The Russian edition of Viktor Suvorov’s Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? sports a blurb on the back, quoting a review of the English translation of the book published in a British newspaper on May 5, 1990.  Suvorov, runs the quotation,

is arguing with every book, every article, every film, every NATO directive, every Downing Street assumption, every Pentagon clerk, every academic, every Communist and anti-Communist, every neoconservative intellectual, every Soviet song, poem, novel and piece of music ever heard, written, made, sung, issued, produced, or born during the last 50 years.  For this reason, Icebreaker is the most original work of history it has been my privilege to read.

The book had been published by Ham­ish Hamilton, in those days a highly respectable house.  The newspaper reviewing it was the yet-magisterial Times, whose literary editor had given over to me almost the whole of the biweekly books page to do justice to a work, as I had told him, of outstanding importance.  Using the term used by Coleridge of Kant in the Biographia Literaria, I said that Suvorov was “allbecrushing.”  The book sold 800 copies.

Some months later, a German edition of the book, under the title Der Eisbrecher: Hitler in Stalins Kaulkül, was published in Germany by a smallish house, Klett-Cotta, to timid and gingerly reviews.  It sold 8,000 copies.  In 1992, Su­vorov’s manuscript was delivered to a maverick publisher in Moscow, and at last the book saw the light of day in the original Russian, quickly selling out its first print run of 100,000 copies.  In the years that followed, over five million copies have been sold, making Suvorov the most-read military historian in history.

And yet, in the nearly 20 years that have elapsed between Icebreaker’s launch in England and the present publication of The Chief Culprit, no British, American, Canadian, or Australian publisher saw fit to exploit potentially global interest in the drifting Icebreaker—or to so much as touch Suvorov with a barge pole—despite the fact that the almost unobtainable $20 copies of the long-out-of-print Hamish Hamilton edition have been changing hands on the internet for upward of $500.  “Revisionism,” meanwhile, had become the war cry of the politically correct, so that historians like Ernst Topisch, expressing ideas that were but pale shadows of Suvorov’s, were now flirting with ostracism, if not prosecution.  Now the Naval Institute in Annapolis has put itself on the line.

Suvorov has written 18 books, including an autobiography and several novels, translated into some 20 languages, but as an historian he is a man of one idea.  The idea is to overturn 20th-century historiography, a bastard discipline born of an unholy alliance between Stalin’s Russia and the political elites of the democratic West.  As the alliance was formed for the expedient of suppressing Hitler—whom Stalin had done his utmost to bring to power for political reasons, and the West its utmost to foster for commercial reasons—naturally, in the wake of World War II, a common interpretation of history came into being, a generic pabulum capable of masking inconvenient lacunae and of obfuscating embarrassing contradictions.

The result was that I, growing up in Moscow under Khrushchev and Brezhnev in the 1960’s, was fed the same Allied pap as any of my contemporaries growing up in London, Berlin, New York, Tokyo, or Bombay.  Between Soviet films about the war and the BBC “World at War” there were only differences of style, as today there are but differences of style between the Kremlin’s official view of the past and, say, Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad.  Not surprisingly, some 30 books have been written since 1990, in Russia, Germany, Israel, and elsewhere, to refute Suvorov’s thesis, while a popular Russian singer by the name of Rosenbaum has called on war veterans in the audience to “waste” him.

Suvorov was not frightened by Rosenbaum.  He had been an officer in the GRU, Soviet army intelligence, until his defection to Britain in 1978.  To the death penalty for defection to which he was subsequently condemned by the court martial, another was added in due course by the KGB, for revealing state secrets.  Neither of these has been repealed.  Yet the “state secrets” that Suvorov has been revealing are joint Soviet-American secrets, with the laudable consequence that the good lie about the good war is now a good deal more transparent.

The Chief Culprit incorporates by reference, as a lawyer might say, the main argument of Icebreaker, putting it into the broader context of Soviet history.  On Soviet history Suvorov is good, though it is not his forte, which is specifically the history of the war, the stuff of Icebreaker.  But as neither the latter, nor its two sequels, Day M and The Last Republic, is available to the American reader, I assure him that The Chief Culprit is the only cogent analysis of World War II that exists in English today.

Unlike the war historians Church­ill and Roosevelt, with skeletons of their own—whether of duplicity or, worse still, of innocence or ineptitude—deep in history’s closet, Suvorov has no objective apart from exposing the bare bones of the matter.  He possesses a photographic memory and is obsessed with weapons technology, qualifications that have enabled him, in the research of the Icebreaker trilogy, to read the war as an archaeologist reads the spearheads and arrowheads of a long-lost civilization, a palimpsest of military construction orders given and countermanded, an archive of dictators’ intentions and illusions.  Sometimes, at first glance, this seems hard going, but the reader’s reward is never long in coming, as here, when Suvorov describes a single fortification in the Finnish War:

The Finns used cement of the brand “600” in the construction of their fortifications.  For every cubic meter of concrete, they used 95 kilograms of steel armature.  Here are the results: Soviet 280-mm mortar guns and 203-mm howitzers fired directly on the Finnish strongpoint named “pillbox no. 0031.”  They used specially designed ammunition for firing on concrete.  A 203-mm shell for the B-4 howitzer weighs 100 kg.  The 280-mm shell for the B-5 mortar weighs 246 kg.  There were 1,043 of the 203-mm shells and 116 of the 280-mm ones fired at the pillbox no. 0031.  One hundred and thirty-two tons of shells for one pillbox!

I dare say this one paragraph reveals more about Stalin’s war machine than all of Antony Beevor’s books put together.

Suvorov’s principal contention, familiar even to those who only know of his work secondhand, is that Stalin created the scarecrow Hitler in order to sic him on the great democracies of Europe, including Britain, and then to strike at the overextended Germany from the rear and to wrest these possessions from the villain.  Is not liberation the very core of communist ideology?  Hence the term “Icebreaker,” used by Stalin as a code name for the other man with the mustache.

Unexpectedly for Stalin, and sensing that he had fallen into Stalin’s trap, Hitler attacked Russia on June 22, 1941—without accurate intelligence, without adequate transport, without antifreeze, without warm clothing for his troops, and in possession of only 3,350 tanks of all types combined, compared with Stalin’s 4,000 amphibious tanks out of a total of some 20,000.  The element of surprise would enable Hitler to prolong his nation’s agony for another four years, but in Suvorov’s analysis Operation Barbarossa was the desperate act of a congenital suicide—or that of a war hero, which is what Hitler had been for his comrades-in-arms in World War I.  Its indubitable achievement, however, lies in the fact that only in the wake of Barbarossa was the West able to regroup and in the end save at least half of Europe, including Britain, from Stalin’s liberating clutches.

The other man with a mustache was the bloodiest of Stalin’s exterminators, and one who proved the most difficult to exterminate.  He was Stalin’s tool of world domination and, when it unexpectedly crashed down on his head, his undoing.  The awesome military potential Stalin had accumulated for an offensive strike at Germany in July or August 1941 was scattered like so many straws in the first days, weeks, and months of Barbarossa.  Therefore, if any of us is free to write, publish, and read this today, it follows that in some not inconsequential part our gratitude for this must go to Hitler.  And if somebody wants to arrest me for saying what I have just said, I make no secret of where I live.

This article first appeared in the May 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

To my own callous ears, Gill is a typical New York neoconservative.  What betrays him, I dare say, is the compulsion to appear forever young by espousing opinions that old fogeys are unlikely to hold in order to appeal to the tall blondes in tight jeans and pearly cashmere sweaters whom he vaguely imagines smiling in liberated approval over the morning’s skinny lattes.  Scratch a neoconservative, and you will find the Nordic dream.

The other day Gill disgorged his frustration on a television program, entitled From Farm to Pharma, in which a former food critic from the New Statesman by the name of Bee Wilson, apparently neither tall nor a blonde, was found guilty of “a partisan kicking of manufactured food.”  Gill had even looked up the hapless woman’s thesis at Cambridge, “on something like French utopian socialism,” as well as a book she had written, “on adulteration, which is like adultery but with cheese.”  I did say Gill was witty.  On the other hand, we all know the type of woman he was talking about.

Though presumably a harridan with highly progressive views, Wilson made light of the “modern chemical cookery” practiced by such giants of fashion gastronomy as Heston Blumenthal and “elBulli’s Ferran Adria.”  Theirs is a cultural innovation that Gill, with an ethereal kiss in the direction of the smiling mermaids, who, after all, are renowned for eating as little and as expensively as possible, professes to admire.  Hence his attack on the very “premise of the programme, that chemists and mass production had no place in our kitchens and had produced nothing but ghastliness and malnutrition.”  All cooking, Gill wrote,

is chemistry.  Every breakfast is science.  An apple tree is mass production.  And the last century and a half has produced a remarkable cornucopia, a renaissance of industrially produced food.  Our palates and our plates overflow with wonderful things nobody had eaten before, ingredients and dishes that are at the heart of our culture.

He concluded by listing a number of these “wonderful things,” ending with chewing gum.  Mermaids chew gum, don’t they?  At least the sugar-free kind?

I now recall the piazza in Palermo where I live.  On Sundays it is transformed into the city’s principal flea market.  As Sicily has not a Russian Orthodox Church, it is there that I can be found most Sunday mornings.  The merchandise on display ranges from 1850’s rubbish to 1990’s junk, allowing the visitor to draw broad conclusions and to indulge his nostalgic fetishism in relative safety, unlike the patsy in Nineteen Eighty-Four, who, with such memorable consequences, falls for the glass paperweight.

Would anybody fall, I ask you, for the one kilogram of Motorola DynaTac 8900x mobile phone, or for the seven kilos of a Macintosh portable computer, with 1 mb of RAM, even if the seller were giving it away?  A glass paperweight, on the other hand, even the shoddy, pseudo-Venetian kind that quickened the pulses of Winston Smith, is an object that I have seen change hands on more than one occasion.  Eight-track tapes, sun-warped vinyl 45s, dusty Fuji cameras, paint-splattered Sony Walkmans, scratched Tupperware, faux-wicker-patterned thermoses, children’s Armalite rifles with bendy bayonets, all the detritus of technological innovation in the closing decades of the last century is perfectly valueless.  It is of less value to civilization than last autumn’s fallen leaves, which can at least become compost.

In fact, there is hardly an analogy one can draw from the natural world that is resolute enough to illustrate the cruel uselessness, aesthetic as well as practical, of the technologically obsolete in the present epoch.  It is a kind of étalon of human failure, a regulatory standard by which all bankruptcy is measured, bringing to mind the scriptural apophthegm about asking for bread and being given stones, except plastic is more indigestible than stones.

Yet pick up a mortar and pestle, and you will find that this is the very thing you need to make Genovese pesto for your Sunday lunch in a.d. 2009.  Its value to civilization is exactly what it was when the appliance was first hewn from Sicilian granite 50, 80, or 100 years ago.  And if the pestle happens to be missing, never mind, because the mortar alone will make a perfectly charming salt cellar for the coarse-grained sea salt of Marsala.

Sicilians browsing the flea-market stalls do not speak of usefulness.  They hold a worthy object up to light—I have seen them do it once with one of those ten-inch white porcelain knobs used as industrial electrical insulators in the 1930’s, and on another occasion with a still larger one, cast in greenish-purple bottle glass—stroke it tenderly, and murmur something like, “Ecco, che bello.  Mipiace da morire.”  Their elation is likewise an étalon, a measure of human achievement, a regulatory standard by which the cultural value of an artifact is measured.

Unlike Gill, in my youth I was a chemist, winning a prize at the U.S.S.R. Chemistry Olympiad in the Microanalysis category at age 13.  I had spent five years of my childhood chasing “superpure” and “extrasuperpure” compounds, as well as virtually unobtainable apparatus, for my home laboratory.  I can confidently say that the hand-blown glass retorts and alembics I was hoarding had more in common with the Sicilian housewife’s mortar and the insulators of electrification’s early days than they do with “the modern chemical cookery” of Messrs. Blumenthal and Adria.  That left-wing harridan, Wilson, was right.  It’s all just a load of rubbish, and obsolescent rubbish at that.

In his critique, Gill describes another food program as “a Stalinist rant on behalf of salad and peasants.”  It is no less witty for being historically inaccurate, as Stalin disliked peasants, whom he collectivized and industrialized into efficient cannon fodder until there was none left.  Few are left in Europe today, as the result of collectivizations and industrializations no less ruthless, if not always quite as bloody, as Stalin’s.  If every joke is a fleeting glimpse of the soul of the person telling it, then surely the neoconservative joker glimpsed here, not the authors of the program, is the Stalinist factotum.

A word of explanation.  I choose food, with its spectrum of associations that run from agriculture to gastronomy, as a convenient optic through which to view modern culture because cooking is something one understands viscerally.  After all, housewives working out their budgets on scraps of papyrus have given civilization the academic discipline of economics, from the Greek words meaning “home governance,” and I reckon it still makes sense not to wander off too much from the beaten track that is the alimentary tract.

Language itself seems to support this approach.  Consider how often, on reading the first few pages of a critically acclaimed novel, we find it literally indigestible.  Consider how instructive it would be, on seeing a show of new paintings in a world-famous gallery, to imagine the million-dollar daubs as a dish on our kitchen table, with crushed glass or petrified guano among the ingredients.  Consider, finally, that while the critical metaphor of taste—as in “that imitation Palladian staircase is in execrable taste”—can be extended to most products of art or literature, it can hardly stretch itself to such as are downright unpalatable, like the idiot’s staircase in Anna Karenina which does not arrive at the landing.

The Russian verb spurt, with its sound of milk hitting the pail, is like our word for life.  The forcible sundering of the peasant and his cow, no less succinctly, is the abiding aim of authoritarian government, which, abhorring the individual’s self-sufficiency that threatens its nihilist absolute, seeks to suppress life itself.  Almost incidentally in this process, the artist is alienated from nature, the writer from his audience, the husband from the wife, the son from the father, and man from God.  The flea-market stalls in my piazza, like the diachronic circles on a tree stump, provide a record of successive decades of that rapidly escalating estrangement.  An acoustic guitar for sale in one of the stalls reminds my wife, a musician, of the time when it was called a guitar.

When I hear of “chemical cookery,” it is not that I want to denounce what I, in concert with the putative harridan Wilson, happen to see as folly.  Rather, I fear that Gill’s view of all cooking as chemistry is destined to become as historically inescapable as the electric guitar, because, whether or not Gill himself senses it, while sucking up to the imaginary mermaids he taps into a substantially less frivolous source of patronage, one which is, for all practical purposes, omnipotent.  For it is as much in the historic interest of global authoritarianism to alienate the Russian man from his wife’s borscht as it is to break up the Spanish guitarist with his flamenco guitar, the Sicilian housewife with her mortar and pestle, or this writer with this space in the magazine you are reading.

A single passage of Schubert, which I hear many times over as my wife rehearses his last sonata with the windows open onto the piazza, is a cultural commodity.  Like the early electrical insulator, and unlike the obsolete in modern technology, it is an object of apparently everlasting value.  In exchange for it, even when merely whistled or hummed with frost-bitten lips, it is possible to imagine a concentration-camp guard increasing the inmate’s portion of slop by a life-saving dollop.  No such generosity awaits Gill, as the spoiled child of the century strains to recall a tune from the Frank Zappa double gatefold Uncle Meat, last seen buckling in the Mediterranean sun upon the cobblestones of the piazza.  As for trying to whistle something thrown up by the avant-garde of classical music in the West since the 1960’s, under these admittedly extreme conditions it would probably get one shot.

To get that extra dollop, and to survive in these last times, an artist will need the ability to produce a likeness and an architect will need to know how one hangs a door.  A poet would have to be able to recite verse by heart, and a writer is well advised to make his audience crack up with laughter.  Unpalatable, indigestible, valueless rubbish, abstruse theories of space and pretentious slices of life—in every way comparable to the detritus of modernity in my piazza of a Sunday—will get them nowhere.  Their chemical cookery is only good as a tool of alienation, subsidized by an evermore authoritarian government out of the pockets of a populace too cowed by culture to cry stop thief.

In a forgotten short story by Ivan Shmelev, set in the Russian Civil War, a band of Muslim guerrillas ambush a Red sympathizer, a distinguished university professor, in a mountain pass in the Caucasus.  They trot out a plaster bust of Darwin and, on pain of death, make him spit on it.  “Funny,” says the guerrilla commander when the terrified savant complies, “we had a White officer here the other day, and we told him to spit on the Crucifix.  He’s over there in the ravine.”

Values are values.  I wonder if Gill would not spit on a bust of elBulli’s Ferran Adria even if threatened only with indigestion.