River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny by Jeffrey Tayler - Book Review

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny by Jeffrey Tayler

This is extraordinary trip not just trough Siberia but through more than three hundred years of brutal, inhuman, and barbarous history from the Czars to Putin. Brilliantly written and superbly edited. Fast moving without a dull moment. Worthy of more than five stars.

EXCERPTS;

In the sixteenth century Russia was poised to shed its identity as Rus’, a European state of Eastern Slavs, and become Russia, a country that would be ruled by a majority Russian population but comprise more than one hundred ethnic groups on two continents, practicing not only Orthodox Christianity but also Judaism, Islam, Shamanism, and Buddhism. Muscovy and other north Russian principalities, most notably that of Novgorod, had already penetrated the European Arctic, taking advantage of the isolation that distance and cold afforded them from Tatar-Mongolian overlords, whose presence was strongest in the warmer and more fertile regions of the south, in what today is Ukraine.

Cossacks ventured down the Lena and its tributaries out into the Arctic and Pacific oceans, sailed through the channel dividing Asia from North America, and thereby delineated Russia’s easternmost boundaries. Cape Dezhnyov, Russia’s easternmost tip (just fifty-three miles from Alaska), bears the surname of the Cossack chieftain Semyon who in 1648 first navigated the strait, preceding by eight decades the Danish explorer Vitus Bering after which it would be (unjustly) named. It is even possible that some of Dezhnyov’s men found themselves shipwrecked on Alaska’s shores.

initiating the annexation of Siberia, Ivan the Terrible and the Cossacks facilitated Russia’s transformation from a middle-size European state into the largest country on earth, a Eurasian superpower with ports on seven seas covering, during the Soviet days, one-sixth of the planet’s land surface.

Russia still stretches some seven thousand miles east to west and almost three thousand miles north to south—enough terrain to accommodate roughly twice the territory of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii. Siberia, of course, would eventually yield a trove of resources far more precious than “fish tooth” and furs, including gold, diamonds, uranium, and, crucially, now, natural gas (of which it holds one-third of the world’s supply) and oil. Beneath Siberia’s permafrost lie the bulk of Russia’s 72 billion barrels of estimated petroleum reserves (the seventh largest on earth) and fourteen of its seventeen fields of natural gas. Oil alone accounts for 45 percent of modern Russia’s export revenues—in 2003 Russia surpassed Saudi Arabia in barrels pumped—and finances 20 percent of its federal budget.

The Lena River would serve as the watery highway down which Russia would travel to superpower status.

Putin spoke often of restoring the state, but for Russians, the state, since Ivan the Terrible’s days, had always been the problem, never the answer.

Life is grief, thieves get rich, the honest stay poor.

Russia is an exacting taskmaster, a bludgeoning educator, and those who suffer under its tutelage here cannot retain their naïveté and illusions—delusions—for long and survive.

As Russia steps back to autocracy, a mode of governance that led it to disaster in the past and could offer it nothing in the future, and, as well-publicized statistical indicators portend a population decline unprecedented in peacetime (Russia, thanks to calamitous birth, mortality, and disease rates, will probably shrink demographically by a third by 2050), I was seized by a desire to find out what had gone wrong. Had I really devoted my life to a doomed land?

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1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder by Arthur Herman - Book Review

 

BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS

1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder by Arthur Herman

This true story tells the tale of the end of three hundred oppressive years in Russia, and America and Russia’s entrance into a world military power struggle which neither were prepared for.

It is an era that should never be forgotten, but history lessons have a disgustingly short memory.

Political power is governed by the very best politicians that money can buy.

A very impressive and well documented book deserving of more than five stars.

EXCERPTS:

The next word they decoded gave them pause. It was “Mexico.” De Grey and Montgomery looked at each other. This was an odd country name to turn up in a wartime communication. For one thing, Mexico was neutral in this war, although its president was hardly a friend of the Allies and had good relations with Germany and Berlin. The next name they decoded was even more incongruous: “Japan.” In fact, it popped up several times in this first part of the dispatch. Japan had been on the side of the Allies since August 23, 1914—but, alarmingly, the dispatch was worded as if Tokyo were about to become Germany’s ally. Thoroughly worried, the two code breakers worked with fierce determination for the next two hours. What emerged was a secret message from Berlin to Washington in two parts. The first contained what they knew was a diplomatic bombshell: on February 1, Berlin informed its ambassador in Washington, Germany would resume its unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral shipping.

German submarines, known as U-boats, had sunk merchant ships without warning, and without picking up survivors—making no distinction between cargo ships of enemy combatants such as Britain, France, and Russia, and neutral ships such as those from Holland, Spain, and America. All those ships unloaded cargo, including industrial goods and sometimes even ammunition, in Allied ports; all were therefore fair targets, in the German view. This ruthless approach to war,

While Europeans ruthlessly fought other nations for land and treasure, Americans did not—those holding this belief conveniently forgetting that, in the nineteenth century, the United States fought for land and treasure more than once: against various Native American tribes; against Mexico in 1844; and, that same year, very nearly against Britain over the Oregon Territory.

In 1915, the year that fighting on the Western Front was bogging down in stalemate and Russia was suffering its first major setbacks, Wilson imagined a conversation among European leaders as they realized they had been wrong, and Wilson right, about the war. “Do you not think it likely that the world will some time turn to America and say, ‘You were right, and we were wrong. You kept your heads when we lost ours. Now, in your self-possession, in your coolness, in your strength, may we not turn to you for counsel and for assistance.

The American president said, a position London and Paris vehemently denied. From their perspective, the whole justification since August 1914 had been that they were the forces of civilization fighting against their opposite, while the Germans were ruthless and bloodthirsty Huns whose aggression and violations of international law knew no bounds.

January 22, 1917, also marked a milestone in American history. Wilson decided to deliver the speech before the Senate, the first time a president had done so since George Washington. Copies would be distributed to every major capital in Europe at the same time. He also did what no president had ever done, not Washington nor Jefferson nor Abraham Lincoln nor even Theodore Roosevelt: he explained why American leadership was essential to the world.

“peace without victory” an international catchphrase just as Wilson’s note of December 18 had done with “league of nations.” Editor Herbert Croly of the New Republic, the house organ of high-grade Progressiveness, was quoted as calling it the greatest event of his life. Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, told the president that “the basis of peace you propose is a new philosophy. that is, new to governments but as old as the Christian religion.” It would put Wilson, Bryan averred, “among the Immortals.”

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