Vol. 16 No. 19 · 6 October 1994
page 8 | 2570 words
What about Anna Andreyevna?
Michael Ignatieff
- Imperium by Ryszard Kapuściński, translated by Klara Glowczewska
Granta, 336 pp, £14.99, September 1994, ISBN 0 14 014235 5
Ryszard Kapuściński’s is the most passionate, engaging and historically profound account of the collapse of the Soviet empire that I have read. Caustic and lyrical by turns, it is driven by that combustible mixture of love and loathing for their neighbour which Poles seem to have felt since the days of Mickiewicz. As in all of his previous work – The Soccer War, The Emperor, Shah of Shahs – Kapuściński (with the help here of Klara Glowczewska’s translation) has raised reportage to the status of literature.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 23 · 8 December 1994
From Ramachandra Guha
Michael Ignatieff writes of Soviet Communism that it was a ‘violent but passing form of Oriental despotism, as relentless as Fascism, as single-minded in its appropriation of modernity’s tools to oppress and control, yet fatally compromised, both by its organised contempt for those in whose name it ruled, and by the central conceit that there could be a systematic, total alternative to capitalism’ (LRB, 6 October). Now modernity’s tools of terror, as well as the philosophy which presents a systematic alternative to capitalism, were elaborated in the West, yet their combination in Soviet Russia is characterised as ‘Oriental’. It is perhaps useless to speculate on the psychological processes that lie behind such acts of geographical displacement: suffice it only to say that between Karl Wittfogel and Michael Ignatieff stretches a long line of Western commentators who have given currency to this particular (mis)attribution. Can this Oriental restate the obvious historical truth that Stalinism, like Fascism, was ‘a violent but passing form’ of European despotism?
Ramachandra Guha
Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin
