2,472: Eight Pieces of Empire by Lawrence Scott Sheets

In first part of Lawrence Scott Sheets’ memoir cum reportage of the two decades immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sheets tells of his first visit to the then-USSR in 1987 where, as a student of Russian, he lodged with a couple in one room of a collective apartment in Leningrad.  Coincidentally, I was also in Leningrad in the spring of that year.

The difference, of course, is that Sheets was a serious language student who went on to live and work in various parts of the Soviet “inner” empire, reporting on many of the ethnic conflicts and political disputes that arose in the years after Mikhail Gorbachev’s formal dissolution of the USSR on Christmas Day, 1991.  Me?  Well I was a teenager on a school trip, more intent on ensuring that the hotel bar stayed open long enough for us to get trollied every night than on the internal workings of Russia.  And I was never going to become a de facto war reporter.

Eight Pieces of Empire is divided, as the title hints, into eight sections dealing with different aspects of the collapse of the Soviet Union.  These include Georgia’s dispute with Abkhasia and then Russia itself, the Chechen struggle against Russia, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, the new “sultanates” of central Asia and post-Chernobyl Ukraine.

I’m happy to say that I found it a fascinating book and I raced through it.  Given the sheer size and complexity of the former Soviet Union, Sheets was only ever going to have been witness to a fraction of its post-collapse life and Eight Pieces is a little like a pointiliste painting, where individual anecdotes sit together to make up a larger picture when one steps back to take an overview of the whole.  By telling the stories of people caught up in the post-imperial seizures of the USSR, Sheets has drawn a compelling picture of the FSU’s recent history.

I would point out that most of the book deals with the Soviet periphery and little deals directly with Russia itself.  Driven by Sheets’ journalistic assignments, it cannot deal with everything and so there is almost nothing on the wholesale theft of Russia’s resources by Yeltsin’s and Putin’s cronies or about Putin’s rise to power and his gradual undermining of the rule of law and reversion to repression.  This is a book that focuses on the warlords of the Caucasus and the new dynasties of the likes of the Aliyevs and the Nurabayevs in central Asia.

It’s also a memoir of Sheets’ life as a correspondent and, compelling as his reporting is, his personal reminiscences are just as fascinating as are his kaleidoscopic group of contacts and acquaintances.  It’s also sobering to read of a series of his friends dying as a result of the conflicts they are reporting on or otherwise caught up in.

For, ultimately, no matter how exciting the action seems or how much humour Sheets manages to extract from the situations he finds himself in, much of Eight Pieces of Empire deals with human tragedy, of innocent deaths, of the destruction of homes and the displacement of families.  The consequences of the artificial imposition of boundaries and the forced deportations and resettlements ordered by Stalin are still being played out and, without Communist repression to restrict them, ethnic and national resentments have led to war and misery.

There’s not a great deal of hope or optimism here.  Most of the conflicts on which Sheets has reported have not really been resolved and there are still more, in places of which we in the West have never heard, that are still to come.  Sheets himself has, by the end of the book, grown weary and, maybe, even a little traumatised by his experiences.  It is salutary to note that he has given up journalism and is now the director of the South Caucasus Project for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organisation.

I was sent a copy of the paperback edition of Eight Pieces of Empire by the publishers, Crown, for which I am very grateful.

2,478: The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg

The Victory Lab, a copy of which was kindly sent to me by Crown Publishing, tells the story of how academics and computer experts have gradually come to play a major role in the way political campaigns in the USA are run.  It features a cast list of political scientists, campaign managers and statisticians who, between them, have come up with a cornucopia of analytical techniques and tools to determine whether you vote, how you vote and, more importantly, how to get you off your sofa, into the polling booth and putting your mark against their candidate’s name.

On the whole, it is a fascinating read, taking a historical view of vote analysis and showing how tools and techniques have been introduced and refined over the years.  As is to be expected, there is an emphasis on recent campaigns, particularly those of Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior and Obama and it is the last of those in particular that are of special interest, given that, as this is posted, America will be about to go to the polls to choose between President Obama and Mitt Romney.

Although one of the criticisms of The Victory Lab is the way it jumps from topic to topic without a great deal of connection, one of the key underlying themes is the shift from precinct based analysis, in which all voters within a single political unit are, essentially, treated the same, to the concept of micro-targeting, in which analysts can identify individual voters in otherwise unpromising locations who are worth spending time on.  Micro-targeting also allows for very specific messages to be crafted for small sub-groups of voters for whom not all of a candidate’s views may be well received.

Underpinning this shift is, of course, the rise of the computer and of processing power, which allow the analysts to process huge quantities of data through their algorithms, enabling them to measure human behaviour and identify exactly which voters they need to get out on the day, as well as how to do this.  The first Obama campaign appears to have been the apotheosis of this approach, using the available analysis to create a kind of mass-participation campaign hitherto unfamiliar to US presidential campaigns.  Some of the details of this campaign are truly amazing, including the mind-boggling view of a senior Obama aide that the computer models had become so sophisticated that, for undecided voters, the computer could determine which way the voter would jump even before the voter knew.

What is also notable from the text is how little the candidates themselves appear to be involved.  Although they, and their manifestos, set the framework, it seems that the voting models and persuasion techniques operate almost independently, although this impression may be distorted by the focus of the book.

There is also very much of a flavour of an arms race between Democrats and Republicans, with each side eagerly adopting innovations made by the other side and ramping up the money and resources given to this new breed of political operative.

The Victory Lab is a truly fascinating book that I would highly recommend to anyone with an interest in the machinery and process of politics.  In a way, it is a shame that I am currently disenchanted with pretty much every British political party as I would very much have liked to deliver a copy of this book to my preferred party.  As I suspect the UK is behind the US in this kind of thing, it would be interesting to see how the tools could be adapted to a British general election and what kind of effect they would have on what is likely to be another close fought campaign.

2,596: The End of the Party by Andrew Rawnsley

Apparently, everyone over the age of 50 or so can remember where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated.  My parents certainly can.  They can also remember where they were when Neil Armstrong made his giant leap for mankind.  If you are at all interested, my mother had got me up for a feed at 3 a.m. or so and was winding me at that precise moment.

I’m unfortunately not so good at remembering where I was when important world events were taking place.  Fall of the Berlin Wall? Not a clue.  Resignation of Margaret Thatcher?  Can’t help you there.  Release of Nelson Mandela?  Sorry.  Collapse of Lehman Brothers?  Nope (although, to be fair, I had only become a father two weeks earlier and wasn’t really firing on all cylinders.).  In fact, off the top of my head, I can remember where I was when I heard that the Princess of Wales had been killed, the 9/11 attacks, the 7/7 bombings and the Heysel Stadium tragedy but not much else readily springs to mind.

I do, however, vividly remember the morning of Friday 2 May 1997.  It was a bright sunny day in London, with a cloudless blue sky.  Walking to my bus stop on the King’s Road to go to work, the air smelled unusually fresh and even the buildings looked less grimy than normal.  The previous day’s General Election had seen the ousting of the Conservative government after 18 years of uninterrupted rule and the election of New Labour and, in particular, an energetic young Prime Minister called Tony Blair.  Overnight, it seemed that the sleaze, arrogance and general unpleasantness of John Major’s government had been washed away.  Tony and his friend and Chancellor, Gordon Brown, promised to govern honestly and openly, for all of us and not just a particular class or interest group.  There would be an end to political scandal.  There was hope in the air.

Fast forward 13 years, almost exactly.  That hope had long died, killed off by a succession of scandals, wars and failures.  Tony had gone off to make his fortune, pushed by Gordon and his friends.  Gordon was holed up in 10 Downing Street, refusing to concede defeat until Nick Clegg ruled out a deal with him.  The country was on its knees economically and the good times of the previous decade were revealed to have been an illusion, created by a debt-binge of unimaginable proportions.  So what the hell happened and where did it all go wrong?

Andrew Rawnsley, one of the UK’s leading political journalists, may not have all the answers but his retelling of the New Labour story certainly gives some pretty big hints.  The End of the Party is the follow-up to his first book on New Labour, Servants of the People, which tells the story of New Labour from its beginnings up to the end of its first term in power.

The End of the Party continues the story from the beginning of Blair’s second term right up to the point where Gordon Brown goes to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation to the Queen.  It is a fast-moving narrative which does not pause for analysis or deep thought but concentrates on telling the story.  At times, it reads like a thriller with dramatic prose and plenty of action.  Rawnsley conducted hundreds of interviews with both key players and less important figures in British politics during the past 15 years.  There are fruity quotes aplenty and some devastating character portraits, especially of Gordon Brown, here shown as a raging bully, driven mad by ambition.

The book is not perfect.  There are many references to anonymous sources, which weakens the book’s authority.  Rawnsley seems also to be incapable of refraining from inserting himself into the narrative, either by quoting himself or making references to his own articles as evidence of the truth of his later observations.  There is also the impression of imbalance, caused by the unequal treatment he gives to the dramatis personae.  For example, the extra marital shenanigans of Messrs Blunkett and Prescott are given a good old airing, while the nasty decision of Tessa Jowell to jettison her husband out of political expediency is skimmed over.  Finally, much of the story is told through the medium of recreating scenes, including quotes that the author could not have been party to.  Although making for a good read, many of these quotes can’t possibly be accurate and, even if they reflect what the subject actually said, they detract from the credibility of the book.  This is only highlighted by the fact that almost all of the actors appear to speak in exactly the same way.

The book weaves several main narrative threads together.  There is the story of the transformation of Tony Blair from a man obsessed by public opinion into a conviction politician, seemingly convinced that public opprobrium was the sign of being correct.  There is the story of the “psychologically flawed” Gordon Brown, tortured by his desire to be Prime Minister yet too timorous to drive Blair out of office.  Finally, there is the story of the ongoing battle for prestige and power between Blair, Brown and their respective teams, reminiscent of gang warfare or a political version of the Montagues and Capulets. 

When the End of the Party was first published, much was made of its characterisation of Gordon Brown as a crazed, megalomaniac bully, surrounded by piles of half-eaten bananas  but, in truth, the real revelation was the shadow of madness that lurked behind many of New Labour’s key courtiers.  From Alistair Campbell’s manic depression to Mandelson’s narcissism, from the deranged brutality of Ed Balls and Charlie Whelan to Cherie Blair’s seeming detachment from common sense, most of the key New Labour figures appear to have been at least slightly disturbed.  I don’t know if this is common to successful politicians (or maybe even a pre-requisite!) but it was faintly unsettling to read about the psycho-dramas and delusions at the top of British government.  Indeed, the most incredible thing of all is that the Labour government managed to do so much, whilst apparently spending most of their time engaged in power struggles, briefing the media against each other and just plain fighting and squabbling.

Although it is only 6 months since the fall of Labour, there is already a substantial body of literature on the period.  The End of the Party is, without a doubt, one of the best of these.  There will be more complex pieces of analysis in due course but when future historians come to consider this period in Great Britain’s history, they will be using this book as source material.  I would strongly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in British politics.

Incidentally, what are your “where were you when” events?