whom they are governed, free from the interference of their often repressively violent and overbearing neighbour, then Russia sees the West acting out of self-interest: heralding and supporting the attempts for independence of those who would seek closer ties with it, while decrying those who would associate with alternative areas of power.

The moral case of the West inevitably implicates democracy as the system of government which best establishes and upholds the rights of the human beings who fall under it. To this supposition, democracy itself must be opened out and questioned, both for its fundamental principles and in its historical development. It is debatable whether modern democracy, as practised in the EU and US, truly allows individuals a significant say regarding how they are governed. This covers a range of concerns, from the lack of choice afforded by too-similar politicians, to revolving door policies and the power of lobbying groups, to the bailout of big banks at the expense of taxpayers, to apparently flawed electoral systems, to a perceived democratic deficit in the governance of the EU.

A notable facet of modern democracies appears to be how efficiently they stifle protest – at an ideological level, before it comes to the legal restrictions placed upon the right to protest and excessive policing of those protests which do take place. Protesters in modern democratic societies are routinely cast and outcast as dangerous and extremist regardless of the specificities of their views. Little over a week ago, 1,000 environmental protesters protested peacefully outside the White House in Washington, over the controversial fourth phase of the Keystone oil pipeline project. 400 of these protesters were arrested, their appeals dismissed as constituting ‘an extreme position…well outside the American mainstream’. De Tocqueville warned of the ‘soft despotism’ inherent in the democratic system, and always to be considered and guarded against:

‘Thus, after having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.‘

Nor can the recent history of Russian-Western relations beyond Ukraine and Crimea be dismissed. Russia can justifiably mock US Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion that ‘You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext’, given the invasion of Iraq – which Kerry voted for – based on alleged but nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, the West’s analysis of the ongoing conflict in Syria seems increasingly open to debate. One prominent study of rocket trajectories argues that the rockets which delivered sarin gas to Ghouta, near Damascus, last August could not have been fired from within areas controlled by the Syrian government.

Thus Russia’s engagement in Crimea implicates Russian concern over Western influence, Western sleight-of-hand, and a breakdown in diplomacy; it has been encouraged by some of the protest movement’s association with aspects of the far-right; and it reflects Russia’s dislike of Ukraine’s change in political regime, as well as a perception that the Ukrainian political class is disorganised, self-absorbed, backed by various competing oligarchs, and incapable of providing the stability that could be conducive to its purposes as well as to the Ukrainian populace. Reading between the lines, there is a sense that many Ukrainian citizens would welcome close cooperation with both Russia and the EU, for economic and cultural reasons; but the more the situation in the country escalates, the more they are forced to pick sides. One of the reshaped parliament’s least helpful measures was its overturning, on 23 February, of a minority languages law, which allowed Russian to function as an official second language in those regions with a sizeable Russian population.

What Russia desires as the result of its excessively militarised response remains unclear. The annexation of Crimea is presumed, based upon the example set in Georgia, but any serious attempt towards this end would be met with international opposition: there would undoubtedly be sanctions, and a serious deterioration in Russia’s international relationships. Russia would have much to lose by perceived annexation: without the ethnic Russian population of Crimea to balance opinion in the west, and in response to such an outcome, Ukraine could slip decisively, electorally and ideologically, from its powers of influence. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, founded along with the city of Sevastopol in 1783, is now small and old and in need of modernisation; but access to the Black Sea from Crimea remains a strategic and economic imperative for Russia. In 1997, a partition treaty divided the Black Sea Fleet and effectively formed the Ukrainian Navy; as part of the treaty, Russia was ensured military access to Crimea, and the base of its fleet in Sevastopol, until 2017. In 2010 this agreement was extended until 2042. According to its terms, Russia are allowed to station 25,000 troops on Crimea – more than the 16,000 which Ukraine claims are currently present – but, of course, these troops are not allowed to assert themselves off base and unidentified. It is plausible that Russia is endeavouring to secure primarily its military access to the region. At this point in time, any further excursions appear as unlikely as they would be unwarranted.

More than a swift reaction to recent political events, Russia’s intervention in Crimea must be read from a longer cultural and historical perspective. The broader response from the populace of Crimea to the protests in the west of the country must equally be viewed not merely within their immediate context – portrayed in opposition to the protesters’ successes in Kiev – but with an understanding of the Crimea’s own highly distinct history and culture. The trajectory of the Crimea does not merely parallel or diametrically oppose what is happening elsewhere in Ukraine: it has unique roots and currents.

The short history of Crimea as part of Ukraine began on 19 February 1954, when the Crimean Oblast was transferred from the authority of Soviet Russia to the authority of Soviet Ukraine. The rationale behind this transfer remains a subject of debate: some have considered it essentially a gift, marking the 300th anniversary of Ukraine as part of the Russian Empire; others have stressed the close cultural, economic, and practical links between the region and the Ukrainian mainland. In January 1991, Crimea was upgraded from an Oblast to an Autonomous Republic. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it remained part of independent Ukraine, with much autonomy and its own parliament. Across 1992 the Crimean parliament agreed to retain unity with Ukraine, but only after securing even greater autonomy from Kiev; in May, the parliament also established a Crimean constitution.

In October 1993, the Crimean parliament established the post of President of Crimea. At the same time, it agreed upon parliamentary representation for Crimea’s Tatars: the Crimean Tatars were given 14 seats in the body of 100, despite their protests that Crimea should not possess a president distinct from the President of Ukraine. After a pro-Russian President of Crimea was voted into power in 1994, in March 1995 the Ukrainian parliament unilaterally abolished the post and scrapped the Crimean constitution. A new constitution was formed and finally ratified by the Ukrainian parliament in 1998; while the treaty of friendship of 1997 regarding the division of the Black Sea Fleet calmed differences between Kiev and Moscow concerning the region.

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For those who desire a retreat from such densely political frontiers; who would extend their political understanding via other contexts; or else derive pleasure or relaxation through incidental knowledge – what follows is the long history of Crimea, seen through the eyes and down the nibs of some of the great men of Russian letters. It is a political history, a cultural history, and a literary history.

Kievan Rus flourished from about 882 – when Prince Oleg moved the capital of the Rus from Novgorod to Kiev – until the 13th century, when the Mongol Empire invaded and destroyed their major cities. While Russia gradually threw off the ‘Mongol-Tatar Yoke’, and began to emerge round the city of Moscow as a powerful independent state, Kiev and much of what is now northern and central Ukraine came under Polish-Lithuanian control. The Russo-Polish War of 1654-1667 ended in a truce, but one which forced the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to relinquish Kiev and the lands east of the Dnieper River (plus Smolensk further north) to the Tsardom of Russia. These lands continued to rule themselves with some autonomy for the next hundred years, the period of the Cossack Hetmanate; but this autonomy was successively diminished during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-1796), and the region came to be fully incorporated into the Russian Empire. Russia often considers the union between Kiev and Moscow to extend back to the beginnings of the the Russo-Polish War in 1654.

The history of Crimea is distinct from the history of Kiev and mainland Ukraine. The region passed through the firm and fragile hands of the Cimmerians, Greeks, Bulgars, and Kievan Rus, among hordes of others, before the 13th century, when it became implicated in the Venetian-Genoese Wars, between the rival Republics of Venice and Genoa. The Republic of Genoa ruled Crimea for two centuries, its rule authorised by the Golden Horde which had fragmented from the Mongol Empire. As the Golden Horde itself began to fragment and dissolve, Tatars who had settled in the region came to power and established the Crimean Khanate in 1441. This Crimean Khanate, ruled by Crimean Tatars, came under Ottoman rule in 1475, but functioned as a protectorate, with significant autonomy from the Ottoman Empire.

The Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774 resulted in a decisive victory for Russia. It annexed the area of land which is now southern Ukraine; and while the Crimean Khanate became nominally independent, in reality it came under Russian control and was annexed in 1783. Thus by the late 1700s, all of modern Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire. The lands of southern Ukraine and Crimea were referred to as Novorossiya (‘New Russia’), and many of the region’s prominent cities were founded at this time: including Sevastopol in 1783, and Simferopol a year later, both in Crimea; and further north-west, on the mainland overlooking the Black Sea, Odessa in 1794.

Odessa grew rapidly, governed in its early years by the Duc de Richelieu, becoming a free port in 1819, and emerging as a truly multinational and multilingual city: Italian was the lingua franca, spoken alongside Russian and French (Binyon, 154). Pushkin, exiled from Saint Petersburg for writing revolutionary epigrams, spent several months in the Caucasus and Crimea in 1820. He joined the company of General Nikolay Raevksy, famous for his feats on Russia’s behalf during the Napoleonic Wars; and Pushkin formed enduring friendships with Raevsky’s sons and daughters. According to D. S. Mirsky, these months, ‘spent in the company of the Rayévskys…were one of the happiest periods of Pushkin’s life. It was from the Rayévskys also that he got his first knowledge of Byron’ (Mirsky, 81). Then, between exiles, Pushkin would spend a year in Odessa from July 1823 until July 1824. The period was particularly fruitful for his work. He had begun writing Eugene Onegin in May, and completed most of the first three chapters, including Tatyana’s letter, in Odessa. Meanwhile, he published the narrative poem The Fountain of Bakhchisaray; and Odessa also proved the source for a number of his greatest love lyrics. Personal intrigue and the proclamation of atheism in one of Pushkin’s letters was enough for the authorities to force Pushkin’s departure from Odessa; he spent the next two years at Mikhailovskoe, his family estate near Pskov.

The Crimean War (1853-1856) would come to centre upon Sevastopol, after impacting Odessa along with many of the major Russian and Ottoman cities by the Black Sea. The war may be perceived as a culmination of the Russo-Turkish wars of the previous three centuries. Provisionally, it was the result of a series of political intrigues concerning the status of Christianity in Palestine, which was then controlled by the Ottomans. Ever since the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Russia had considered itself the protector of the Eastern Orthodox Christian faith. The see of Moscow had been accepted as an Orthodox patriarchate in 1589; though rather than taking the traditional place of Rome as the first patriarchate, it was listed fifth, behind the patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. One of the consequences of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774 had been the assertion of Russia’s right to protect all Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule. Roman Catholic France, during the reign of Napoleon III, sought to alter this state of affairs, and began to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire demanding that it be given power over the Christian peoples and places of Palestine.

After the Ottoman Empire initially upheld the position of Russia, France undertook a show of force, sending the warship Charlemagne to the Black Sea. Cowed by the superior naval capacity of the French, the Ottomans ceded to their demands, allowing France and the Roman Catholic Church authority over Christianity in Palestine, and reverting to Latin an inscription at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, symbolically placing it under French control. Attempts towards a diplomatic resolution made little progress, and the Russian Empire responded by sending soldiers through Moldavia and Wallachia (regions of modern-day Moldova and Romania), and to the Caucasus, which it was in the long process of annexing. (Lermontov was twice exiled as an officer to the Caucasus, and depicted the region in his novel A Hero of Our Time, published in 1840, in the middle of the Caucasian War). With both the Russians and the Ottomans also building their fleets in the Black Sea, this first phase of the Crimean War reached a climax with the Battle of Sinop. Sinop, historically called Sinope, was itself the birthplace of important writers, philosophers and theologians: Diogenes of Sinope is noted as the founder of philosophical Cynicism, and his witticisms, bold manners, and frequent quarrels with Plato are amusingly recounted in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers; Aquila of Sinope completed a translation of the Old Testament into Greek, the influence of which was recognised ans assured when Origen included it as part of his Hexapla: and Marcion of Sinope was ultimately declared a heretic for his rejection of the God of the Old Testament, but his writings encouraged the formation of the New Testament biblical canon. The battle which took place in the waters of Sinop in November 1853 saw Russian warships attack an anchored Ottoman patrol force, and come away with a significant victory.

This forced the hand of the French and the British, both of whom desired to prevent the expansion of the Russian Empire into the weakening Ottoman state. In March 1854, both declared war on the Russian Empire. By September, the focus of the war had turned to Crimea, and the allied forces of the French, British and Ottomans laid siege to Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city and home to the Russian Empire’s Black Sea Fleet. Battles were fought in nearby towns and ports, and Sevastopol was repeatedly bombarded by the allies; despite the death of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I in March 1855, the Siege of Sevastopol persisted throughout the year, until the Russian forces withdrew the following September.

The fall of Sevastopol meant Russian defeat in the Crimean War. The Treaty of Paris, signed in March 1856, saw the Russian Empire return land to the Ottoman Empire, and relinquish all claims to the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which became independent. France won authority over the Christian peoples of the Holy Land. Crimea – which had been devastated, and seen the departure of much of its population – was restored to Russian control, but the Black Sea was declared a neutral territory, diminishing the Russian Empire as a military force. The failed war effort had also hurt the Empire economically, and the practical and psychological ramifications had far-reaching consequences: they encouraged the Alexander reforms of the 1860s, where Alexander II – Nicholas I’s son and successor – emancipated the serfs, and later reformed the Russian judiciary and military; and they impelled the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, with Russia struggling for funds and fearing they may lose the region without recompense in future military engagement.

Tolstoy had travelled to the Caucasus in 1851, and was motivated to sign up for the Russian army, serving in the same artillery regiment as his brother Nikolay. For two and a half years he participated in the Caucasian War; he was based in modern-day Chechnya. It was during this period that he began in earnest his artistic career: he completed, and saw published in The Contemporary, his first novel Childhood; wrote and published his second novel Boyhood; and in between published his first short story, ‘The Raid’, a realistic portrayal drawing upon his experiences in the region. In 1853, he attempted to resign from the army, but as an officer, his resignation was refused owing to the onset of the Crimean War.

So Tolstoy became an active participant in the Crimean War, serving in Bucharest from March 1854, then in November travelling to Odessa, then on to Sevastopol, where he was to be based for the next year. He began work on Youth, the final novel in his autobiographical trilogy; and wrote three reports on the war, ‘Sevastopol in December’, ‘Sevastopol in May’, and ‘Sevastopol in August’. ‘Sevastopol in December’ was published in June in The Contemporary. While his first two novels had resulted in literary acclaim, this first piece of war reportage brought Tolstoy a wider reputation across Russia. ‘Sevastopol in May’, a harsher, bleaker, and anti-militaristic depiction of the war, was butchered by the censor. The three texts would be published as the Sevastopol Sketches after the war had ended; together, they comprise Tolstoy’s claim to being the first modern war correspondent (an accolade often bestowed upon William Howard Russell, who covered the Crimean War for The Times). The Siege of Sevastopol would provide another first within the realm of Russian art and letters: Defence of Sevastopol was the Russian Empire’s first feature film, premiering at the Livadia Palace in Crimea in October 1911. The Livadia Palace near Yalta, a summer estate of the Russian Emperors from the 1860s, rebuilt by Nicholas II, would host the Yalta Conference towards the close of World War II.

Numerous biographers depict Tolstoy’s year in Sevastopol as decisive for his personal and artistic development. Both Henri Troyat and Rosamund Bartlett cite a diary entry he made in March:

‘Yesterday a conversation about divinity and faith led me to a great and stupendous idea, the realisation of which I feel capable of devoting my whole life to. This idea is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind – the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but providing bliss on earth. I realise that to bring this idea to fruition will take generations of people working consciously towards this goal. One generation will bequeath this idea to the next, and one day fanaticism or reason will implement it. Working consciously to unite people with religion is the foundation of the idea which I hope will occupy me.‘

Bartlett comments that, ‘In a sense all of Tolstoy’s future career is here, as he was always a religious writer, concerned with seeking the truth. In his early works this concern was implicit, but it became increasingly explicit as he evolved as an artist’. Troyat writes, ‘The whole of Tolstoy’s future doctrine is summed up in these few lines scribbled in his notebook: refusal to submit to Church dogma, return to early Christianity based on the Gospels, simultaneous search for physical well-being and moral-perfection…The time was undoubtedly not yet ripe for a full spiritual flowering. But a slow process of fermentation had begun, deep within this unquiet soul, a subterranean and painful preparation for apostolate…in the state of perpetual mental upheaval which he lived, one idea remained constant: write’.

Tolstoy’s perspective on ‘the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery’ reverberates in the works of Dostoevsky, particularly in the Grand Inquisitor passage from The Brothers Karamozov. Tolstoy’s religious and ethical views, his Christian anarchism, his pacifism, and his focus on man’s relationship with the land, would also profoundly influence foreign thinkers, including Wittgenstein and James Joyce. Still, other historians view the decisive impact of Sevastopol upon Tolstoy in material rather than spiritual-artistic terms.

Tolstoy remained at this point in his life a fervent gambler and womaniser. Orlando Figes recounts, ‘In 1855 Tolstoy lost his favourite house in a game of cards. For two days and nights he played shtoss with his fellow officers in the Crimea, losing all the time, until at last he confessed to his diary ‘the loss of everything – the Yasnaya Polyana house. I think there’s no point writing – I’m so disgusted with myself that I’d like to forget about my existence’. Much of Tolstoy’s life can be explained by that game of cards. This, after all, was no ordinary house, but the place where he was born, the home where he had spent his first nine years, and the sacred legacy of his beloved mother which had been passed down to him’. Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana towards the end of May 1856, after several months in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. With the family house sold and dismantled to pay his debts, he lived in one of the remaining wings and, ‘as if to atone for his sordid game of cards, he set about the task of restoring the estate to a model farm’. Tolstoy would continue at Yasnaya Polyana for the remainder of his life, leaving just over a week before his death in the stationmaster’s house at Astapovo; he was buried at Yasnaya Polyana, amid thousands of mourners, in a treasured spot of the woods by his home.

The Crimean War had also seen the allied forces lay siege to Taganrog, a port city on the Sea of Azov, in the Rostov region of Russia which borders modern Ukraine.  Taganrog withstood the siege by British and French forces between June and August 1855, though it suffered significant damage; consequently, the city was exempted from taxes in 1857. In 1860, Chekhov was born in Taganrog. When he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1897, he was required to seek warmer climes than those of Moscow or Melikhovo, the estate twenty miles south of Moscow where he had lived since 1892. So at the end of August 1899, Chekhov sold Melikhovo and moved to Yalta, where he had built a villa. East of Sevastopol and overlooking the Black Sea, since the Crimean War Yalta had emerged as the most popular resort within the Russian Empire. Chekhov was not overly fond of Yalta, which he called a ‘hot Siberia…there is nothing here to interest me’; and he bemoaned the tendency of Russian doctors to proscribe time in Crimea for anyone suffering the slightest cough. He would have preferred to return to Taganrog, but the city did not have an adequate water supply. Still, Chekhov lived in Yalta until June 1904 when, his health deteriorating, he travelled to the spa town of Badenweiler in Germany, dying there the following month.

In Yalta – aside from receiving visitors, and spending some time with Tolstoy, who stayed at nearby Gaspra between 1901 and 1902 – Chekhov wrote his two final plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Both were written for the Moscow Art Theatre, who produced them under the direction of Constantin Stanislavski. Chekhov wrote the part of Masha in Three Sisters specifically for Olga Knipper, a leading actress with whom Chekhov had corresponded since she appeared in The Seagull in 1896. The pair would marry in May 1901. Also in Yalta, Chekhov wrote some of his greatest short stories, including ‘In the Ravine’ and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. The latter begins in Yalta: a middle-aged man and a young woman, both married but visiting alone, meet there and become lovers. They return to their different lives, but eventually begin meeting secretly in Moscow. They talk to each other, they feel that they are in love, and the story ends:

‘And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and glorious life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far off, and that what was to be most complicated and difficult for them was only just beginning.‘

Nabokov described Chekhov’s story: ‘All the traditional rules of story telling have been broken in this wonderful short story of twenty pages or so. There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories ever written’.

Nabokov’s father would be a key figure during the next tumultuous period in Crimea’s history, as the Russian Empire succumbed to revolution and civil war. The February Revolution of 1917, centred on Saint Petersburg – which had been rechristened Petrograd during World War I, an attempt to remove all vestiges of German from the name – and in fact emerging out of protests to mark International Women’s Day, resulted in the abdication of Nicholas II, who had lost popular, political, and military support. He named the Grand Duke Michael, his brother, as his successor, but the political situation was not conducive for any succession, and Michael declined to accept until the formation of an elected Constituent Assembly, which could approve his role. It was Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, who wrote Michael’s abdication letter; and in the Provisional Government which formed under Alexander Kerensky in the absence of a ruler, Vladimir Dmitrievich served as secretary.

Kerensky’s government was progressive, but struggled to assert a new political structure. It made numerous missteps of its own; angered the populace by refusing to withdraw from the war; and suffered fierce opposition, from the Petrograd Soviet within the capital, and from the Bolsheviks further afield. It fell in the October Revolution of 1917 which saw the Bolsheviks seize power. Vladimir Dmitrievich would later write an important memoir of this period, entitled The Provisional Government. More immediately, Nabokov’s family were forced to hurry from Petersburg, and they moved to Crimea. Nabokov’s biographer, Brian Boyd, summarises the political climate:

‘Three main political currents swirled around the Crimea late in 1917: the Socialist Revolutionary influence dominant in the countryside and in the local zemstvos; the nationalism of the Tatars, one-third of the population, who during the power vacuum of 1917 had set up their own parliament to administer Tatar affairs; and the anarchism of the sailors and soldiers in the port cities, especially Sebastapol, headquarters of the Black Sea fleet. While most of the unruly sailors at Sebastapol felt themselves full of revolutionary spirit, they had little inclination to Bolshevism until heavily armed Baltic sailors were dispatched from Petrograd late in the year. A takeover of the Sebastapol Soviet in December gave Bolsheviks power in the city and set in motion the first of the region’s massacres (more than a hundred officers killed). Elsewhere the Crimea was calm, with Tatar military detachments holding the area around Simferopol.‘

It was these Tatars, making up around a third of the population in late 1917, and setting up their own government – the Crimean People’s Republic, which lasted for only one month between December 1917 and January 1918, but may be considered an attempt to form the first secular Muslim state  – who would be forcibly deported from the region during World War II. The Soviet Union under Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis, and the population of 200,000 were deported, the vast majority to the Uzbek SSR. It is thought that 46% of these people died during deportation. The Tatars only began returning to Crimea during the 1980s; today, they comprise around 250,000 of the region’s population of just over two million.

Staying at Gaspra, the Nabokov family initially sought to stay out of current affairs, Vladimir Dmitrievich’s political past making him vulnerable to arrest or worse. As the Russian Civil War progressed and the Bolsheviks endeavoured to assert themselves in Crimea, World War I continued, German troops advanced and, in late April 1918, occupied the region. This was a welcome relief for much of the populace, a respite from the tension and potential bloodshed of the Bolsheviks clashing with their opponents. Crimea became a relative stronghold of the opposition, and authority in the region would pass between the Bolsheviks and their opponents over the next few years.

When the Germans withdrew from Crimea and the puppet government they had installed fell in November 1918, the Crimean Regional Government formed under Solomon Krym. This Crimean Regional Government was opposed to the Bolsheviks, but was not closely allied to the White Army, drawing its members from both socialists and non-socialists, and concerned with the specifics of the local situation. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov became the government’s minister of justice, and served until April 1919 when, weakened by its differences with the White Army, the Bolsheviks again seized power. Nabokov’s family were again forced to depart, and they eventually made their way, through Greece, to England, where Nabokov would study at Cambridge. Crimea would become the site of the last stand of the White Army: the defeat of the White Army, under the command of General Wrangel, in November 1920 effectively marked the end of the Russian Civil War. The Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was formed a year later, and converted to the Crimean Oblast, fully part of Soviet Russia, in 1945. Nabokov’s father Vladimir Dmitrievich died in Berlin in March 1922, shot in the process of defending one of his liberal political rivals from far-right gunmen.

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For the political overview of this piece, I have used a variety of news sources – including Reuters, the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Slate, and RT; online encyclopedias, notably Wikepedia; and each of the books listed below.

A selection of sources:

The BBC’s timeline of the Ukrainian crisis: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-26248275

A depiction of the role of the far-right in the protest movement: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26468720

A New York Times piece on the fall of Yanukovych: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/world/europe/as-his-fortunes-fell-in-ukraine-a-president-clung-to-illusions.html

RT’s response to the interim Ukrainian government’s cancellation of the minority languages law: http://rt.com/news/minority-language-law-ukraine-035/

‘Facts you may not know about Crimea’: http://rt.com/news/russian-troops-crimea-ukraine-816/

On the arrest of Keystone pipeline protesters in Washington: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/03/us-usa-keystone-protest-idUSBREA210RI20140303

A study suggesting that chemical weapons used in Syria could not have been fired from within areas controlled by the Syrian government: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/01/15/214656/new-analysis-of-rocket-used-in.html

An opposing perspective: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/06/sarin-gas-attack-civilians-syria-government-un

Literature:

Rosamund Bartlett Chekhov: Scenes from a Life (Free Press, 2005)

Rosamund Bartlett Tolstoy: A Russian Life (Profile Books, 2010)

T. J. Binyon Pushkin: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 2002)

Brian Boyd Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (London: Vintage, 1993)

Anton Chekhov Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov (trans. R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky) (Modern Library, 2000)

R. F. Christian (ed.) Tolstoy’s Diaries (London: Flamingo, 1994)

Norman Davies Europe: A History (Pimlico, 1997)

Orlando Figes Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Penguin, 2003)

D. S. Mirsky A History of Russian Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)

Vladimir Nabokov Lectures on Russian Literature (Harcourt, 1981)

Henri Troyat Tolstoy (Penguin, 1980)

Cedars Lebanese Restaurant, Heemstedestraat 80, Amsterdam, with Asides

There has been something of a surge of interest in Lebanese cooking over the past several years. Perhaps this would demonstrate itself most profoundly and convincingly in a growing number of people gorging themselves on Lebanese food – however, I possess neither the statistics, nor the conviction, nor sufficient photographic evidence of lips covered in hummus, to assert that this is the case. That there continue to exist numerous Lebanese restaurants in prominent European cities offers little to support the claim of ‘a surge of interest’, even in these ‘difficult economic times’.

One may look to the political situation in Lebanon, to gauge whether any change in the country’s global standing has influenced the global perception towards its food – and yet there is nothing especially noteworthy here either. Bordering Syria and Israel, both of whom were implicated and involved in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s former Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, saw the emergence of the March 14 Alliance, which accused Syria of the murder, and the March 8 Alliance, which accused Israel. The Cedar Revolution which followed drove all Syrian troops from Lebanon; and the elections which took place in the country between May and June 2005 were the first for thirty-three years without the Syrian military present.

Today, Lebanese politics – under elected President Michel Suleiman; with a strong regional focus; and with the March 8 Alliance, which includes Hezbollah, one of the three blocs and numerous parties elected to govern in 2009 – continues to be shaped by the conflicts of its neighbours. The Saad Hariri government established after the 2009 elections fell in 2011. His replacement as Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, resigned on 22 March of this year; and his proposed successor, Tammam Salam, has struggled to form a new government. Owing to the political deadlock and the ongoing Syrian civil war – which has led to increased violence in Lebanon, and seen the country receive around 200,000 Syrian refugees – a couple of weeks ago, on 31 May, it was announced that this year’s scheduled elections have been postponed until November 2014. All of which does nothing towards interpreting the world’s interest in Lebanese food.

So instead I reflect on my own growing awareness of Lebanese cuisine; and on the profusion of Lebanese cookery books displayed prominently in popular bookstores. Phaidon published The Lebanese Kitchen, authored by Salma Hage, as part of their encyclopedic cookbook series last October. Its tessellated page-edges and lavish illustrations across five-hundred recipes make it one of the nicest cookbooks I have ever touched. Everyday Lebanese Cooking, by Mona Hamadeh, was published in January. The Jewelled Kitchen: A Stunning Collection of Lebanese, Moroccan and Persian Recipes, by Bethany Kehdy, will be published next month. Then in September will come Man’oushe: Inside the Street Corner Lebanese Bakery, written by Barbara Abdeni Massaad with photgraphs by Raymond Yazbeck, and considering Lebanese bread-making.

I went recently to Cedars Lebanese Restaurant in Amsterdam. The restaurant, which opened in 2007, is in the south-west of the city, just beyond the Oud Zuid, between the Hoofddoorpplein and Amsterdam’s World Fashion Centre. Set back from the Heemstedestraat road and well outside the city’s centre, Cedars sits upon and overlooks the Westlandgracht where the canal broadens out, providing an exceptional view whether you’re inside, looking out of the restaurant’s glass construction, or out on the terrace poised atop the water. The wide terrace and its wooden flooring, the easy movement between inside and outside and the light the building affords gives the restaurant a relaxed atmosphere even in its more formal interior.

Lebanese cuisine includes mezze, an array of small warm and cold dishes which are typically eaten to accompany drinks or main courses, or as a meal in their own right. Prominent ingredients are pickled and stuffed vegetables, aubergines, tomatoes and chickpeas, and there is much use of olive oil, garlic and lemon. Hummus, eaten with a range of flatbreads, is considered so much a national dish that in October 2008, the Association of Lebanese Industrialists petitioned for it to be classified a specifically Lebanese food – in the same way that Parmigiano-Reggiano and Melton Mowbray pork pies have protected geographical status in the EU. Tabbouleh, with bulgur wheat, tomato, parsley and mint, is another traditional Lebanese dish. Chicken and lamb dominate the meat market, frequently cooked with yoghurt; the Lebanese eat seafood; and pistachio nuts are common, in desserts made with white cheese and filo pastry.

Cedars offers two mezze menus, a ‘Royale’ and ‘Petite’, comprising different groupings of warm and cold dishes; and two menus, the ‘Cedars’ and the ‘Lebanon’, comprising mezze, main courses and desserts. There are twenty-six mezze proffered in all; three fish mains; three vegetarian mains; and ten mains from the grill. The wine menu is extensive and eager to soar in price (the glass of red wine I ordered was pleasant but dry together with the food); and the four desserts consist of three pastries with nuts and cream, and one ice cream with chocolate. The group with which I ate forewent all manner of mezze, opting after a drink to order main courses. These were prefaced by a selection of wonderfully baked flatbreads, served with olive oil and mixed spices.

I ordered the ‘Shikaf Garouf’, with lamb, cherry tomatoes, potato, mushroom, onion, and ‘spicy pita’. My partner ordered much the same dish but with chicken instead of lamb; while the third member of our group ordered risotto with lamb and yoghurt. My overall impression was of a well balanced meal replete with subtle but distinct flavours. The lamb had been marinated and charcoal-grilled, and a square of potato and one white mushroom were both sautéed in olive oil to perfection: the mushroom was seasoned with salt and pepper but otherwise unspiced, yet had taken just enough of the oil and was so well cooked that it was the best mushroom I have eaten; while the potato was spiced with what tasted like nutmeg, turmeric, and a little black pepper and ginger, and was equally delicious. The ‘spicy pita’ was in fact a miniature pizza, with a hot tomato sauce. Again, the rice had been cooked expertly with a little oil and spices: it was an appealing yellow-golden colour, suitably fragrant, delicate and light.

Initially calling regarding Saturday night, only to hear it described as ‘fully booked’, my party went to Cedars on Sunday evening, when the restaurant was fairly quiet. We had the terrace to ourselves for drinks on a bright and warm-enough evening; and without being rushed, the waiters were not only helpful and polite, but more, talkative and funny. Mains at Cedars are priced at around €20; mezze at €6.50 each – fairly standard for restaurants in Amsterdam.