History: Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War By Patrick Wright Oxford University Press, 488pp. £18.99
This is nothing if not an unconventional book: the reader should expect neither a seamless narrative nor a dry academic discussion of the Cold War. Instead, Patrick Wright offers us a survey of the Iron Curtain as a cultural concept, ranging from the invention of the iron curtain as a safety device in the 18th-century theatre more or less to its popularisation as the defining metaphor of the Cold War by Churchill in 1946.
The author meanders from topic to topic in the manner of a charming if inconsequential conversationalist. Important points and clever observations are apt to be buried in thickets of anecdote and digression. Despite this, the book can still beguile the patient reader.
After an introductory disquisition on sundry animals (a pigeon and a dog) and individuals who breached the Curtain in the 1950s, Wright moves on to a discussion of Churchill's speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, which gave the metaphor "Iron Curtain" the meaning it has today and then traces the origins of the metaphor, pointing out that Churchill was not the first to use the term. The pacifist Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) in an article of 1914 deplored the fact that the German and British peoples were cut off from each other by the "iron curtain" of war. But the term really came into its own in the aftermath of the first World War when, Wright argues, the continent was divided culturally, initially between the starving, blockaded and defeated countries of central Europe and the western allies.
The most significant division, however, was that between Soviet Russia and the rest of Europe. Wright suggests the Iron Curtain was in place a generation before Churchill put the term into general circulation. Soviet Russia was a world apart, behind the looking glass, where the conventional values had been reversed. Wright offers us a tour d'horizon of various naive and bemused visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, including sympathetic tourists who wanted to believe what they were told of these glimpses of the future in the making and sceptics who evaded their officious guides to see for themselves.
This is the best part of the book. Although rather repetitive in terms of argument and unsystematic in treatment, his account is often amusing and engaging. Wright cites the earnest Walter Benjamin, who visited Moscow in 1926-7, struggling with the dilemmas of the Marxist traveller:
"In Russia, you can only really see if you have already decided. At the turning point in historical events that is . . . 'Soviet Russia', the question at issue is not which reality [the West or Russia] is better, or which has greater potential. It is only: which reality is inwardly convergent with truth? Which truth is inwardly preparing itself to converge with the real? . . . Someone who wishes to decide 'on the basis of facts' will find no basis in the facts." Wright's summary of inter-war Soviet tourism includes memorable snapshots. He leaves us an acute vignette of the Old Bolshevik Christian Rakovsky in Stalinist exile in Astrakhan, surrounded by his books and working as a planner while awaiting Stalin's final reckoning with him. Rakovsky alone would attempt to recant the confessions beaten out of him by the NKVD at his Show Trial in March 1938.
WRIGHT'S ACCOUNT OF the travels and opinions of the irrepressible Panaït Istrati is among the most interesting in the book and sits well alongside more familiar accounts of Shaw's fatuous observations and Duranty's complicity. Istrati, a Romanian vagabond befriended by the writer Romain Rolland, established a reputation in France in the 1920s as a popular writer celebrating the rebellious traditions of the Balkans. He decided in the late 1920s to move to Soviet Russia and travelled the country with a grim determination to see for himself. In tandem with the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, he observed the repression of the left opposition in 1927, tried to visit the camps in the Solovki islands and contemplated with contempt other deluded tourists and the authorities who misled them.
He returned to France in February 1929, took a flat near another disenchanted old Soviet hand, Boris Souvarine, and wrote a three-part denunciation of Soviet Russia (two of which, according to Wright, were ghosted by Souvarine). When he returned in the 1930s to Romania, by now ill and dying, he found himself suspect to the right-wing authorities there, while being reviled as a traitor by his former friends on the left. "Long live the man who will adhere to nothing", he declared at the end of his life, insisting that he no longer believed in any party, idea or man. "I am", he affirmed, "the eternal opponent."
Judith Devlin is a lecturer in modern history in UCD. Her books include Slavophiles and Commissars: Enemies of Democracy in Modern Russia (1999)