British Chill

Letters

Vol. 22 No. 17 · 7 September 2000

From Michael Cox

Anatol Lieven (LRB, 24 August) does not present a fair picture of E.H. Carr. Having failed to mention some of Carr's most important and influential work – The Romantic Exiles, Bakunin, Conditions of Peace and The New Society – he goes on to engage in amateur psychological speculation about what he detects as a connection between the 'slipperiness' in Carr's personal life and his views on Stalin's annexationist policies towards the Baltic states. Carr did not need to be leading a slippery personal life (and wasn't) in order to justify Stalin's unjustifiable takeover of Eastern Europe. Nor is there any concrete evidence, as far as I know, that he was a wife-chasing Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth in the 1940s, as alleged by Lieven. For one thing he was hardly ever there after 1939 – much to the chagrin of the university's president, Lord David Davies. By then, his first marriage was breaking down and he became involved with a woman who had fallen out of love with her husband, who happened to be the Professor of Geography. This hardly makes Carr the Don Juan of West Wales.

Lieven gets one or two other things wrong as well. Carr did visit Germany during the Nazi period: in fact, he gave a revealing lecture on the subject to Chatham House in 1937. He was also a serving diplomat in Latvia in the 1920s – not, as Lieven says in 'the 1930s' – where, by the way, he did not much like the 'expats' or the Russian exiles with whom Lieven says he associated. He spent most of his time in Riga learning Russian, studying the Russian classics and reading Dostoevsky – the subject of his first book, published in 1931. Then there is the vexed question of Carr's much criticised views on the Soviet Union. These were far more complex than Lieven implies. He clearly believed that great economic strides had been made in the USSR; he also defended the country from its critics during the Cold War. But he was not an apologist for the Soviet system, and as he grew older became increasingly critical of the USSR – from a left-wing perspective. Furthermore, though he agreed with de Tocqueville that revolutions often changed less than they set out to, he did not think the Soviet Union was 'merely the geopolitical extension of imperial Russia', as Lieven argues. If he had, why would he have viewed the 1917 Revolution as the most important event of the 20th century and spent more than forty years of his life analysing the USSR? Why, moreover, would he have spent too much of that time analysing that most Soviet and not 'Russian' of institutions, the Communist International? Finally, his views on appeasement were undoubtedly questionable (though standard fare in the Foreign Office) but this hardly makes his observations on the interwar period worthless. The briefest flick through his extensive writings on these years reveals that he was a most punctilious and fair-minded observer.

Michael Cox
University of Wales, Aberystwyth

Vol. 22 No. 18 · 21 September 2000

From David Sweden

Anatol Lieven's review of Jonathan Haslam's biography of E.H. Carr (LRB, 24 August) contains the gratuitous neologism of 'swedenisation', defined as 'sanctimoniousness tempered by cowardice'. I take this to be a slur on the people and policy of an entire country, rather than an attack on my family or myself.

David Sweden
London W2

Vol. 22 No. 19 · 5 October 2000

From Anatol Lieven

Far from suggesting that E.H. Carr's observations on the interwar period were worthless, as Michael Cox suggests (Letters, 7 September), I spent much of my essay pointing out that aspects of them are of great and indeed increasing value.

On Carr's character, I was careful to say that his love affairs 'aren't so very shocking sixty years later', and that what stands out from his personal life is not sexual voracity, but its deeply depressing character. As to the connection between emotional coldness and evasiveness in Carr's character and aspects of his work, I am no friend to pop psychologising, but any biographer worth their salt must make some attempt to draw a picture of their subject as a whole person, and to look for some of the roots of their work in their character and upbringing.

Carr's personal distance from the subjects of his writing is not open to dispute. Yes, he made very brief visits to both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but his experience of these countries was wholly inadequate to give him any real understanding; and even more culpably, he also failed to draw on the accounts of people who had experienced these systems at first hand.

Cox writes that 'Carr was not an apologist for the Soviet system.' For many years that is exactly what he was. It's true that his views evolved over time, and The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin, published at the end of his life, is a great improvement on his earlier work when it comes to a recognition of Stalin's crimes. But this change was made slowly, unwillingly and in response to both well grounded criticism and the increasingly obvious failures of the Soviet system. It may be true that he recognised these failures sooner than some left-wing analysts, but is that great cause for congratulation? Rather than a 'most punctilious and fair-minded observer', Carr was a polemicist through and through, and a brilliant one. It's what made him such a natural leader writer, and it is what makes many of his writings such fun to read even when you profoundly disagree with them.

Anatol Lieven
Washington DC

Vol. 22 No. 20 · 19 October 2000

From W.G. Runciman

In view of the recent interest in both A.J.P. Taylor and E.H. Carr in the LRB and elsewhere, it may be worth my putting on record what the second of those eminent historians once said to me about the first: 'He started by believing that the Germans were responsible for everything; then he decided that the Germans were responsible for nothing; then he decided that nobody was responsible for anything.'

W.G. Runciman
Trinity College, Cambridge