To every historian’s despair

Today marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader who did much to build up his country’s nuclear arms and its control over the Warsaw Pact countries. He was a rather vain man, who had himself awarded many medals in later life. His diaries also reveal the extent of his vanity, for they are full of detail about his hair, weight, clothes etc. But they also show, according to one modern writer ‘a total lack of intellectual and spiritual interests’ - ‘to every historian’s despair’.

Brezhnev was born on 19 December 1906 in Kamianske, Ukraine, to a metalworker and his wife. He studied at the metallurgical institute in Dniprodzerzhynsk (now Kamianske). In 1928, he married Viktoria Petrovna, and they had two children. After graduating in 1935, he worked as an engineer and director of a technical school, but also he began to hold positions in the local branch of the Communist party. Having survived Stalin’s various purges, in 1939, he was appointed Party Secretary in Dnipropetrovsk, and put in charge of the city’s defence industries.

During the Second World War, Brezhnev served as a political commissar in the Red Army, progressing steadily to become a major general in 1943, and head of the political commissars on the Ukrainian front. On leaving the army in 1946, he returned to high level party positions, gaining national prominence in 1950 when elected as first secretary of the Central Committee of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Two years later he was in Moscow, serving under Stalin in the powerful Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

With Stalin’s death in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to First Secretary of the Central Committee, Brezhnev was sidelined, and posted to lower positions, first in the ministry of defence and then in the Central Committee of the Kazakh Republic. However, his administrative skills won him a recall to Moscow and membership of the Politburo. In 1960, he was promoted to the post of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, nominally head of state. In 1964, he resigned that post to become Kruschev’s assistant as Second Secretary. By this time, however, having been loyal to Khrushchev, Brezhnev had begun to side with those criticising his leadership, and may even have led to plot to remove him. Brezhnev took over as First Secretary (subsequently General Secretary) of the Communist Party later that same year.

Brezhnev’s early years as head of the Soviet Union were characterised by collective leadership: he left many affairs of state to colleagues, Aleksey Kosygin and Nikolay Podgorny, while he took charge of measures to control dissidence, through the Soviet Union, and travelled extensively aiming for more solidarity among the Union’s republics and its partners in East Europe. However, when Czechoslovakia tried to liberalise its Communist system in 1968, Brezhnev developed what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, justifying the invasion of Czechoslovakia by its Warsaw Pact partners. His leadership, in fact, would later be characterised by a massive build-up of nuclear arms, at a great cost to the country’s economy.

During the 1970s, Brezhnev sought to ease tensions with the West, especially the United States, while, at the same time, consolidating his own power base at home, diminishing the effect of collective leadership. He negotiated various weapons agreements with the US, culminating with SALT II in 1979 - although the US chose not to ratify it because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In his latter years, Brezhnev’s vanity led to a growing personality cult (he was obsessed with being awarded medals); and there was a marked deterioration in his health. By early 1982, he was rarely appearing in public, and was no more than a figurehead with decisions being made in the Politburo without his presence. He died in November that year. Further information is available form Wikipedia, Encyclopedia of World Biography, Encyclopædia Britannica, Spartacus, or Country Studies (Library of Congress).

Although Brezhnev kept diaries, there have been no published editions in English (possibly not in Russian either). Their existence first came to light in the 1990s when Dmitri Volkogonov, a Russian historian who had been head of the Soviet military’s psychological warfare department, published extracts in a Russian magazine called Top Secret. The US magazine, Newsweek, ran a brief item about that article, which is worth quoting in full:

‘BREZHNEV: DIARY OF A DULLARD
BOMBS, SHMOMBS . . . what’s for lunch? Such were the thoughts that drove the leader of the Evil Empire at the height of the cold war. A newly published diary underlines the astonishingly pedestrian mind of Leonid Brezhnev, the burly Soviet leader derided by Russians for his senility and corruption. “Was home at the dacha. Had lunch - borscht with fresh cabbage. Rested in the yard, finished reading material. Watched hockey game - USSR-Sweden, 4-2,” Brezhnev recorded on April 10, 1977, just days after Moscow rejected an important U.S. arms-control proposal. Then came the most exciting part: “Watched evening news. Had dinner, went to bed.” Is it more - or less - scary to learn what the Soviet leader was really like? While Brezhnev faithfully recorded the monthly changes in his weight (ranging from 179 to 182 pounds), policy matters received only fleeting attention. “Talked to [Supreme Soviet Chairman Nikolai] Podgorny about soccer and hockey and a little bit about the constitution,” Brezhnev recorded months before a new Soviet Constitution was passed in 1977. The combined talents of Woody Allen and Nikolai Gogol probably couldn’t have produced a less significant historical document. The diary marks such high points of Brezhnev’s final years as a hunting trip on which he “killed 34 geese,” a visit to the circus and a game of dominoes with Podgorny. A more typical entry reads, “I didn't go anywhere. No one called. In the morning I had my hair cut, shaved and washed my hair.” Says historian Dmitry Volkogonov, who published excerpts from the diary in Top Secret weekly: “When I read this I was sorry for Brezhnev, but I was sorrier for the great nation he led.” ’

Volkogonov also makes mention of Brezhnev’s diaries in his biography of Lenin. This was translated into English, edited by Harold Shukman and published by The Free Press in 1994 as Lenin: A New Biography. Brezhnev wrote his diary every day, Volkogonov says, between ten and twenty lines, in a flowing, sweeping hand. And he gives a series of examples, as follows:

10 April 1077
‘Was at the dacha, had lunch. Borshch made with fresh cabbage Rested went outside read some papers. Watched hockey USR Sweden - USR won 4-2. Watched “programme vremya [Time]” Had dinner - sleep.’

21 January 1977
‘Rested at home for first half of the day lunched at home. Weight 85.200 Second half worked in Kremlin Signed PB [Politburo] minutes of 20 January. Bogolyubov reported . . .’

16 February 1977
‘Work at the house.’

18 March 1977
‘Exercise. Then talked to Chernenko. Then with C[omrades] Gromyko A.A., Andropov Ustinov - we read materials about Vance’s visit - Rang Pavlov G.S. on cost [next word started and crossed out] Read all kinds of material with Galya Dorishina Went to the circus.’

13 April 1977
‘Morning usual domestic chores. They took blood from a vein From 11 o’clock conversation with Daoud Question of one-to-one meeting dropped Had good rest - (lunch) Worked with Doroshina.’

14 April 1977
‘At home - Tolya washed my hair Weight 86.700 Talks with Podgorny about presenting me with Koms, card Presentation of Komsomol card No. 1 speech by Tyazhelnikov my speech Galya read serial from ‘pravda’ on limitation of strategic arms Who are the authors of this material Lunch and rest 2.30-4.10’

15 April 1977
‘Zavidovo 4 ducks - 33rd wild boar - 21- dragged’

22 April 1977
’86.400 Five o’clock meeting devoted to his [Lenin’s] birthday Talked with Grishin Gromyko Chernenko Doroshina

23-24 April 1977
‘Days off’

3 May 1977
‘Weight - 85.300. Talk with Ryabenko. Talk on phone with Storozhev? I know what he wants. Talk with Chernenko K.U.-? About PB agenda Tailors - gave the grey suit, got the leather double-breasted casual jacket Rang Yu.V. Andropov - he came and we chatted Worked with Doroshina’

3 June 1977
‘Received Chernenko - signed minutes worked with Galya Doroshina Rest - flew to Zavidovo - 5 boars.’

Volkogonov’s text (in the Lenin biography) continues: ‘And so it goes on [. . .] The diary meanders in this way for hundreds of pages. [. . .] The important point is that the Leninist system of the monopoly of power facilitated and even favoured the promotion of colourless, mediocre and semi-literate people, whose intellectual potential was only half-developed. Everyone knew it, and it suited almost everyone.’ He concludes: ‘Brezhnev’s pathetic diary only arouses one’s pity for the country.’

More recently, other writers have echoed Volkogonov’s assessment of Brezhnev’s diaries. Edwin Bacon, in his essay Reconsidering Brezhnev (found in Brezhnev Reconsidered, edited by Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle, published by Palsgrave Macmillan in 2002), says: ‘The late Russian historian Dmitrii Volkogonov had access to the diaries of Leonid Brezhnev in the 1990s, and notes the mundanity of their content, and Brezhnev’s apparent obsession with minor, personal issues, rather than the great issues of state.’ Bacon quotes two extracts form Brezhnev’s diaries:

16 May 1976
‘Went nowhere - rang no one, likewise no one me - haircut, shaved and washed hair in the morning. Walked a bit during the day, then watched Central Army lose to Spartak (the lads played well) . . . 7 August. 19th day of holiday. Swam in sea 1.30 - massage pool 30 minutes. Washed head - with children’s soap . . .’

16 June 1977
’86.00 [kilograms]. 10 a.m. Supreme Soviet session. Appointment of Com. Brezhnev as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (a lot of congratulations).’

And, finally, Vladislav M. Zubok in his book A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), states: ‘Along with many young Communists of the 1930s, Brezhnev acquired the habit of keeping a diary to raise his intellectual level. The diary’s content, however, reveals a total lack of intellectual and spiritual interests. To every historian’s despair, Brezhnev recorded mostly routine and banal events of his private life.’

The general emptiness

‘This life is nomadic, cold, transient, disordered. We are getting used to just hoping for the best. That wheezing accordion underscores the general emptiness. The cold click of a rifle bolt. Wind outside the window. Dreams and drifting snow.’ This is from the diary of Ivan Chistyakov, a cultivated Muscovite who was conscripted into Stalin’s army of internal troops and sent to guard forced labourers in the remote far eastern region of the Soviet Union. The diary has been translated by Arch Tait and is just published in the UK by Granta as The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard.

Very little is known about Chistyakov. It is likely he was born at the very beginning of the 20th century. He lived in Moscow, not far from Sadovo-Kudrinkskaya Square on the inner ring road, and probably had some secondary education, may even have been an engineer. He took the tram to work, went to the theatre, played sport and enjoyed sketching - all details drawn from his later diary. During one of the extensive purges, he was expelled from the Communist Party in the late 1920s or early 1930s.

In 1935, Chistyakov was conscripted into the army, the internal troops, and sent to a so-called Gulag camp - Baikal-Amur Corrective Labour Camp or BAMLag - in the remote region around Svobodny, very roughly 5,000km east of Moscow and a 1,000 km north of Vladivostok. There he was given command of an armed guard platoon on a section of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) railway being built with forced labour under the direction of GULag, the State Directorate of Camps of the NKVD (secret police). His platoon was charged with guarding the prisoners (zeks) on their way to work, patrolling the camp perimeter, and catching anyone trying to escape.

The prisoners built the railway in unbelievably severe geographical and climate conditions, in extremes of cold and rainstorms, laying track through untamed land, mountains, rivers, swamps, permafrost. Life was little better for the guards; and for Chistyakov it was a daily nightmare, the severe cold, the lack of a bathhouse, illness, terrible food. Early on, he confided in his diary that he was thinking of committing a minor offence to get himself a conviction. There is very little further information as to what actually happened to him. In 1937 he was arrested, only to be released the following year, and to meet his death during the first months of the war with Germany, in 1941, at the front in Tula Province.

According to Elkost, the international literary agency, ‘it is a miracle that Chistyakov’s diary somehow survived, that it did not fall into the hands of NKVD officials, that it was not discarded and destroyed, and that somebody managed to send it to Moscow.’ Since 1988, the diary has been held by the Memorial International Human Rights Centre in Moscow which collects documents, testimony, memoirs, and letters relevant to the history of political repression in the USSR. Elkost calls the diary a ‘unique historical testimony’ since there are few memoirs ‘written by people outside the barbed wire’. Elkost says it has sold the rights to publish the diary in more than half a dozen countries, as well as to Granta in the UK for worldwide English distribution. Indeed, Granta has just published The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard in the UK, as translated by Arch Tait, with an introduction by Irina Shcherbakova. The book can be previewed at Googlebooks or Amazon. 

Here are several extracts.

6 November 1935
‘The frost is really setting in. Minus 18. I’ve put on my felt boots, a very good invention. We go through another one of our farces, searching the zeks for knives etc. They are so indignant. People need to be able to slice bread, peel potatoes, chop firewood, don’t they? If they had any serious weapons, they certainly wouldn’t store them in the huts. Budnikova (Article 35) rightly protests, and very forcefully. I would have done the same.

I give them a talk in the evening. They listen silently, mistrustful of every word. There is tension whenever we are present. I decide to leave. Budnikova has a way of petulantly kicking off her shoes. They dream of having boots, glance at my leather coat and say, ‘Nice boots that would make up into.”

“I’ll nick silk stockings just for you, but only tell me yes or no,” a baby-faced zek serenades me sarcastically.’

10 November 1935
‘This life is nomadic, cold, transient, disordered. We are getting used to just hoping for the best. That wheezing accordion underscores the general emptiness. The cold click of a rifle bolt. Wind outside the window. Dreams and drifting snow. Accordion wailing, feet beating time. There’s heat from the stove, but as soon as it warms up one side, the other gets cold. A fleeting thought: am I really going to have to put up with this for long? Is life just one perpetual shambles? Why? I want to let everything go hang and just float downstream, but I’d probably get banged up myself. Come on, head, think of something and I’ll buy you a cap!

Alas, the days here are filled with longing and anger, sorrow and shame. Your work is slapdash and you just hope for good luck. It’s degrading. Nobody thinks of us as people; they think of us as platoon commanders and that’s it. Periodically someone calls you a representative of the USSR government. I ‘sadly look back at the life I have lived’ [a line from a popular ballad Sleigh Bells], and kick myself yet again. I have to get out of this place! Think of something, wise up!’

27 November 1935
‘This is how we live: in a cramped room furnished with a trestle bed and straw mattress, a regulation issue blanket, a table with only three out of four legs and a creaky stool with nails you have to hammer back in every day with a brick. A paraffin lamp with a broken glass chimney and lampshade made of newspaper. A shelf made from a plank covered with newspaper. Walls partly bare, partly papered with cement sacks. Sand trickles down from the ceiling and there are chinks in the window frames, door, and gaps in the walls. There’s a wood-burning stove, which, while lit, keeps one side of you warm. The side facing towards the stove is like the South Pole, the side facing away from it is like the North Pole. The amount of wood we burn would make a normal room as warm as a bathhouse, but ours is colder than a changing room.

Will they find me incompetent, not up to the job. and kick me out? Why should I be sacrificed like so many others? You become stultified, primitive, you turn into a bully and so on. You don’t feel you’re developing, either as a commander or a human being. You just get on with it.’

28 November 1935
‘It’s cold outside, it’s cold inside, and it’s cold and cheerless inside me. How can you do a job properly if you have no interest in it and no wish to do it? And why is that? Because you don’t have the bare necessities of life and culture. The top brass don’t even talk about these things. Today we are faced with the fact that there is no firewood. I have to order people about. I don’t need all this. Why does it always turn out this way?

My hands are stiff with cold. Why is no one looking after us commanders? What do all the brave words amount to? If we had even a hundredth of what Voroshilov promised here, on the railway, we would at least have a little hope. All the talk is of The Second Five-Year Plan, Maxim Gorky, Klim Voroshilov. The USSR has unparalleled aeroplanes, but here we don’t have even the bare minimum. Oh, hell! The only consolation is that it was even worse at the front. Some comfort! I sleep under two blankets, a leather coat and a sheepskin jacket.

I just can’t find my place here in the Baikal-Amur Mainline system, probably because it doesn’t exist. It’s different for peasants. They get something out of it, learn new tricks, find out things they didn’t know. All I’m going to learn here is how to be a slob, not give a damn, and not get caught.’

28 March 1936
‘Day greets me with a ray of sunlight on the wall, shining through a crack. I experience a moment of sheer joy, like that sunbeam, then BAM immediately crushes it and our life here falls into even starker contrast. A life of never knowing and . . . can’t come up with a name for it because everything here is just dreadful.

1 Squad have lost it, which is no surprise. They’re stuck out in the forest with none of the amenities human beings need to live, e.g., food for the soul or the mind. They’re out of touch with civilization and have food only for their stomachs, so they end up behaving like animals. Even wolves gather and play together. But us? It is forbidden for two commanders of the same educational level to serve together. What sort of policy is that? They shift you from one place to another saying you were getting too close. We have screwball superiors who couldn’t understand human psychology even if they were allowed to and just demoralize you. I’ll stick it out till autumn, and at the end of September, that’s it! Freedom or jail! I now have one idea for getting discharged - a report or speech at a meeting. I have seven months to think something up. I do want to see the Far East Region in the summer, then I’ll have savoured all the seasons.

Bystrykin, a platoon commander, has TB but doesn’t want to leave. Why? Because for him this life is perfect and he gets fed. For me, it would be hip, hip, hurray!

Golodnyak has arrived. Why have the top brass moved him here? Is it clemency or does he scare them? I got talking to a doctor in the canteen and learned an interesting fact. One of our doctors qualified as a bookkeeper but is said to ‘know about diseases’. How amusing.’

To Bataan and Back

‘Why do the American people at home parade and rejoice in the glory of “all out” war when these poor devils here daily watch the seas and skies for the aid of the US which now appears too late. I have held hope all along for something to happen to get this mess straightened out and, mind you, I still have hope, but the situation is desperate.’ This is from the diary of Thomas Dooley, aide-de-camp to General Wainwright, commander of the Allied forces in the Philippines, on the day the Japanese took Bataan, the last remaining American stronghold in the region. The quote is taken from To Bataan and Back: The World War II Diary of Major Thomas Dooley, being published today by Texas A&M University.

Dooley was born in McKinney, Texas, in 1913. He studied engineering at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M University) - thus he’s often referred to as a Texas Aggie. After graduating in 1935, he signed up early the following year for active duty as a second lieutenant with the US Army, heading a Civilian Conservation Corps for six months. A year with the 2nd Squadron of the 12th Cavalry was followed by jobs in the oil industry. In 1940, he was reactivated for duty, and soon joined the 26th Cavalry in the Philippines, arriving in May 1941.

Dooley was assigned as aide-de-camp to Major General Jonathan M. Wainwright, commander of the Philippine Division, south of Manila. Later in the year, though, Wainwright was named as commander of North Luzon Force, and moved his HQ to Stotsenburg. Early on, Dooley was awarded the Silver Star for actions during the bombing of Clark Field in the Luzon region. He continued to serve with Wainwright through the Corregidor and Bataan campaigns, but was captured and held as prisoner of war for over three years. Following his release, he was a witness to the surrender of the Japanese on board the USS Missouri.

In the midst of bombings, in April 1942, with the Japanese about to overrun the Allies on Corregidor (a small Philippine island off the coast of Bataan), Dooley help compile a list of 25 Aggies on the island, and the artillery commander held an Aggie Muster (a long-standing tradition of the university to pause for a moment and remember and honour the dead). Dooley told a journalist about the muster, and the resulting article received massive coverage in the US, thus forever connecting Dooley to the enduring Aggie tradition.

Dooley remained in the army for the rest of his career, receiving a Distinguished Service Medal, with roles ranging from a Combat Command at Fort Hood, Texas, to a three-year assignment overseeing Fire Support Elements in Naples, Italy; his final positions were Chief of Staff of the Armored Command and Deputy Post Commander at Fort Knox, Kentucky. He died in 2006. There is only limited information about Dooley available on the internet, but he is mentioned on the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets website, on a chat thread at Free Republic, and on the Wikipedia page about the Aggie Muster.

Indeed, it is partly (or even mostly) thanks to Tooley’s role in the Aggie Muster on Corregidor that his diaries came to light, and have now been published - today, in fact, by Texas A&M University Press, as To Bataan and Back: The World War II Diary of Major Thomas Dooley. They were transcribed and edited by Jerry C. Cooper who explains, in his introduction, how he had been seeking permission to use a speech given by Dooley about the muster to the Texas A&M campus, when he asked about the diaries. And, subsequently, the family sent him copies, and agreed to Cooper transcribing, and possibly, publishing them. Following Dooley’s death the six small notebook diaries were turned over to the Texas A&M University Archives.

Texas A&M University Press says: ‘[Tooley’s] journals reveal the inside story of the battles of Bataan and Corregidor and with it the capture, imprisonment, and struggle for survival of tens of thousands of American prisoners of war. Dooley’s journals - dutifully maintained even as he was a prisoner - are at once witty, articulate, stark, and often reflective.’

To Bataan and Back is very handsomely produced with a good number of photographs, maps, glossary and an index. Dooley writes his diary with some flare and humour, but, still, this is largely a book for those interested in the Pacific theatre of WWII. Cooper supplies useful context information in italics through the text (rather than using footnotes), and there is a foreword by Col. James Edwin Ray. Cooper also provides a few facts about Dooley’s life before and after the war, but a more detailed and considered biography would have been useful and interesting. 

Here are a few extracts from Dooley’s diaries - with many thanks to Texas A&M University Press.

11 December 1941
‘Another air raid today. No casualties and little damage done. Casualties on Monday’s raid have been totaled - 82 dead and about 110 wounded. 29 dead were civilians - poor little Carenderas that worked near Batchelors Building. We are getting Jap planes down though. Lots of them are being hit and the Japs toss out equipment to lighten the load so they can get as far back toward their base as possible. Quite a few have been brought down near here though. One plane shot down near Mabalacat (east of Stotsenburg) and Chaplain [Maj. John E] Duffy brought a gun from it to G-2 section. Workmanship crude but they still fire. He reported that natives had buried the pilot and said he was man of larger size than the Chaplain which indicates he was a German. Planes in today’s raid carried Swastika markings. The Nazis have planned and directed the execution of all this. It (especially Monday) was too methodical and timely. My appetite has doubled. For breakfast, even, which prior to “this” consisted of coffee and toast - now consists of fruit, coffee, toast, bacon + eggs and anything else within reach. Am still sleeping like a log when I hit the bunk.’

15 December 1941
‘My intentions are to keep some sort of running account of what goes on in this fracas. Not a diary nor a memorandum, but a cross between the two. I am one week late in getting this poop on the go - that is, it will be one week old in about four hours. My turn came up as Duty Officer from 12:00 midnight to 8:00 a.m. and the routine being very quiet tonight I can get this under way. Corporal Molina, Battery A, 24th Field Artillery (Philippine Scouts) is the Non-Commissioned Officer on duty and he has just shown me a copy of the radiogram signed by General MacArthur saying “a state of war exists between the US and the government of Germany, Japan and Italy”.’

8 April 1942
Bataan fell! [Dooley added this entry in the top margin after recording the event.]
‘A new day which I hope proves to be no worse than yesterday. The II Corps pulled back during the night to a line approximately thru Lumao. All Filipino troops have disintegrated except about one regiment. The I Corps will have to pull back to conform. They (the Nips) continue their bombing of the new areas. These must be some salvation for the Americans on Bataan. Why do the American people at home parade and rejoice in the glory of “all out” war when these poor devils here daily watch the seas and skies for the aid of the US which now appears too late. I have held hope all along for something to happen to get this mess straightened out and, mind you, I still have hope, but the situation is desperate. The reports all day are bad. I took report at 7:00 p.m. which means the end of Bataan. Col. [James V.] Collier called from G-3 Luzon Force and said that Philippine Army troops on right flank of II Corps line had fled and the Japs pouring thru. Proved to be double envelopment as Nips were also coming around II Corps left flank. Col. Irwin (G-3) and Col. Galbraith (G-4) went to Bataan this p.m. with plans for evacuation of certain units to “Rock.” During night Ordnance + Engineers busy destroying ammunition + other such few supplies as need be.

Gen. Wainwright in conference most of day with Chief of Staff Gen. Lewis Beebe (who is quite sound). Gen. Wainwright quite upset. Two days ago Gen. Funk came to “Rock” for Gen. Edward King to say he was going to capitulate. Gen. Wainwright gave two direct orders - one - do not surrender - two - attack with I Corps toward East. Later the second order was modified. Last night when things looked so bad and plans for evacuation of certain units were made and order was given to Gen. (I Corps) to make a frontal attack with his Corps and attack Olongapo. Went to bed about 1:00 p.m. Frank Hewlett, United Press, wanted me to wait up and see the Bataan episode, but I didn’t want to watch it. I feel sick when I think of it and feel that I should be there with them, but I started this war with the General (and before it) and will stay around ’til ordered differently.’

22 December 1942
‘Pretty day - sunshine - Inspection 1:00 p.m. by Jap Quartermaster general. Breakfast + dinner - no good. Supper better - some gabi today - bridge - Gen. Wainwright sent Xmas greetings to English + Dutch. Choir + octette practice. Thoughts of home at this time make me ache.’

17 January 1943
‘Been here 5 months today. Today is memorable in that we had tripe for supper (in the soup). B.P. went down and made the arrangements at the slaughter house where they are killing beef for the Japanese army. He got for us the heart, liver, and stomach of the beef. We had tripe at supper and promise of heart, liver, + kidney for breakfast. “Edible awful” is the term some applied to our meal. Other than that the day was uneventful with inspection and church in a.m. and bridge in p.m. A cold day.’

14 April 1943
‘Distribution of Corned beef from the Red Cross started today. For first month we will receive 3 oz. corned beef per day; 1# sugar per week. We will get 1/2# cocoa + 1# salt per month. The Corned beef is Argentine beef and is wonderful. This small amount of Red Cross real food is remarkably raising the morale of everyone.’

Nothing to fear from the Soviets

Juho Kusti Paasikivi, the Finnish statesman who successfully guided his country towards peaceful relations with its much bigger and more powerful neighbour, the Soviet Union, died 60 years ago today. His diaries have been published in Finnish, but no translation exists in English. However, a few translated extracts can be found in history or biography volumes, such as Containing Coexistence: America, Russia, and the “Finnish Solution’, which, in fact, opens with a quotation from Paasikivi’s diary.

Johan Gustaf Hellsten was born in 1870 in the Häme region of central Finland, though he was brought up further south in Lahti. His mother died when he was four, and his father when he was 14, whereupon he was looked after by an aunt. He was educated at one of the first schools founded by the Fennomans (Finnish nationalist movement), and, in 1885, he Finnicised his name to Juho Kusti Paasikivi. He went on to study history at the Imperial Alexander University, focussing on Russian history and language, graduating in 1892, thereafter switching to law for postgraduate studies. Paasikivi achieved his masters in law in 1897 and, in the same year, married Anna Forsman. They had four children.

Paasikivi completed his doctoral thesis in 1902, and became an associate professor at the university. The following year, though, he was appointed director general at the state treasury of, what was still, the Grand Duchy of Finland, a position he kept until he resigned in 1914. From 1907 to 1913, with a short gap, he was also a Finnish Party member of parliament. Eschewing the direction of the Finnish Party politics, he took over as president of KOP bank, piloting the company, within the newly independent Finland over the next 20 years, to one of the country’s most successful. After the death of his wife, in 1931, he resigned his position at the bank, and returned to politics, as head of the right-wing National Coalition Party, successfully steering it away from radical right wing policies. In 1934, he married Allina Valve.

Having stepped down as chairman of the National Coalition Party, Paasikivi was persuaded to take the important diplomatic role of ambassador to Sweden. During the war years, he was brought into government as a kind of political adviser; and his negotiations with the Soviet Union (Finland and the Soviet Union were at war for much of the 1939-1944 period) brought him much respect both in Moscow and in Helsinki. Immediately after the war, in 1944, he was appointed prime minister. He brought a radically different kind of politics to the country, based on wanting a peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union. In 1946, he became Finland’s seventh president, holding that position until 1956. He died later that same year, on 14 December. Further biographical information is available at Wikipedia, National Biography of Finland or the University of Helsinki.

Paasikivi kept diaries for most of his life. These were edited by Yrjo Blomstedt and Matti Klinge and published in 1985 in two volumes as Paasikiven paivakirjat, 1944-1956 (Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö, 1985). However, as far as I can tell, there is no English translation. A few snippets from the diaries appear in translation here and there, in biographies and/or history books, such as Containing Coexistence: America, Russia, and the “Finnish Solution” by Jussi M. Hanhimaki (Kent State University Press, 1997).

Containing Coexistence is the first full-scale study of Finland’s role in Soviet-American relations during the onset of the cold war, says the publisher. For the book, Hanhimaki drew on a wide range of multinational source material, including newly released archival materials, employing a comparative approach interrelating American, British, Finnish, Russian, and Swedish perspectives. Containing Coexistence will be of interest, the publisher claims, to historians and political scientists as well as to any scholar interested in American and Soviet foreign policies during the cold war, post-World War II international relations, or twentieth-century European history.

The following extracts from Paasikivi’s diary are quoted below in the context of the Hanhimaki’s narrative.

[Opening paragraph]
‘When Juho Kusti Paasikivi sat down to write in his diary on September 2, 1944, he was angry. “Our foreign policy has not been led with brains, but with buttocks,” the seventy-four-year-old conservative banker, politician, and former prime minister complained. “We should never have joined this war,” he added, accusing both the wartime leaders and the newly appointed president, Marshall C. G. E. Mannerheim, of shortsightedness and incompetence in handling Finnish foreign policy. The worst sin, Paasikivi would argue repeatedly in private conversations and public speeches until his retirement from Finnish political life in early 1956, had been to ignore the geopolitical realities of Finland’s position, that is, the country’s proximity to the Soviet Union. Such neglect had, according to Paasikivi, led to such recent disasters as the 1939-40 Winter War and Finland’s cobelligerency with Nazi Germany in 1941-44. This, he added, had led Finland to the brink of collapse by the fall of 1944 when Soviet occupation appeared imminent.’

[Page 91]
‘Paasikivi was also annoyed by Kekkonen’s decision to launch an active run for the presidency, complaining frequently about Kekkonen’s “American style” of campaigning in late 1949 and early 1950. “A president’s most important qualities are not talent in speech writing and propaganda, but wisdom and experience,” Paasikivi sarcastically remarked in his diary. For Kekkonen, however, the 1950 presidential campaign was a good opportunity to make his name more widely known to the general Finnish public, which payed dividends six years later.’

[Page 136]
‘By late 1955 Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the leader of the Soviet Union. But despite Khrushchev’s eventual success the days of undisputed one-man rule were over as a new era dawned in Soviet history in the spring of 1953. “We shall see how this affects our relationship with the Soviet Union and our general position in the world,” President Paasikivi wrote in his diary on March 4, 1953. It was to have a major impact in both respects.’

[Page 164]
‘Relieved [. . . ] had not meant a shift in Soviet attitudes toward Finland, Paasikivi wrote in his diary on July 29, 1954, “This proves that our relations with the Soviet Union are still good and we have nothing to fear from the Soviets.”  At the same time, however, Paasikivi was concerned about “the loss of good will in the U.S.” toward Finland.’

[Page 174]
‘That Finland was left to fight its internal battles without outside interference became clear during the Kemi strikes of August 1949. In this lumber town located at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia the Communist-dominated lumberjacks’ union began a strike on August 18. President Paasikivi had no sympathy for and few illusions about this labor action. He interpreted it as a communist effort to bounce back from the losses they had suffered in Finnish internal politics since the spring of 1948. As Paasikivi noted in his diary on August 18, 1949, “The Communists seem to want to regain their position of power and become dominant in Finland.” Paasikivi, however, trusted the Fagerholm government, which controlled a large part of the labor movement through the Social Democratic party, to have the ability to neutralize the strikes. Accordingly, Prime Minister Fagerholm declared that the strike was illegal and authorized the local police to break up the picket lines. On the same day, however, a riot ensued between the strikers and the local police; shots were fired, and one striker was killed. Paasikivi ordered a general alert of the armed forces; the government sent army troops to Kemi and arrested twenty-two leading activists. Meanwhile, the violence propelled a series of sympathy strikes around the country by other Communist-dominated labor unions such as the harbor workers and many metal union workers.’

A giant of Japanese literature

Natsume Soseki, one of the greatest and most important novelists of modern Japan, died a century ago today - events celebrating this anniversary in Japan are ongoing, not least the unveiling of a Soseki android! By contrast he is little known in the West, although he did, in fact, spend two years in the UK, and, on returning to Japan, became a leading scholar in English literature. Two diaries he kept while in London were put on display recently as part of an exhibition of his life and works. However, there are no published editions of his 12 diaries, and only occasional references to them in various biographies.

So seki was born in the Edo region of Japan (now Tokyo) in 1867, but his parents, with five older children already, gave him up for adoption to a childless couple. That couple looked after him until they divorced, when Soseki was 9, and he was returned to his parents. His mother died a few years later. In 1884, he entered Tokyo Imperial University with the intention of studying to become architecture, but, encouraged by his friend Masaoka Shiki, he became increasingly interested in literature, switching to the English literature department in 1890. On graduating, he continued to study but also teaching part time. In 1895, he left Tokyo to teach in Ehime and then in Kumamoto. In 1896, he married Kyoko, who gave birth to their first daughter in 1899; they would have five more but one would die very young.

From 1900 to 1902, Soseki lived in London - one of the first government-sponsored scholars to be sent abroad - attending lectures at University College (UCL) and doing research that would lead later to his Japanese monographs (Theory of Literature in 1907, and Literary Criticism in 1909). From 1903 to 1907, he was back in Tokyo, teaching at the university; however, he was also writing poetry and literary sketches for magazines, and producing his first novels, such as I am a Cat, Little Master (Botchan), and Grass Pillow. His literary reputation grew rapidly, and by 1907 he was able to give up teaching and become a professional novelist.

The Embassy of Japan in London has this assessment of why Soseki is important in Japan today: ‘Many of the novels of Soseki analyse the human psychology in depth, such as jealousy and love, or loneliness and friendship, so they are applicable even today. At the same time, the very clear style of his prose is now considered the standard for the modern Japanese language. In addition, he pointed out the need for the Japanese people to establish a sense of “individualism”, while at the same time being critical of the tendency toward the superficial “Westernisation” (meaning modernisation) of Japanese society. Such assertions and criticisms are still considered relevant for Japanese society and its people today.’

In 1909, Soseki travelled to Manchuria and Korea. The following year he was hospitalised for the first time with stomach problems, but continued writing, completing one or two more works (such as Kokoro, Grass on the Wayside) each year until his death - on 9 December 1916. According to The Japan Times, events to celebrate this 100th anniversary have been ongoing in Japan throughout 1916 (a university has even unveiled a Soseki android!), and will continue in 2017 with celebrations for the 150th anniversary of his birth. Indeed, The Japan Times begins a long article on Soseki as follows: ‘Fascination twinned with veneration of Soseki is exceptionally high in Japan. The Asahi newspaper has been serializing installments of his novels on a daily basis for several years, while a new Soseki museum is scheduled to open next year in the Tokyo district of Shinjuku, where the writer once lived. On television, meanwhile, a drama series titled “Soseki’s Wife” has attempted to show the revered author from his spouse’s perspective. By a considerable margin, Soseki is the most analyzed Japanese author in modern literature. Hundreds upon hundreds of books have been written about him and thousands upon thousands of academic papers published.’

There is some further information about Soseki at Wikipedia, The New World Encyclopedia or Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some translations of his works can be found at Internet Archive (Botchan, for example), and a 1957 translation of Kokoro can be read at ibiblio.

There appear to be twelve extant volumes of diaries kept by Soseki (see this librarians 1978 workshop report), and held by the Natsume Soseki Collection at Tohoku University Library. As far as I can tell, these have not been published in Japanese, and certainly not in translation. Donald Keene, writing in Rethinking Japan Vol 1: Literature, Visual Arts & Linguistics (Routledge, 2014), says he finds the diaries of Natsume Soseki ‘especially disagreeable’, but without further explanation.

In late 2013, UCL Library Services and Tohoku University Library held a collaborative exhibition in London - Natsume Sōseki, the Greatest Novelist in Modern Japan - to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of UK-Japan Academic Interaction. Some artefacts from this were then put on display by the Embassy of Japan in early 2014. Both exhibitions included the two diaries written in London - named as Diary of Drifting across the Sea and Diary from England in 1901. According to the Embassy of Japan: ‘These diaries are extremely important academic source materials, not only because they describe his student life but also because they contain a number of his unique thoughts on the difference between the Japanese and British societies from his own viewpoint of  civilisation theory.’

A brochure to accompany the UCL exhibition is freely available online, and contains photographs of the diaries, as well as translated quotes from each, as follows.

12 September 1900
‘When waking from a dream, I am far away from my familiar mountains. The vast and limitless ocean surrounds me.’

28 October 1900
‘Left Paris for London. There was a hard and bitter wind on board. I arrived at London in the evening.’

23 January 1901 [Queen Victoria had died the previous day]
‘Flags are hoisted at half-mast. All the town is in mourning. I, a foreign subject, also wear a black-necktie to show my respectful sympathy. “The new century has opened rather inauspiciously,” said the shopman off whom I bought a pair of black gloves this morning.’

Otherwise, various biographies of Soseki make occasional reference to his diaries.

The following two extracts are taken from Reflections in a Glass Door: memory and melancholy in the personal writings of Natsume Sōseki by Marvin Marcus (University of Hawaii Press, 2009).

18 July 1909
‘Oppressive heat. Daughters running all over the house, totally naked. Not a normal thing to do, the heat notwithstanding. The master of the house goes about writing his fiction, surrounded by barbarians.’

8 December 1911
‘This morning, my wife accuses me of being totally antisocial. “People come over for Hinakos wake, and you tell them not to bother, that they should just go home. Well, when I die, be sure not to plan any wake for me.” “But in that case the mice will come out in the middle of the night and gnaw at the tip of your nose.” “Fine with me - the pain would bring me back to life!” ’

And the following extract is taken from Chaos and Order in the Works of Natsume Soseki by Angela Yiu (University of Hawaii Press, 1998)

1911
‘I carried my manuscript with me as notes. My stomach has been troubling me since yesterday, but since this is the last of the lectures, I took some medication and tried to hold out. My lecture was followed by Honda Setsudos “The Fundamental Problems in Finance and Economics” and Ishibashi Hakuyo’s “The Revision of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.” The series ended at twenty past eleven. (There were four thousand seven hundred or eight hundred people in the audience, including fifty women. Since it was so packed, admission was restricted three times, and after seven o’clock no one else was allowed in the hall.) Staying in the Shiunro, despite not having eaten anything, I vomited blood.’ [Subsequently, Soseki was hospitalised again]

Of Thee I Sing

‘Evening we were too tired to go to the Kit-Cat Club where a “George Gershwin Night” was on, so stayed in hotel & played 21.’ This is from a diary kept by Ira Gershwin, the American lyricist born 120 years ago today, while in London on a three month tour with his brother, George. The two brothers, famously, produced some of the most memorable musical hits of the 1920s and 1930s, not least Porgy and Bess, and Ira was the first lyricist to win a Pulitzer Prize - for Of Thee I Sing. There is not much information about Ira’s (few) diaries, but they are held by a charitable trust in San Francisco, and, though accessible to biographers, have never been published.

Israel Gershowitz was born on 6 December 1896 in the Yiddish Theater District of New York City, and was the oldest of four children. His father changed the family name to Gershwine (which later became Gershwin). He attended City College but dropped out, and worked as a cashier in the local Turkish baths. His younger brother, George, was already composing and ‘plugging’ (piano playing in stores selling sheet music) in Tin Pan Alley, when Ira, prompted by George, first became involved in the music business. Initially, he wrote lyrics under a pseudonym so as not to be seen as trading off his brother’s growing reputation. Very soon, though, the brothers were collaborating on their first musical - A Dangerous Maid.

In 1924, Ira and George wrote their first musical for Broadway - Lady, Be Good - which starred Fred and Adele Astaire and ran for 330 performances, transferring later to the West End in London. In 1926, Ira married Leonore Strunsky, and around the same time the brothers decided to live together in a large Manhattan house; this became a kind of artistic and musical hub of creativity. However, after a while, Ira moved to a farm north of the city, and at times George would join him there to work and collaborate. Through the 1920s and 1930s, they wrote music for a dozen successful shows as well as four films, and produced many hits, not least Tip Toes, Oh, Kay, and Funny Face.

In 1932, Gershwin, along with George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Of Thee I Sing. And, in 1935, Ira and George collaborated on Porgy and Bess, a box office failure, but considered by some to be Ira’s best work. Following George’s sudden death in 1937, Ira stepped back from writing for the best part of three years. Thereafter, though, and through the 1940s and into the 1950s, he teamed up with other composers - Jerome Kerm, Harold Arlen and Kurt Weill - writing the lyrics for many notable scores. In his latter years, he mentored several aspiring musicians, and collated and annotated much of his and his brother’s legacy before donating it to the Library of Congress. He died in 1986. More biographical information is available from Gershwin Fan, Wikipedia, George & Ira Gershwin or Bio.com.

Ira Gershwin must have kept a few diaries as they are quoted occasionally in biographies, in particular by Deena Rosenberg in Fascinating Rhythm: The Collaboration of George and Ira Gershwin (1991, University of Michigan Press). Rosenberg’s reference notes lists the Ira Gershwin Archive (IGA) - a collection of scrapbooks and clippings - as the source for diary quotations, and that ‘at present’ the IGA was still housed in Gershwin’s house in Beverly Hills, California. However, a few years earlier, in 1987, the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts (ILGT) were established. When Lenore (Lee) died in 1991, her nephew, Michael Strunsky became much more involved in the Ira Gershwin estate - Trustee of the estate itself and of the two Trusts. In 2000, the organisations - and presumably all the archives - were moved from Beverly Hills to new quarters in downtown San Francisco. Some years later, in 2007, the ILGT began publishing Words Without Music - The Ira Gershwin Newsletter.

In the newsletter’s second edition, also in 2007, the managing editor, Michael Owen published two extracts from a diary Ira Gershwin kept during his three-month trip to Europe (with his wife, George and their young sister Frankie), ‘reviving a habit he had begun in 1916’. Here is the first extract:

22 March 1928
‘Up at 12. To the Embassy Club with Lee to meet Guy Bolton for lunch. My lunch very nice, too - smoked salmon (everybody eats smoked salmon here), filet of sole marguery, curried veal with chutney, coffee, wine, cake (cocktail & beer). The club was crowded with a lot of important looking men, mostly over 40 and a lot of young women. At the next table to us sat Arnold Bennett, Frederick Lonsdale & 3 other men. After lunch walked Guy down Piccadilly to the theatre where his “Blue Eyes” is rehearsing. Dropped in for a minute, saw John Harwood. Then to Anderson & Sheppard for fittings. Visited some other shops. Evening we were too tired to go to the Kit-Cat Club where a “George Gershwin Night” was on, so stayed in hotel & played 21 with Phil [Berman] & Leo [Robin], losing about £4. Frankie came in about 3 & told us both “This Year of Grace,” the Noël Coward revue opening to-night, & the Kit-Cat affair were great successes. The weather was lovely again to-day & it’s too bad we don’t get up earlier in the morning to do some sight-seeing. Changed $200 worth more of American Express checks to-day making 5 in all.’

As far as I can tell, though, the ILGT has not published any further information about Ira Gershwin’s diaries anywhere on its extensive website; and I haven’t been able to find anywhere online (or in biographies) a list or inventory of diary material Gershwin left behind. Nevertheless, here are several more extracts from the diaries as found in Rosenberg’s book Fascinating Rhythm (in the context of her text).

- ‘Ira read incessantly. The first book he remembered apart from school primers was a nickel novel. “That thin publication with its bright lithographed cover had a tremendous fascination,” he wrote in his diary in 1916. “Sitting by the warm stove, huddled in a chair, I read the marvelous adventures of Young Wild West, his sweetheart, his friends, and all about the claimjumpers on whom he finally and completely turned the tables. I read and reread it at least half a dozen times.” ’

- ‘Meanwhile, Ira enrolled as an English major at the City College of New York in 1914, and his omnivorous reading continued. “Everytime I had a dollar or two to spare,” he recalled, ‘‘I would walk from Second Avenue and Seventh Street to the old Dutton bookshop on 23rd Street to buy various volumes in the catalogue of Everyman’s Library. (Most of the classics - hard linen covers - were only 34 cents.)” He also read twentieth-century fiction and drama; his special favorites were Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, and Theodore Dreiser - in Dreiser’s case, at least in part because of his assaults on the constraints of a still-Victorian culture. “Altogether a great novel,” the twenty-year-old Ira noted in his diary after reading Dreiser’s The Genius, “not one for anaemic individuals, for prudes, for those who dislike anything but the conventional clap-trap of sweet young things by sweet old things.” ’

- ‘Ira was also drawn to the lively writers in the American popular press. During the early decades of this century, some American journalism was characterized by a high degree of literacy, intelligence, and humor. Essays, poems, short stories, and even novels flowed from the pens of a richly endowed generation into newspapers and magazines. “The Tribune Sunday Magazine is without a doubt the cleverest newspaper I have ever seen, with delightful drawings and smart literary sketches,” Ira noted in his diary in 1916. “It combines the wit of Life, chic drawings and sketches of Vanity Fair and Smart Set - and let us not forget the literary New Republic. The daily Tribune (bless its progressive soul!) I could hardly do without. F.P.A. very interesting, Heywood Broun, theatrical critic, delightful, Briggs, artist, human and humorous, S. H. Adams, “Advisor” column, fine editorials full of firm convictions, be they right or wrong, ever forceful, and on literary topics, ever instructive and entertaining.” ’

- ‘For Ira as well as George, Kern’s Princess Theater shows were a revelation. On January 15, 1917, he wrote in his diary: “Love O’ Mike: Kern music, with Harry B. Smith lyrics. Music and lyrics good. Book slow but many originalities. 1st - atmosphere of a house party was sustained throughout by having only young people in the cast (6 and 6) with college boy’s jealousies, etc.; no roues, biases, or mundanes. No chorus. Ira’s first first night.” ’

- ‘Ira kept close track of George’s career. He wrote in his diary on May 21, 1918: “George played Baltimore, Boston, and Washington with Louise Dresser. As yet his firm has printed nothing of his although 4 or 5 of his numbers have been filed away for use when opportunity presents. At present he is rehearsal pianist at the New Amsterdam Roof Garden where the 1918 Ziegfeld Lollies is in preparation.” ’

- ‘Ira still spent a lot of his free time “drawing, reading at the Ottendorfer branch of the Public Library, going to the movies,” supporting himself through a series of odd jobs such as cashier at B. Altman’s department store and business manager for his cousin’s touring carnival show. At twenty-one, he considered himself a “floating soul,” unsure where he would land. Meanwhile, he kept up his diary, taking note of a wide variety of matters that would become useful later on. For instance, Ira used entertainment events to observe human behavior: “The movies and their audience,” he wrote in 1918, “are a good means of studying. Yes. Psychology, ethics, fashions, manner. Manners. Would be’s. Have beens. Never weres. Can’t be’s. Impossibles. And here and there an occasional Is and Are.” ’

- ‘As always, the Gershwins met assorted luminaries. On May 30, 1928, Ira wrote in his diary: “After dinner we drove to Dushkin’s  [the eminent violinist], 160 Rue de l’Université, where was a musical party - a Concerto for two violins by Bach, then Vladimir Horowitz played, then George. Nice formal people there and a nice formal party. Later Horowitz played his study on Carmen, a marvelous technical accomplishment. Dushkin also played [George’s] Short Story and Blue Interlude accompanied by George.’’ ’

Rubicund, serene, puffing

A century ago today saw the resignation, amid high political drama, of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. He had been the UK’s leader for more than eight years (having taken over from Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman who resigned because of ill-health), first as head of a Liberal government with a very slim majority, and then as head of war coalition government. However, he was forced to step down, and his rival Liberal David Lloyd George took over as Prime Minister to lead a coalition with a cabinet dominated by Conservatives. Wikipedia’s biography of Asquith gives a day-by-day account of what happened prior to, and on the day of, his resignation.

But, for a more personal view of events that day, 100 years ago, it is worth revisiting the diaries of Lady Cynthia Asquith, wife of Asquith’s second son Herbert - see Heartbreaking day for more about Lady Cynthia and her diaries. On that ‘historic’ night, she was dining at 10 Downing Street, and sat next to the Prime Minister, who was ‘rubicund, serene, puffing a guinea cigar’ and talking of going to Honolulu, while his wife, Margot, looked ‘ghastly ill - distraught’. The diary extract below comes from a 1987 Century Hutchinson reprint of The Diaries of Lady Cynthia Asquith 1915-1918 (originally published by Hutchinson in 1968).

5 December 1916
‘Lunched Bluetooth - he was very sad about Bron and perturbed about political situation. He seemed still to hope that the P.M.’s resignation might be averted. He said, rather reproachfully, that Montagu had secured his position with both parties. He twitted me again with my (according to him) reputed incapacity for loose talk.

I was dining early with Oc for his last night, but he telephoned to say dinner was postponed until 8.45 as the P.M. was in after all and the theatre was abandoned. It was great luck for me to dine at Downing Street on so historic a night. The atmosphere was most electric. The P.M. had sent in his resignation at 7.30 - a fact I was unaware of when I arrived and only gradually twigged. Oc, the Crewes, Eddie, Cis, and Elizabeth and Margot were dining.

I sat next to the P.M. - he was too darling - rubicund, serene, puffing a guinea cigar (a gift from Maud Cunard), and talking of going to Honolulu. His conversation was as irrelevant to his life as ever. Our subjects were my mandrill riddle (which Beb had told to a startled party the other day), and this wonderful brand of cigars. I asked for one to give Beb for Christmas and he gave it to me. Cis afterwards offered me ten shillings for it. I had a great accès of tenderness for the P.M. He was so serene and dignified. Poor Margot on the other hand looked ghastly ill - distraught (no doubt she was, as she always claims, ‘rumbling’) - and was imprecating in hoarse whispers, blackguarding Lloyd George and Northcliffe.

When we first came out Elizabeth, Lady Crewe and I had an à trois - Margot joined us. When the men came out she, Mr Asquith and the Crewes played bridge. Violet came in, bringing with her Mr Norton and Sir Ian Hamilton - the latter to say goodbye to Oc. Of course, the whole evening was spent in conjecture and discussion - most interesting. I tried to absorb as much as I could, but I am not quick about politics. I gathered that, before dinner, Mr Asquith had said he thought there was quite a chance of Lloyd George failing to form a Government at all. The Tories - in urging him to resign - had predicted such a failure. In any case, most people seemed to think that any Government he could succeed in forming would only be very short-lived. Of course Lloyd George would greatly prefer Bonar to be Prime Minister, in order himself to avoid incurring the odium of responsibility. The King had sent for Bonar but, of course, it would be very difficult for him to accept the office on the terms which had made Asquith resign it. The King is alleged to be very terribly distressed and to have said, ‘I shall resign if Asquith does’. The prospective attitude of the Liberal ministers was discussed. Everyone was convinced that not one of them would take office under Lloyd George, with the possible exception of Montagu. Bluetooth had assured me that the latter would, but nearly all the Asquith family repudiated the idea. George had been a very wily, foxy cad, and the Government whips must have been very bad, as apparently the P.M. was very much taken by surprise.

It had been a well-managed plot. According to Margot and others, Northcliffe has been to Lloyd George’s house every day since the beginning of the war, the imputation being that George feeds him with Cabinet information, telling him the next item of the Government programme, so that he is able to start a Press agitation, and thus gain the reputation of pushing the Government into their independently determined course of action. It was said that the F.O. was really Lloyd George’s ambition, and during the last weeks he has been going to the Berlitz School and reading histories of the Balkans. I believe the French like him, but he is loathed in Russia and Italy. He has had to cart Winston - whose exclusion was, I believe, one of Bonar’s conditions. Certainly one cannot imagine a crazier executive titan George, Carson, and Bonar, Of course, it would virtually be only George.

Was it my last dinner at Downing Street? I can’t help feeling very sanguine and thinking the P.M. will be back with a firmer seat in the saddle in a fortnight. I only hope to God he is - disinterestedly because I really think him the only eligible man. Incidentally, what could happen to all our finances I daren’t think! Certainly it is a most painfully interesting situation - deeply to be deplored at this juncture I think - and it’s rather disgusting that such seething intrigue should survive war atmosphere.

Oc saw me off in the tube. Very sad to say goodbye and he had a tear in his eye. Lost my head and passed through Charing Cross three times owing to political excitement. Got home very late. Talked to Papa. The P.M. said The Volunteer was incomparably the best war poem.’

Photos to surprise and amaze

‘I want to make photos such as I’ve never made before, ones that are life itself and the most genuine life, photos that are simple and complex at the same time, that will surprise and amaze . . .’ This is the Russian artist and Constructivist pioneer, Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko who died 60 years ago today. Having turned from art to photography in his 20s, he was only a few years away from switching back to painting, though he would never enjoy the success of his early years again. According to the Museum of Modern Art, which put on the first major retrospective of his work in 1998, Rodchenko remained steadfastly committed to the ideals of the Revolution. However, his diaries - English translations of which MoMA has published - suggest he never understood the forces that eventually drove him from prominence.

Rodchenko was born in St Petersburg in 1891. On the death of his father, in 1907, his working class family moved to Kazan. His interest in art seems to have come about through magazines rather than any contact with the art world. He enrolled at the Kazan School of Fine Arts in 1910, where he met Varvara Stepanova, whom he later married. They had one child together, also Varvara, born in 1925. Rodchenko moved to Moscow to continue his art studies at the Stroganov Institute. He was much influenced by Kazimir Malevich, the pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the avant-garde Suprematist movement. In 1915, Rodchenko participated in The Store exhibition organised by Vladimir Tatlin, a painter and architect, who was also an important influence on the young Rodchenko - especially towards Constructivism and the use of art for social purposes.

Rodchenko clearly thrived in the conditions following the Bolshevik Revolution. He worked at the People’s Commissariat for Education (or Narkompros), being appointed director of the Museum Bureau and Purchasing Fund in 1920, responsible for the reorganisation of art schools and museums. He was one of the organisers of RABIS (the trade union of art workers). He taught at the Higher Technical-Artistic Studios from 1920 to 1930, and he also helped found the Institute for Artistic Culture.

Culture Trip’s biography says this: ‘Featuring bright primary colors, aggressive geometric shapes and repeated bold lettering, Rodchenko successfully underpinned the stark dynamism of the Soviet regime. In rejecting passivity, the aim was to transform the submissive viewer into an active observer. With this in mind, he often worked with his wife Varvara Stepanova, providing graphic design for advertisements ranging from children’s dummies and cooking oil to beer and pharmaceuticals. In the 1920s, the regime had fully adopted Rodchenko as one of its tools for shaping the face of Soviet advertising.’ Indeed, together with the poet and playwright, Vladimir Mayakovsy, Rodchenko viewed himself as a crucial figure in the artistic representation of the regime. One of his best known images is the film poster for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin.

Increasingly, Rodchenko turned to photography, and impressed by the kind of photomontage being produced by the German Dadaists, he turned his own artistic endeavours to photomontage often incorporating text. In the 1930s, with the changing guidelines governing artistic practice, he concentrated on sports photography and images of parades and other choreographed movements. He had joined the October Group of artists in 1928 but was expelled after three years, charged with “formalism”. By the 1940s, he had returned to painting, producing abstract expressionist works, though he continued to organise photography exhibitions for the government. He died on 3 December 1956.

Culture Trip’s biography concludes with this assessment: ‘Rodchenko was both an upholder and a transgressor of the Communist regime. Throughout his life, he was a passionate believer in the new future of the Soviet Union, yet ultimately, his work failed to comply with the political and social values of Russia at the time. Nonetheless, his legacy continues to define modernist art, especially in the mediums of painting, graphic design and photography. The latter has, in many ways, contributed to the entire notion of modern European camerawork.’ Further information is available from Wikipedia, The Creators Project, The Culture Trip or an article in The Telegraph.

Rodchenko was an interesting diarist, intermittently documenting his professional and private thoughts alongside more philosophical musings. When MoMA put on a major retrospective of Rodchenko’s work in 1998, it also produced a major book on Rodchenko, which drew, to some extent, on his diaries. Aleksandr Rodchenko by Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman and Peter Galassi, with essays by Aleksandr Lavrentiev and Varvara Rodchenko, is freely available as a pdf on the MoMA website.

Here is one paragraph from the introduction: ‘Rodchenko was an original theorist of art, but he was not a political thinker. He remained steadfastly committed to the ideals of the Revolution, and his diaries suggest that he never understood the forces that drove him from the prominence he had enjoyed in the decade after 1917, and eventually rendered him, as he put it, “an invisible man.” In the mid-1930s the artist who had boldly renounced painting in 1921 again began to paint - not abstract works but imaginary circus scenes. These paintings signal his alienation from the thrilling collective enterprise to which he had dedicated his life and from which he had drawn much of his unflagging inventiveness. In the 1940s he also painted abstract works of somewhat greater interest, but these too are omitted from the present exhibition. For as his diaries express, they are not products of a sustained creativity but of a painful and bewildering isolation, suffered by an artist whose work had been deeply rooted in collective goals. By the late 1930s Rodchenko and Stepanova were largely excluded from official culture, despite the design commissions they continued to receive from time to time. Like most Russians they suffered miserably during World War II, from which Rodchenko never fully recovered.’

And elsewhere in the book, there is a little more, including a diary extract, about this latter period in Rodchenko’s life: ‘Rodchenko’s diaries from the mid-1930s until his death in 1956 are saturated with suffering, especially during World War II, when like millions of other Russians he and Stepanova spent much of their time and energy simply on finding enough to eat. The entry for August 11, 1943, reads in part:

‘Can it be that someday a middle-aged Mulia [Rodchenko’s nickname for his only child, i.e. Varvara] and her children will sit here, and that she’ll look at my things and think: what a pity my father didn’t live to see this, he’s been recognized at last and there’s a demand for his things. . . . People are buying them. . . . They’re hanging in the museum. … [. . .] My future Mulia, your late father can honestly tell you: and what he can tell you is that he wasn’t certain, and even that he was totally uncertain, and that the uncertainty was like a disease. He didn’t know why he kept working. And that there were times like now when he thought all his work would be destroyed, thrown out and not a single piece would be left anywhere. [ ... ] Dear Mulia! Maybe you will be poisoned by all of this. . . . But I wish you no harm. Better to throw all of this away and live simply “like everybody else.” But I did have fame and a European reputation, I was known in France, Germany, America. And now I have nothing.’ ’

Several contributors to this book reference an English translation by James West, commissioned by MoMA, of a 1996 compilation of Rodchenko’s writings published in Russia. However, for whatever reason, West’s translation itself was never published, and it was not until 2005 that MoMA published an English version of the Russian book, as translated by Jamey Gambrell, with the title: Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings. This book contains four sets of diary extracts - from 1911-1915; from 1934, 1936-1940; from 1941-1944; and from 1944-1954 - amounting to around 100 pages, a quarter of the total. Here are several of those extracts.

18 August 1912
‘In the evening Mam and I like to sit and talk over tea. I love it when she tells stories. The lamp. . . A little samovar . . . Her father was a sailor, served twenty-five years. He was a small, nimble man with a pointed beard and gray eyes. He married a girl from a rich peasant home. And left for the Turkish campaign . . . Their ship was destroyed, and he floated on the wreckage with other sailors, there were fifteen of them. They floated for a long time, three days, hungry and cold. They were taken on board a ship and brought home. Her papa was sick for a long time . . . He was given a job at a gunpowder factory, where he worked stuffing the cartridges with gunpowder. But he soon died . . . They had to go to Petersburg, where my Mama’s mama took up a position. Mama was given away for one chervonets, she was seven years old. . . She babysat the kids. And that’s how her life began . . .’

4 February 1934
‘How many interesting things have been missed that you can’t depict with either a Leica or a drawing. So I begin to write. . .
A certain loneliness from my private life being not quite in order forces me to write . . .
You don’t know what’s interesting: private life together with work, or just work alone.
Probably one should write what one lives and breathes by. And as to who will find it interesting, it doesn’t matter. Moreover, one has to write every day. It disciplines.
Twenty years ago I wrote a diary, and it seems to me that what I wrote had no meaning, either then or now . . .
A page is begun . . . My private life is over, my work isn’t moving.
Philosophy of diary writing: I read Varvara’s diary and I see that there are few concrete facts, it’s a lot of philosophy in general, probably one should write quite simply, like a log one keeps on a ship.
I’m drawing a caricature of Freberg and the publishing section of Politizdat. I want to do caricatures [. . .], and put together an evening exhibition in the studio - but why? I don’t know. A diary is a strange thing; everything looks dumb, somehow. It’s possible that when a person is completely opened up, the emptiness and silliness is terribly embarrassing.
I’m beginning to understand that one needs to record and not philosophize . . .
For example, in the Mostorg store, the price of electric plugs - one ruble - is twice what is in the VEO [Electrical Society] store on Miasnitskaia - fifty kopecks. True, this isn’t particularly interesting, but it’s a fact.
I’m writing like you take an exam, and this is my own exam, it’s stricter that way. Have to write to that, it will be interesting for me to read. Don’t feel like writing about love, you can’t exactly write the same way as writing letters to her . . .’

18 February 1934
‘Today I began to paint the circus tor myself, and thought: What if I painted the first painting, the circus, in black and pink, huge and complicated, 200 x 120cm, and then the Dinamo stadium: gray and green.
Zhenia called, wants me to come shoot something tomorrow. I feel like going off somewhere tomorrow. Alone. Neither with her nor without her. . .
I want to print all the “Leftorvo,” “Dinamo,” “Park of Culture and Leisure” [photos}. I’m forty-two, and it’s terrible . . .
I’m reading about Courbet, he worked like an ox.’

20 February 1934
‘Yesterday I was at the Press House with Zhenia . . .
The question is coming up bluntly, either live with her once and for all or say good-bye, PART. She’ll want to go visiting, to go to parties for the evening, and I need to work seriously; 26-43, it’s mathematics. Its reality.’

21 February 1934
‘I wrote a farewell letter to Zh. Drew a little. The feeling is like I just got home alter the hospital, and I’m not myself. I keep rifling around the shelves looking for something . . . And I’m looking for my certainty and calm . . . I look at magazines, read about painting  . . . I want to start everything from the beginning. . .’

14 March 1934
‘There’s a proposal to go to Kramatorka, to photograph the finished workshops of the factory and make ten albums for a report and for showing the government.
I’ve begun packing, I’m even taking the enlarger with me, and I decided to try to keep a diary of the trip. I’m leaving on March 17th. Tomorrow I go to the Trust to arrange the tickets. . . I don’t know what the weather will be like, recently it has been cold, snowing. I also have to fix the Leica tomorrow, to try out the film . . . I want to photograph not just the workshop and factory but make new photographs of everyday life and types, too. . .
I want to make photos such as I’ve never made before, ones that are life itself and the most genuine life, photos that are simple and complex at the same time, that will surprise and amaze . . .
Otherwise there’s nothing to do in photography, then it’s worth working and fighting for photography as art.’

25 August 1936
‘The most interesting books are those written not by writers but by people who have experienced and seen a great deal and who feel acutely. Moreover, they love, hate, and want a lot. . . Everyone who feels he thinks differently should definitely write. Write everything down and you will be better than the aristocrats of the spirit, who invent things in studies.
History will ask what you, “the non-honored” did and thought.
We don’t agree with the depicters, those like Gladkov, et al. Maybe it was all invented, spiced up with other people’s accomplishments from books, newspapers, and magazines.’

27 December 1944
‘I’m not working. We’re living bunched into one room, three or even four, also Mulia’s Kolya. It’s plus five degrees in the studio.
It’s cold. The gas isn’t on. Kerosene is 30 rub. a liter.
Electricity from six in the evening until six in the morning, that’s until January 1st. From January they’ll turn off the allocation on household necessities. I’m working as head artist in the House of Technology, I get 3,000 rub. a month. My student, Volodya Meshcherin, set it up, he’s a head engineer now, and a professor.
We wash ourselves now in parts in a cold kitchen.
I do my own laundry.
The war still isn’t over. . . There’s still another year left of it.
We are gallivanting across Europe with cannons. We’re taking Budapest. But there’s still no end.
And we ourselves don’t have firewood or fuel in Moscow.
We’re wearing rags, the bathhouses aren’t working. . .’

I know my own death

‘I feel that I know my own death, and have known it tor a long time. I feel that I died long ago, the same death I shall die later on. When I think of my own death, I do not think of something that has yet to happen, but of something that happened long ago but was forgotten. When I am of this mind, it seems to me that my death is what is most me. I think it is much more me than all the rest of my life.’ This is from the diaries of Seán Ó Ríordáin, born a 100 years ago today, who is one of most important of  Irish-language poets. Although he kept diaries for much of his life, few extracts have ever appeared in English.

Ó Ríordáin was born in Ballyvourney, County Cork, on 3 December 1916. When he was only 10, his father died of tuberculosis, a disease that he would also contract as a young man, and leave him with chronic poor health. His family moved to Cork city, where he and his brothers were sent to a Christian Brothers school. From 1936, he worked in the motor taxation office, remaining there until he took early retirement in 1965. During the latter years of his life, he wrote a column in The Irish Times, commenting strongly on national affairs, and lectured at University College Dublin. He died in 1977. Further biographical information can be found at Wikipedia, Transcript Review or Cork Institute of Technology.

But, it is for his poetry in the Irish language that Ó Ríordáin is remembered. He only published four collections in his lifetime, roughly one every decade. According to Transcript Review: ‘His writing is the product of patient distillation, and as a result is resonant and potent. [He] forged a personal idiom unlike that of any other Gaelic writer. It is an idiom made of key-words representing key-ideas, innovative compounds, and bombastic adjectives coined by the poet. His telling vocabulary is coupled with clarity of syntax.’

Ó Ríordáin was also a diarist for much of his life. A few excerpts from his journals have appeared in Irish-language publications - in the Irish-Language literary journal Comhar, and in Seán Ó Coileáin’s 2011 biography. More recently, the Irish-language publisher Cló Iar-Chonnacht has brought out Anamlón Bliana: Ó Dhialanna an Ríordánaigh, an anthology of 365 entries from Ó Ríordáin diaries, as collated by Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, one for each day of the year. ‘Together,’ the publisher says, ‘they provide a unique insight into the tortured mind of the poet, from 1940 when he first began to write in his diary.’

According to Róisín Ní Ghairbhí writing in The Irish Times, ‘The Ó Ríordáin of the diaries is precocious, erudite and articulate, and these excerpts are a fascinating insight into the troubled mind of a poet.’ She goes on: ‘The diary excerpts reveal a man with a mystic’s mind, a scholar’s passion and a generous cosmopolitan outlook. The raw intimacy of some of the writing is unsettling; elsewhere the reader will laugh out loud at Ó Ríordáin’s self-deprecation. His dim view of Irish bishops (he deems them Pharisees), his irreverent humour (he compares his suffering to that of Jesus, who at least, he says, had the consolation of wine and Mary Magdalene) and his repeated crises of faith remind us that he had a rebellious streak, which, although often overlooked since, was a great inspiration to the next generation of writers in Irish.’

The only extracts from Ó Ríordáin’s diaries that I have been able to find in English were published nearly 20 years go in The Diaries of Ireland: An Anthology 1590-1987 (The Lilliput Press, 1998) edited by Melosina Lenox-Conyngham. Here are several extracts.

11 August 1964
‘I have just returned from a funeral. A Protestant who died yesterday was being taken to the church at seven this evening. I went into this church for the first time and felt a strong sense of eeriness. I stood at the door and looked in. A small chapel was visible. The congregation was standing, its back to me, facing the altar. It was divided in two, a path in the middle. The altar and the minister could be seen at the end of the path. ‘Holy - Holy - Holy’ was written on the altar cloth. The place had the appearance of poverty, although the building seems ostentatious from the outside. The coffin was at the foot of the altar. I must confess that I was deeply moved, that is to say that every part of my mind was moved and renewed, and every moment of my life back to the days of my youth, and I might even say that I felt the hundreds of years between me and the Reformation slipping away when I looked into that holy place this evening. It was as though I had opened a door in my own soul that I had not had the courage to open until now. That was the strangest thing of all: that it seemed to me that I was looking at something which concerned me closely but that I had neglected, and I felt guilty. It was though I had visited relatives with whom my own family had long been at odds, people whom we had denied and avoided, and suddenly a hidden part of my own heritage was revealed to me. I found it difficult to satisfy my eyes. If allowed, I would have remained till midnight, peering about. There before me was Protestantism within which I hitherto had seen only from without. These are the people whose faith and way of life and destiny I had thought was to remain outside. This evening I saw them inside - inside though still outside. I felt that here was spiritual shelter. Although they had separated from the larger flock at the time of the Reformation, observe the heed they paid to the altar, to the altar cloth, to the priest’s vestments, to the rail, to the chapel itself, and observe how they had preserved these and other things. Who would claim that they did not preserve something of faith and sanctity and efficacy? Who would claim that their prayers are not heard?

I have long known a man of this congregation, but I never saw him pray to God until today. I looked on his back and on his grey hair and felt guilty. Why guilty? Because, I suppose, this thing has been happening among us for ages and we closed our eyes firmly to it. I felt also that I had been here before, although I had not. There is a part of Ireland and a part of the Church and a part of me here that exists nowhere else. Simple and not so simple people have been worshipping God, in this way, in this kind of church, for hundreds of years. Behind this worship is one great historical deed: the rejection of the Pope’s authority. It took great courage to risk damnation, but it required even greater faith to believe in the teaching of this severed Church. What a thing a great deed is, be it right or wrong! To do is to live! Think of the suffering, the love, the hate, the bloodshed, the philosophy, the history that followed this deed. All this activity must have contributed greatly to the light of truth.’

1 August 1963
‘I feel that I know my own death, and have known it tor a long time. I feel that I died long ago, the same death I shall die later on. When I think of my own death, I do not think of something that has yet to happen, but of something that happened long ago but was forgotten. When I am of this mind, it seems to me that my death is what is most me. I think it is much more me than all the rest of my life.

Like everyone else, I am a rich man for I have death in the bank. I cannot be drawn upon, however; death cannot he spent until it has matured. Death is land that cannot he sold or tied up in money, and we must live our life without it. We are often impoverished, without as much as a penny to spend, despite all this wealth we have stored up.’

2 June 1964
‘I saw a fat, ugly, middle-aged woman the other night. She is long married. Where is the snow that was so bright last year? I remember when she was a vision, when I thought I was in love with her. There was no beauty or contentment in the world then but what could he found in her. Now I wouldn’t care if she didn’t exist. She is a fat, ugly, old woman. Other, younger women, now hold the sway that she once held. This is an old story - the departure of youth and beauty. But it is even worse when they don’t depart but still remain, and we continue to crave them. People matter not a whit. They come and they go. But youth and beauty are eternal, and however old we may be they remain our constant goal. It was always people between twenty and twenty-five that Marcus Aurelius saw on the Appian Way. That is enough to break one’s heart.’

21 March 1974
‘I have been grasping for breath today and yesterday. Perhaps death is near. It doesn’t bother me in the least. I remember a fine, sunny day long ago in Clondrohid. I lived in Ballyvourney at the time, and cannot have been yet fifteen. I think my aunt Kathleen (now dead) was there. I don’t remember who else, but there were many. I got a spin in a large motor car that had no roof. The world was very airy. It is only a memory. Everyone is dead.’

The Diary Junction