HISTORY

Jugement à Moscou, a considerable classic based on Politburo documents that Bukovsky found in surreal circumstances, is not in Mitrokhin’s index), a sort of Asiatic Finland: faithfully helping Moscow, only needing to be left alone. Her affairs passed into semi-anarchy, and then the Russians blundered in, meaning to restore order, and destroyed millions of lives. Another book which should have been in Mitrokhin’s list of sources is Christopher Kremmer’s The Carpet Wars. Its author, an Australian journalist who saw the disintegration of Afghanistan, understood the consequences of the Russians’ actions. The West, as in Iraq, has had to pick up the pieces, and deserves some credit. All in all, the Mitrokhin volume is an odd book, which prompts some reflection. In the Thirties and Forties, Moscow’s foreign intelligence was very good: it recruited the Cambridge Five, captured the secrets of the atomic bomb, and had, so far as one can judge, an important part of the French machine working for it.

B LAIR W ORDEN

FEAR OF FOREIGNERS

S OLDIERS AND S TRANGERS : A N E THNIC H ISTORYOFTHE E NGLISH C IVIL W AR

★By Mark Stoyle (Yale University Press 297pp £25)

O VERTHEPAST fifty or sixty years, interpretations of the English Civil War, which have always been controversial, have become so in a new sense. Previously the disputes were about the rights and wrongs of the war. Now they are about the causes of its outbreak and course. Historians are expected to have, not a preference for one side, but an analytical line. The lines, which have had their debts to intellectual fashion, have often changed. Half a century ago the war was perceived as a class war, in which an ailing feudal order succumbed to an emerging bourgeois one, or else in which prosperous landowners did battle with declining ones. Next came the war as a conflict between centre and locality, caused by the determination of Charles I in the 1630s, and of the Long Parliament in the 1640s, to impose a national will on the regions. In the third phase, the struggle became the last of Europe’s wars of religion, in which material and constitutional interests counted for less than the confrontation of Anglican and Puritan. Then came the war as a British conflict, where events in England were inseparable from the simultaneous quarrels in Scotland and Ireland. Mark Stoyle’s excellent book is a variant on the last of those themes. To him the war was about ethnicity and

Parts of that world survive. For instance, the Russians are much better than anyone else about Turkey (strangely, not a subject that comes up here, though Istanbul is the windpipe of their trade), and Prime Minister Primakov should have been listened to on the subject of Iraq. But on the whole, there was a dreadful decline in the quality of Moscow’s understanding of the Third World, or perhaps just a certain cynicism about the whole business of ‘national liberation fronts’, in which clever young men spouted the correct platitudes in return for the right to go to some Mozambique or Grenada and buy ballpoints. In this, there is a non-dit of some significance. Jews, on the whole, were very important indeed in the early decades of the USSR. They understood something about foreign countries. In the later Forties, antiSemitism started officially, and foreign intelligence understood less and less. So what? The unspoken question in Mitrokhin’s book. To order this book at £24, see order form on page 78

racial prejudice. He traces the impact on the military campaigns of English hostility not only to the Irish and Scots but to the Celtic populations of Wales and Cornwall, an emotion largely reciprocated – and sometimes also mirrored in the treatment of those groups by each other. Since Elizabeth’s reign, Englishness and Protestantism had grown together, and the hatred and fear of foreigners,

M ICHAEL M C K EON

THESECRETHISTORYOFDOMESTICITY Public, Private, andtheDivisionof Knowledge

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thematerial andconceptual

separationofthepublic fromtheprivate, onethat

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006