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Another Perth Sunset

Ken Burns Civil War Documentary.....

I was initially rather sceptical about a free month's Netflix trial, yet when it arrived on my computer courtesy of my family - I was delighted to see Ken Burns famous (American) Civil War series there in its entirety! I first saw this ground breaking series in Canada in the early 1990s, when staying with a pal from university in some remote corner of Nova Scotia. The American PBS channel were showing it every night at some absurdly late hour, and it became a nightly ritual that we'd get back to his parents house every evening in time for the next instalment. I knew almost nothing about the American Civil War then, it was all new - and utterly compelling. Years later I saw a set of DVD discs on Ebay of it, and bought them expectantly, but when they arrived they were scratched ad unplayable! I sent the discs back, and have waited to see the series again, until now!

Burns and his team did an amazing of telling the story of the American Civil War militarily, biographically, politically, socially, racially and culturally through an carefully edited series of contemporary diaries, articles, letters and papers, voiced by great actors; to the accompaniment of archive photos of people and places; set to the most perfectly executed sound-track, and interspersed with 'talking heads' commentary segments.

The series is basically a straightforward chronology of the conflict, charting the origins of the conflict, it developments, key movements, battles and strategies, until the final Union victory, and the assassination of Lincoln. It examines the main strategies, such as Lee's invasion of the North, all the main battles (famous names such as Antietam, Wilderness, Gettysburg, Bull Run), key incidents within those battles such as "Pickett's Charge" at Gettysburg; it looks at all the main characters, Grant, Lee, Sherman, Longstreet, Forrest, MacLennan, Hill, Lincoln and Davis etc, and of course the emerging importance of the legal status of slavery as a war aim for both sides. All of this is hugely informative, and provides the uninitiated with a crash-course in the every aspect of the era from social customs to military technology.

As the series returns to the same diarists over-and-over again, its possible to chart the course of the war from individual perspectives too. Southern and Northern voices are both represented in this, as are the views of both back and white people affected by the conflict. Mary Chestnut, in the Southern aristocracy was an avid diarist in the war, and her 'voice' is a remarkable historical document, as the Sam Watkins, a Union soldier and writer who recorded 'his' war too. By the end of the series these voices become familiar, and almost as close to the viewer as if they had been interviewed. Morgan Freeman's voicing of Fredrick Douglass' words is brilliant too - amazingly powerful in fact. 

The talking-heads are interesting too. They feature a retired Congressman, the historian Barbara Fields, and Shelby Foote the Southern Writer. They each pull in different directions in their comments too, the politician wants to see the conflict as part of the great American narrative, Fields is a sharply incisive academic historian who wants to emphasise the centrality of racial injustice as a central theme in American history, and while Foote is no apologist for the Confederacy itself, he certainly wishes to rescue the historical voice of the average Confederate soldier. Foote's contributions are in fact highly memorable, as he drawls from a vast array of anecdotes, told in the first person as if he had been a participant!

Obviously the causes of the conflict are a huge source of division even today. The Confederacy claimed to be fighting to protect states rights, not primarily to defend slavery (although of course these two things merged in practise), while the North began by fighting to save the Union, but ended up tangled-up in a fight to end the evil of slave-holding. Fields and Douglass are persuasive in their analysis of the centrality of racial questions, but Foote adds an important side note when he intones, "The average southern soldier wasn't a slave-holder" - he was fighting for his state's independence. In many of these questions Burns allows a variety of perspectives to be heard, and one wonders if that would be the case today; or whether if he was making it today he would have to be far more one-sided. For instance, Mary Chestnut's diaries of the ruin of the Old South, left decimated by the Northern Armies of Sherman and Sheridan, are well-written and moving. Sherman's terse commentary of his battering of the Confederacy in his 'March to the Sea' campaign, adds weight to

the sympathy that one cannot help but feel when a first-hand account of war, and decimation of towns, cities, homes, farms and families, is read. This especially the case when the reading is accompanied by mournful music, and photos of the ruins. Then however we are immediately reminded that Richmond was devastated because it was the capital of a slave-empire, the symbolic embodiment of a system of grotesque evil. The we are diverted again by Abraham Lincoln's assessment that the while horror of the war was a divine judgement on whole the USA for the sin of slave-holding.

The haunting music isn't in fact a piece from the 1860s, but a far more recent tune called Ashokan Farewell. It so wonderfully frames the awful scenes of the dead, the injured and the fallen that it became highly sought after, following the release of the series, apparently.

After having amazed by this series back in 1992, I was interested to see how it would stand up after all these years (and my acquisition of a degree in American history!) All I can say is that I thought it was wonderful to see it again. Powerful, instructive, and very moving - and highly relevant today.  The horror and sadness of war are powerfully and profoundly displayed here. 

Huge, (really huge!) amounts of ink have been spilled commenting on this series, some lauding it, other criticising it. One or two of those criticisms are probably valid; but they do not detract from the overall brilliance of this tremendous series, which certainly is worth watching at least twice.

Book Notes: Molotov's Magic Lantern by Rachel Polonsky

The Russian writer Danil Granin used the word 'tosca' to describe the villages outside Novgorod, writes Rachel Polonsky. Russian-English dictionaries, suggest that there is no direct English equivalent for this word but Polonsky goes on to say, tosca a word which "besides melancholy, contains shades of yearning, nostalgia, even anguish", (p158).

Molotov's Magic Lantern is a book which is overflowing with tosca, positively brimming with it in fact. It's a book without a plot, and without any central characters, and almost no dialogue! It's really a stunningly written travel book, in which the author immerses herself in the, cultural, political, economic and literary history of each place she visits. The way that she does this is so compelling, absorbing and Russian, that the reader is made to feel that they have been touched by these places too.

Polonsky's travels begin in Moscow, where she was living. The flat she rented in the 1990s was however no ordinary dwelling; but a former Nomenklatura residence, reserved for the upper echelons of the Soviet hierarchy, throughout the seven decades of communist rule. The list of people who lived at 'number 3', reads like a roll-call of the cream of the Old-Bolsheviks of Lenin's revolutionary party, like Trostky and Vishinsky; through to latter characters such as the deposed Krushchev. Most significant for the book however is the fact that Vyachaslev Molotov, and his wife Polina, lived in the flat above Polonsky's; from his reign as Stalin's Foreign Minister, until his death in 1986. What's more, Molotov's flat was largely unchanged from the days when he negotiated the non-aggression pact with Hitler, signed the death-lists in the great purges, or flew off to Yalta with Stalin. Most fascinating of all, his library full of his heavily-annotated books was present too; and which Polosnky delved deeply into. The purges, gulags, The Lubyanka and the death squads of the NKVD reached deeply into "number three".

In succeeding chapters, Polonsky travels around the part of Moscow in which she lives, then down to the Sea of Azov, through the strange history of the traditional Russian banya, up to Murmansk and Barentsburg, and out through Tunka into Siberia. In each of these places she digs deeply into the lives of the people who have lived there, and into the political and literary figures who forged history and responded to it. One reviewer called it a 'delicious celebration of Russia.... from Pushkin to Putin." My knowledge of literature is very poor compared to my understanding of Russian history and politics; which I studied at university. So while most of the historical-political references made sense to me; some of the literary illusions were harder to follow. Nevertheless, when describing the physical, political, cultural and ideological landscapes in which the writers she follows operated, Polonsky evokes such profound moods that even the more obscure references are swept up into the whole. Some scenes, such as her exploration of the abandoned Stalinist scientific research centre where the ideologically Stalinist,  but Scientific charlatan Trofim Lysenko operated, are vivid:

Here, where biology once grew freely as a natural science, Stalin's favourites degraded into an ideological farce. Not all the Lutsino dachniki were natural scientists, some were in the social sciences. On the way back from the Biostation, I took the loop in the road that leads past dacha No.7, whose grounds are grander than most in the colony. Said to have a parquet floor, the dacha was given to Andrei Vyshinsky to mark his years of scholarly service to the Soviet state.... [but this was only] his reserve dacha, and visits of the chief prosecutor were rare. I had found Vyshinsky in Moscow, amongst Molotov's books and here he was again, at his property in the country. (p125)

Vyshinsky was the legal mind behind the great purges, show trials and horrors of Stalin's 30s. He was the person, who as head of the USSR's legal system declared that legal representation for the accused was bourgeois and corrupt. 

The historical references never seem to stray far from the gulags, and the purges, of course. When they do, the toska inevitably returns with a throwaway comment such as, "this is before he was arrested in 1937, tortured by the NKVK and shot in 1939", and could refer to a peasant, a politician, a writer, actor, scientist, doctor or soldier. When Polonsky follows the route of the exiles from Moscow/Leningrad out into Siberia, the sorrow of Russian history from the Okhrana to the Cheka, the NKVD, GUGB etc. is powerful.

I went to Russia during Gorbachev's era - and the country left a permanent impression on me. Although by then the communist system was ailing; the party itself had lost the will to impose itself upon the largely reluctant populace any longer; it was possible to still 'smell' the past - and imagine the state terrorising its own. The body of Lenin was still on display in Red Square, though Stalin's had been removed. Driving past the Lubyanka, was still enough to cause the tour party to shudder and imagine Beria and his ilk arriving to commit their crimes against humanity. This book is so evocative and stirring, that it is almost like a visit to Russia, in the mind; from the reading chair. For anyone who has an interest in all things Russian this is a tremendous read.