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At the end of last week, the president of Turkmenistan, Serdar Berdimuhamedov, extended warm wishes to Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi for Eid al-Fitr, the celebration that marks the end of the month-long, dawn-to-sunset fasting of Ramadan. Turkmenistan’s leader stressed the importance of tranquility, compassion, and moral integrity. 

The Iranian regime marked the occasion by raining down missiles and drones on Israel. Last week, Turkmenistan wrapped up its month-long campaign of killing dogs and cats in honor of the holy period. The two countries—working to deepen their relationship since Berdimuhamedov met with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in June 2022—continue to generate stomach-turning examples of how twisted faith, perverted culture, and the modern totalitarian state meet to advance the most bizarre kinds of cruelty.

I wrote recently about the intensifying crackdown in Iran, where schoolgirls are poisoned, LGBT+ people are executed, the disabled are hanged, and women receive lashings for failing to meet the dress code. The human rights situation in Iran is dire. With Iran’s neighbor Turkmenistan, things are gruesome in different ways—and getting worse.

During the month of Ramadan in Turkmenistan, managers at public utility companies issue quotas, reports Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Turkmen service; employees are required to kill a certain number of dogs and cats by poisoning, starving, or beating the animals to death. Any dog or cat will do. If workers struggle to meet their quota, though, they need to destroy a pet from home. City officials enlist poor kids to help. Children get money to share poisoned bread and sausage with the animals. Consider the method merciful.

In one recent incident in the capital of Ashgabat, eighteen dogs and cats were beaten to death with iron rods in a park by a hospital. This grisly scene happened in plain view of horrified patients. Bystanders who photographed the madness had their phones confiscated, reports RFE/RL’s outlet Azatlyk, a lifeline for those adept and brave enough to access its content.

After the fact, dogs and cats get carted off to landfills where some animals, not yet expired and whining, are buried alive. It’s not just during Ramadan that these killing sprees take place. The run-ups to important state events also offer the occasion. 

*  *  *

Over the past decade and a half, some nations of Central Asia—albeit in fits and spurts—began to undertake reform. Things opened up for civil society and independent media. That’s being reversed now. Influence from Russia and China plays a role. Turkmenistan remains an extreme case. Today, Freedom House ranks the country as less free than North Korea.

Turkmenistan is a nation of 6.5 million people bordering Iran to the south, Kazakhstan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, Afghanistan to the southeast, and the Caspian Sea to the west. It’s led by a ruler suspicious of any outside influence. In February, one Turkmen province banned foreign music at weddings.

“We know about Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. But we can’t access them,” a fruit seller in the Turkmen capital told Voice of America earlier this year. WhatsApp, Viber, Signal, and Telegram are all blocked. Young people use proxies to access social media. Much of the population is fed endless state television footage of President Berdimuhamedov attending sports events and planting trees in the desert. According to State Department human rights reports, the president controls all aspects of society. 

In Turkmenistan, detention is commonplace; torture, widespread. Prison cells are overcrowded and food shortages frequent. Jailers beat inmates’ kidneys with plastic bottles full of water so that bruises don’t show. There’s a practice known as sklonka that has prisoners forced to stand outside in the open sun or in the cold for hours. August daytime highs run around a hundred degrees Fahrenheit; winters can be bitter. There’s forced and child labor in Turkmenistan—thousands of teachers, health care workers, and young children pick cotton in brutal summer heat—and at least 162 enforced disappearances that have included two foreign ministers.

In February, municipal workers in Ashgabat began removing benches from apartment building courtyards to prevent people from congregating and socializing. Even that never happened in the darkest days of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist Romania. In the province of Turkmenbashi, there’s now a 9 pm curfew so “people can rest peacefully at night,” so the official line.

It’s hard to make the case for Turkmenistan in Western capitals. Plates are full. The country is remote and scarcely known. Still, the exceptionally abysmal state of human rights deserves our attention. And the savagery toward animals is jarring and revealing. 

It reminds one of how Saddam Hussein dumped some four hundred thousand barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf in January 1991. Polluting water and killing fish and birds of the sea was purposeless, noted Joshua Muravchik at the time, difficult to grasp except as an act of pure evil. Amnesty International says, “Turkmenistan has failed to take meaningful action to address climate change.” We’re still not very good at connecting dots.

Turkmenistan is a tiny but unbearably distressing front in the struggle for decency against rising authoritarianism and cruelest dictatorship. Guardrails in developed democracies are coming down. Dictators know no bounds, or shame. Today’s totalitarianism is surreal as ever. 

Four years ago, Turkmenistan’s then-President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov unveiled a 20-foot golden statue of an alabai dog in Ashgabat. The president designated the last Sunday of April as a national holiday dedicated to the handsome Central Asian breed. His son, Serdar, is chair of the Turkmen Alabai Association. Turkmenistan even once gave a puppy to Vladimir Putin for his birthday. 

Jeffrey Gedmin is co-founder and editor-in-chief of American Purpose. He’s a member of the RFE/RL board and a Senate-confirmed member of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board. Views expressed are the author’s alone.

Winston Churchill investigates in the same volume what might have happened had the Confederacy won the American Civil War. Churchill has an ironic twist: The South’s own abolition of slavery. Along similar lines, Abraham Lincoln had concluded, “If willing faithfully to cleanse this continent of slavery, and if they will dwell beside us in goodwill as an independent but friendly nation, it would not be right to prolong the slaughter on the question of sovereignty alone.” In Churchill’s counterfactual history, the two Americas and Britain form the “English Speaking Association” and prevent World War I.

Swastika Night was published in 1937. British writer Katharine Burdekin, writing under the pseudonym Murray Constantine, depicts a Nazi future with Jews eradicated, a cult of masculinity gone wild, and women confined in concentration camps serving reproduction purposes only. Burdekin used a pseudonym to protect her family from fascist attacks in England.

The Man in the High Castle came later. Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel is about a dystopian alternate reality where victorious Germany and Japan have divided America into two occupied territories after World War II. Japanese Pacific States are in the west with San Francisco as regional capital. New York is Greater Nazi Reich’s capital in the east. The Amazon-produced television series based on the book premiered in January 2015.

*  *  *

Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine began two winters ago with proclamations of “Glory to Ukraine.” Those blue and yellow flags were hoisted everywhere. We all knew that Russian revanchism had to be defeated. An end to Vladimir Putin’s imperialist project, we said, would send the signal that America and its allies were prepared to defend the rules-based world order. China and Iran would be chastened. Authoritarian populism would be dealt a blow. Liberal democracy across the West would rally and be revived.

What if Ukraine loses the war? We’re now getting used to the idea that yet another made-in-Moscow frozen conflict may lie in store. If this is where we’re headed, we’d profit from a wide lens and a long-term view of possibilities and probabilities of what’s apt to follow.

Vladimir Putin is almost certain to use a freeze as a tactical pause to start building back better. Russian armed forces performed miserably at the outset. But then Putin fired commanders, discovered Iranian drones, survived sanctions, and identified a secret weapon—the vast quantity of men he can chuck onto the battlefield. Ask Poland, the Baltic nations, and the Nordic states how secure they’ll feel if today’s Russia, led by an indicted war criminal, is allowed to sit at the table to negotiate peace through Ukrainian partition.

If Kyiv feels compelled to cede territory to invading, occupying forces, Ukrainians will finish the war divided with grievance rather than united and rejuvenated. A friend describes a bleak scene: a village in western Ukraine where inhabitants are women, the elderly, and young men back from war without limbs. Get used to the profile. Young amputees will feature in a future Ukrainian parliament. A decent number will be bitter from sacrifice without victory. The Ukrainian vision all along has been that all invading Russian forces must leave Ukraine. 

Absent this outcome, an angry political Right will get traction, blaming the West for temporizing and appeasement. We gave Ukraine just enough weapons, they’ll maintain, to prolong the war and settle for a draw. Growing ranks of radicals and neo-Nazis will go underground to fight Russian occupying forces in the east. Crimea will remain in Russian hands. The Black Sea will become a Russian lake.

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Viktor Orbán will say I told you so. This was never our war, they’ll sermonize, and Russia was never to be defeated anyway. Pointing to what they describe as those corrupt, ungrateful Ukrainians, authoritarian populists will get a boost. This will include both the right-wing AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) and Sahra Wagenknecht’s new left-wing workers’ party in Germany. It will include Marine Le Pen’s comparably pro-Russian National Rally party in France. Le Pen will have a chance at the French presidency in three years. Michel Houellebecq’s last speculative novel Destroy actually has Le Pen stepping aside and a turn to an even harder Right in 2027.

By then Germany’s Zeitenwende will have gone out with a whimper as Germans turn to a new “principled realism.” Winning would have mattered. But now German Greens and other ardent war supporters will be chastised. Berlin will adjust to accommodate new realities. Russia is still a nuclear power with national interests that are hardly illegitimate, it will be said. America can’t make up its mind about its place in the world; it’s either turning inward or toward Asia. A Berlin-Moscow rapprochement makes parts of Central and northern Europe more than jittery.

By 2027, Poland will be on the path to its own nuclear weapons. It was a grave mistake, Warsaw will explain, that Ukraine ever gave theirs up in the 1990s—and placed faith in the security assurances of Britain and the United States. The European unity that came about initially as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine will be a distant memory. The EU will splinter between Russia hawks and peace-pragmatists. As the United States steps back, Iran will step forward to drive new wedges between Europe and Israel. Mercantilism returns. It fits the evolving and energetic nationalist Zeitgeist and appears to more manageable than what’s now maligned as the old “human rights-centered” foreign policy.

Irredentism is back. Budapest talks about Greater Hungary. This includes Hungarians who comprise the third-largest minority in Ukraine. Far-right Romanians will gain momentum and want back territories that currently belong to Ukraine and Moldova. Hungary also has claims in Romania. War will threaten the Balkans and talk of Greater Serbia will make headlines again. Russia’s war on Ukraine set precedent. Nations can change borders by force. 

Hybrid war goes wild. Russia will rail about endangered ethnic Russians in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—and use cyberattacks, disinformation, and assassination to destabilize. NATO will worry about pretexts for intervention, but signal there’s little it can do under present circumstances. No one wants World War III. By now Georgia is firmly in the Russia camp, Turkey is all but gone from NATO, and Russia is preparing for another go at Kyiv. 

Ukrainian politics will be fragmented and dysfunctional. Reconstruction will be slower and more expensive than expected. Polish-Ukrainian relations will be fraught with farmers and truckers feuding through border blockades. No one in the West can stomach the idea of another full-scale Russia-Ukraine war. The luster will have vanished from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who started as Ukraine’s Churchill but who now, out of power, will be blamed by everybody for the immense war costs of 2022–2025 and a bad outcome. 

China will be having a field day. Chinese Communists wanted the United States humbled over Ukraine and thinking twice about the defense of Taiwan. Beijing wanted Russia as its wingman and America marginalized in this part of the world. It had long seen southeastern Europe and the Black Sea region as a gateway to wider Europe. Splitting America from an internally divided EU is now an achievable goal for the Russians and the Chinese. 

And what if the United States is led by our own Kaiser Wilhelm?

*  *  *

During Wilhelm II’s time, Austria-Hungary was coming apart. Nationalist awakening was everywhere. Trust in any sort of consensual politics was eroding. Faith in armies over process and parliaments had taken root. The Kaiser wasn’t responsible for these trends, but his reckless, erratic leadership and narcissism fed them. A close adviser to Kaiser Wilhelm observed:

Wilhelm II takes everything personally. . . . He cannot stand boredom; ponderous, stiff, excessively thorough people get on his nerves and cannot get anywhere with him. Wilhelm II wants to shine and to do and decide everything himself. What he wants to do himself unfortunately often goes wrong. . . . To get him to accept an idea one has to pretend that the idea came from him.

Wilhelm was bellicose abroad and divisive and vicious at home. “Behead the socialists,” he said. “It may come about that I order you to shoot down your own relatives.” 

We’ll see about America 2025. You don’t have to believe in dystopian futures, though, to grasp the current nature of the problem. Our excessive concern about escalation—and our unwillingness to define clear war aims—has meant we’ve never given freedom-fighting Ukrainians the full military firepower they need to prevail in this war. 

Adversaries and allies alike are watching. A clock is ticking and you can feel victory slipping away. It’s not too late to provide Ukraine with the additional weaponry it urgently needs and a path to victory. Imagine what defeat looks like.

Jeffrey Gedmin is co-founder and editor-in-chief of American Purpose.

In August 2018, Austria’s foreign minister Karin Kneissl invited Vladimir Putin to her wedding in Gamlitz. The reception took place in a picturesque village tucked into the rolling hills of southeast Austria, near the Slovenian border. Putin waltzed with the bride. Kneissl curtsied. 

The marriage collapsed. In spring 2020, Kneissl accused her husband, Austrian businessman Wolfgang Meilinger, of domestic violence. There was no estrangement between the Austrian foreign minister and Russia’s president, however. Kneissl became a contributor to RT, Russia’s state-controlled media outlet. She joined the Moscow State Institute of International Relations as a visiting professor. And in June 2021—by now out of government—Kneissl followed in former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s footsteps by becoming a board member for the Russian energy giant Rosneft.

It was a year ago last month that the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin for the unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia. Yet Kneissl fawns over Putin, “the most intelligent and accomplished gentleman I’ve ever met,” she says. We live in times when nothing really shocks anymore.

Last fall, Kneissl moved to Russia, where she now heads up a think tank attached to St. Petersburg University devoted to advancing Russian foreign policy objectives around the world. In December, Kneissl told the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg, “I can work here in a kind of academic freedom which I started missing when I was still teaching at various universities in the European Union.” She’s been joined by her boxer dog Winston Churchill and her two ponies, the ponies having been transported to their new home aboard a Russian military aircraft from Syria. Kneissl had been living in Lebanon until summer 2023. 

*  *  *

Kneissl has been widely condemned in mainstream Austrian media and politics for her pro-Putin PR. There was even a debate at the time of her wedding whether the curtsy to Russia’s ruler—the bending of a knee being customary at the end of a Viennese waltz—was traditional Austrian charm or an ingratiating deep bow. But then things can get quickly confused and convoluted in Austria.

Austria claims to side with Ukraine in the fight against unprovoked Russian aggression. While the country sticks to its 1955 Constitutional Law on Neutrality—unlike the Swedes and the Finns, there’s no sign Austrians want to join NATO—it allows weapons for Ukraine to pass through its territory. Austria takes in Ukrainian refugees. It has largely supported EU sanctions against the Putin regime. 

At the same time, though, this small nation of nine million has fought mightily to protect its financial and energy relationships with a country led by an indicted war criminal. Austrian dependence on Russian gas increased to 98 percent in December. Before Christmas, Vienna threatened to withhold support from the EU’s twelfth package of sanctions because of Ukraine’s refusal to take Austria off its blacklist of “sponsors of war.”

Austrians have been known for a shaky moral compass. 

In 1986, former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim had considerable support as presidential candidate, despite evidence he had concealed his work as an intelligence officer for the German military during the Nazi period. There was reluctance to pay reparations to slave laborers used by Austrian companies during World War II. There was resistance to the idea that the country should return to rightful owners art looted by the Nazis from Jewish families and collectors.

Today, things are getting complicated again. Last month, U.S. Treasury officials traveled to Vienna to notify officials that Austria might be shut out of the U.S. financial system if the government doesn’t get Raiffeisen Bank out of Russia. The Austrians say they need more time. The Americans suspect the Austrians of slow rolling in order to keep ties in place with Moscow once the Ukraine war ends. More than half of Raiffeisen’s profits have been coming from Russia.

The United States has also been cautioning Raiffeisen against buying a stake in the Vienna-based construction company Strabag, which is owned in part by sanctioned Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska. Last week, Deripaska’s $1.62 billion stake in Strabag was transferred to another firm registered in Russia whose ownership is unclear. 

There’s a notable shift afoot in the Austrian political landscape. As an independent, Karin Kneissl owed her post as foreign minister to the right-wing populist, pro-Russian Freedom Party (FPÖ). A year ago, lawmakers from the FPÖ walked out of Austria’s parliament during a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Just as Zelenskyy began his address via video, Freedom Party MPs placed signs with "Neutrality” and "Peace” on their desks before standing up in unison and leaving the chamber.

Austria is scheduled to hold parliamentary elections in September. Polls suggest that the FPÖ may be on course to take as much as a third of the vote. This would mean an increase of a dozen points over the party’s 2021 election result, when the FPÖ topped its 1999 record of 26.9 percent. It’s impossible to predict the vagaries of coalition politics, but it cannot be excluded that Austria will soon have an explicitly pro-Putin chancellor.

As is the case with a number of Western democracies, Austria’s establishment parties are getting weaker. The political center is wobbly and shrinking. The perception of self-dealing elites keeps growing. Last fall, a powerful justice official’s suicide rocked the nation. Christian Pilnacek had been under pressure by senior politicians to ease up on investigations of political corruption. 

*  *  *

I confess to a fondness for Austrian history and culture. I once worked as a tour guide in Vienna. I studied music in Salzburg. I was positively impressed how modern, vibrant, and sparkling the town looked when I visited Mozart’s birthplace briefly last summer. I was dismayed to learn that the hedge of some Salzburg voters against the rise of the far Right is the far Left. The Marxist publication Jacobin calls it “a glimmer of hope.”

In Salzburg's state elections last spring, thirty-four-year-old museum tour guide Kay-Michael Dankl helped the Austrian communists secure nearly 12 percent of the vote. The communists will have a role in the new Salzburg city government. Dankl had a shot at winning a runoff election for mayor last month. The Austrian communists already have the mayorship in the country’s second-largest city, Graz. That’s in idyllic Styria, where Mr. Putin danced with Frau Kneissl. 

Where traditional center left and center right parties founder, political space opens up. The Putin regime keeps capitalizing on this.

Watch for Russian propaganda and disinformation to ramp up this year with narratives about corrupt Ukraine and little independent Austria being bullied by the United States, NATO, and the EU. There’s fertile ground for such narratives. Peter Gridling, head of Austrian intelligence from 2008 to 2020, told the Financial Times last fall last fall he was concerned about money flows to the FPÖ and cabinet positions being divvied up in a future coalition government. “The Russians,” Gridling observed, “have a very long perspective.”

There’s a housing crisis in Austria. Some voters worry about immigration, security, and national identity. An increasing number of voters seem to be drawn to authoritarian populists. Others may just be agnostic about how problems get solved. It’s a regional problem and trend. Austria shares a border with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary in the east and with Robert Fico’s Slovakia to the northeast; there’s plenty of pro-Russian sympathy in this neck of the woods. There’s ample moral relativism and increasing pro-China sentiment, too.

Graz mayor Elke Kahr has condemned Putin for his invasion of Ukraine. She also holds all sides, including the United States, responsible for the war. Kahr offered an implicit defense of communist China’s political system recently. “It’s not appropriate,” she opined, “to judge how people in other countries live and choose their governments.” 

Our moral compass is going haywire. Across the liberal democratic world norms are breaking, with the U.S. certainly in the mix and examples materializing in Central Europe. Bizarre and outright disgraceful behavior is becoming normalized. Dangerous old ideologies, on far-right and far-left, threaten a comeback. Austria fits the mold in its own unique, disturbing way.

My very best,

Jeff

nzie, the ex-chief of Central Command—blamed both sides. In the midst of our chaotic departure, on August 26, 2021, an Islamic State suicide bomber killed thirteen U.S. service members and more than 150 Afghans outside an airport gate in Kabul. 

Last Friday, Afghanistan roared back into the news with the horrific attack on Russian concertgoers that left at least 137 dead and more than 180 injured. Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility. Behind the attack, U.S. officials believe, is IS-affiliate Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) in Afghanistan. ISIS-K has been stepping up activity at home. Last Thursday, the group sent a suicide bomber into a crowd of Taliban members at a bank in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. Islamic State and the Taliban despise one another.

I suspect we’re starting to see the costs of foreign policy light. In Ukraine we decided against boots on the ground and pilots in the sky. We have provided large amounts of military assistance. But our reluctance to give Ukrainians the tanks, air power, and long-range missiles they need to defeat Russian invaders is showing its effect. Our worries about escalation paved the way for Vladimir Putin’s forces to overcome early setbacks. 

President Biden took credit for ending America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan. But at the time of our exit there was no significant push from the American public for withdrawal. At the start of the Biden Administration we were already down to 2,500 troops, a level that might well have held the fragile country together. Security had improved. 

That’s not all. Life expectancy had improved for both men and women. Fewer infants were dying and more women were surviving childbirth. Nine million Afghan children had started going to school over the time of our presence, some 40 percent of them girls. The bet was to buy time, said former U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, “for a young generation of Afghans to come of age.”

The calculation ended with our withdrawal. Women are oppressed again. Girls are barred from schools. Music is banned, even at weddings. 

March 20th marked the holiday called Nowruz, the first day of spring and the beginning of the new year. Family and friends celebrate. Children receive new clothes and other gifts. This belongs to the Afghanistan I know, through RFE/RL colleagues and my own in-country experience. Afghanistan is religious, tribal, traditional—and a naturally loving and lyrical place. RFE/RL’s radio network Azadi, for instance, doesn’t so much communicate with its audience as it communes, swoons, and dances. This is reflected in the fan mail its producers receive that is replete with tributes, songs, poems, petitions, and paintings. Azadi’s audience includes teachers and soldiers, shepherds and refugees all dreaming of a better life. They suffer their country’s culture wars. 

Days after the U.S. withdrawal in late August 2021, the Taliban painted over the protective barriers and concrete blast walls of Kabul that had been adorned with dedications to fallen journalists, portraits of iconic musicians, and pop art depictions of young children. Bright and colorful messages were replaced with black-and-white texts proclaiming the Taliban was back as “protectors of the land and people.” Last week, the Taliban canceled Nowruz. 

Far grimmer: The Taliban is back to flogging, stoning, and amputating body parts for theft or suspected adultery. A twelve-year-old boy received public lashings in eastern Laghman province recently for immorality, Voice of America reports. Executions are carried out again in soccer stadiums. “The judiciary has been gutted,” says RFE/RL analyst Abubakar Siddique who questions whether any of this is even allowed under strict Sharia law. “It’s all about creating an atmosphere of fear. Terror and terrorism have returned,” he says. 

But the vacuum that’s been created by our departure has done more than destroy progress in human rights. Tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan have been on the rise since the Taliban returned to power. Qadir Habib, who directs Azadi with its programming in Dari and Pashto languages, notes that “Islamabad now openly accuses the Taliban of harboring Pakistani militants on its territory and allowing them to carry out cross-border attacks in Pakistan.”  

Pakistan's pressure on the Taliban is a major shift. Pakistani warplanes conduct strikes inside Afghan territory. Conflict is escalating, reports RFE/RL’s outlet Maashal that serves audiences in Pakistan’s border regions. Pakistan is threatening to close an important trade route from Afghanistan to India that goes through Pakistan. 

As part of its response, the Taliban has been turning to Iran. The Taliban announced recently that it will invest in Iran's strategic Chabahar Port, located in the country’s southeast, a move aimed at reducing landlocked Afghanistan's dependence on Pakistani ports. In matters including energy and security cooperation, Taliban-Iranian relations keep growing closer.

Former U.S. National Security Council Director Lisa Curtis has been sounding the alarm for some time about U.S. security interests in the region. On the fourth anniversary of the Doha Agreement—the Trump administration’s deal with the Taliban that included a deadline for U.S. withdrawal—Curtis argued that “it’s time to set [Doha] aside,” warning that terrorism is coming back and only a joint pressure campaign exerted with other like-minded nations has a chance of improving human rights in Afghanistan. At the time of the Doha Agreement the Taliban had been feigning moderation.

President Biden ended a “forever war” in 2021. The expression appeared back in 2005, four years after 9/11, in a New York Times piece by journalist Mark Danner. The Forever War became a book title for writer Dexter Filkins in 2008.

Seven decades after the end of the Korean War, the U.S. maintains 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea. We keep more than 50,000 troops in Japan and Okinawa. You can see this as “forever war,” or view such presence as the overhead cost for peace and security.  

In his testimony on Afghanistan last week, General Milley said we had succeeded in helping to build a military and a state but failed to forge a nation. Sometimes keeping a lid on things ought to be enough.

America sacrificed blood and treasure in Afghanistan. An ongoing mission with two-to-three thousand troops would not have been without additional risk. But in leaving the country entirely, we abandoned partners, unsettled the region, boosted the Iranian regime’s influence, returned a country to unspeakable brutality, and restored opportunity for Islamic State terrorists. Islamic State has established a presence in South Asia, threatened Europe, and its Afghan affiliate has pledged lone-wolf attacks on the United States.

By breaking with Afghanistan, we gave allies but also adversaries something to ponder. China is probably less interested in how Russia and Ukraine war with one another than in how long the United States sticks with our Ukrainian friends. For their alternative vision of world order, our rivals have staying power—and relish seeing ours tested. 

Jeffrey Gedmin, a former president of RFE/RL, is cofounder and editor-in-chief of American Purpose. He’s currently a member of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board. Views expressed are the author’s alone.

American Purpose co-founder Frank Fukuyama met with Sandu in Moldova in September 2022. She had been elected as the country’s first female president two years earlier. President Sandu was determined to conquer corruption, particularly in the courts, and get Moldova into the EU. Frank worried at the time that Moldova would be forgotten in the swirl of events. That swirl includes today war in the Middle East, a volatile election year in the United States, and the danger now of Russian forces making headway in Ukraine.

Moldova is easy to overlook. It’s a tiny nation, smaller than Denmark, with a population of 2.6 million. Depending on which index you read, at the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 it was either Ukraine or Moldova that counted as Europe’s poorest country. Parts of rural Moldova still lack running water and indoor toilets. Corruption has been horrendous; “the magnitude . . . transformed it into a threat to our national security,” Sandu told Iulia Joja in an interview for American Purpose three years ago.

Moldova is also home to a made-in-Moscow frozen conflict. The separatist region of Transnistria is recognized by the Council of Europe as Moldovan territory. Not a single UN member recognizes Transnistria’s sovereignty. Yet it’s here that Russian President Vladimir Putin meddles mightily and keeps some 1,500 troops. Transnistria, its capital Tiraspol filled with Lenin statues and Karl Marx avenues, shares a border with Ukraine. 

It’s an immense challenge to hold this country together and to keep things moving forward. But poverty rates in Moldova are declining, slowly. The fight against corruption has made progress. Over the last five years, Moldova has improved its ranking by forty-four positions in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. Against considerable odds, the country is now ready for EU accession talks. It’s still a complicated and dangerous road ahead.

A couple of years ago, Moldova was decidedly cautious in its expressions of support for Ukraine. The country was nearly entirely dependent on Russian gas. That’s changed thanks to Romania’s assistance with alternative energy. 

*  *  *

The last time I saw Maia Sandu was last fall during my interim presidency of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. At the network’s Prague headquarters, she pleaded for support of Ukraine. During her visit earlier this month with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris, the fifty-one-year-old Moldovan leader said, “If the aggressor is not stopped, he will keep going . . . closer to us. Closer to you.”  

NATO coordinates joint military exercises with Moldova. Romania quietly stations special forces inside the country and trains Moldovan special forces in Romanian mountains. France chips in with intelligence. Truly, Moldova needs every speck of assistance it can scrounge up. The country’s defense budget is smaller than the budget of Real Madrid’s soccer team.

Russia is now ramping up political pressure. Moscow pushed Russians in Transnistria to vote in Russia’s presidential election last weekend. Moldova said Russians could vote on the premises of the Russian embassy in the Moldovan capital of Chişinău. That’s what international law dictates. The Kremlin facilitated instead unsanctioned voting booths and illegally-produced election papers in Russian-occupied Transnistria. In the wider struggle for freedom, sovereignty, and democracy, Moldova matters.

Mr. Putin knows this. Look for his security services to intensify efforts aimed at destabilizing the Sandu government using disinformation, political intimidation, economic sabotage, and cyberattacks. Sandu is up for reelection in the fall. She’s also called on Parliament to organize a referendum in autumn on Moldovan accession to the European Union. The Sandu government is striving for fullest buy-in and unity.  

Last month, Transnistria appealed to Russia for “protection.” In January, separatists had claimed without proof that Moldova’s central government was creating “special strike teams” for murder and sabotage in Transnistrian territory.

The head of Moldova’s intelligence service predicts that Moscow will try this year “to trigger several social and political crises, to spark clashes, and to incite interethnic hatred.”  

It was Ukraine’s inching toward the European Union in 2013 that provoked the ire of the Putin regime and triggered the 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea. 

*  *  *

Last year, Sandu rescued a homeless dog that had lost a leg in a car accident. Sandu’s mother was a music teacher and her father a veterinarian who worked morning to night caring for pets in their village. During communism, Sandu’s aunt stood in front of dozens of soldiers to prevent a convent from being closed. 

There’s something about this family. Perhaps trying to show he belongs, First Dog Codruț—meaning small forest—bit the Austrian president’s hand during a state visit to Chişinău last November. Austria has maintained its energy and finance relationship with Russia throughout unprovoked aggression and atrocities in Ukraine. 

I’ve been asking regional experts and diplomats in Chişinău how we can help Moldova. It’s a mantra: Support Ukraine, pass the ammunition. Many I’m speaking with believe Russia intends to focus on Odesa and bring the war to Transnistria. 

On Sunday, Moldovan authorities dismissed as Russian provocation separatist claims that Ukraine had launched a drone attack from the Odesa region on a Transnistrian airbase.

Last Friday, a Russian missile strike on a residential area in Odesa killed twenty and injured at least seventy. When Russia shells the Ukrainian port city, you can hear the sounds of explosions in Moldova’s capital. The aggressor keeps getting closer. 

My very best,

Jeff

Fifty years ago, in spring 1974, a stunning Cold War secret was revealed. A top aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt was exposed as an East German spy. The revelation spelled the end of the Brandt administration. How this all came about is a remarkable story. It ought to help us think about Vladimir Putin’s mindset and the Kremlin’s new Cold War today.

A decade after the end of World War II, the original Cold War was putting things into sharp relief. There was full employment in West Germany. Postwar prosperity was taking hold. The country had held free elections. In communist East Germany, a workers rebellion had been crushed, food was still rationed. By the mid-1950s, the East German police state was properly established.

 In May 1956, Günter Guillaume and his wife Christel fled East Germany and arrived as refugees in Frankfurt am Main. Christel’s mother came ahead to prepare the family’s new life. Next to the Frankfurt cathedral the Guillaumes opened a cafe called “Boom,” after the last name of Christel’s stepfather. 

All three—Christel, her mother, and her husband Günter—were agents of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. Günter and Christel had been assigned to work as handlers for sources in West Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). By registering at a local police station instead of a refugee center, the Guillaumes were able to elude customary vetting. Christel’s mother, having married a man from the Netherlands in the early 1930s, had a Dutch passport and was ready to vouch for her daughter and son-in-law.

Christel’s career got traction. From 1964 to 1969, she worked for an SPD regional head who served as a member of the Bundestag, the European Parliament, and the council of the Frankfurt-based public broadcaster, Hessischer Rundfunk. Husband Günter developed his own career as a conservative SPD man in local Frankfurt politics. Then, through an association with Georg Leber, West Germany’s minister for transportation—Günter had worked for Leber’s election campaign—Günter landed a desk officer’s job in the Bonn chancellery. He started in 1969, responsible for trade union relations. Three years later, he was one of Chancellor Brandt’s three personal assistants.

Günter organized the Chancellor’s travel and accompanied Brandt virtually everywhere he went, gathering documents for the Stasi along the way. Brandt took his aide along on a holiday in Norway in the summer of 1973. Günter later claimed that he had stuffed a briefcase full of material—including letters from U.S. President Richard Nixon on NATO nuclear strategy—that he passed to an agent in Sweden on the way back to the West German capital.

It was Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher who first alerted Brandt to the suspicion that Günter was an agent. That was summer 1973 right before the Norway vacation. The investigation continued. Brandt’s young son Matthias would report odd behavior, including typing in the middle of the night at the family’s holiday home north of Oslo. 

On April 24, 1974, at 6:32 in the morning, Günter and Christel were arrested at their Bad Godesberg apartment near Bonn. Two weeks later, Brandt was forced to resign. The West German public was shocked. West German security services were embarrassed it had taken so long to identify a spy who had risen so high. It was the biggest espionage scandal in German Cold War history.

There’s possibly more we don’t know about “the Guillaume Affair” with files destroyed by the Stasi in East Germany’s waning days and with an unknown quantity of material transferred into KGB (and CIA) hands. We know that Günter had the cover name “Hansen,” his wife Christel the cover “Heinze,” and that while Hansen filed twenty-three reports between 1969 and April 1974, none of the material was considered by the East Germans to be of particularly high quality. 

In 1976, West Germany arrested three East German spies who had access to hundreds of top-secret documents, the magnitude of which far surpassed what Günter had collected. But Günter had developed unparalleled access. 

In Günter Guillaume East Berlin lost a prized source. The fall of the Brandt government, what’s more, was a blow to the SPD’s Ostpolitik and the normalization of East-West relations that East German Communists had been desperate to establish. 

*  *  *

All nations spy just as all governments lie. Authoritarian regimes flourish in spying and lying. The absence of checks and balances at home provides one natural advantage. Another: Free societies with their accessibility—and our never-ending goodwill and naïveté—are a field day for adversaries. 

East Germany ran several thousand agents and influencers across West Germany during the Cold War. There were some 1,500 West Germans working for the Stasi when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. For years, the Stasi and KGB had supported left-wing terrorism to destabilize West Germany. 

In The Art of War Sun Tzu said know yourself and your enemy. We’re not very good at either. The masters of spying and lying excel at both. 

Markus Wolf, the legendary spymaster, was already central to the world of East German foreign intelligence when the Guillaumes were dispatched in the mid-1950s. Wolf grew up in the Weimar Republic. He came from a communist family that had fled Nazi Germany and received political asylum in the Soviet Union. In the 1930s, he finished secondary education in Moscow, joined the Soviet Young Pioneers, and marched across Red Square for Joseph Stalin.

At the age of twenty, Mischa, as Wolf was called, learned how to use machine guns, rifles, pistols, explosives, and hand grenades. A special school he attended included training in disinformation and techniques for message passing and clandestine meetings. 

After World War II, Wolf was sent to East Berlin, first to work as a propaganda journalist and then to help set up East Germany’s security services. The Stasi was the KGB’s star pupil. Germany was a key Soviet investment. World revolution, Lenin had contended, depended on the Germans.

Wolf was creative. His “Romeo” program sent agents into the West to date and develop long-term relationships with staff in politics and industry. Preparation was remarkable. It might take two years or longer to prepare a profile of the target. Romeo agents studied interests, preferences, previous relationships—every opportunity and vulnerability—long before an orchestrated chance encounter would take place at a bus stop, a cafe, a park bench. In his memoir, Wolf boasted he had perfected the science of seduction for espionage. 

Gabriele Kliem was a thirty-two-year-old translator at the U.S. embassy in Bonn when she fell for Frank Dietzel, a good-looking gentleman who claimed he was a researcher with an international peace foundation. During the course of their seven-year relationship Kliem supplied Dietzel with hundreds of classified documents. She just wanted to help her boyfriend with his important work. She was loyal and in love. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stasi files revealed that an East German scout had Kliem under observation for two years before Dietzel approached her. 

Romeo agents wouldn’t marry. Paperwork might lead to a blown cover. In one instance, when an agent felt pressured by his West German girlfriend to wed, he obliged with a ceremony in a Copenhagen church. One Stasi agent played the role of the mother-in-law. Another presided in the role of a priest. 

*  *  *

An aide to Chancellor Angela Merkel once told me that his boss’ relationship with President Putin rested on the fact that “she knows he lies and he knows she knows he lies.” But then Merkel had the advantage of having grown up in East Germany where Putin came of age as a KGB agent.

There’s a 2004 play called Democracy by Michael Frayn that tells the story of Günter and Brandt, a study of psychology and relationships. 

There’s tragedy and wreckage wherever KGB culture has been present. Christel Guillaume gave birth to a son, Pierre, two years after she and Günter arrived in West Germany. Pierre was seventeen at the time of his father’s arrest. After Günter’s release from prison, his father disowned Pierre and may even have plotted to have his son murdered. Both were back in East Germany in the 1980s. Günter was disgusted that his son wanted to return to the West.

After six years in prison, Günter and Christel came out in 1981 in separate spy swaps. Christel divorced her husband. She had been frustrated in early Frankfurt days that superiors in East Berlin seemed to favor him. Once he was placed in the Chancellery, there’s no record of Christel filing anything. She never forgave her husband for confessing after their arrest.

Günter Guillaume died of a heart attack in Petershagen-Eggersdorf outside Berlin on April 10, 1995. Christel Guillaume died of heart failure in the West Berlin neighborhood of Wilmersdorf on March 20, 2004. Markus Wolf died in his sleep in his Berlin home on November 9, 2006.  

Willy Brandt, who died outside Bonn on October 8, 1992, called the Guillaume Affair his greatest failure. “Not for the first time,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I had overestimated my knowledge of human nature.” 

Christel and Günter’s son Pierre is a journalist living on the North Sea island of Sylt. In his book Der Fremde Vater (“The Foreign Father”), he discusses the relationship with his father. A 2004 documentary Schattenväter (“Shadow Fathers”) has Pierre and Matthias Brandt recalling childhood and relationships with their parents.

Vladimir Putin, age seventy-one, has an expiration date. He’ll be survived, though, by a deep KGB culture that will likely test us for some time. 

In the 1980s, I traveled frequently to East Germany. I’ve just applied to review my Stasi file. I’ll share with American Purpose readers what I find.

My best,

Jeff

By March 1933, there was a growing sense that mainstream parties in Germany had lost touch with ordinary voters and that Adolf Hitler, whatever one thought of his methods, was the only one who could address accumulating grievances and initiate a national renewal. 

Trust in the democratic institutions of Weimar Germany was disintegrating. There was violence between far Right and radical Left. Nazis were intimidating Social Democrats and rounding up Communists. It was six days after the Reichstag Fire—Hitler’s pretext for suspending civil liberties—when Germans went to the polls. March 5, 1933, was the last time Germans would vote as a single nation in a multiparty election until December 2, 1990.

Kurt Weill had seen it all coming. The popular composer and close collaborator of playwright Bertolt Brecht fled Nazi Germany in March 1933 and, like so many exiles of the period, ended up in LA. Brecht was there. So was filmmaker Billy Wilder, writer Thomas Mann, and Mann’s brother Heinrich. Screenwriter Salka Viertel organized salons a few blocks away from Santa Monica beach. Gustav Mahler’s widow Alma lived in Beverly Hills with her husband, Austrian novelist Franz Werfel, next door to conductor Bruno Walter.

Weill was never naive about his adopted country. He witnessed racism and experienced how America struggled with immigration. American critics initially labored with Weill’s ways with a musical score. “The weirdest cinematic hash I ever saw,” wrote one. But Weill adapted to and embraced America. Songs like his “Mack the Knife” caught on. 

He split with his partner, though, when Brecht became properly and dogmatically Marxist. Weill told his wife, the singer Lotte Lenya, he couldn’t quite imagine setting the Communist Manifesto to music. 

Brecht moved to communist East Germany after the war. Weill stayed in America and became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Last month, I attended an inspired performance at the National Gallery of Art in Washington led by our friend, Spanish-born conductor Angel Gil-Ordóñez and his PostClassical Ensemble. On the program was The Seven Deadly Sins, with music by Weill and libretto by Brecht. The “sung ballet” in one act tells the story of a young woman named Anna and her seven-city, seven-year journey across America, as she struggles to raise enough money to buy a house for her family. The National Gallery concert was tied to an exhibit of German expressionism running through May 27.

In German culture, there was a sense of foreboding everywhere you looked in the expressionist period of the 1920s. Painter Ludwig Kirchner rebelled against the impressionists, seeing something dark lurking in Western civilization. Composer Arnold Schoenberg broke with tonality. Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz was the great novel of the doomed Weimar Republic. The book tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, an emotionally scarred veteran released from prison into a world of eroding trust and collapsing social norms. To make money, Franz sells the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter, while swearing he’s not antisemitic. It’s the feebleness of Weimar Germany’s democracy that he loathes.

Alfred Döblin escaped Nazi dictatorship and lived in Hollywood for five years. Schoenberg found refuge at the University of Southern California and UCLA. Weill, often the youngest in his circles, found many of his fellow exiles unbearably haughty—so much so that he stopped going to their salons.

*  *  *

Marine Le Pen has a good chance of becoming France’s next president in April. French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal says of Le Pen’s pro-Russian, right-wing populist National Rally, “Putin’s troops are already in our country.”  

The entire continent is likely to shift to the right in European elections in June. For a significant number of voters, immigration, domestic security, and economic anxiety are issues mainstream parties have been unable to persuasively address.

Germany has a new right-wing party launched last month by former intelligence official Hans-Georg Maassen, who says he wants to chart a course between tired, ineffectual, establishment conservatism and the far right AfD. But then Maassen’s been accused of racism by his former Christian Democratic colleagues and was dismissed in 2018 as head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency for minimizing threats from right-wing extremism.

Charismatic Sahra Wagenknecht broke with her post-communist Die Linke party to start another new party in January. Wagenknecht is a Marxist with a nationalist message that aims to attract AfD working-class votes. Last week, the Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) quickly cleared a first hurdle. It collected eighteen thousand signatures, significantly more than the four thousand required, to participate in European elections on June 9. 

It seems like something structural-cultural is happening across the West. Voter ties to mainstream parties are loosening. There’s a persistent and perhaps growing perception that elites are out of touch, left-wing progressivism is out of control, and immigration is very badly managed. Extremism and susceptibility to demagoguery grow. 

Last November in Germany there was a conference of right-wingers outside Potsdam with talk about mass deportation of asylum seekers and German citizens of foreign origin. It’s grist for radical mills that Germany had the world’s worst-performing major developed economy in 2023, with expectation of recession this year.

Today’s Germany has its institutional safeguards. Still, polarization and fragmentation seem to be ascendant, as the political center weakens and splinters. In September, elections in the eastern German states of Thuringia, Brandenburg, and Saxony are likely to show big voter support for the AfD.

Then come the American elections. Our predicament has become a problem for the anxious democratic world.

Our primary system is about to cough up two candidates that leave many Americans mystified. Joe Biden is starting to look a little like Paul Hindenburg. A leading politician in Weimar Germany recalled how eighty-four-year-old President Hindenburg came to greet him at a railway station in 1932, but failed to recognize him. 

A second Trump administration is certain to plunge the United States into deep political dysfunction and provoke even worse polarization. Angry Trumpism begets militant wokeism—and vice versa. Exacerbated by social media, it’s a dangerous cycle in which we now find ourselves. And while Trump may not be Hitler, our former President’s descriptions of migrants poisoning American blood and of political opponents as vermin is Nazi rhetoric through and through.

*  *  *

Weill’s 1945 musical Where Do We Go From Here? was about America as bastion of freedom and democracy. We got there in the end. Only seven years earlier, Weill had collaborated with Maxwell Anderson on the musical Knickerbocker Holiday, a New York satire that suggested America might be just as susceptible to fascism as Europe. The America First Committee was founded in 1940 with its toxic mix of isolationist, antisemitic, and fascist views. In 1939, a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York attracted twenty thousand people. In 1938, Hitler had annexed Austria and national socialism was on a roll.

Weill saw things through a wide lens. He challenged America to live up to its ideals and pleaded for decency, something he thought was fundamentally American. He argued for resistance to the thousand rationalizations and little inducements that turn us into enablers of corruption and evil.

Weill’s “Ballad of the Nazi Soldier’s Wife” (“Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib?”) tells the story of the proud wife who receives gifts from her husband on the front. There are furs from Oslo, a silk dress from Paris, and other beautiful presents, until one day, from Russia, a widow’s veil arrives.

Best regards,

Jeff

Alexei Navalny was close to being released, his supporters say, before he died in an arctic penal colony on February 16. Members of the Russian opposition leader's team claim that arrangements for a prisoner swap were underway. Navalny would have been exchanged, along with two U.S. citizens, for Vadim Krasikov, a convicted murderer who sits in a German prison.

Through my role with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, I’ve followed Putin’s hostage-taking spree over the last year, the Krasikov case in particular. I was in Berlin twice in late fall working on the case of RFE/RL’s detained journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. Here’s what I know.

Not far from where I used to live in Berlin near the Brandenburg Gate, fifteen minutes by bike, is the Kleiner Tiergarten, a park with playground swings and a beer garden by a church. It was in the Kleiner Tiergarten on August 23, 2019, that Vadim Krasikov murdered Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen of Chechen ethnicity. It’s my view that the Tiergarten-Mord, as it’s known in Germany, marked the beginning of Berlin’s Zeitenwende, a deep shift in foreign policy thinking. 

The circumstances are jarring. It was clear and eighty degrees around midday when Krasikov approached his target by bicycle; Khangoshvili was walking along a wooded path. Using a Glock 26 with silencer, Krasikov fired at point-blank range. The victim, a veteran of Chechnya’s war for independence, was rumored at the time to be cooperating with Germany’s BND intelligence agency. A shot in the back followed by two to the head finished Khangoshvili.

German authorities took note. The murder in broad daylight took place a short walk from the Chancellery and Parliament buildings.

The assassin was well prepared. Krasikov had been in close contact with members of the Vympel group, a network of companies comprising former officers of Spetsnaz GRU, the special forces of Russia’s military intelligence. On the eve of his Berlin trip, Krasikov visited an FSB training facility. The forty-nine-year old Russian citizen—born in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan—entered Germany under a false identity. 

For Krasikov, the Tiergarten job was apparently not his first bicycle murder Bellingcat researchers believe Krasikov was the killer who executed a Russian businessman in Moscow in June 2013. In this case, too, the assassin approached his target on a bicycle and shot him with a handgun at close range, both in the back and the head.

In Berlin, he slipped up. Krasikov was arrested after teenagers told police they had seen a man in the bushes throwing a bike, a gun, and wig into the Spree River.

In December 2020, a Berlin court convicted Krasikov of murder and sentenced him to life in prison. That the court pointed to Russian President Vladimir Putin was a shock in German politics. It was a Kremlin-commissioned crime, concluded the presiding judge. Then came Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and any remaining scales fell from German eyes. Big changes are afoot in how Germans think about Russia and European security.

*  *  *

Krasikov’s name has figured in possible prisoner swaps for a couple years now. U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner came home in December 2022 in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. Back in Russia, Bout promptly joined an ultra-nationalist party and traveled to Russian-occupied Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. Contract killer Krasikov was said to be Vladimir Putin’s focus for a swap ever since the Griner-Bout trade. The Russians hinted at a deal, Krasikov for Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich. March will mark one year in pre-trial detention for Evan. The Germans have been reluctant to put a notorious murderer back in circulation. Up until now anyway.

Putin’s trade bait has also included RFE/RL reporter Alsu Kurmasheva, ex-Marine Paul Whelan, and history teacher Marc Vogel. He added recently to his list Ksenia Karelina, a U.S.-Russian dual national who came to the United States as a ballet dancer eight years ago. Karolina works at the Ciel Spa in Beverly Hills. In January, she went to visit her grandparents in Russia—and found herself accused of harming national security by providing financial assistance to a foreign state. The thirty-three-year-old LA spa manager had apparently donated $50 to Razom, a U.S. charity helping victims of the war in Ukraine. Karelina faces up to twenty years in prison. 

Russia keeps collecting hostages. There’s a related story beyond prisoner exchanges, of course, that has to do with how Putin eviscerates his opposition.

The man Putin had killed in Berlin in summer 2019 was a Chechen military commander once trained to fight Russians in Georgia’s breakaway region South Ossetia. Putin also imprisoned rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky for a decade. He has democracy advocate Vladimir Kara-Murza serving a twenty-five-year sentence at a maximum-security facility in the Siberian city of Omsk. Alexei Navalny died suddenly this month at age forty-seven in an Arctic penal colony. There’s resolve in all this.

In 2018, former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent at their home in Salisbury, England. Former Gazprom media chief and ex-Putin advisor Mikhail Lesin died in his bathroom at the Dupont Circle Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2015. Blunt-force trauma to the head was the cause of death. There were reports that Lesin was about to meet with Justice Department officials. Then there was the remarkable case nearly twenty years ago that may have started all this. Ex-FSB agent and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko died in London in 2006 after contact with radioactive material at the Millennium Hotel’s Pine Bar.

It’s been a chilling two decades and it’s not over. Last August, German prosecutors said they were investigating the attempted murder of Berlin-based Russian journalist Elena Kostyuchenko. She was one of two Russian exile journalists who experienced symptoms consistent with poisoning after attending a Khodorkovsky-organized conference in the German capital.

Today marks an anniversary. On February 27, 2015, opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was gunned down in Moscow on a bridge just steps away from the Kremlin. Russian security services were well prepared. Nemtsov had been tailed by an agent from an assassination team for a year before his murder. He was followed on more than a dozen trips by train and by plane.

*  *  *

We need a bigger picture. In 2012, Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney for outdated Cold War thinking. John McCain called Russia “a gas station masquerading as a country.” Jeff Sessions ridiculed the idea that Russian agents could influence American politics. In the first year of the war, we convinced ourselves that Ukraine would be a cake walk. Putin’s forces were so dilapidated, his stockpiles depleting, and Russian generals inept. No, Russia is not China, but we have a dangerous habit of underestimating our enemies.

Russia has stumbled. There was miscalculation in Ukraine. There were the botched poisonings of the Skripals and then Navalny in August 2020. In Germany, Putin overestimated the pro-Kremlin lobby created by ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. But as The Economist and a recent report from the UK think tank RUSI document,the Putin regime has been learning. Covert operations are improving. The Wagner Group’s assets have been divvied up and reconstituted, posing new threats in Africa, and by extension elsewhere. Who would have imagined Ukrainian special forces fighting Wagner mercenaries in Sudan? Cyber and sabotage remain very much in the mix. And in Europe, propaganda and disinformation efforts are better coordinated—and ramping up.

In the single month of January, bots were spreading on X (formerly Twitter) hundreds of thousands of German-language posts daily from a network of fifty thousand Russia-linked accounts. French officials recently identified a network of sites pumping disinformation into France, Germany, and Poland. The French also say the FSB has been behind antisemitic graffiti campaigns across Paris.

There’s a Putin doctrine that goes like this: Spread defense. Create mayhem across the West. Assert dominance in the east. Anti-Putin bloggers get kidnapped now and taken back to Russia from places like Georgia and Kazakhstan. In Serbia, safe haven is disappearing for Russian critics of the war.

We forget that Putin is a true KGB man and that there’s deep habit and careful method in all this. From the Stasi files we know the KGB’s East German allies ran some four thousand agents and influencers in West German politics and media, in businesses, churches, and civil society.

The French were shocked to learn this month that former L’Express director Philippe Grumbach—a man who rubbed shoulders with the great and the good in French politics and society throughout his career—had served as a KGB agent for twenty-five years during the Cold War. In 1974, West Germans were stunned to learn that an East German spy served as a close aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt. We’re slow to learn.

No one is suggesting we start jumping at shadows. But today, as we see Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran working to restrain American power and disrupt and diminish the West, it’s not clear we grasp how much damage Vladimir Putin for his part can do. In Eastern Europe—and in Western Europe increasingly—no one thinks Russia’s war on Ukraine is only about Ukraine. Or that hostage taking is random. 

Who knows whether Putin would have released Navalny and American hostages. We should know by now that Putin has a vision and acts with impunity.

The Tiergarten murder started one Zeitenwende. We shouldn't wait for the next "incident" to start our own transformation in thinking.

My very best,

Jeff

In David Herszenhorn’s recent book on Alexei Navalny, there’s an account of Navalny’s return to Russia in January 2021. His plane was diverted away from Vnukovo airport, where hundreds of supporters had gathered to greet the Putin critic. Navalny landed instead in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport—and was arrested before he could get through passport control. Two weeks later, he was back in a Moscow courtroom facing absurd new charges. For one thing, Navalny had failed to check in with his parole officer while in a coma in Berlin’s Charité hospital. “There are many ways to take a life,” writes Herszenhorn in The Dissident. “Poison had failed. Prison was now the fallback.” 

The Dissident is as much about Vladimir Putin’s relationship to power as it is about Navalny as opposition figure. As a young KGB man in Dresden in the 1980s, Putin watched with deep frustration as Moscow failed to shore up the East German regime against popular uprising. But it was the Kursk submarine disaster in August 2000, according to Navalny—all 118 on board perished—that first prompted Putin to grasp fully the danger of public opinion. 

Ukraine’s mass protests in 2013 further focused the mind. Putin’s nightmare: comparable commotion in Red Square spreading across the country. Catalysts for such a nightmare had to be held in check. 

Last week, one such catalyst died in an Arctic Circle penal colony, the site of a forced labor gulag during Stalin’s time. Alexei Navalny was formidable. And complicated. In a 2015 NewYorkeressay, Masha Gessen described Navalny as a committed Putin foe who at times had been inclined toward “extremely objectionable and potentially dangerous views.” 

In 2007, Navalny dressed up as a dentist and recorded a video in which he compared migrants in Russia to cavities. Aggressively treating the decay or pulling the tooth, he suggested, was the only way to prevent fascism in Russia. It’s a creepy performance. In 2008, Navalny supported Russia’s invasion of Georgia. In 2014, Navalny made ambivalent comments about the future of Crimea after Russian annexation. His positions evolved and softened. By the end, he apparently thought of himself as a moderate nationalist who could tame Russia’s malign nationalism.

We’ll never know how Navalny would have led Russia. We’ll find out now whether his death can be a catalyst. His widow has vowed to continue his work. Western media have lionized him with some heralding a new era. Russia’s neighbors, Ukrainians in particular, have been more restrained.

“My initial reaction to Alexei Navalny’s death was a word ‘beznadyoga’ in Russian—which means ‘hopelessness,’” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) senior Ukrainian correspondent Rostyslav Khotin told me. “Navalny was controversial but he gave that glimpse of hope.” Says Khotin: “The fact that we don’t see huge protests in Russia after Navalny’s death shows how sick, how fearful and passive much of Russian society has become under Putin.”

* * *

Navalny insisted on going back to Russia. Elena Bonner, a champion of liberal democracy and an anti-imperialist to her core, was cut from a different cloth. Dissidents in her day fought for the right to leave. AmericanPurpose author and friend Vladimir Tismaneanu reminds me that we just passed the anniversary of Bonner’s birth. 

Elena Bonner was born in the Soviet Union on February 15, 1923, in Merv (today Mary), Turkmenistan. Hers was the first call I received during my initial stint as president of RFE/RL in Prague. That was 2007, when Bonner was already warning of the re-Stalinization of Russia under Putin.

Bonner’s life with physicist, dissident, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov was extraordinary. But then Bonner was exceptional. Sakharov was born into privilege. His father Dmitri Ivanovich was a physics professor and pianist. Bonner was the daughter of a Jewish communist activist from Siberia and an Armenian father who died a year after Bonner’s birth. Her stepfather founded and led Armenia’s Communist Party. He was arrested in 1937 and executed in one of Stalin’s purges. Bonner’s mother served ten years in the gulag, followed by nine years of internal exile.

For Bonner and Sakharov, their internal exile lasted six years. Mikhail Gorbachev released the couple in 1986. They had been confined to Gorky, the city on the Volga River that at the time was closed to foreigners. This was punishment for Sakharov’s criticism of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 

Bonner was a pediatrician by training. She was fierce on principles and tender in temperament. Natan Sharansky reflected on Bonner after her death in Boston on June 18, 2011. The story of a letter Sakharov wrote to U.S. President Jimmy Carter about human rights in the Soviet Union told it all. Sakharov drafted the letter in Russian. Sharansky translated. But it was Bonner who made sure the names of prisoners were included. She knew sixteen of the most difficult cases by heart. 

“The philosophy was Andrei’s,” Sharansky said, “but the names came from her, the constant worry about these individuals; he was the spirit . . . she was the energy and the warmth.” “There are no little people or unimportant lives,” Bonner liked to say. 

We’ve asked Tismaneanu for his reflection on Navalny and the future of the Russian opposition. Watch for his article later this week. The distinguished scholar of communism has his own interesting family background. Tismaneanu’s parents fought in the Spanish Civil War. His father lost an arm at twenty-four-years old. In 1939 he traveled first to the Soviet Union, where he filed dispatches for Radio Moscow, and then home, where he became a leading propagandist for the Romanian Communist Party.

* * *

Watch Greg Feifer’s series—co-hosted by his Institute of Current World Affairs, AmericanPurpose, and the U.S. Institute of Peace—with distinguished Russian exiles on the future of the Russian opposition. Keep an eye on the evolving roles of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Garry Kasparov. 

Watch for Natan Sharansky’s interview with Syd Lipset and me this week. Natan addresses Navalny’s death and Putin’s hostage-taking spree. A German citizen was taken last week. Another U.S.-Russian dual national was added to the list this week. 

Next month will mark one year in pre-trial detention for the Wall Street Journal’sEvan Gershkovich. Ex-Marine Paul Whelan has been behind bars since 2018. RFE/RL’s culture reporter Alsu Kurmasheva has been trapped since last summer.  

Alsu is still awaiting the State Department designation as “wrongfully detained.” Both Bonner and Navalny understood the power in initiative, in setting an agenda—and of language, symbols, gestures, and solidarity.

Best wishes,

Jeff

Since the death of twenty-two-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022, three days after she fell into a coma and died in police custody, Iran’s regime keeps ramping up its efforts to maintain order and rein in its people. 

Last October, Ramtin Fatehi joined pro-democracy demonstrations in Germany. He wanted to be the voice of his father, uncle, and aunt who had all gone missing for ten days in Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s northwestern Kurdistan province. By the time Ramtin had taken to the streets in Berlin, the regime’s security services had already murdered his father back home.

Roya Heshmati comes from Sanandaj. On January 6, the thirty-four-year-old activist who lives in Tehran was arrested after a photograph of her was posted on social media. “Roya Heshmati encouraged permissiveness [by appearing] disgracefully in busy public places in Tehran,” according to the court. Roya was walking down a popular street in the capital when a photo, snapped at a distance from behind, showed her in a modest black skirt, flat shoes, and a red blouse. Failure to wear a head scarf was her offense. Roya was sentenced to seventy-four lashes. 

Last month on January 23, Mohammad Ghobadlou, a twenty-three-year-old protester with a mental disability, was hanged. On the same day, Farhad Salimi was executed. He came from Iran’s Kurdish Sunni minority and had pleaded for a retrial without torture-tainted “confessions.” Ethnic minorities in Iran are disproportionately targeted for executions.

Not that other minorities are spared. The Iranian regime is estimated to have executed between four thousand and six thousand gay and lesbian citizens since the Islamic Republic’s founding in 1979. Nor is deviation or dissent of any sort tolerated. Mohammed Nourizad, a filmmaker calling for political change, has been locked up now for half a dozen years. Recently, he denounced corruption in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, where he’s being held. For that, he was just handed five more years.

The battle of wills in Iran between rulers and ruled is becoming extraordinary. The pro-democracy protests that rocked Iran in 2022 continue across the country’s thirty-one provinces. In December, a viral dance campaign frustrated authorities—and inspired the country.

One needs to be creative. “Disfigured faces. Metal pellets lodged in skulls. Ruptured retinas. Permanent blindness.” That’s the medical journal The Lancet on regime efforts to drive protestors off the streets. Blinding eye injuries led dozens of Iranian ophthalmologists to sign a petition demanding security forces end the use of projectile weapons. 

“Despite the brutal crackdown—some twenty thousand people have been arrested over the past year and a half—Iranians remain defiant,” says Golnaz Esfandiari, managing editor of the RFE/RL Persian network Farda. People shout at night in defiance from the windows of their apartment buildings. Plain clothes police mark buildings with a red “x” to designate properties under surveillance.

It’s no wonder that the Iranian regime supports Vladimir Putin’s campaign to annihilate Ukrainians. The Moscow-Tehran axis is part of a wider war against pluralism, tolerance, respect for diversity—and a rules-based international order. A fragmenting, increasingly inward-looking America presents opportunities for tyrants lusting for spheres of influence. That we are prone to underestimate adversaries hardly helps. In Ukraine, Russia’s decrepit armed forces have shown resilience. Iran’s dictatorship is not going down without a fight. 

* * *

Roya Heshmati has women’s rights and the safety and security of girls on her mind. “Why was I identified in less than twenty-four hours from a back-view photo,” she asked, “while for four months, schoolgirls have been poisoned without any arrests or trials?” Her jailers professed ignorance. Roya expressed skepticism that random mischief can explain gas attacks across ten provinces and sixty schools.

“The regime has no solution to its ‘Roya’ problem,” says Kambiz Fattahi, Farda’s director; “[the clerics] now face a new, courageous generation that is fearless and fed up with the Islamic Republic.” Of course, the brave people of Iran will decide Iran’s future. But considering the trouble Iran causes in the world, you would think the United States and its allies would do more to hasten a truly ghastly regime’s demise. How else to end the terror at home and abroad?

On her way to the lashing, Roya was reminded by her lawyer, whom she later described as kind and helpful, that an expression of remorse might mean leniency and that the expected bruises and scars would take a long time to heal. Into the dark room she went, recounting later:

There was a bed with handcuffs and iron bands welded to both sides. . . . there was a chair and a small table behind the door, the latter full of whips. It resembled a full-fledged medieval torture chamber. . . . The man began striking my shoulders, my back, my hips, my thighs, my legs. I lost count of the blows. Under my breath, I was reciting: In the name of woman, in the name of life, the garments of slavery were torn apart. May our dark night turn into dawn.

Florence Nightingale went to the region in October 1854. She took thirty-eight women volunteers to care for wounded British soldiers arriving at a base hospital in Constantinople. By that time, some eighteen thousand British soldiers had been admitted to military medical facilities. Conditions were deplorable. “Beggars in London were living the lives of princes compared to the life of our soldiers in Crimea,” Nightingale, the pioneer of modern nursing, recounted.

Mary Seacole went in March 1855. She set up her British Hotel—an establishment providing food and medicines to British troops—between Sevastopol and Balaklava in Crimea. She, too, assisted the wounded at military hospitals and met casualties from the front. For a long time, Mary Seacole was a missed story.

Over the last decade, Nightingale and Seacole have been in competition with one another through proxies in Britain’s culture wars. In the middle of the controversy—a statue and school textbooks. Who belongs where in British history? Jamaican-born Seacole came to fame later than Nightingale. She started as the daughter of a Creole mother and a Scottish military father stationed in Jamaica, which at the time was part of the British Empire. I’m reading Seacole’s autobiography. She was a remarkable businesswoman, humanitarian, and world traveler.

*  *  *

This month marks the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It’s also ten years since Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to invade and annex Crimea. 

The telling of Nightingale’s and Creole’s stories usually includes little, if anything at all, on Crimea’s indigenous population. The same applies to our reporting today. Crimea is an important piece on the geostrategic chessboard. Russia maintains its Black Sea fleet headquarters at the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

But Crimea is also home to Ukrainians, Russians—and Muslim Tatars, the indigenous population that, with roughly three hundred thousand citizens today, makes up roughly 14 percent of Crimea’s population. The Tatars of Crimea go back to the 10th century but are often missing from the story. At the time of the Crimean War, they represented more than three-quarters of the population in Crimea.

This May, Tatars in Crimea will mark the eightieth anniversary of Sürgün—the mass deportation of their entire nation to Siberia and Central Asia. This was the work of Joseph Stalin. At the time, some two hundred thousand Tatars were forced into cattle cars and driven into exile. Roughly half perished during deportation. It was only during Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalization in the 1980s that Tatars were allowed to return home.

“If Crimea remains Russian now,” says Rim Gilfanov, chief editor and director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Tatar-Bashkir service, “it will become a brutal reality for Crimean Tatars that the measure of freedom they had enjoyed within the Ukrainian state will come properly to an end—and tragic more.” Repression has been steadily increasing. Dissenters disappear in Russian prisons with draconian sentences.

Mr. Putin’s so-called liberation of Russians in Crimea has left Ukrainians vulnerable, too. I know this through the case of Vladyslav Yesypenko, a Ukrainian-Russian journalist with Crimea.Realities, a regional news outlet of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian service. Vlad was detained by the Russian FSB on March 10, 2021. In a closed-door trial, he was sentenced to six years in prison by a Russian judge in occupied Crimea on February 16, 2022.

Watch the Netflix series Occupied. In a fictional near future, Russia uses force, security services, and economic and judicial means to intervene in Norway’s affairs, ostensibly to save Europe from an energy crisis but ultimately to bend the country to Moscow’s will. 

Track the case of Rim Gilfanov’s colleague Alsu Kurmasheva here. Alsu is an RFE/RL correspondent who reports on religion, culture, and ethnicity in the Russian Federation’s Republic of Tatarstan. Among a growing list of American hostages, Vladimir Putin has two U.S. journalists in his clutches. The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich is locked up in Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo prison. Alsu is behind bars in Tatarstan’s capital, Kazan, five hundred miles east of Moscow. Tatars in this part of Russia are native to the Volga-Ural region—and under increasing Kremlin pressure to surrender autonomy and identity.

*  *  *

In 1856, there were Russians who saw defeat in Crimea as an opportunity to modernize and liberalize their society. A son of the czar’s, Grand Duke Constantine, contended that Russia was becoming “weaker and poorer than first-class powers . . . not only in material terms but in mental resources.” There’s food for thought in this. A year ago in an essay on the history of Crimea for American Purpose, Fred Starr asked whether a defeat for Mr. Putin in Ukraine might usher in an era of reform. 

The list of reasons why Russian revanchism must be defeated is rather long indeed.

My very best,

Jeff

Belarusian Vitali Alekseenok went abroad to develop his talent. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 2016 before moving to Germany for further studies at Weimar’s University of Music. A year ago, he won the prestigious Toscanini Conducting Competition in Parma. By that time, Vitali was already enmeshed in politics. 

After Belarus’ fraudulent election in summer 2020, Vitali traveled home from Germany to join pro-democracy protests in Minsk. Since June 2021, the thirty-three-year-old conductor has served as artistic director of Ukraine’s Kharkiv Music Festival, which organizes concerts in bomb shelters, subways, and hospitals.

There were stunning mass demonstrations across Belarus in August 2020. People of all walks of life participated. Striking was the role musicians played. Vitali Alekseenok led orchestra members in a silent concert on the steps of the Philharmonic in Minsk. “Everyone came without instruments,” he wrote in a 2021 book about the nascent democracy movement; “all of us held placards [of solidarity].” 

Belarusians used the encrypted social media app Telegram to organize anti-regime flash mobs in shopping malls and subways. Pro-democracy Slogans had been banned for years in Belarus but people started assembling to clap their hands. “The sound became an expression of solidarity with the Belarusian opposition,” recounts Vitali.

Alexander Lukashenko answered peaceful protest with terror. Thousands have been arrested—by some estimates thirty-five thousand—with many maltreated and tortured. He’s brazen, Belarus’ dictator.

On May 23, 2021, a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius was diverted to Minsk after Belarusian authorities notified flight crew that a bomb was on board. After a forced landing, no explosions were found on board, but twenty-six-year-old Belarusian activistand blogger Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega were removed from the aircraft, arrested, and sentenced in sham trials to lengthy prison sentences.

* * *

By now it’s hard to sell stories about repression in Belarus. It’s dog bites man. But there’s a bigger picture. Authoritarians of different stripes across the former Soviet Union and in parts of what once constituted communist Europe are fighting hard against anything that smacks of Western liberal democracy. Russian President Vladimir Putin leads the pack, of course, but Lukashenko is a serious player. He now holds more than 1,400 political prisoners in appalling conditions. 

I have a sense of some of the circumstances through my association with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. RFE/RL journalist Ihar Losik is being held at Penal Colony No. 1 in Navapolatsk in northern Belarus. He’s cut off from communication with the outside world. The last time his family received a letter from him was a year ago. Since March last year, the thirty-one-year-old reporter has spent most of his time in a special punishment cell. Former inmates describe these cells as cold and particularly bleak, with a bench, a table, a wash basin, and a toilet. Benches are made of metal, making it nearly impossible to sit for a very long time because of frigid temperatures. Families of prisoners in Penal Colony No. 1 report outbreaks of smallpox.

Ihar’s RFE/RL colleague Andrey Kuznechyk is held in the same prison. Andrey is forced to work morning to night, six days a week, in bitter winter weather at a sawmill. There’s a colleague in another facility in similarly difficult conditions—in a cold cell, with no hot water, a single toilet in plain view used by other cellmates. Then there is Ihar’s wife Darya, incarcerated in a penal colony in eastern Belarus. Her crime? The thirty-two-year-old mother of a five-year-old child pleaded for her husband’s release in a short video. Husband Ihar is serving a term of fifteen years. 

It’s a page out of Stalin’s book to go after family members. Last week, there was another wave of arrests in Belarus focused on the relatives of political prisoners. And the net keeps widening. Last fall, authorities decreed that Belarusians living abroad will have to return home if they want their passports renewed. For many, this is a choice between arrest or statelessness. “We’re like al-Qaeda in the regime’s eyes,” a young female Belarusian democracy advocate based in Europe tells me.

* * *

Vitaly’s silent concert in August 2020 turned to sound. Spontaneously, musicians started to sing a folk song kids grow up with in Belarus, a song called Kupalinka that up until that moment had had nothing to do with the pro-democracy protests. It’s inspiring, the spirit and courage of the Belarusian people.

Today, there’s absolutely no room for music engaged in social critique or dissent. In November, members of the electronic rock Tor Band were sentenced to seven and a half, eight, and nine years, respectively. Courts found Andrei Yaremchyk, Yauhen Burlo, and Dzmitry Halavach guilty of inciting hatred and insulting the president. 

But then Mr. Lukashenko, Belarus’ ruler since 1994, is clear. We’re finished with “imaginary norms like freedom of speech and other freedoms,” he said recently. That’s what we’re up against—and what we in the free West are fighting for.

My best,

Jeff

On Thursday, January 18 at 10:00 a.m. ET, join Richard Aldous for a live recording of his latest Bookstack podcast. Richard will be interviewing Ray Arsenault, author of the forthcoming John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community. The first full-length biography of John Lewis, Arsenault explores the civil rights hero and congressman's dedicated efforts to an overarching objective: bringing to fruition the concept of the "beloved community," a society characterized by fairness and inclusivity. Following the conversation, Richard will open the floor to participants for a brief Q&A with the author.

Praise for John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community:

“Beautifully written and deeply researched, Arsenault’s biography of John Lewis captures his indomitable courage and steadfast moral clarity.”
— Mia Bay, author of Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance

“Arsenault’s highly readable book presents us not just with an indispensable chronicle of a transformative era, but with the portrait of a remarkable human being whose character and vision challenge us all to live up to both his ideals and his sacrifices.”
— Drew Gilpin Faust, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor and President Emerita, Harvard University

“This is a lovely, honest, and thorough book about an American hero who should be better known.”
— Thomas E. Ricks, author of Waging a Good War: How the Civil Rights Movement Won Its Battles, 1954–1968

You can register for the live taping here.

Arch worked for Rustin as a researcher in the 1970s. Republican Richard Nixon, an exploiter of grievance and racial resentments, was president. Many in the Democratic Party insisted America turn inward and away from the world. In 1976, Rustin supported Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Senate campaign. As UN ambassador, Moynihan had shown deep commitment to internationalism and democracy. History doesn’t repeat itself, said Mark Twain, but it rhymes. Our colleague Suzi Garment, American Purpose senior editor, worked for Moynihan.

Rustin and Moynihan were both interested in human rights in the Soviet Union. I’m rereading Natan Sharansky’s prison memoir Fear No Evil. Sharansky has a birthday coming up—he was born on January 20, 1948, in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. It was in winter 1977 that Sharansky was abducted from a friend’s apartment on Gorky Street. A dozen KGB agents were dispatched to transfer the diminutive (five foot, three inches) twenty-nine-year-old human rights activist to Moscow’s Lefortovo prison. Sharansky was charged with high treason and sentenced to thirteen years in a labor camp.

At the time of Sharansky’s arrest, Vladimir Putin was a twenty-four-year-old KGB agent working undercover as a police detective in Leningrad. He was already fascinated by the idea, he’d later recount, of “how a single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands of people.” 

* * *

As we begin a new year, I’m grateful for the continued support of our members and donors. I’m back with American Purpose after a six-month stint in Prague as interim president and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). In the fall, there were important managerial tasks: budget process, a division restructuring, Czech trade union negotiations, end-of-year evaluations, preparations for two potential U.S. government shutdowns. Supported by $146 million in congressionally appropriated funds, RFE/RL produces world-class journalism and first-rate analysis across all media platforms in twenty-seven languages with bureaus in twenty-one countries. You don’t do any of this without superb operations and an outstanding senior leadership team. I’m indebted. And inspired.

RFE/RL journalists are on the front line, again, and this spells considerable sacrifice and risk across Central Asia, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. South of Herat, we had a colleague picked up by the Taliban for hanging out in a forbidden cafe where men had tried to drink tea and play cards. 

In this authoritarian moment, regimes are becoming increasingly strict and brazen. Russian and Iranian agents track exiled journalists across Europe. RFE/RL’s Prague headquarters was rocked this fall by a mysterious death in Current Time, the Russian-language television and digital network, and by an ensuing homicide investigation. The company currently has four behind bars in Belarus, one in Russian-occupied Crimea, and two in Russia proper. There’s almost certainly more to come. The Ukrainian staff work under tremendous pressure. This past fall, an RFE/RL female reporter, cameraman, and driver were nearly killed in an air attack in the midst of interviews not far the front. They helped to administer first aid to badly wounded military personnel.

Russia’s president has been collecting American hostages. Two are journalists—the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich and RFE/RL’s Alsu Kurmasheva. I thought to reread Sharansky as we worked on Alsu’s case. Alsu’s editor said to me, “Remember, this is the one thing the Kremlin does well and there’s a playbook.” It’s cruel. Alsu is the mother of two young children. She went home last summer on a private trip to visit her frail and elderly mother.

Predators like easy prey, I suppose. Chilling is the clinical approach used to wear people down mentally and physically. Sharansky’s first interrogator at Lefortovo—Evan is in Lefortovo; Alsu is five hundred miles east in a detention facility in Kazan—was a KGB colonel named Galkin, a small elderly man with glasses who told Sharansky with a smile, “We shall be working together.” Sharansky was freed nine years later in a prisoner swap. 

Natan Sharansky will be in Washington at the end of this month. We’ve invited Natan to speak to an American Purpose gathering. 

I’m eager to share more about Alsu’s case, my stint at RFE/RL, and American Purpose plans for 2024. Look for a notice soon about a virtual discussion and in-person salon in Washington. Carolyn Stewart and the entire American Purpose team have done a truly splendid job these last months. I find myself again indebted and inspired.

On Monday, we pay tribute to the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s important to remember King’s legacy. And Rustin’s. It’s a good time to remind ourselves of all we’re still fighting for. 

My best,

Jeff

Dear member,

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Best wishes this holiday season,

The editors

I thought of the story recently when a colleague suggested to me that, in the case of Vladimir Putin’s police state, we need to affirm and amplify every small act of independence, opposition, and liberal dissent. There’s something very Havelian about this. In his iconic Cold War essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Václav Havel argued for the importance of small gestures as opportunities for resistance in totalitarianism. Havel used the example of the greengrocer who obligingly displayed in the window the sign “Workers of the world, unite!” The restoration of a free society, Havel believed, starts when the individual refuses to submit to empty slogans, forced rituals, and the little lies that destroy dignity and empower the oppressor.

Arturo Toscanini loved Wagner—and hated Nazis. He wept at seventeen during a performance of Lohengrin, kept a death mask of Hitler’s favorite composer by his piano, and chose an all-Wagner program for the final performance of his career. He left Mussolini’s Italy, where he declined to have his orchestras play the fascist anthem “Giovinezza,” and refused to perform in countries where authoritarians ruled.

The other great conductor of the time, Wilhelm Furtwängler, chose to stay in Germany through Nazism and the war. He performed before Hitler. But Furtwängler refused to perform the Hitler salute and declined to sign letters with “Heil Hitler.” Goebbels, who needed him for propaganda, hated him for this.

*  * * 

History is filled with examples of music as political gesture and symbol of resistance. Is there political change otherwise? Victor Jara’s 1971 song “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” became a Chilean cry of resistance against Pinochet. In Hong Kong, “Do You Hear the People Sing” from Les Misérables became a refrain in 2019 protests. Alexander Galich was a playwright who became known for his dissident songwriting in the Soviet Union. Banned by censors and harassed by the KGB, Galich left in 1974 for the West, where after some months in Norway he joined Radio Liberty in Munich. In Russia today, his music is back. Russian and Ukrainian colleagues at RFE/RL in Prague are preparing a joint program on Galich’s life and work.

During the Third Reich, Jews in Theresienstadt—today’s Terezín, an hour by car from Prague—sang Verdi’s Requiem to the Nazis, accompanied by piano. The Nazis saw a chance to show the world how well the Jews were treated. In fact, one camp survivor recounted, “We sang to the Nazis what we could not say to them.” In Verdi’s Requiem, as part of the Dies Irae sequence, are the words, “from the ashes, the guilty man will be judged.” Here’s the explosive section with Carlo Maria Giulini conducting.

*  * *

I’m writing this on Wednesday August 2 in Prague, where on the first Wednesday of every month sirens are heard across the city, an emergency test at noon for 140 seconds. In this part of Europe, history and proximity to war and repression focus the mind. Slovakia shares a border with Ukraine. The sirens here in Prague were canceled from March to May in 2022 to prevent panic among Ukrainian refugees.

At the top of Wenceslas Square there’s a small plaque on the pavement remembering Jan Palach, the Charles University student who lit himself afire after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Friends said Palach wanted to shake fellow citizens who had become apathetic and acquiescent.

Note: This weekly column resumes in September when American Purpose returns after a break.

I’m listening to Haydn and have been reading about the great classical composer’s patron, Nikolaus I, Prince Esterházy (1714–90), who was apparently cut from a similar cloth. Nikolaus, too, had a feel for the rank and file.

The Viennese prince employed twenty-nine-year-old Franz Joseph Haydn at a moment when transition at court was afoot. It was time to ease Gregor Werner out as Kapellmeister. Baroque and sacred music were falling out of fashion. Nikolaus favored instead the new classical, secular style, and instrumental music in particular. But Nikolaus also wanted to do right by Werner.

Werner was retained as Kapellmeister, but in name only. Nikolaus granted Haydn the real musical authority. Haydn recruited and rehearsed the musicians daily. He served as librarian, was responsible for instruments, and composed the music. Not surprisingly, Werner and Haydn feuded. At one point, the former wrote a letter to the prince about the latter. The semi-retired Werner complained about Haydn’s sloppy administration, excessive spending, and lazy musicians—“[Haydn] lets them get away with everything.” Haydn was indeed stretched thin at the time and the criticism was not entirely baseless.

As a result, Nikolaus held Haydn accountable. He clarified the composer’s responsibilities—there was a letter of reprimand—and tasked a horn player named Josef Dietzl to provide administrative assistance and start taking better care of the musical instruments. As for the two men, Haydn and Werner, they never made peace.

Nikolaus irked fellow royalty. Rather than spending his fortune entirely on himself—and the prince did like his palace, parties, and extravagant clothes—he paid pensions to his employees. He provided decent sums to the widows of men who had worked for him. The prince also supported two hospitals available to court staff, covering the medical bills of ailing employees. This was a century before social security took hold in Europe.

All of which brings us to the story of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony—Abschiedssinfonie—a work composed in the summer of 1772. Nikolaus was spending time at his favorite getaway in Esterháza, a stunning palace he had built in the countryside, northwest of Budapest and south of Vienna. The prince may have reveled in the excursion, but for his musicians the stay had grown longer than expected. They wanted to return back home and appealed to Haydn as their advocate.

Haydn stood by his troops. During the final movement of the Farewell Symphony, the composer had each musician stop at a certain point. Each player snuffed out the candle on his or her music stand and left the stage, the players gradually peeling off, so that by the end there were just two violins left. This was Haydn’s hint. Nikolaus got the message. The next day, orchestra members were on their way home.

*  * *

The team at American Purpose is taking a well-deserved break starting next week. Acting editor-in-chief Carolyn Stewart and colleagues will be back in September. Watch for newsletters in August. You’ll have a chance to revisit outstanding material from the first half of the year. Watch for a robust agenda in the fall, too. There are already new articles, podcasts, and in-person events in the pipeline.

I’m still on temporary assignment in Prague as acting president and CEO of RFE/RL. Look for an invitation for a virtual event on August 23, a discussion with Ukrainian and Russian colleagues. They’ve uncovered documents on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine pertaining to a private Russian military organization (not Wagner). Look for my report from Georgia at the end of August. I’ll be in Tbilisi for meetings with the RFE/RL bureau, the Georgian government, and opposition. I’ll also attend in Tbilisi an RFE/RL-Reuters Institute conference on digital innovation. There will be more to share on a number of fronts by then.

My best,

Jeff

Napoléon Bonaparte had defeated the Austrian army in four major battles as Franz Joseph Haydn was finishing his Missa in angustiis (“Mass for Troubled Times”). And Napoléon was on the move south. This was summer 1798. After capturing Malta, French forces landed in Egypt. But a counteroffensive was prepared. On August 1, the British arrived off the coast of Egypt. Led by Admiral Horatio Nelson, the Brits split the French navy, decimating both anchored and seaward-positioned ships, and destroyed seventeen of nineteen French vessels. It was a stunning victory. Nelson was awarded the title “Baron Nelson of the Nile”—and Haydn’s Mass for Troubled Times quickly became known as the Lord Nelson Mass.

The Lord Nelson Mass is a stirring piece of music, arguably one of Haydn’s finest works. It was intertwined with politics of the day in more ways than one. For one thing, war had its effect on European economies and Haydn’s employer, Prince Esterházy, felt compelled to reduce budgets. This affected his court composer; Haydn had to dismiss his woodwinds and was forced to work with an orchestra of strings, trumpet, and timpani. Organ had to substitute for oboes and flutes and French horns. Haydn made do.

The opening Kyrie of the Lord Nelson Mass is dark and foreboding. There are fireworks throughout. By the end, Dona Nobis Pacem—“grant us peace” from the Latin mass—strikes like a flash of light in the sky. Haydn closes the mass with a joyous, victorious fugue. Great music requires both serious rigor and affectionate joy, Boulanger liked to say. Listen and follow the score for the end of Haydn’s mass here and you’ll get the point. The Agnus Dei—“Lamb of God”—starts meditative, but then things break wide open.

For Nelson, victory over the French was a break. He had suffered malaria, yellow fever, the loss of his right arm, and military defeat against the Spanish at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife on July 25, 1797. The American War of Independence two decades earlier was no picnic, either. Admiral Nelson very likely heard the Lord Nelson Mass performed by Haydn himself in 1800 at the Palais Esterházy in Vienna. As for peace in Europe, it remained elusive. In 1805, Napoléon seized Vienna. Seven years later, the emperor’s forces were marching east. 

*  * *

In September 1863, Leo Tolstoy asked his sister-in-law Elizabeth Bers for research assistance. Tolstoy was interested in letters and diaries from the War of 1812. War and Peace, set during the Napoleonic Wars, was published six years later.

In October 1880, pianist and composer Nikolai Rubinstein commissioned his friend Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to write a piece commemorating the Russian defeat of Napoléon’s forces. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Solemn Overture—popularly known as the 1812 Overture—premiered in Moscow in 1882. The exuberant finale with chimes, brass, and cannon fire has become a popular accompaniment to Fourth of July fireworks in the United States.

Tchaikovsky struggled with depression and fought to find his way in the Russian musical scene. Art was caught up in a nationalist movement and Tchaikovsky’s music was criticized for being insufficiently Russian. Some lamented his weak link to Western style, tradition, and methods.

Today, Tchaikovsky has been caught up in culture wars, with some orchestras tempted to ban him, along with other Russian composers. Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—and the ongoing atrocities committed by Russian forces—has stirred debate about collective guilt, individual responsibility, and the power of gestures. Last year, the Israeli Philharmonic performed Tchaikovsky at Carnegie Hall—to both delight and protest. Wales’ Cardiff Philharmonic took the 1812 Overture off a program last year. Last summer, the Ukrainian Parliament voted to ban music by Russian artists from the post-Soviet era.

*  * *

Ludwig van Beethoven was in his mid-thirties when he composed his Fifth Symphony. Troubled times, to be sure: The composer was becoming deaf, Napoléon was in Vienna, occupation and censorship plunged Austria into political turmoil. Beethoven worked on Symphony No. 5 between 1804 and 1808. 

Beethoven had already ripped up in rage the dedication page of his Third Symphony, having originally thought Napoléon to be a man of freedom, not of tyranny and domination. He remained furious. “If I understood the art of war like I do the art of music,” he quipped, “I’d conquer Napoléon!” He once called out after French soldiers in the same vein with a clinched fist on a street corner in Vienna.

The opening of the Fifth is filled with fury. You have to hear the right kind of performance, though. Here’s Nikolaus Harnoncourt in rehearsal. There’s something raw and brutal in key passages. “It’s about oppression,” says Harnoncourt, “about how one can free oneself [and] the desperate shaking of shackles.” Listen to the first ten minutes—interspersed with Harnoncourt’s vivid commentary—and you’ll get the point.

My very best,

Jeff

It’s amazing what you learn through water cooler talk at RFE/RL headquarters in Prague.

On an elevator, I heard last week from an Afghan colleague about a summer concert in Berlin; Afghan musicians are raising money for artists struggling under the Taliban. In the snack bar, a Balkan service colleague tells me about growing Milošević nostalgia in Serbia. Over coffee on the rooftop, a Russian editor explains how the FSB pressures Russian theater directors. Failure to put the symbol “Z”—an indication of support for the war in Ukraine—above an office door can mean an actor gets drafted and sent to the front.

Culture matters. In 1933, the Völkischer Beobachter (the leading Nazi Party newspaper) wrote, “So long as an unpolitical, neutral, liberal, individual art is left in Germany our task has not been done.”

*  * *

RFE/RL is a treasure trove, a magnificent resource whose story is not so simple to tell. The old Cold War name gets in the way; iconic, yet off-putting in a different era. The modernized, digitized media group gets its annual budget (currently $146 million) from Congress through the United States Agency for Global Media. There’s editorial independence. RFE/RL is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Across all platforms, RFE/RL provides uncensored news and facilitates open debate in twenty-seven languages. There’s work being done in Prague and across twenty-one bureaus that knocks your socks off.

Human capital in this organization is immense. There’s deep talent in technology, innovation, organizational strategy, complex operations, and daunting security. And what a goldmine otherwise: hundreds of journalists, editors, and producers with intimate, firsthand knowledge of places like Russia and Iran, the Black Sea region and Central Asia.

In a hallway, an Iranian colleague tells me the latest on Narges Mohammadi, the fifty-one-year-old physicist turned human rights advocate who’s been summoned by a court for the fifth time in six months—while she sits in notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. “It’s the Iranian way,” says the colleague with a wry smile. The charges keep piling up. Mohammadi keeps sending (sneaking) letters and messages to followers and friends.

There’s grit in this outfit. Staff from Minsk has been forced to set up shop in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, site of this week’s NATO summit. Two colleagues remain jailed in Belarus. As the Kremlin has ramped up surveillance and repression, Russian colleagues have been pulled from Russia and settled in the Latvian capital of Riga.

And the reporting rolls on. There’s a story from Yashkino in the Kemerovo region—three days by train from Moscow—about women in a confectionery whose husbands have been forced into war. Kyrgyz colleagues are investigating the plight of an estimated eight million migrant workers in Russia from across Central Asia who are becoming fodder for Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine adventure.

The Ukrainians live in war. RFE/RL has an office in Lviv, a bureau in Kyiv, and correspondents reporting from front lines. Last year, far from the front, journalist and producer Vira Hyrych was killed in the capital when late one evening a Russian missile slammed into her apartment building. Vira was working on a story on environmental damage done by Russia’s fleet in the Black Sea.

The method for RFE/RL is accurate, reliable, and responsible journalism. The mission lies at the heart of everything. There’s every political stripe and persuasion in this company—and broad and deep commitment to accountable government, rule of law, and human rights.

Prague headquarters came about through an agreement between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Czech President Václav Havel. The organization moved from Munich in the 1990s. I’ve always thought of Havel as RFE/RL’s patron saint. The playwright turned politician exemplified pluralism, tolerance, and respect for diversity—values and aspirations that got him five years behind communist bars. “Keep the company of those who seek the truth,” Havel said, “[and] run from those who have found it.”

 *  * *

I always thought of Havel as having a musical soul, even if his friend and biographer Michael Žantovský says Havel’s fondness for underground rock—for Frank Zappa, the Velvet Underground, the Plastic People of the Universe—was less about the music than about its rebellious, contrarian spirit.

In today’s Afghanistan, music is banned, even at weddings. Private musical gatherings exist. Hidden.

Last weekend, I went to the basement venue of a Prague bar to hear a band called “The Gripes.” Drummer Josef and rhythm guitarist Francesca come from Britain, singer Joey is from Australia, and lead guitarist Terry from America. The Gripes play garage (or shed) rock, says Rashteen, the nineteen-year-old Pakistani-Czech bass player. At Chapeau Rouge in Prague Old Town, the music was loud, ferocious, fun.

Rashteen is the son of a top RFE/RL reporter who grew up in Waziristan, the mountainous area populated by ethnic Pashtuns that lies roughly three hundred miles southwest from Islamabad by the Afghan border. I was amused by Rashteen’s seven-year-old sister and her girlfriend. Both covered their ears with their hands at the Gripes gig. They came prepared with serious-looking noise protection ear muffs. That was, until the rhythm finally got them and the two girls started dancing.

My best,

Jeff

This is a corner of Europe marinated in culture and history. Spa town Teplice is an hour’s drive northeast of Prague. It’s just across the border from Chemnitz, once known as Karl Marx City during East German communist times. Teplitz (in German) is where Beethoven met Goethe in 1812. It’s also where, in a letter dated July 6 of that summer, Beethoven wrote his famous “Letter to the Immortal Beloved.” The identity of Beethoven’s great love has never been established. Or was it an intense flirtation? There’s a 1994 film called Immortal Beloved with Gary Oldman as Ludwig van Beethoven.

Beethoven was passionate about life and liberty. 1812 was the year the Russians repelled Napoleon’s invading forces. Beethoven had once dedicated a symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte. He saw him as embodying democratic ideals. Upon hearing that Napoleon had declared himself emperor of France, he tore up the title page in rage.

The great German composer was taken by anti-monarchic ideals. Beethoven’s opera Fidelio was of a piece with other work of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that celebrated ideals of the Aufklärung, the Enlightenment, with stories in which a main character is liberated from malevolent forces.

In Mitteleuropa, music and politics have always mixed.

A decade after the end of World War II, the Wiener Staatsoper (the Vienna State Opera House) reopened. On November 5, 1955, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was in attendance as Austrian television, ORF, made its first live broadcast with Karl Böhm conducting Fidelio. The streets were lined with people unable to get tickets, but eager to hear the performance over loudspeaker. Furtwängler saw in Fidelio ”comfort and courage” after ”human dignity and liberty” had been restored.

On October 7, 1989, a performance of Fidelio at the Semperoper in Dresden was to mark the fortieth anniversary of communist East Germany. The performance coincided with pro-democracy demonstrations across the so-called German Democratic Republic. Rousing applause after the “Prisoners’ Chorus” went on so long that the opera was interrupted. Four weeks later, on November 9, 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the end of the East German regime.

*  * *

For Beethoven, everything involved struggle. May 23, 1814, marked the first proper performance of Fidelio. It premiered in Vienna at Theater am Kärntnertor.

For Beethoven, the road to Fidelio—his only opera—was an arduous one. Along the way there were meddling censors, a disappointing libretto, a cancelled commission, a bankrupted theater, two major revisions, a failed love relationship. Leonore, as it was originally called, had to be shortened at one point from three acts to two. The opera was poorly received at first. Beethoven had lost his ”original creative flair,” wrote one critic. The genius became depressed, friends reported.

Of course, Fidelio stands as one of his greatest works. Here’s an aria from the opera sung by Florestan, inmate of the cruel prison warden Don Pizarro. Beethoven reworked the beginning eighteen times.

Last July, Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska brought down the house at Royal Albert Hall in London with her performance of Leonore’s great aria ”Abscheulicher!” Leonore is the character who rescues her husband Florestan from political prison. 

*  * *

As for the symphony Beethoven wished to dedicate to Napoleon, you can see the first printed edition at Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle. The symphony is Eroica—Symphony No. 3—with the revised dedication to Prince Lobkowicz. The edition has Beethoven’s handwritten corrections and annotations.

As for Prague, it’s always been a capital of cultural freedom.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni premiered here on October 29, 1787, a work that grappled with issues of freedom and responsibility at a time when the liberal regime of Habsburg Emperor Joseph II was falling apart. 

Czech composer Antonín Dvorák started with violin at the age of six here and would become known as the composer of the late 19th century able to balance and fuse change with tradition.

Written in New York City in 1893, his Symphony No. 9, From the New World, drew on Black spirituals and Native American music. Starting in 1892, Dvorák lived for three years at 327 East 17th Street. Neil Armstrong took a recording of the New World Symphony along during the Apollo 11 mission that landed on the moon in 1969.

Otherwise, Dvorák lived a good portion of his life on Žitná Street in Prague, a few blocks away from where I currently stay, next to the Václav Havel Library and three blocks from Žofín Palace—where Smetana, Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky all paid visits.

My very best,

Jeff

Germany made its deal with national socialism long before the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. In 1930, three years before Hitler came to power, Mann denounced the “wave of anomalous barbarism, of primitive popular vulgarity” that was destroying decency in his country. He warned of “a state of feeling that may become a world menace.”

In Doktor Faustus, before Leverkühn’s descent, Mann had Leverkühn composing in the style of shimmering, impressionistic Debussy. But Wagner, and the pushing and stretching of boundaries—the pre-Schönbergian moment—was on the march. On one occasion, Mann wrote:

A passion for Wagner’s enchanted work has been a part of my life ever since I first became aware of it and set out to make it my own, to invest it with understanding. . . . hours filled with frissons and delights for the nerve and the intellect alike.

But then he also added:

[Wagner] had so much ability and talent and interpretative skill—more than words can say. Yet so much affection with it, such lordly pretension, self-aggrandizement and . . . self-dramatization—again, more than words can say or patience can bear.

Toward the end of the 19th century, orchestras and choruses swelled in size. Composers used increased chromaticism for richer and more complex harmonies. Full-on dissonance was no longer taboo in late romanticism. Some like Wagner turned to literature, poetry, and the visual arts for inspiration. Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 for orchestra and chorus—composed in southern Austria in the summer of 1906—became known as the “Symphony of a Thousand.” Mahler played with unconventional structure. Instead of several movements, he divided the work into two parts. He mixed Latin and German, with Part II using the text from the final scene of Goethe’s Faust.

*  *  *

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was preoccupied with music. In Magic Mountain (1924), protagonist Hans Castorp loves music for its narcotic effect. This is exactly what troubles his friend, the Italian humanist Settembrini. “Let music assume its most high-minded pose,” says Settembrini, “[but] then our emotions are inflamed. . . . the real point should be to inflame our reason.” That was on the eve of World War I.

In Buddenbrooks (1901), Mann’s tale of a merchant family in decline over four generations, there are leitmotifs in prose adapted from the musical technique of Wagner. In the figure of Hanno, the musical son of the outwardly successful yet fragile Thomas and his neurotic wife Gerda, there’s a path from stability to experiment to decadence and finally madness.

Mann finished his Doktor Faustus in 1947, two years after World War II. He had his main character, Adrian Leverkühn—born on June 6, 1885, near the fictional town of Kaisersaschern—expire on August 25, 1940. But the career of the composer had ended a decade earlier with a mental breakdown, twenty-four years after his pact with the devil.

Mann was fixated on musical detail. Leverkühn’s humanistic friend Serenus Zeitblom plays viola d’amore in social settings. That’s the soft, sweet-sounding instrument—with six or seven strings compared to the four of the viola or violin—Mann’s son Michael played in the Pittsburg Symphony after the war.

Mann was in Switzerland when Hitler came to power in 1933. He was in southern California, in Pacific Palisades, when he began work on Doktor Faustus. Mann suffered and flourished and fought for his causes through his exile years. He was a vocal opponent of the Nazis. By 1947, when he finished Faustus, he was a U.S. citizen in Los Angeles active in opposing hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

*  *  *

Richard Wagner (1813–83) became known for opera productions that explode in sound and sense, in depth and duration. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg runs roughly five hours. His “world-conquering artistry” would become appropriated by the Nazis. Hitler was obsessed with Wagner at the age of twelve.

It all came from somewhere. Here’s Wagner’s Symphony in C Major—his only complete symphony, a musical form that was going out of fashion at the time—written when the composer was nineteen years old.

Here’s a string quartet by post-Romanticist, anti-modernist Hans Pfitzner. The Nazis liked him, until they hated him (Pfitzner insisted on remaining close to Jewish conductor Bruno Walter). Pfitzner’s contemporary Gustav Mahler appreciated his work (Alma Mahler couldn’t stand him). Mann befriended him, and undoubtedly absorbed musical lessons from countless conversations with him.

Mann quarreled with musical revolutionary Arnold Schönberg. They had both taken refuge in southern California. You can read their correspondence in this book.

Schönberg came from a lower middle-class Jewish family in the district in Vienna called Leopoldstadt. That’s the name of Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award-winning play that just, incidentally, premiered in Moscow. In Leopoldstadt, the renowned Czech (Moravian-born) playwright tells the story of a Jewish family—survivors of pogroms, strivers, and strugglers for belonging and identity—from 1899 to 1950.

Schönberg’s break with the musical past also came from somewhere. Here’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) from 1899, a work for strings in one movement. You can hear influences of Wagner. There were kudos for inventiveness at the time. The pushing of chromatic boundaries raised the eyebrows of audiences and some critics. Shock and atonal scandal were still to come. 

My best,

Jeff

Gershwin is remembered for his embrace and integration of classical music, popular music, and jazz, and for his ability to express sounds that were uniquely American. Maurice Ravel thought so much of the young Gershwin that he wrote to the legendary teacher of composition Nadia Boulanger, urging her to take him on as a student. She declined, explaining to the great French composer that in the case of such a deep and original talent she might do more harm than good. Boulanger did accept Copland, and Bernstein, and Barenboim.

Gershwin is well remembered. There are at least two dozen biographies. “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess, the first great American opera, has been recorded more than twenty-five thousand times. Forgotten is the fact that Gershwin accomplished so much in such a short amount of time. George Gershwin died at the age of thirty-eight on July 11, 1937, in Los Angeles after surgeons performed surgery to remove a brain tumor.

His music has traveled everywhere, of course, and the Baltic nations are no exception. I’m currently in Riga, where American jazz and pop music first showed up in the 1920s. By summer 1927, the first African-American band was playing in Latvia; the group Happy Broadway appeared at a festival in the coastal resort city of Jūrmala. In 1929, “Sonny Boy” became a hit here. In spring 1932, “Rhapsody in Blue” followed, the piece Gershwin had been commissioned in 1923 to write in honor of Lincoln’s birthday. It was, he said, “a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness.”

It’s summertime here, with sunset at 10:19 p.m. Next week, there’ll be music across the countryside for the most Latvian of holidays Jāni, or Līgo, the night of June 23 into June 24. That’s summer solstice. It’s a necessary respite this year from what seems to be on many people’s minds. “The war on Ukraine is a fight for our future,” a senior Latvian official tells me. Indeed across much of the region, support for Ukraine is inspired by experience, and proximity. “Hands off Ukraine, Putin,” reads the large banner (in Ukrainian colors) draped across the facade of St. Salvator’s, the early Baroque church built by the Jesuits that is situated at one end of the Charles Bridge where Prague’s Old Town begins (I’ve just started a temporary assignment with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the Czech capital).

* * *

Gershwin’s “Summertime” is an American amalgamation. The song comes from the novel Porgy and Bess by DuBose Heyward, whose wife Dorothy adapted the 1925 book for the stage in 1927, which in turn inspired the masterpiece Gershwin called “an American folk opera.” Heyward and Ira Gershwin teamed up on the libretto, traveling to Charleston, South Carolina, to research African-American music. The tune for “Summertime” draws on a Black spiritual. The synthesis and collaboration got everything right. Here’s Stephen Sondheim on the result, on the very first line:

That ‘and’ is worth a great deal. I would write ‘Summertime when’ but that ‘and’ sets up a tone, a whole poetic tone, not to mention a whole kind of diction that is going to be used. . . . It’s the exact right word, and that word is worth its weight in gold. . . . The choices of ‘ands’ and ‘buts’ become almost traumatic as you are writing a lyric.

Everyone will have their favorite rendition. Here are my top five:

5. Janis Joplin

4. Ella Fitzgerald

3. Billie Holiday

2. Sarah Vaughan

1. Miles Davis

Gershwin’s dedication in Porgy and Bess was “To My Parents.” Here’s to memory, freedom, sovereignty, independence—and summertime.

My very best,

Jeff

On June 8, 1968, Leonard Bernstein conducted members of the New York Philharmonic in Gustav Mahler’s “Adagietto” from Symphony No. 5 for the funeral of Senator Robert F. Kennedy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Sirhan Sirhan had shot Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles three days earlier. RFK’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination had lasted eight-two days.

“New York was a strange sight,” Lady Bird Johnson recounted. “The streets were lined with people who stood silent, motionless . . . the voiceless chorus of a Greek tragedy. St. Patrick’s was filled to overflow with four thousand people.”

At 4 a.m. on the day after the funeral, Jacqueline Kennedy wrote Bernstein a seven-page, handwritten letter of gratitude. Her successor as First Lady, Lady Bird, described “an expression of the utmost passion, of torment,” in Bernstein’s rendering of the Mahler work.

Bernstein was always drawn to Mahler. After JFK’s assassination in 1963, he led a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection) in tribute to the fallen President. The 1960s was a decade of killings that rocked the nation. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on April 4, 1968; Malcom X in 1965; John F. Kennedy and civil rights activist Medgar Evers both in 1963. In music, solace.

Why Mahler? is the name of a short, engaging book by British music critic Norman Lebrecht. To go deeper, read Jens Malte Fischer’s Mahler biography. And to widen the lens, read our friend Joe Horowitz’s new novel, The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York.

Mahler was by all accounts a force. Alma Schindler wrote during her courtship with Gustav, “The fellow is made entirely of oxygen. When you get near him, you get burnt.” Alma Mahler—a composer in her own right—became her husband’s manager, copyist, editor, and muse. Gustav dedicated his Eighth Symphony to his wife (“Every note,” he told her, “was directed to you”).

The Mahlers lived in New York. They spent three years there with their daughter Anna, from 1908 to 1911. The family’s first residence was an eleventh floor suite at the Hotel Majestic overlooking Central Park (115 Central Park West). Alma moved back to New York years later. She loved New York. “I had [often] given my soul a holiday and fled to that city of light,” she said. From 1952 to her death in 1964, Alma lived in a flat on the third floor at 120 East 73rd Street.

Gustav died in Vienna in summer 1911, age fifty, at a time when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was coming apart at the seams. He came originally from Bohemia, his family a part of a Jewish, German-speaking minority.

Leonard Bernstein was attached to Mahler, an attachment that affected and inspired family and friends. In her memoir, Bernstein’s daughter Jamie recounts how she and her teenage girlfriend went to see her father conduct Mahler’s Fifth in New York:

During the Adagietto music, the most achingly beautiful music we had ever heard, Linn fell apart. I’d never seen her cry over anything before. . . . She never did explain why that music got to her the way it did—but that was how we discovered the point of music.

Here’s Bernstein in detail on the “Adagietto:”

And so we come to the final incredible page, and this page, I think, is the closest we have ever come, in any work of art, to experiencing the very act of dying, of giving it all up. The slowness of the page is terrifying: Adagissimo, [Mahler] writes, the slowest possible musical direction; and then langsam (slow), ersterbend (dying away), zögernd (hesitating); and if all those were not enough to indicate the near stoppage of time, he adds äussert langsam (extremely slow) in the very last bars. It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate. We hold on to them, hovering between hope and submission. And one by one, these spidery strands connecting us to life melt away, vanish from our fingers even as we hold them. . . . We lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything.

In Mahler, ambiguity. Here’s Bernstein speaking and breaking down the “Adagietto” at the piano. And then, finally, Bernstein conducting the famous fourth movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.

* * *

On June 8, 1968, a twenty-one-car train carried the body of New York Senator and presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy from New York’s Penn Station to Washington D.C.’s Union Station. The journey took a long eight hours, with as many as two million people crowding platforms along the way to pay respects. RFK had started in a different place politically, but by 1968 he was trying to unite the White and Black working class. He traveled to poor regions of the United States and supported striking farm workers. Robert F. Kennedy is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Leonard Bernstein, the son of Ukrainian immigrants, is buried in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. He lies with a copy of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony across his heart.

Sincerely,

Jeff

Elgar was a Roman Catholic in Protestant England. He was a country boy who struggled to make a living in cosmopolitan London. As a student, he studied German in hopes to attend the Leipzig Conservatory. In the end, his parents could not afford the tuition fees. It seems life dealt Edward a weak hand.

He was an introvert who struggled with serious mood swings. It was not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that medical science began to understand and think about ways to treat depression.

Eventually recognition would come. In March 1904 there was a three-day festival at Covent Garden devoted solely to Elgar’s music. A member of the royal family attended each concert. Three months later, at age forty-seven, he was knighted. Sir Edward Elgar’s music would be played at Covent Garden for the king and queen. Even still: A 1955 British reference book asserted that Elgar’s work was a true reflection of Edwardian times—music with “emotional vulgarity” and a “ruthless philistinism.”

Here’s Elgar’s great cello concerto, about which our colleague Rebecca Burgess has written. It’s performed in this instance by Jacqueline du Pré under the baton of Daniel Barenboim (the two married on June 15, 1967). Mstislav Rostropovich stopped playing the concerto after he heard du Pré’s stunning rendition. I like the lesser known gems by Elgar. Here’s one.

There are a thousand reasons to love and appreciate music for music’s sake. Music also offers us a lens and unique perspective on a particular time and period. Music is social and cultural history. I’ve always been fond of the C.S. Lewis quote that, “Day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.”

*  *  *

Vincent Persichetti was born in Philadelphia on June 6, 1915. His father came from the Italian village of Torricella Peligna in Abruzzo (east of Rome), home to the family of opera composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35).

Young Vincent was a prodigy. He performed his first piano recital at five, and was taken under the wing of Olga Samaroff, Samaroff being an accomplished Texan-born pianist who changed her name—her agent persuading her to drop “Lucy Mary Olga Agnes Hickenlooper”—to pursue a career in classical music. Persichetti went on to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and join the faculty at New York’s famed Juilliard.

Persichetti is remembered most as a great teacher. He taught the Washington, D.C., composer and music critic Robert Evett, who, incidentally, worked from 1952 to 1968 as music and literary editor for The New Republic. But Persichetti composed interesting and beautiful music, too.

Here’s mesmerizing piano music by Persichetti. Persichetti studied double bass as a child. Try this, with Uxía Martínez Rotana from Spain. I like this very much. Persichetti’s “Hollow Men” is inspired by the poem of the same name by T.S. Eliot, written in 1925 and influenced by the mood of post-World War I Europe.

*  *  *

Igor Stravinsky came of age just before World War I. Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882, in the town Oraniembaum on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, twenty-five miles west of St. Petersburg. He owed his fame and fortune, one could say, to the art critic Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), who is remembered as the greatest impresario of the early 20th century. Diaghilev knew everyone in literature, music, theater, painting, and dance—Émile Zola, Charles Gounod, Giuseppe Verdi, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Vaslav Nijinsky, Modest Mussorgsky. He founded the most important ballet company of the time.

Stravinsky’s Firebird (1910) was the first hit of Diaghilev’s company. Critics loved the scenery, choreography, and music. Here’s Stravinsky himself conducting in 1959. Petrushka followed a year later. It quickly became one of Ballets Russes’ most popular productions. Here’s a scene with Rudolf Nureyev from 1976. In 1913 came The Rite of Spring—scandal due to the polytonality of Stravinsky’s score. The frenzied rhythmic changes, the primordial grunts prompted the audience to hiss and laugh (“Exactly what I wanted!”, claimed Diaghilev afterwards).

*  *  *

Herbert von Karajan came onto the scene at another troubled time. In 1938, the year Germany annexed Austria, the thirty-year-old conductor from Salzburg led a performance of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Berlin State Opera that captured quite a bit of imagination. It was the moment of the strong man. By 1938 in Italy Mussolini was driving forward his fascist agenda with full force.

After his Tristan performance, the Berliner Zeitung proclaimed in a headline, “Von Karajan the Miracle.” That same year von Karajan conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for the first time. With von Karajan it was complicated. He consented to the playing of the Nazi anthem, the Horst-Wessel-Lied, before concerts, but was never forgiven by the Führer after a June 1939 performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Von Karajan had led a deliberately un-Germanic performance, a livid Hitler was convinced. Apparently heroism and glory were absent that evening. After the war, von Karajan tried to conceal his Nazi Party membership. He had first joined in Austria in 1933.

Von Karajan developed a reputation for promoting young talent: Conductors Claudio Abbado and Seiji Ozawa and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter all benefited from his support. He started the Orchestra Academy in 1972 to prepare musicians for work in a professional orchestra.

In 1982 von Karajan hired, against the will of the Berlin Philharmonic, clarinetist Sabine Meyer. Members argued that the style and sound of the gifted young soloist would not blend. Von Karajan—who himself for years had opposed having women in his orchestra—was convinced that discrimination was playing a role in the opposition to Meyer. The dispute led to von Karajan’s departure.

Von Karajan died on July 16, 1989. Here’s his intense rendering of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. I’m fond of this quote by Abbado, who said, “I love the sound of snow; the Berlin Philharmonic manages it sometimes.” Try this. It’s the Berlin Phil with American composer Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

My best,

Jeff

Elgar was a Roman Catholic in Protestant England. He was a country boy who struggled to make a living in cosmopolitan London. As a student, he studied German in hopes to attend the Leipzig Conservatory. In the end, his parents could not afford the tuition fees. It seems life dealt Edgar a weak hand.

He was an introvert who struggled with serious mood swings. It was not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that medical science began to understand and think about ways to treat depression.

Eventually recognition would come. In March 1904 there was a three-day festival at Covent Garden devoted solely to Elgar’s music. A member of the royal family attended each concert. Three months later, at age forty-seven, he was knighted. Sir Edgar Elgar’s music would be played at Covent Garden for the king and queen. Even still: A 1955 British reference book asserted that Elgar’s work was a true reflection of Edwardian times—music with “emotional vulgarity” and a “ruthless philistinism.”

Here’s Elgar’s great cello concerto, about which our colleague Rebecca Burgess has written. It’s performed in this instance by Jacqueline du Pré under the baton of Daniel Barenboim (the two married on June 15, 1967). Mstislav Rostropovich stopped playing the concerto after he heard du Pré’s stunning rendition. I like the lesser known gems by Elgar. Here’s one.

There are a thousand reasons to love and appreciate music for music’s sake. Music also offers us a lens and unique perspective on a particular time and period. Music is social and cultural history. I’ve always been fond of the C.S. Lewis quote that, “Day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.”

*  *  *

Vincent Persichetti was born in Philadelphia on June 6, 1915. His father came from the Italian village of Torricella Peligna in Abruzzo (east of Rome), home to the family of opera composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35).

Young Vincent was a prodigy. He performed his first piano recital at five, and was taken under the wing of Olga Samaroff, Samaroff being an accomplished Texan-born pianist who changed her name—her agent persuading her to drop “Lucy Mary Olga Agnes Hickenlooper”—to pursue a career in classical music. Persichetti went on to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and join the faculty at New York’s famed Juilliard.

Persichetti is remembered most as a great teacher. He taught the Washington, D.C., composer and music critic Robert Evett, who, incidentally, worked from 1952 to 1968 as music and literary editor for The New Republic. But Persichetti composed interesting and beautiful music, too.

Here’s mesmerizing piano music by Persichetti. Persichetti studied double bass as a child. Try this, with Uxía Martínez Rotana from Spain. I like this very much. Persichetti’s “Hollow Men” is inspired by the poem of the same name by T.S. Eliot, written in 1925 and influenced by the mood of post-World War I Europe.

*  *  *

Igor Stravinsky came of age just before World War I. Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882, in the town Oraniembaum on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, twenty-five miles west of St. Petersburg. He owed his fame and fortune, one could say, to the art critic Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), who is remembered as the greatest impresario of the early 20th century. Diaghilev knew everyone in literature, music, theater, painting, and dance—Émile Zola, Charles Gounod, Giuseppe Verdi, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Vaslav Nijinsky, Modest Mussorgsky. He founded the most important ballet company of the time.

Stravinsky’s Firebird (1910) was the first hit of Diaghilev’s company. Critics loved the scenery, choreography, and music. Here’s Stravinsky himself conducting in 1959. Petrushka followed a year later. It quickly became one of Ballets Russes’ most popular productions. Here’s a scene with Rudolf Nureyev from 1976. In 1913 came The Rite of Spring—scandal due to the polytonality of Stravinsky’s score. The frenzied rhythmic changes, the primordial grunts prompted the audience to hiss and laugh (“Exactly what I wanted!”, claimed Diaghilev afterwards).

*  *  *

Herbert von Karajan came onto the scene at another troubled time. In 1938, the year Germany annexed Austria, the thirty-year-old conductor from Salzburg led a performance of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Berlin State Opera that captured quite a bit of imagination. It was the moment of the strong man. By 1938 in Italy Mussolini was driving forward his fascist agenda with full force.

After his Tristan performance, the Berliner Zeitung proclaimed in a headline, “Von Karajan the Miracle.” That same year von Karajan conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for the first time. With von Karajan it was complicated. He consented to the playing of the Nazi anthem, the Horst-Wessel-Lied, before concerts, but was never forgiven by the Führer after a June 1939 performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Von Karajan had led a deliberately un-Germanic performance, a livid Hitler was convinced. Apparently heroism and glory were absent that evening. After the war, von Karajan tried to conceal his Nazi Party membership. He had first joined in Austria in 1933.

Von Karajan developed a reputation for promoting young talent: Conductors Claudio Abbado and Seiji Ozawa and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter all benefited from his support. He started the Orchestra Academy in 1972 to prepare musicians for work in a professional orchestra.

In 1982 von Karajan hired, against the will of the Berlin Philharmonic, clarinetist Sabine Meyer. Members argued that the style and sound of the gifted young soloist would not blend. Von Karajan—who himself for years had opposed having women in his orchestra—was convinced that discrimination was playing a role in the opposition to Meyer. The dispute led to von Karajan’s departure.

Von Karajan died on July 16, 1989. Here’s his intense rendering of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. I’m fond of this quote by Abbado, who said, “I love the sound of snow; the Berlin Philharmonic manages it sometimes.” Try this. It’s the Berlin Phil with American composer Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

My best,

Jeff

The French composer Darius Milhaud saw Rodeo and Billy the Kid as authentically Copland, and very American. There was, said Milhaud—who himself immigrated to America to escape Nazi rule in 1940—a “feeling for the soil . . . the wide plains with their soft colorings, where the cowboy sings his nostalgic songs.” Milhaud saw in Copland’s music a powerful mixture of “pounding dance rhythms,” of “underlying distress” buttressed by “sturdy strength and sun-drenched movement.”

I’ve always been struck by Copland’s ballet Billy the Kid. The idea came from Lincoln Kirstein, the poet, editor, and co-founder of the School of American Ballet. Copland was taken by the saga of the notorious outlaw Henry McCarty, alias William H. Bonney and best known as Billy the Kid. The story is a vivid, famously violent one. McCarty was alleged to have murdered a person for every year of his short life. His first robbery was of a Chinese laundry at fifteen. He lived as a gambler, cattle rustler, and horse thief. At age twenty-one, McCarty was shot and killed by sheriff Pat Garrett at Maxwell Ranch in New Mexico. All this, too, was part of the American frontier.

Leonard Bernstein once noted that Copland the man and Copland the composer could show very different personalities. The measured, mild-mannered colleague and friend, an avowed pacifist who by his own admission was not easily hurt and never carried grudges, produced a good deal of music with “prophetic severity, a ferocious rage, a sharp bite, a prickly snap . . . a wounding, an agonized howl.”

The Brooklyn Copland grew up in was not without its edges. At the beginning of the century, this corner of New York was inhabited mostly by German and Irish immigrants. But then mixed in, too, were African Americans and newcomers from the West Indies, Wales, Sweden, and Finland. On the way to school, young Aaron walked through “a tough and slightly scary neighborhood,” he’d recount. To be avoided at all costs was “the Irish section, down on Dean Street and Vanderbilt Avenue.”

In his memoir, Copland describes his parents as hardworking, busy, loyal Americans. He can’t imagine his father Harris, who ran a local department store, ever retiring. His mother Sarah came from a small town called Vištytis on the Russian-Lithuanian border near Kaliningrad. She attended high school in Dallas and always considered herself a Texan. Copland grew up a believer in what he called “Jewish adaptability.”

We’ve just hosted a program with the D.C. public library (West End Neighborhood Branch) that included a discussion of music by Copland. The evening’s wider aim was to see issues of race, gender, and ethnicity through the lens of music. In Copland’s work there’s plenty to dig into. Copland rewrote lyrics for his adaptation of the minstrel song “Ching-a-Ring Chaw” because, he said at the time, “I did not want to take any chance of . . . being construed as racist.”

*  * *

AP editorial board member Michael Mandelbaum has written for us about Beverly Gage’s revisionist biography of J. Edgar Hoover, a man who both abused his authority and established elements of an administrative state that were efficient and effective. You can watch the discussion we hosted on the book with Beverly and Michael here. You can read Frank Fukuyama’s series on the history of the administrative state and the need for a competent, accountable, well-administered bureaucracy here. Incidentally, Beverly Gage has just been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her meticulous research on Hoover.

We’re interested in the new George Kennan biography. Richard Aldous has just hosted for his AP “Bookstack” podcast Frank Costigliola on his Kennan: A Life between Worlds. You can read Mandelbaum on the Costigliola book here.

We’re interested in anything that offers a competition of ideas and possibilities in the GOP. We noted this week that Republican Governor Chris Sununu may throw his hat in for 2024. He was the first guest Chuck Lane hosted for his AP podcast “Times Like These with Charles Lane” last May. You can listen to that conversation here.

Elliot Ackerman should run for office. We’ve just hosted Elliot for a discussion of his new novel Halcyon, a blend of counterfactual history and futurism and a way to think about some of our thorniest social and cultural issues today. Elliot served five tours of duty as a Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan and was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star for Valor, and a Purple Heart. Read when you have a chance the recent Wall Street Journal profile of Elliot. On June 6 we’ll host for a salon Joanne Leedom-Ackerman (Elliot’s Mom) on her new novel. But more about that next week.

This week, we’re publishing the first in a three-part series on America’s fraught history with debt. Rutgers historian and AP editorial board member Kate Epstein is tackling this for us. It’s a formidable piece of work, steeped as much in culture as it is in economics.

*  * *

Politics, public policy, and foreign policy may be the mainstay of what we do, but there’s always culture as complement. There are different ways to think about how we rejuvenate liberalism and keep authoritarian impulses at bay. Sometimes it’s useful, says my colleague Suzi Garment, to come at things sideways.

We started our series with D.C. Public Library with a program titled, “Why James Baldwin?” featuring AP editorial board member Azar Nafisi and Nolan Harris. Last week, we took up “Old and New American Songs” as social history with Erin Freeman, Michael Kimmage, and Andrew Lee. We’ll turn next in this series to “What’s an American?” Roya Hakakian and other distinguished conversation partners will help us untangle some knots. Date and details to come soon. In case you missed it, here’s my own teaser. It’s the story of composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a mass of American contradictions and paradoxes.

For a brilliant evening of music in Washington D.C., there’s Lee’s D.C. Strings’ annual gala at the Arts Club of Washington on June 3.

On June 4, you can hear Freeman lead the City Choir of Washington in a performance of old and new American music. The program will include Aaron Copland and the collection of songs he adapted in 1950 and 1952. 

Copland is an American original. As a high schooler and novice choral singer, I sang a program of Copland’s at the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra, Copland conducting. More about that another time. If you want to learn more about Copland’s life and work, I recommend Howard Pollack’s fine biography and Copland’s own autobiographies, co-authored with musicologist Vivian Perlis. Here’s a performance I like very much, meanwhile; it’s Copland’s “Old American Songs.”

My best,

Jeff

In Vilnius, history is close. Around the corner from our hotel are the former Gestapo headquarters, a property that sits on the tree-lined Gediminas Avenue across from Lukiškės Square. Today, the building houses the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights. The Soviet Union annexed Lithuania in summer 1940. Nazi Germany invaded a year later. Trauma after trauma here.

For their part, German Einsatzgruppen worked efficiently — together with Lithuanian auxiliaries — to cleanse Lithuania of its Jews, some 250,000 citizens, roughly 10 percent of the population. In short order, 90 percent of Lithuania’s Jewish community was wiped out. Many were shot in the countryside. Some were transferred to death camps in German-occupied Poland.

In summer 1944, the Soviets were back. The city’s main boulevard became Stalin Avenue, which eventually became Lenin Avenue. Gestapo headquarters became KGB headquarters. It was here that resisters and dissidents were interrogated—and tortured. A thousand or so were murdered in the basement. This city never had it easy with the Russians. Lukiškės Square across the street was infamous in the 19th century for public executions. Mikhail Muravyov-Vilensky, the imperial governor, earned himself the nickname “the hangman.” The Moscow-born personification of czarist repression was determined to wipe out local language and culture and kill off resistance to Russification.

No surprise that in Vilnius we met Lithuanians pulling hard for Ukraine. It’s a regional-historical-cultural thing. The Norwegians were in town when we were there conspiring with Lithuanian counterparts on how to get Ukraine into the Atlantic Alliance. Vilnius hosts the NATO Summit in July. The Baltic and Nordic states, along with Poland, are becoming a bloc. We heard from a young Finnish colleague that, back home in Helsinki, the war is almost all her friends talk about. Finland shares an 830-mile border with Russia.

*  * *

Through thick and thin, the arts and culture have managed to flourish in this vulnerable part of Europe. During the Winter War with Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1939–40, Finland conscripted the near entirety of its population. The Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra stopped giving concerts. Finnish radio and the Radio Orchestra were evacuated to Pori on the west coast.

Swing was adored in Finland in the early 1940s. People needed an escape. Patriotic music was very popular. One military officer named R.W. Palmroth, “Palle” — a poet and composer of sorts — organized concerts and wrote songs for the troops. His best-known song during the Winter War, Silmien välliin, encouraged Finnish soldiers to shoot Russians right between the eyes.

I’ve noted before the work of our friend Sofi Oksanen, the acclaimed Finnish-Estonian novelist, who has now written the libretto for the new opera Innocence by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. The one-act work performed over two hours is multilingual. It’s set in Helsinki, where the son of a Finnish-French family is marrying a Romanian woman. Innocence opens at a wedding reception, where a Czech server is stunned to realize that the groom is the brother of the boy who killed her teenage daughter and several others in a school shooting a decade earlier.

In Eastern Europe, culture butts against culture. Composers Arvo Pärt and Krzysztof Penderecki are well known in musical circles. Penderecki died three years ago. He was born in Dębica (in Yiddish – Dembitz), in southeastern Poland, in 1933. Before World War II, the town was inhabited mostly by Hasidic Jews. Penderecki was of Armenian-German-Polish stock. His grandfather was a German evangelical. His grandmother came from Stanisławów—now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine—and was Armenian. Here’s lyrical Penderecki. And here’s the composer of defiant avant-garde, with Mstislav Rostropovich playing cello. Rostropovich, who lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, had fled the Soviet Union for the West back in 1974.

The 87-year-old Pärt is attached to cultural memory and responsibility. Last year, he issued a statement that addressed Ukrainians directly: “Forgive us,” he said, “for failing to protect you.” Pärt has composed over his important career exceptionally beautiful secular and sacred music, the latter having led to the disappearance of his work for years during the communist period. Here’s a moving, reflective piece of his.

Vilnius is a town of culture, charm, and even whimsy. A decade ago in summer, classical pianist Petras Geniušas surprised swimmers and sunbathers by performing on a white grand piano stationed on a raft floating down the Neris River. This Saturday there’s city-wide street music. In July, there’s a festival for innovative arts.

Here are three composers all from Lithuania, all women. 

Onutė Narbutaitė (born 1956) writes for orchestra, voice, and chorus with vivid, expressive melodies. Here’s a short, wonderful a cappella piece.

Zita Bružaitė (born 1966) served as chair of the Lithuanian Composers’ Union from 2009–17. There’s jazz, ethnic music, and medieval asceticism blended in her music. I like this very much, for clarinet and piano.

Dalia Raudonikytè (1970-2018) composed electronic, instrumental, vocal, and orchestral music. Here’s something with sharp, lyrical, angular tones.

My best,

Jeff

Our arts and culture editor Sydnee Lipset is working on a July 4 program tentatively titled, “What’s an American?” Syd has been inspired by the book A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious from our friend and American Purpose senior fellow Roya Hakakian. 

In the early 1840s, the head of the piano division at a French conservatory decided he knew what it meant to be American: “America is only a land of steam engines!” When Louis Gottschalk applied to the distinguished music school in question, he was rejected without an audition. Chopin was more open-minded. The Polish virtuoso predicted that Gottschalk would become “king of the pianists.”

Louis Moreau Gottschalk was born on May 8, 1829, in New Orleans. His father Edward was born in London to German-Jewish parents. His mother Aimée Marie-Françoise was the daughter of French Créole refugees to New Orleans after the 1791–94 slave revolt in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (later, Haiti). 

Young Moreau, as he was called at home, was a talent. He began playing piano at three. By eleven, the boy was playing at the St. Charles Hotel. That must have been grand for the kid. The original St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans had a Grecian front capped with a large white dome, second only in size to the dome of the Capitol in Washington. From the street, a flight of marble steps led to a marble statue of George Washington. After New Orleans surrendered in the Civil War, the St. Charles Hotel was seized by Union General Benjamin Butler, who used the landmark property as his headquarters.

Gottschalk studied classical music in Europe — his father considered such training a must — which in turn caused a bit of trouble back home. In some New Orleans circles his music was deemed not properly American. Gottschalk threw people a curve by fusing classical with other influences, including Louisiana Creole.

He was an uninhibited, independent-minded soul. A Southern abolitionist who sided with the North in the Civil War, Gottschalk was shaken when he heard that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. He was aboard a ship sailing to California from a tour in Latin America when he received word. He wrote in his diary of Lincoln’s assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth:

I remember having seen him play a year ago in Cleveland. I was struck at the time with the beauty of his features, and at the same time by a sinister expression in his countenance. I would even say he had something deadly in his look.

Gottschalk moved in and out of worlds. He spoke five, and by some accounts nine, languages. His Italian was good enough to read Machiavelli in the original and work with Italian opera singers and librettos. He played before Isabella II in Spain. He toured the Caribbean and South America extensively — Puerto Rico, Peru, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Brazil — complaining often in his diaries of badly tuned pianos or poor accommodations. He traveled numerous times to Cuba, his first visit lasting a year.

What a circle of friends and fans Gottschalk had. Pianist Franz Liszt admired the way he played. Ditto Hector Berlioz. Lincoln liked his music. So did Jefferson Davis, the Democratic Senator representing Mississippi who served as the first and only president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865.

Here’s patriotic music from Gottschalk, “The Union or Paraphrase de Concert on the National Airs Star-Spangled Banner, Yankee Doodle, and Hail Columbia.” 

Here’s a famous Gottschalk piece, Bamboula. And here’s a piano sampling. Europeans found his music exotic. He appeals to “our restless and insatiable passion for novelty,” said Berlioz. His incorporation of Latin and African elements in his work was alluring. He was quite the showman as well, which helps explain his immense popularity during his lifetime, even if stuffy critics frowned over the composer’s unabashed eclecticism. “I admire the beautiful wherever I find it,” answered Gottschalk, “never bothering myself to demand its passport.” Here’s A Night in the Tropics.

Gottschalk never took himself too seriously. Under the name Seven Octaves — he published his compositions at times under pseudonyms — he dedicated the piece “Fairyland, Schottische de Concert” “To my dear friend L.M. Gottschalk.”

I’ve discovered — and just ordered — a book on Gottschalk by S. Frederick Starr. That’s the same Fred Starr who has written for us, the author/editor of some 20 books on Russia and the former Soviet Union, the former president of Oberlin College — and an accomplished clarinetist who founded the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble while at Tulane University in New Orleans. The New York Public Library houses Gottschalk’s diaries — he scribbled copious but often illegible notes on travels that his sister Clara helped to decipher after his death— along with 30 boxes of research material collected by Starr during work on his Gottschalk biography.

You can attend an in-person discussion of American music on May 18 by joining a program we’ve planned with the Washington, D.C., public library (West End Neighborhood Branch) and the City Choir of Washington (Erin Freeman, artistic director). Political scientist and foreign policy scholar from Catholic University Michael Kimmage — himself a former music student at Oberlin — will participate in the discussion. Keep an eye on our website for further details.

*  *  *

Stay tuned for details on our July 4 program “What’s an American,” including readings by Roya Hakakian and a playlist. Stayed tuned as well for a Zoom discussion with Joe Horowitz on his new novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. Gustav and Alma’s years in the Big Apple were 1907 to 1911. Writes Joe, “Gustav arrived in America weakened and fatigued. His energy and idealism were aroused by the New World . . . [even if] he remained a chronic outsider.” Companion and soulmate Alma was always the restless insider.

By May 1865, the adventuresome and restless Gottschalk had logged some 95,000 miles of rail travel and an estimated 1,000 concerts across the United States and Canada. In Europe, he had performed two to three hundred concerts in France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and Belgium. Regarding an American tour, Gottschalk wrote in his diary: 

I have given eighty-five concerts in four months and a half. I have travelled fifteen thousand miles by train. At St. Louis I gave seven concerts in six days; at Chicago, five in four days. A few weeks more in this way and I should have become an idiot! Eighteen hours a day on the railroad! Arrive at seven o’clock in the evening, eat with all speed, appear at eight o’clock before the public. The last note finished, rush quickly for my luggage, and en route until next day to recommence.

In November 1869 in Brazil, the pace finally caught up with him. Gottschalk collapsed on stage during a performance — he had contracted malaria — and died shortly thereafter in Rio de Janeiro at the young age of 40. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the American composer and pianist, is buried in Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Best,

Jeff

Hans Grimmelshausen (1621–76) was kidnapped as a 10 year old. His abduction by Hessian soldiers began a lifetime caught up in the Thirty Years’ War, which left Germany ravaged and utterly exhausted. The war kicked off in spring 1618 with a local religious conflict between the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor and Protestant subjects in Bohemia and expanded to a continent-wide struggle for power.

I studied Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus in grad school. I can’t say that I read the whole thing. It’s an epic novel in five volumes — plus a sequel — documenting the horror of Europe’s infamous 17th-century war. German territories lost something between 30 and 60 percent of their populations. An estimated 2,200 castles,18,000 villages, and 1,500 towns were destroyed.

Thought to be Grimmelshausen’s autobiography, Simplicius is considered the first German novel in the picaresque (adventure) genre and bears a rather expansive subtitle: The account of the life of an odd vagrant named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim; namely of where and in what manner he came into this world, what he saw, learned, experienced, and endured therein; and how and why he left this world of his own free will. Grimmelshausen inspired Bertolt Brecht to set his 1939 play Mutter Courage in 17th-century Europe.

The Thirty Years’ War affected everything, including music and the arts. Samuel Scheidt (1587–1654) stayed in Germany for the duration and became a musical pioneer of the early Baroque period. As raging conflict made everything grotesque in some sense — the illustration facing the title page of Grimmelshausen’s masterpiece novel depicts a winged monster with features of a goat, fish, bird, and human — music became more elaborate and ornate. The word “baroque,” deriving from the Portuguese and originally referring to a disfigured pearl, was first used as a pejorative. The Catholic Church was not without a hand in developments. The Council of Trent had pushed for more emotional involvement — and religion, of course — in the arts.

Scheidt survived by teaching and through work as a church musician. None of this was easy. In 1630, he lost his post in Halle as a result of a disagreement with his boss. In 1634 in Halle, he lost his four children to the plague.

He sought refuge in music. Scheidt left a significant body of organ, choral, and instrumental work. Here’s his Battle Suite. Try this; it’s called O Nachbar Roland (Oh Neighbor Roland). Scheidt bridged past and present. He pushed boundaries, a bit. He liked variations on themes that became increasingly complex. But he also remained in essence a traditionalist. “Music is now so foolish,” he once said, that “everything that is wrong is permitted.”

Bach (1685–1750) and Handel (1685–1759), towering figures of the Baroque musical period, emerged from a society still suffering from the shock and trauma of the Thirty Years’ War. Each in his own way perfected the elaborate and bejeweled style of the era. But before them — and alongside them — were a good number of other fine Baroque composers whose contributions have been overshadowed by these giants.

Here are half a dozen lesser known, wonderful composers of the Baroque. They innovated. They produced beautiful music. Their lives and circumstances were often remarkable.

•    Don Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (1566–1613) was a nobleman from the Kingdom of Naples who murdered his first wife and her aristocrat lover — and went on to write numerous religious and secular works. Gesualdo grew severely depressed over time. At least one biographer thought his wife of the time finally did him in. Here’s intense, expressive, early Baroque music — far ahead of its time.

•    Michel Lambert (1610–96) had a Schubert flair and instinct for writing songs. He composed hundreds; 330 survived. He was known as a singer and ballet dancer with close ties to the French Royal Court. Here’s expressive music by Lambert performed by mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre and lutenist Thomas Dunfor.

•    Lambert’s daughter married Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87), the most famous composer of the time who famously died from a bizarre conducting accident. It happened during a performance of his Te Deum, a work dedicated to Louis XIV in celebration of the king’s recovery from surgery. Lully accidentally stabbed his foot with a wooden staff trying to keep time on the podium during a concert. Gangrene set in. Here’s the Lully Te Deum.

•    Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679–1745) was a Czech composer who studied in Vienna, started his career in Prague, and eventually worked in Dresden where, incidentally, he took on Bach as a student. Zelenka was dedicated to helping young musicians and devoted his compositional work to experimentation with counterpoint. Zelenka has been dubbed “the Czech Bach.” His Mass in D Major is beautiful.

•    Giovanni Battista Pergolesi died tragically young at the age of 26 in 1736. He had contracted tuberculosis. Astonishingly, he was able to leave a large body of work, of which his masterpiece Stabat Mater is probably the best known.

•    Jakub Józef Orliński is a Polish countertenor, opera singer — and break dancer — born on December 8, 1990. I’m especially fond of his performances of Baroque music. Here’s something from Zelenka. This, from rehearsal, is fantastic. It’s music from Johann Hasse (1699–1783). Haase was a friend of Bach’s who worked in Dresden, Naples, and Venice. He was celebrated at the time. King Augustus II of Poland and Saxony granted Hasse the title of the Royal-Polish and Electoral-Saxon Kapellmeister.

We just hosted Greta Uehling of the University of Michigan on her new book Everyday War (Cornell University Press), a study that draws on extensive field work in eastern Ukraine since 2014. When the war ends, reconstruction of the economy and infrastructure will not be the only challenges Ukrainians face. You can watch the discussion here.

You won’t be surprised that Orliński, who is from Warsaw, is devoted to supporting the victims of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Here’s pensive music with gripping images. We’ll share music from Ukraine soon, too.

My best regards,

Jeff

In September 1947, Monica Lovinescu left Bucharest for Paris. She was 24, the recipient of a French government-sponsored fellowship. Lovinescu returned home 45 years later. In 1960, her mother had died in a communist prison, incarcerated for exchanging letters with her daughter. So dangerous did dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu deem the journalist and literary critic that he had his secret police, the Securitate, stalk her for decades in France.

Lovinescu died on April 20, 2008. She endured a great deal. In November 1977, the Securitate orchestrated a vicious attack on Lovinescu; she was beaten into a coma by three men in the courtyard of her Paris apartment. Ceaușescu’s idea was not to kill her, but to leave her disfigured and decimated in spirit. Lovinescu recovered and returned to her microphone. She worked for the Paris bureau of Radio Free Europe.

This year, Romanian publisher Humanitas is celebrating Lovinescu’s work. Her books and letters are being reissued. There will be a gala. A statue will be unveiled in Bucharest. There’s already a street named after her. Following the news of her death in 2008, there were even calls for a state funeral. Lovinescu never understood what all the fuss was about her broadcasts.

Lovinescu was erudition, talent, and tenacity; “her sharp critical intelligence … operated as the blade of a scalpel in the hands of a gifted surgeon,” writes Iulia Vladimirov. “Lovinescu fought against terrorist collectivisms, the regimentation of the mind, and moral capitulation,” wrote Vladimir Tismaneanu after her death. “Thanks to her, Romanian intellectuals were able to internalize the great messages from the writings of Camus, Arendt, Kolakowski, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, Cioran, Milosz, Revel, Aron.” Lovinescu is remembered today for her tireless advocacy of pluralism and tolerance. She’s vilified in ultranationalist, antisemitic circles.

We’ve invited Tismaneanu and Oana Serafim to join us by Zoom to discuss why Monica Lovinescu matters. Both knew her. Both enjoyed long affiliations with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Oana having served as director of the company’s Romanian and Moldovan services — never work for the faint of heart. After Lovinescu, three successive Romania directors at RFE/RL died of sudden and rapidly developing cancers. Editor Emil Georgescu was stabbed 25 times in front of his Munich apartment. In February 1981, RFE/RL headquarters was bombed. The explosives were supplied by the Romanian intelligence service. After the bombing, the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal received a medal from the Securitate for his role in planning the attack.

Watch for the date with Vladimir and Oana. Oana tells me she was 9 or 10 years old when she first listened to Lovinescu’s broadcasts with her grandfather and was moved and amazed by her care for language and “crystal clear thought.”

Culture

We care deeply about culture without succumbing, we hope, to the mind-numbing aspects of today’s culture wars. If you missed it, watch our recent discussion with Phillips Collection director emerita Dorothy Kosinski and Dan Weiss, president/CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on the museum as a platform for ideas and public debate. 

Sofi Oksanen — the Finnish novelist and eloquent champion of free speech, whom we’ve hosted before — has written the libretto for a new opera titled Innocence. Sofi has collaborated with composer Kaija Saariaho in a large-scale, one-act drama that takes up how individuals and societies grapple with emotional shock, trauma, loss, and resilience. We’ve invited Sofi to join us for a Zoom discussion. She’s been a staunch supporter of Ukraine. Keep an eye out for the date with Sofi.

Virginia Postrel has written for us on Guo Pei, China’s most acclaimed fashion designer. “She avoided ideological assumptions Western students pick up in design schools,” writes Virginia. She also “came of age when China was opening to the world.” Her work challenges crippling ideas in our culture today, says Virginia, namely that psychological and physical comfort are paramount, that adopting motifs from other cultures is an insult, and that injustices of the past negate accomplishments of the same era. Look for Virginia’s essay soon. Thanks to Jonathan Rauch for sending Virginia and her essay our way.

I’ll also mention here: We’ll have soon Joanne Leedom-Ackerman on her new historical novel Burning Distance set in post-communist Berlin. We’ve hosted Joanne before on her work and long affiliation with the PEN writers association that fights for freedom of expression and advocates on behalf of harassed and imprisoned authors and journalists across the globe. For more historical fiction, we’ll host Joe Horowitz on his first novel, The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. Coming soon, too, is Elliot Ackerman. Elliot’s new novel Halcyon is about two self-made men in America’s recent past confronting a disorienting world moving rapidly past them. Spoiler alert: Scientists during the Gore Administration discover a cure for death.

Music

On April 20, 1986, Vladimir Horowitz returned home after 61 years. Horowitz was born in Kyiv on October 1, 1903, and left the Soviet Union as a young man. He went back as a celebrated 81-year-old pianist playing Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Schumann before an adoring audience. There were six curtain calls and three encores at his historic Moscow performance. A Soviet composer remarked to American friends during intermission by saying, “I want to congratulate you as Americans — he plays with total freedom.” Many in the audience openly wept.

Horowitz’s wife Wanda, daughter of the famous conductor Arturo Toscanini, said of her husband that he never took himself too seriously. Here’s a wonderful documentary with the two. Music was in his blood. Horowitz started playing at three — not on a keyboard, but on a window that he broke, his mother recounted.

Here’s Horowitz with Schumann. And with Chopin. He was eager to connect with his audiences in the most direct, intimate sort of ways. His Chopin was terribly personal, said fellow pianist Leon Fleischer.

Monica Lovinescu and her husband Virgil Ierunca — himself a distinguished literary critic — loved music. She wanted Monteverdi played at her funeral. She once wrote in her diary about a Schubert trio — “an unexpected surprise” — that always fascinated her. Here’s the Schubert. It’s touching.

Sincerely,

Jeff

At Duke last week, I was caught up on “tenting” and K-ville by students as we walked across the university’s emerald green campus. For those who didn’t know, “tenting” is the process by which Duke students obtain tickets to the game of great rivals, Duke versus University of North Carolina. K-ville — where the tents are lined up with fans taking shifts and waiting weeks — refers to legendary basketball coach Michael Krzyzewski. Coach K retired last year with 5 national titles, 13 Final Fours, 15 ACC tournament championships, and 13 ACC regular season titles. Not too shabby for the son of Polish working-class immigrants. Krzyzewski, whose father was an elevator operator and mother a cleaning lady, started at Catholic schools in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village.

It was Ukraine (and the Alexander Hamilton Society) that brought me to Duke for a talk about Vladimir Putin’s war. A number of students wanted to discuss Russia and what’s gone wrong. Why do so many Russians apparently support the war? How is it that authoritarian tendencies seem so strong? A student from China opined that there’s more independent thought in his country where controls on media and civil society are even stricter than in Putin’s Russia.

Frank Fukuyama has just delivered a lecture at SAIS hosted by Charles Gati on culture, national identity, and liberal democracy with special attention to Ukraine and Russia. I’ll share a copy next week. We’re also preparing an interview with Fred Starr on Russia’s future. Starr’s view is not all dark, although it must be said that he takes a long view. It should also be noted that our friend Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested a year ago. His trial is expected to wrap up with a final verdict on Monday. Kara-Murza faces up to 25 years in prison for spreading false information on the war. We’re inviting his wife Evgenia to speak with us soon. We’ve invited president/CEO Jamie Fly to speak about RFE/RL’s work in Russia.

There are otherwise a number of offerings I want to commend:

•    Victor Monteverdi (a pseudonym) digs into grievance, mythology, and a pathology, a Russia trapped, unable “to modernize itself through liberalization, even as the traditional means (economic, ideological, and military) of survival are shrinking.”

•    Tom Carothers and Benjamin Feldman write about democratic bright spots around the world. They advocate policies that square the circle “of drumming up real energy and support [in Washington for democracy abroad], while conveying significant realism and staying power regarding execution.”

•    Marc Plattner has reviewed Robert Kagan’s new book, The Ghost at the Feast, the second volume of a planned trilogy. The first was Dangerous Nation (2006). The new book, spanning the era 1898 and 1941, was discussed by Marc and Bob at an event we had the pleasure of jointly co-sponsoring recently with the National Endowment for Democracy. This thanks to Michael Allen’s Penn Kemble Forum at NED and our arts and culture editor Syd Lipset.

•    Frank provides the (likely) final installment in a nine-part series on the administrative state. He combined this work into a single lecture delivered on March 21 to the American Society for Public Administration. You can listen to the lecture here. His new essay looks back to the pandemic and delves into the relationship between political leaders and their bureaucratic agents.

•    Hyrum Lewis joins us by Zoom on Monday, April 17, for a discussion of his new book, co-authored with his brother Verlan, The Myth of Left and Right. Hyrum and Verlan argue that “left” and “right” are more social groupings, as opposed to enduring philosophical belief systems. As a result, they contend, there must be ways to open a new political discourse that is both more accurate and less incendiary.

There’s more. We have Greta Uehling by Zoom on Thursday, May 25, on her new book telling the story of the lives of ordinary people in the Donbas since 2014. We have Seth Cropsey writing on Iran, Chuck Lane hosting in his podcast Microsoft’s Natasha Crampton on responsible AI, and Yale student Wiktor Babinski interviewing former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.

Arts, Culture, and Music

We always make space for arts, culture, and music. Our friends at PostClassical Ensemble — Angel Gil-Ordóñez conducting — have something intriguing coming up at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on April 19. It’s Spanish history and human drama with the world premiere of Entwined: Love’s Magicians by Derek Goldman and El retablo de maese Pedro by Manuel de Falla.

On May 18, we’ll convene the next in our series with the D.C. public libraries (Rob Schneider’s West End Neighborhood branch). Last time, we had Azar Nafisi and Nolan Harris on “Why James Baldwin?” This time, we have a program titled, “Old and New American Songs” with Washington City Choir conductor Erin Freeman, Catholic University’s Michael Kimmage, and Marine Corp Band historian Philip Espe. There’s music and a lens on race, gender, and social progress in America.

Join us on May 18, and attend the Washington City Choir’s concert on June 4 for a program of American music that includes works by Aaron Copland, Jessica Krash, Samuel Barber, Gilda Lyons, Robert Shafer, Armando Bayolo, and more.

Here’s a bit of Copland — a bundle of social and cultural history. All of this is charming. Some of it is jarring when you pay attention to the words.

My best,

Jeff

Part of the joy and privilege of our small enterprise is the engagement, big heartedness, and collaborative spirit of our community (this starts with the American Purpose team). The following are excerpts from recent letters I thought you might appreciate.

• Concert pianist Elena Klionsky writes:

Reading [last week’s Weekly] about Renée Fleming brought me back to my Juilliard days and the Master Classes by Leonard Bernstein. Those were unbelievable experiences, each moment was unique because Bernstein was so fun, so open, so full of life and love of music! In those days he chain-smoked and nobody minded it. Renée Fleming studied in Juilliard and her Master Class carries the Juilliard ambiance in the best way — kind yet incredibly knowledgeable, tough, and highly professional. Her attitude is so soothing yet strict. She is there to teach and to guide anyone who wants her guidance. She first encourages, then criticizes. Not all at Juilliard worked that way … one of my piano teachers threw shoes at me!

• Historian Allen Guelzo weighs in on great American composers:

Thank you for that generous mention of Samuel Barber. My inclination is to hand the palm for ‘greatest American composer’ to Charles Ives, and though I’ve never read any comments Ives made about Barber, my guess is that they would be irascible and dismissive. That said, though, I find much to enjoy in Barber (in fact, I live just fifteen minutes away from his birthplace in West Chester), and regard his most ingenious composition as the Overture for the School for Scandal, which he wrote as an 18-year-old at Curtis Institute. The slow theme in the middle for English horn is simply heavenly.

• Political scientist and editorial board member Dan Chirot writes about a piece we’ve published on Catherine the Great by Polish scholar Andrzej Nowak:

Professor Nowak interprets the past in modern nationalistic terms that were simply not present in Catherine’s time. One of the hallmarks of empires like hers was that it accommodated the local elites and customs of conquered areas as long as they did not revolt. Local landowners mostly kept their lands and most remained loyal to Russia. It was a bad bargain for local peasants who often tended to become serfs ruled by local elites. It wasn’t until the 1890s that Russification became serious. In fact when Russia took over Finland in 1809 Tsar Alexander I spoke to the local Parliament, run by the Swedish landowning elite, to promise that he would protect their property rights, their Protestant religion, and all their customs. He addressed them in French. Only at the very end of the 19th Century, under Tsar Nicholas II, did Russia start trying to turn Finns and Swedes into Russians, and that of course gave rise to Finnish nationalism. The same happened in other European parts of the Empire.

• Former member of Congress Mickey Edwards shares an idea:

A piece i’d love to see: … i’m a russophile — the great composers, not just the big names but the incredible gamut — glazunov, glinka, khachaturian — the writers, the gorkys and chekhovs, chernyshevsky, yevtushenko (with whom i once had a delightful conversation) — the bolshoi and kirov, both of which i’ve attended and marveled at, and how this incredible artistic output — the epitome of civilized society — could coincide with a history of barbarism and dictatorship and flourish in the midst of it.

• In reference to Russia’s war on Ukraine, an informed friend there writes:

The Kremlin plans to continue the ‘operation’ — it has to become a routine. The blood price does not worry these guys. We see radicalization of the militarist segment of society — about 20 percent of [the] population. We are moving toward a new stage of bloodbath.

Ukraine Bleeds, China Pleads

Russia’s “operation” certainly does continue. The International Committee of the Red Cross says roughly 10,000 civilians “are on the brink of survival” in and around Bakhmut. According to the World Bank, Russia has caused $2.5 billion in damage to medical facilities in Ukraine. Nearly 1,000 medical facilities have been partially or fully destroyed by Russian artillery shelling and aerial attacks; 650 ambulances and 596 pharmacies have been rendered non-functional.

Last month, Beijing outlined its 12-point peace plan. This month, Chinese President Xi Jinping — just days after the International Criminal Court issued its arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for mass kidnappings of children from Ukraine — traveled to Moscow, where he described China’s position on the conflict as “impartial.”

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is expected in Beijing today. Spain assumes the rotating presidency of the European Union in July. Sanchez says he’ll tell Xi that it is the Ukrainians themselves who will decide when a peace process begins.

French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to arrive in Beijing on April 4. We’ve just hosted our friend and National Assembly deputé Ben Haddad for a preview of the visit — and discussion of current strikes and protests in France against pension reform (thanks to editorial board member Patrick Chamorel for initiating and moderating the Leaders’ Circle conversation).

Last week, we hosted in Washington — together with Greg Feifer’s Institute of Current World Affairs and Juleanna Glover’s Ridgely Walsh — a delegation of senior parliamentarians from Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Spain, and Canada. Western unity will be tested this crucial calendar year.

Liberalism Struggles, Advocates Fight

Keep an eye out for Nancy Yu on China. “Liberals” she writes,

have been slow to leverage history to their cause.… Chinese arguments for liberalism often begin with ahistorical values such as equality, individual liberty, and universal human rights — values that are supposedly innate and self-evident but that lack any grounding in Chinese political tradition.

Yu finds important ideas for a different approach in Shi Zhan’s Hub: 3000 Years of China, a book now popular among Chinese students, entrepreneurs, and technocrats.

We can’t have enough quality ideas or sources of inspiration. Dan Weiss talks about museums as a civic enterprise of “shared, uplifting purpose” providing ways to discover “perspectives larger than our own.” Dan is the president and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He joined Dorothy Kosinski, director emerita of the Phillips Collection in Washington, for a discussion this week on the arts and society that included debate on the pressure from left and right to curb expression. You can watch a recording of the event here.

Tom Carothers has a piece next week with co-author Ben Feldman on “democratic bright spots” — how to bolster, what’s to be learned.

Meanwhile, friends have alerted me to attacks by Communist officials on academic exchange programs for Hong Kong scholars. “Slander” of the Chinese will no longer be tolerated. “Academy scoundrels” cultivated by the West must be dealt with. “We must plug the loopholes in the education sector that endanger national security,” says a party organ. Here’s the article. I have an English translation if you’re interested.

Art and Music

Dan Weiss and Dorothy Kosinski prompted me to think about art influencing music. Mickey Edwards and Dan Chirot have me thinking about Russian history and music.

Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, a piano suite in ten movements, is a musical depiction of a tour of an exhibition of works by Russian architect and painter Viktor Hartmann displayed at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition in three weeks, in June 1874, a year after Hartmann’s sudden death from an aneurysm at age 39. Both Hartmann and Mussorgsky were passionate about creating art that was distinctly Russian in character.

About Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky once wrote in a letter to a patron, “His nature is narrow-minded … blindly believing in the ridiculous theories of his circle and in his own genius.… Yet he has flashes of talent which are, moreover, not devoid of originality.”

Here’s beautiful, stirring music, Pictures at an Exhibition, with Kurt Masur and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

My best,

Jeff

I’m watching master classes with soprano Renée Fleming. You don’t have to be a musician to appreciate master classes. Like watching a rehearsal, they offer in their own way a peek under the hood to see how things get assembled. Not that any of this is mechanical! I like how Fleming is able to take each student on his or her own terms: The fuller, more operatic voice; the straight tone (Fleming asks in one case whether the singer has done a lot of choral music); the performer who needs help in acting, or in breath control. Fleming likes to know — and finds out quickly, segment after segment — where students have come from and where they’re going, in their practice, performance, and career.

Here’s a Fleming master class with a series of students working on a variety of pieces, with audience Q & A at the end. Each segment is a gem. Throughout, Fleming is interested in technique, expression, and interpretation — with the composer’s intentions at center stage.

It’s a wonderful thing when students are allowed to develop their unique gifts. The great French composer Nadia Boulanger was known for taking each student on his or her own terms. German composer Paul Hindemith was infamous for the opposite. “I had the impression,” wrote one of his Yale students in the 1940s, “that [your] composition had to follow his style or he lost interest in it.”

Fleming loves teaching. Her background helps to explain why. She comes from “a madly industrious” family, she says in her autobiography. Her great-grandparents came from Prague. “My father’s family was inexhaustibly capable,” she writes. “Need a house? We’ll build one! Don’t know a thing about foundations, plumbing, electricity? We’ll figure it out! It seemed like every one of them could rebuild an engine, shingle a room, fix a refrigerator,” says Fleming.

Fleming is the daughter of two music teachers. Born on February 14, 1959, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, she grew up in Churchville, New York (west of Rochester, part of the town of Riga — pronounced “rye-guh,” unlike the capital of Latvia — population barely two thousand). Central Europe somehow always stuck with her. Her great-grandmother left Czech lands for America to escape the unwanted advances of a Russian soldier.

After studies at Juilliard, Fleming got her big break at the Met at age 29, and developed a career known for extraordinary range — opera, jazz, musical theater, indie rock. She always made time for new music and never shied away from experiment, from the avant-garde to the silly. She learned to sing in elf language for Lord of the Rings.

Fleming learned early that to be a good teacher one must be a good student. German “lehren” (to teach) and “lernen” (to learn) are close to being the same word, just by the way.

After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Fleming performed at Ground Zero. On November 14, 2009, she performed in Prague at a concert organized by Václav Havel to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. Havel’s friend Joan Baez took part, and Fleming sang a duet with Lou Reed.

On September 1, 2018, Fleming sang “Danny Boy” at the funeral service for John McCain at Washington National Cathedral. Fleming, a staunch supporter of Ukraine, discusses in a snippet here the ban by some organizations of Russian musicians.

* * *

Our friend and writer Paul Kroeger is devoted to Ukraine. Paul is a tenor from Dallas who has sung at regional opera houses in Germany, and who now finds himself at Texas A&M University working toward a master of international affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service. Of late, Paul has been in Croatia. He’s been working as a volunteer for a Texas businessman who has hustled to produce and provide demining equipment for Ukraine — at no cost. Paul shares his experience from this part of his life in a piece we’ll publish next week.

On Ukraine and across the board, let us keep hearing from you. We depend on your feedback and support.

• Keep an eye on our work; it’s a balanced and integrated mix of foreign policy, domestic reform, and history, arts, and culture — all in the defense of liberal democracy.

• Sign up for our newsletters and join our discussions, in-person and virtually. Listen to our podcasts with hosts Frank Fukuyama, Charles Lane, and Richard Aldous.

• Support American Purpose. We welcome new members — and we’re eternally grateful for connections to new donors.

Next week, much more about our pipeline for April and politics and public policy in the offing. For now, though, more music — and notes on master classes and rehearsals.

Music

Franz Liszt is credited with having established the modern idea of the master class for music. His master classes first started in the mid-1850s and became famous in Weimar around 1869. Sessions were held late afternoons on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in the music room of the Hofgärtnerei, Liszt’s residence. The classes, designed primarily for pianists, also drew singers, composers, violinists, and cellists.

Liszt was a piano virtuoso who loved teaching. He once recorded in his diary that his days were so packed with private lessons, from half past eight in the morning through ten at night, that he hardly had time to breathe. For a lens on his teaching, The Diary Notes of August Göllerich, a student of Liszt, is available in book form in English.

Liszt insisted on a variety of repertoires in his master classes. He was precise and exacting. He even banned two works: his own Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 and Chopin’s B-Flat Minor Scherzo, complaining that students played these pieces too frequently.

As for Liszt’s own work, if you want to sink into something, here’s Liebestraum No. 3 played by Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili.

Otherwise: Here’s another master class with Renée Fleming, this one for the Riga Jurmala Academy in Latvia in 2021. Here’s a master class with pianist Emanuel Ax and music from Mozart.

I like these rehearsals with great conductors:

• Georg Solti with Mussorgsky

• Bernstein with Mahler

• Riccardo Muti with Berlioz

Finally, and for good measure and fun, here’s Fleming on the role of Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata. I mention this because the Met’s spectacular Traviata this season just wrapped up in New York. I had the good fortune of attending Saturday night’s performance. Angel Blue sang Violetta.

My best,

Jeff

In her memoir, Germany’s legendary mezzo soprano Christa Ludwig recounts how her mother survived wartime conditions. At a time of drawn carriages, if an emaciated horse collapsed on the street, there was nothing soon left but a skeleton. Food was scarce. Ludwig’s mother Eugenie came from a poor middle-class family in Berlin.

Ludwig was born in Berlin on March 16, 1928. Through one lens, the politics of the day didn’t look so terrible. That spring, following federal elections, the Social Democratic Party remained the largest party in the Reichstag. There was 75 percent turnout. The Nazis captured a mere 12 seats with 3 percent of the vote. But those were days of accelerating fragmentation and sectarianism. There were already 41 parties represented in the Parliament; the Social Democrats had secured 153 of 491 seats.

Ludwig grew up an opera addict, she writes. At age three, she could sing the Queen of the Night’s aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute right through to its high E-flat ending. Or at least that’s what her proud and ambitious mother reported. Ludwig’s mother was a singer. Her father sang, but preferred directing. “I practically lived in the theater,” recalls Ludwig, “and saw everything as theater in my imagination.”

The family moved from Berlin to Aachen, a medieval city known for its culture and architecture. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born in Aachen in 1886. Herbert von Karajan did a stint as conductor at the Aachen opera house. As a ten year old, Ludwig remembers walking with her mother to the theater on November 10, 1938, the morning after Kristallnacht. She recalls:

We could see the smashed shop windows on which ‘Jew’ had been scrawled over and over and the burning synagogue. My mother was indignant.… propaganda was so powerful that many families believed the lies of the Hitler regime, which claimed that ‘the people had been justifiably stirred up.’ Hitler himself seemed to be standing outside the turmoil, as if he were merely listening to the opinion ‘of the people.’

Ludwig grew up on air raid sirens and rationing. Families got an eighth of a pound of coffee at Christmas. The kids ate “Lohengrin liverwurst,” which she and her classmates referred to as “the grey mystery.” The sausage was named after the knight who figures in Richard Wagner’s opera, a character who insists to his beloved Elsa that she never ask where he comes from.

Much of Aachen was destroyed in World War II. The city’s famed cathedral was badly damaged by Allied bombing and artillery fire. The theater was destroyed on July 14, 1943. Ludwig’s family was shattered when news arrived that Ludwig’s brother Rudi had been killed on the Eastern Front.

In the war’s last days, Ludwig and her girlfriends skipped going to bomb shelters — “We saw the squadrons fly over head to other, more important targets,” Ludwig writes — and went instead to a neighboring cafe to drink “heavy southern” wine served in coffee cups.

For many reasons, Ludwig’s In My Own Voice is a worthwhile read.

* * *

I’ve just read Jeffrey Herf’s essay-review in Quillette of Richard Wolin’s new book Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology. There’s the familiar story of reactionary Weimar politicians attacking democracy. But most important, writes Jeff, is Wolin’s detailing of the intolerant fanaticism and radical antisemitism found in Heidegger’s academic work. Nazism had its theorists, just as Jeff notes today that,

A Heideggerian element can be found in Putin’s revanchist dictatorship and in Iran’s antisemitic theocracy, both of which denounce the decadent West and celebrate martial virtues in pursuit of authenticity.… Heidegger’s legacy may finally be in ruins, but the fascist attack on liberal democracy still has its intellectual advocates.

Foolish ideas have their media advocates. Tucker Carlson says he’s “rooting for Russia.” We’re not.

This week in Washington, we convened a roundtable with Belarus opposition to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine and the intensifying domestic crackdown by Vladimir Putin’s ally Alexander Lukashenko (thanks to Juleanna Glover and her associates Mimi Lyons and Elizabeth Sullivan for hosting us). Next week, we convene a D.C. discussion with a delegation of foreign affairs committee chairs from Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Spain, and Canada.

There’s much to commend in our pages otherwise, either already posted or scheduled for the near term, including Andreas Umland on Moscow’s own legal obstacles to making peace with Kyiv, Victor Monteverdi (pseudonym) on Russia’s ever darkening mood at home, and Dalibor Rohac on EU aid to Ukraine. Wiktor Babinski has interviewed former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko in London. Sahar Soleimany has just conducted a splendid interview with Azar Nafisi.

Yushchenko was poisoned in Kyiv in September 2004 by ingesting TCDD dioxin, a contaminant found in Agent Orange. In Iran over the last several months, more than 1,000 schoolgirls at more than 26 schools in 25 of Iran’s 31 provinces have fallen ill by gas poisoning. Victims report a smell akin to rotten oranges, followed by nausea, headaches, and shortness of breath.

Paul DeRosa writes about why Italy and its worsening economic situation deserve our attention. John Rodden discusses Time at 100 and asks whether the iconic brand can be revived. Our Suzi Garment shares reflections on James Q. Wilson and crime four decades after the broken windows theory was first published.

Now Music — and Christa Ludwig’s Opera Addiction

Here’s Christa Ludwig with something from Wagner’s Lohengrin. She first sang the role of Ortrud at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin when the opera reopened after the war in 1961 (the same year East German Communists erected the Wall). Here’s a jewel from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

Ludwig had immense respect and affection for Leonard Bernstein. She loved the spirit of the Tanglewood festival; it was “closest to my heart,” she said. Bernstein loved Ludwig, so much so that the two could argue like siblings.

Here’s Ludwig quarreling with Bernstein over a tempo in Mahler. At the same time, she quotes Herbert von Karajan approvingly in her memoir that there’s no such thing as an absolutely right tempo, “because every day our pulse is a little different, and, because of that, our way of thinking and moving.” Karl Böhm, von Karajan, and Bernstein were her “three great ones” among conductors — Böhm for precision, von Karajan for beauty of sound, and Bernstein for sheer excitement and joy.

Bernstein used to tease Ludwig for not going out on the town after performances. Here’s Ludwig with “I Am Easily Assimilated” from Bernstein’s Candide.

And then more Mahler: Here’s Das Lied von der Erde, Der Abschied (The Farewell). Wagner composed his orchestral song cycle between 1908 and 1909. Liberal politics had been discarded by then. The old social and political order was disintegrating. Music was exhausting its possibilities and Mahler was himself nearing the end. His music, said Ludwig, seemed to seek salvation from chaos. In May 1911, Mahler contracted pneumonia, slipped into a coma, and passed away at age 50.

Christa Ludwig died two years ago at age 93 on April 24, 2021. She had been teaching master classes for young musicians as recently as 2014. Here’s a charming snippet of Ludwig working with a student. She was passionate about teaching; about vocal technique, acting, the psychology of performance, and the process of becoming “decent people with honest hearts.”

Sincerely,

Jeff

Petr Pavel was sworn in today as Czech president. After the announcement that Pavel had won the election, there were chants of “Pavel na Hrad” (Pavel to the Castle), reminiscent of the chants of “Havel na Hrad” that filled the streets and squares of Czechoslovakia during the November 1989 Velvet Revolution.

Pavel’s arrival represents a new opening. The former NATO general who defeated populist Andrej Babiš — a former prime minister — succeeds the Beijing-friendly, pro-Russian Miloš Zeman. The Czech Republic’s new president is a staunch supporter of Ukraine and Taiwan. In the homestretch of the campaign, candidate Pavel was forced to deny rumors of his own death circulated by Russian disinformation. He has the attention of Chinese Communist officials. Two days after being elected, Pavel took a call from Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-we.

When I was in Prague last month, I heard the impressive Pavel speak at a rally marking the first-year anniversary of Russia’s war on Ukraine. You can read here in The Bulwark and here in American Purpose impressions from Bill Kristol and me. American Purpose just hosted roundtables in Prague and Berlin (with partner Renew Democracy Initiative) that included — beyond Czechs and Germans — colleagues from Poland, the Baltic countries, Nordic states, and others in the vicinity of Ukraine. There’s a new generation of leaders stepping up; there’s a sense of urgency in the region that Ukrainians must finally get the weapons they need to defeat revanchist Russia.

Eric Edelman and Frank Miller argue that it’s time we take the war to Russia. Battlefield defeat will end aggression, they observe. But it may well also start a process leading to political change in Moscow, which in turn would at least open the possibility of lasting peace.

Viola von Cramon-Taubadel raises awareness of Russian threats to the West. The German member of the European Parliament for Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance has worked with her team in assembling a list of attacks, physical and cyber, on German infrastructure over the past year. We’ll publish her chart next week with details of suspected Russian attacks and the stage of ongoing investigations. The pattern is alarming.

Carolyn Stewart, our managing editor, writes about Russia’s war on Ukrainian culture and identity. The exhibit Women at War at the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., brings together the work of leading contemporary women artists in Ukraine with striking pieces related to the ongoing war (American Purpose supported the project). Read Carolyn’s commentary on the exhibition here.

* * *

Our culture war debates are not exactly given to subtlety and nuance. On Monday, we held a salon discussion on how to walk the transgender movement back from extremists with Jonathan Rauch, Giselle Donnelly, and Deirdre McCloskey. Yesterday, we convened a salon-style discussion at the West End Neighborhood Library on James Baldwin, featuring Iranian-American author Azar Nafisi and young Black librarian Nolan Harris, Jr. Thanks to Rob Schneider and his team at West End — this is the first in a series on politics and culture. We’re working to shed light and lower temperatures. Thanks to actress Jazmyn Ja’net for reading from Baldwin’s work. And thanks to our arts and culture editor Syd Lipset for curating this program.

We have remarkable writers tackling important problems. Read Frank Fukuyama this week on how to tame destructive forces in social media. Read Nicole Penn on the gender and sexuality debates. Nicole has reviewed Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It and Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. “Instead of looking to solutions that encourage mutual support,” writes Nicole, we too often err “by either denying that men and women face different challenges or by grounding their diagnoses in outdated stereotypes—all while relations between the sexes appear to be rapidly deteriorating.”

We have a number of essays in the pipeline I’m confident you’ll be interested in, including Marc Plattner on Bob Kagan’s new book on the collapse of world order between 1900 and 1941; Seth Cropsey on how U.S. policymakers can support the protest movement in Iran; and Mariam Memarsadeghi on the role today of Reza Pahlavi. Ariane Gottlieb is writing about new threats in the disinformation space. Don Bishop is reviewing Josh Kurlantzick’s book on Beijing’s global media offensive.

We have in hand a formidable piece of work by editorial board member Kate Epstein on America’s tortured history with debt. Read anything the Rutgers historian writes for American Purpose. Her most recent essay was “A Dispatch from the Exhausted Majority.” Kate argues that both the woke Left and MAGA Right are failing to understand that most people are fed up with vicious, demonizing, winner-takes-all politics.

Music and Politics

Václav Havel dreamt of a liberal, democratic society. He was passionate about the arts and found himself attached to the music of Frank Zappa and the Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe. In his biography of the dissident-playwright turned president-statesman, Michael Žantovský writes that Havel was actually less interested in the music than he was in freedom and integrity, and in rebellious, non-conformist challenges posed to a totalitarian system. For Havel, it was an epiphany when the secret police rounded up the Plastics and other musicians on March 16, 1976, for the crime of playing music.

I’m reading about Havel and Frank Zappa, and listening this week to Samuel Barber. Barber was born on March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Barber had his own Czech links. In 1946, he was enlisted by the State Department as a member of the American delegation to the first Prague Spring International Music Festival. His music was showcased alongside Leonard Bernstein and other leading American composers. Two years later, on February 25, 1948, Soviet-backed Communists took full control of the Czechoslovak government.

Everyone knows Barber’s gorgeous, reflective Adagio for Strings. Even if you think you don’t know it, you might have heard it in soundtracks for the movies Platoon, Elephant Man, or Lorenzo’s Oil. It has popped up in comedic fashion in Seinfeld and The Simpsons. It was played over the radio when Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945, at the funeral of Albert Einstein in 1955, and after the funeral of John F. Kennedy in a national broadcast on November 25, 1963.

But there’s other work by Barber that gets overlooked. (The same applies to Pachelbel, who wrote more than his Canon in D major.) Here’s a string quartet by Barber. You can try his first symphony here.

I like Barber because he wasn’t afraid to experiment. He didn’t run in horror from dissonance. Yet Barber was also convinced that music must be accessible. He saw himself as a bit of an outsider, and genuinely American in spirit. He never belonged to the Stravinsky inner circle, he once mused, or was written about in The New Year Review of Books. Comfortable in his own skin would be an apt way to describe Samuel Barber.

Best,

Jeff

American Purpose, in partnership with D.C. Public Libraries, is hosting a salon-style discussion of James Baldwin’s enduring significance next Wednesday, March 8, from 6:30 - 7:30 pm. We hope you can join us for this special event.

The event will feature Azar Nafisi, AP editorial board member and author of (among other books) Reading Lolita in Tehran; Nolan Harris, Jr., host of West End Neighborhood Library's James Baldwin Discussion Group; and live Baldwin readings by actress and Chadwick Boseman College of Fine Arts graduate Jazmyn Ja’net.

Event location:

West End Library, Large Meeting Room
2301 L St., NW
Washington, D.C.

Seating is limited. Register here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/race-religion-rebels-why-james-baldwin-still-matters-tickets-565278562397?ref=american-purpose

Best,

Michelle

Michelle High
Senior Editor
American Purpose
https://www.americanpurpose.com/
Tel. 202-297-8737

Jeff and I are back from Ukraine roundtables in Prague and Berlin, co-hosted by American Purpose and Renew Democracy Initiative. He’s sharing his reflections in a piece he’s co-authored with Bill Kristol, which can be read here.

Best,

Michelle High
Senior Editor

We’re in Europe, where American Purpose is convening roundtables on Ukraine—and a small meeting on Iran—in Prague and Berlin over the coming days. We’re grateful to be partnering in these activities with Renew Democracy Initiative. Jeff will be reporting on events in his letter next Thursday.

Best,

Michelle

Michelle High
Senior Editor

Earlier this month, I wrote a piece about Black history and Black classical music in which I noted that only recently had I come across the work of conductor Dean Dixon. In response, writes Ron Radosh:

But I must say I knew about him in 1947’, ’48 or ’49! I was in elementary school, PS 173 in Washington Heights, NYC, and for what was then Black History Week (yes, only one week), the progressive PTA leaders arranged to have Dixon come to the school to spend a few hours with our classes talking about and illustrating examples of classical music! I will never forget it. We were all mesmerized by his enthusiasm, his charm, and his ability to reach all our little souls with wonder. It was literally one of the highlights of my years at elementary school. My parents had told me of how he was unable to find conducting jobs because he was black.

The Harlem-born Dixon was compared early in his career to Toscanini. In 1942, he became the first Black conductor to lead the New York Philharmonic. But landing a full-time job was not easy. He built a career in Europe hoping to escape racism—and the insane, hectic life of New York City, he’d say. Dixon returned from his self-imposed exile, though. After 28 years and prominent stints abroad, he was back in his hometown in 1970, where he conducted the New York Philharmonic before an audience of 75,000 in Central Park.

James Baldwin was born Harlem in 1924. He died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in southern France on December 1, 1987. Baldwin moved to Paris in 1948 looking to finish his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Like Dixon, he also sought respite from segregation and, in Baldwin’s case, sexual discrimination as well. Azar Nafisi has spoken to me for some time about Baldwin’s relevance for civil rights, the struggle for freedom, and the challenges for liberal democracy today. “He needs to be far better known in Iran,” she says.

We’ll do an in-person program with our friend Azar on Baldwin on March 8. Azar—author of Reading Lolita in Tehran—spent teenage years as a pupil in England and Switzerland. She did her Ph.D. in English and American literature at the University of Oklahoma. Later, in 1982, she was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear a veil. She would eventually teach at another Iranian university, until she tried to resign. But her resignation was rejected and she was expelled instead. Azar has lived in the United States since 1997.

Our partner for the March 8 program is the D.C. public library system; the time will be 6:30 pm and the venue will be the West End Neighborhood Library at 2301 L Street, NW. Participating in the discussion with Azar will be West End assistant librarian Nolan Harris. We’ve invited Princeton scholar Eddie Glaude as well (AEI researcher Sahar Soleimany will conduct an interview with Azar for publication in English and Farsi).

This is the start of a miniseries on politics and culture we’re undertaking with the D.C. public library system. Warmest thanks to Rob Schneider and his colleagues Mimi Lyons and Harris at the West End branch. Tip of hat to our arts and culture editor Sydnee Lipset for curating this program; Syd juggles more balls than I can count.

We do think there’s a good deal to be learned from history, biography, and culture. Read Sharon Skeel’s sharp and interesting review of Rupert Christiansen’s new book, Diaghilev’s Empire: How the Ballets Russes Enthralled the World. If you’re inclined then for more, Igor Stravinsky wrote at length in 1953 about his friendship and collaboration with Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev—two exiles in Paris. Critic and impresario Diaghilev was a phenomenon: He knew Émile Zola, Charles Gounod, Giuseppe Verdi, Rimsky-Korsakov, Nijinsky, Mussorgsky. He involved in his work Debussy, Kandinsky, Matisse, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Ravel.

There are a number of other things to commend this week:

• On political reform in the United States and “final-five voting,” watch our recent discussion with Katherine Gehl, Larry Diamond, and Jim Glassman.

• On depolarization and teaching history in America, read Hans Zeiger and polling that might surprise you. On the need for a competent, efficient and effective, non-ideological administrative state, read Frank Fukuyama’s latest in a series. This time, Frank is discussing instances where he sees charges of bureaucratic overreach as entirely valid. On March 21, Frank will deliver the annual Donald Stone Lecture to the American Society for Public Administration. Not irrelevant to these issues: Watch Michael Mandelbaum’s recent conversation with Beverly Gage on her new book on the consummate bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover.

• On the quintessentially American idea of perpetual self-invention, read Matt Hanson on Greil Marcus’ new Bob Dylan biography. Read Gary Schmitt on the new Lincoln biography by Michael Zuckert. Incidentally, our friend Allen Guelzo was in Washington earlier this month at Ford’s Theatre for the release of the anniversary edition of his Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.

• On cultural history, take time for Don Bishop’s essay on four Norman Rockwell paintings 80 years later. Rockwell was taken by President Franklin Roosevelt’s four essential freedoms.

• On the fight for freedom in Ukraine, watch for our published symposium on the one-year anniversary of the war next week—and please consider joining our Zoom conversation on Tuesday, February 21, at 9 am ET with Gen. Phil Breedlove, Gen. Ben Hodges, and Adm. Jamie Foggo; Iulia Joja will moderate. On Crimea—and the importance of a full defeat of Russian imperialism now—read Fred Starr. Fred brings interesting history to bear, as you might imagine.

• On Germany and the Ukraine war, keep an eye out for the upcoming essay by Caroline Fetscher. Caroline links things to the Balkans and draws on her own experience reporting from the region.

• On Poland and the fight against Russian disinformation, read Stanisław Żaryn. State Department friends keep telling me about our commitment gap in the information war. Moscow remains fully dedicated. Beijing, too.

• On global stakes and the Russian war against Ukraine, read the piece I’ve co-authored with Bill Kristol for the German daily Tagesspiegel. You can read the original German here, and an English version we’ve published here.

• On Japan’s evolving security outlook, read Brad Glosserman. Writing from Tokyo, Brad cites evidence that change may be happening faster than one might think.

• On Iran, Ulrike Becker joins us by Zoom from Berlin on March 7 at 12 noon ET. Meanwhile, we’ve recently hosted two exceptionally interesting conversations. You can watch Roya Hakakian on history and fresh perspectives with former senior Iraqi official Samir Sumaida'ie here. Vera Mironova offered members of our Leaders’ Circle an inside look at growing Iranian-Russian defense cooperation.

• On Latin America, read Frank (Fukuyama) here. Frank writes from a recent trip to Colombia on a number of concerns he has about the region and the rise of a new Left.

Friends and Music

Michael Kimmage has written for us a number of times. Here’s his review of Hal Brands’  book on American statecraft during the Cold War. Only recently did I learn that he started as a music student at Oberlin College and Conservatory. Read Michael’s marvelous essay “The Missing Delight” in Liberties. Fans of Mozart and Mel Brooks would be pleased.

Follow Joe Horowitz on music in his Arts Journal blog here. I’ve been learning recently from Joe about 27-year-old conducting sensation from Finland Klaus Mäkelä. Of course, Joe is also a leading expert on Black classical music.

I’ve been watching performances led by my recent discovery, Dean Dixon. Here’s Dixon with Gershwin’s An American in Paris. Listen here to Dixon—with Antonio Janigro—in a rendering of Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor. I love this: It’s Dixon with Schumann and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra in 1953.

Very best regards,

Jeff

Jeff invited us this week to share our Top Ten American Purpose articles and podcasts. We consulted our colleagues Suzanne Garment, Rebecca Burgess, Sydnee Lipset, and Laura Silverman—our Favorite Five from each category are below. Enjoy reading and listening.

Best,

Carolyn Stewart and Michelle High

Our Favorite Five AP Articles

Arch Puddington’s “Orbán’s China Infatuation”

More and more I value Arch’s clear, steady intelligence among our diverse offerings. Puddington puts a fine point on the irony that the man the nat cons embrace as a savior of Christian civilization has himself embraced one of the world’s leading persecutors of Christians.

—Suzanne Garment

* * *

Tamar Jacoby’s “Ukraine Displaced”

With her reporting on Ukraine’s internally displaced families, Jacoby offers color and compassion as she details a chronically overlooked aspect of Russia’s invasion.

—Carolyn Stewart

* * *

Carl Gershman’s “Wisdom from Warsaw”

Gershman draws parallels between the democratic spirit forged during the Solidarity movement and Ukraine’s heroic resistance to Russia’s invasion today. It is a splendid essay—incisive, moving, and reflective.

—Sydnee Lipset

* * *

David Skinner’s “The New Language Police”

Words are the currency of this human realm, Skinner reminds us in this four-part series, enabling us to be human with ourselves and with each other. What happens to our souls when our new semantic regulator-overlords shush whole lexigraphies out of existence?

—Rebecca Burgess

* * *

Daniel Chirot’s “Those We Leave Behind”

Chirot looks at the withdrawal from Afghanistan through a long lens, probing deep into the crevices of societal psyches. A haunting take.

—Michelle High

Our Favorite Five AP Podcasts

The Islamic Republic and Protests in Iran, Saeid Golkar with Francis Fukuyama on “Democracy IRL”

Golkar, an Iranian scholar and expert on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, offers an inside look at the anti-regime protests and why they represent an unprecedented break from past unrest in the Islamic Republic.

—Carolyn Stewart

* * *

The Ten Days That Defined Obama’s Presidency, Cody Keenan with Richard Aldous on “Bookstack”

Very few people know what it’s like to be in the “room where it happened” with President Barack Obama. As the producer-editor of “Bookstack,” I really did feel like a fly on the Oval Office wall during this gripping half-hour depiction of ten pivotal days in Obama’s presidency.

—Laura Silverman

* * *

The Challenges Facing Latin America’s Young Democracies, Jorge Castañeda on “Times Like These with Charles Lane”

Lane’s engagement of former Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Castañeda in a tour de force of the status of democracy in an array of Latin American countries packs in a remarkable amount of knowledge and insight.

—Michelle High

* * *

The First Journey into Space, Stephen Walker with Richard Aldous on “Bookstack”

The details that Walker shares on the four months preceding Gagarin’s record-breaking flight into space make the success story of the Soviet space program all the more astounding.

—Carolyn Stewart

* * *

Confederate Names and Military Bases, Kori Schake on “Times Like These with Charles Lane”

A fascinating and heartwarming discussion about the Naming Commission’s inclusive civic process as it considered new names for thousands of military installations that originally honored confederate generals.

—Michelle High

In lieu of Jeff’s weekly note, please see the article he has published today in American Purpose on “Black History, Black Classical Music.”

Best,

Michelle

Michelle High
Senior Editor
American Purpose
michellehigh@americanpurpose.com
Tel. 202-297-8737

Dear Friends,

The trial in absentia of Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and four associates started in Minsk last week. All five challenged 2020 election results they claim were rigged in order to keep Vladimir Putin’s ally Aleksandr Lukashenko in power. Tsikhanouskaya is accused of high treason, organizing mass disorder, creating an extremist group, inciting hatred, and plotting to seize power.

I was in Minsk a dozen years ago having dinner with journalists and NGO leaders in a restaurant’s private room; semi-private actually, as two KGB men sat at a table close to us. It’s hard to imagine that Belarus has become appreciably more repressive.

Two weeks ago, I was in Lithuania meeting with Belurusian journalists working for RFE/RL. They had just relocated to Vilnius, two and a half hours by car from Minsk — 20 miles from the border — in a small NATO country where the contrast between freedom and unfreedom is feeling a lot like West Berlin abutting communist East Berlin during the Cold War.

In Vilnius, I had dinner with a group that included award-winning journalist Aleh Hruzdzilovich and his wife Maryana. Aleh is a former political prisoner. RFE/RL is still fighting for the release of two colleagues in Belarus. Journalist Ihar Losik was arrested in June 2020 and sentenced to 15 years in a penal colony in December 2021. RFE/RL’s colleague Andrey Kuznechyk was arrested in November 2021 and is serving six years for his reporting. Grim becomes grimmer.

Russia’s War on Ukraine after a Year

We’re taking stock. February 24 will mark the first anniversary of Russia’s war on Ukraine. We’ll publish a symposium with voices from the region, including from Belarus. We’ve invited RFE/RL President Jamie Fly to comment on media freedom in Russia. We’ll include in our package an interview with Askold Krushelnycky, who’s been reporting from the trenches of eastern Ukraine over the past year.

We’ll also host by Zoom General (ret.) Philip Breedlove, General (ret.) Ben Hodges, and Admiral (ret.) Jamie Foggo, the first time these three of the Air Force, Army, and Navy have combined their experience in a single discussion (thanks to Iulia Joja for chairing the conversation and to Iulia’s “Eastern Front” podcast colleagues at AEI Giselle Donnelly and Dalibor Rohac for co-hosting the program).

We’re still of the view that Russia’s war on Ukraine changes things. Read Andreas Umland on the stakes. Read our friend and my co-author Bill Kristol in The Bulwark here.

Read my conversation on Germany with Laure Mandeville in Le Figaro here. They take time, but paradigm shifts are afoot. Read Frank Fukuyama, just back from Tokyo, on Japan’s Zeitenwende. Frank, incidentally, is on Bill Kristol’s podcast this week.

For important history, read Joe Joffe on the work of the late, great historian Robert Conquest and his 1986 book — Harvest of Sorrow — that “curdles the mind … [and] sets the stage for our time by reaching back ninety years.” Though published a generation ago, Conquest’s work, writes Joe, “is as relevant (and heartbreaking) today as we watch Putin’s pitiless war against Ukrainian cities and civilians.”

An Otherwise Full Plate

— Yesterday, we hosted by Zoom Beverly Gage on her new biography of J. Edgar Hoover. One of the things that struck Michael Mandelbaum — who moderated — is Beverly’s portrayal of Hoover as an able, responsible administrator and civil servant. Frank has been writing for us on the need for such competent individuals in government today (in contrast to political cronies).

— In February (date TBD), we host Melinda Haring and Olga Rudnieva for a salon discussion in Washington. Melinda and Olga will speak about their remarkable work with the Superhumans Center, a hospital and scalable project being created in the Lviv region that will provide prosthetics and reconstruction surgery.

— On February 3 at 12 noon ET, researcher Vera Mironova joins us by Zoom for a briefing on Russian-Iranian defense cooperation. Putin spoke to Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi twice within ten days in January; other recent, high-level bilateral meetings have apparently focused on drones, ballistic missiles, and Sukhoi fighter jets for Iran and enhanced intelligence cooperation between Moscow and Tehran.

— On February 9 at 12 noon ET, former senior Iraqi official Samir Sumaidaie joins us by Zoom to share his perspective on the demands from the Iranian people for political change in their country. American Purpose senior fellow Roya Hakakian has arranged the conversation and has kindly agreed to moderate.

We’ll have more on Iran and there’s a good deal still to commend.

Read Michael Mandelbaum on China and the new book by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley (paradigm changes are afoot). Read Dalibor Rohac on new alliances within Europe (Russia’s war on Ukraine changes things).

On reform in the United States, read Frank DiStefano’s review of Timothy Shenk’s The Realigners. Join us on February 6 at 12 noon ET for a Zoom discussion with Katherine Gehl. Katherine advocates final-five voting, a preliminary round open to voters and candidates of all parties, with the top five finishers going into the general election, decided by rank-choice voting. Jim Glassman will moderate. Larry Diamond will serve as respondent.

Keep an eye out for David Lowe’s essay on how to fight the war of ideas plus discussions with Joanne Ackerman and Susan Brind Morrow on their new books. Details on both next week!

Music and Zeitenwenden

Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier premiered at the Dresden Opera on January 26, 1911. That was a time of turning points filled with opportunity — yet also, tragically, a period drenched in treachery and self-destruction. In the summer of 1911, Thomas Mann was at work on Death in Venice. Between 1911 and 1914, there were small wars, a land arms race to match naval races, Austro-Serbian military clashes (and Austro-Italian frictions over Albania), and a German-Russian crisis.

Der Rosenkavalier was a relief of sorts on the eve of World War I, a comedy in three acts from a composer whose life would become increasingly intertwined with politics. In 1933, Strauss would be appointed to the role of principal conductor of the Bayreuth Festival, a post he accepted after Arturo Toscanini resigned from the position in disgust over Nazi politics.

Strauss (1864–1949) made his accommodation with the regime to advance his career, to protect copyright and composers — he kept Mendelssohn on programs — and to minimize risk for his Jewish daughter-in-law. Strauss insisted on a Jewish librettist for another opera, Die schweigsame Frau — namely, author Stefan Zweig — a choice that led to his dismissal as president of the Reichsmusikkammer in 1935. Hitler and Goebbels refused to attend Die schweigsame Frau, which was cancelled after three performances and then banned by the National Socialists.

I’m reading Charles Youmans’ book on the quarter century friendship between Strauss and Gustav Mahler. The two argued over everything from budgets and opera scenery to alternative paths for the future of music.

I’m listening to Der Rosenkavalier, Die schweigsame Frau, and Friedenstag, a one-act opera set during the Thirty Years’ War, a thinly veiled critique of Nazi rule with themes of freedom and tyranny. Try this from Der Rosenkavalier. Here’s an excerpt from Friedenstag.

If you don’t know them, try Strauss’ tone poems. He wrote nine, or ten depending how you count; here’s Macbeth.

My best,

Jeff

Jeff is back from Berlin. I share with you a piece he co-authored with Bill Kristol that was co-published this week in American Purpose and The Bulwark. In it they share impressions from the roundtables – part of our series of conversations, co-sponsored with Renew Democracy Initiative, about the war in Ukraine.

Best,

Michelle

Michelle High
Senior Editor
American Purpose
michellehigh@americanpurpose.com
Tel. 202-297-8737

Jeff is in Vilnius and Berlin this week — he'll be back next week with a full report!

Best,

Michelle

Michelle High
Senior Editor
American Purpose
michellehigh@americanpurpose.com
Tel. 202-297-8737

Dear Friends,

Ukrainians are made of steel, says U.S. Ambassador in Kyiv Bridget Brink. They’re also experts in networks and social capital, to borrow an expression. This came to mind when I had lunch in Washington last week with Askold Krushelnycky. Askold has spent most of the last ten months reporting from the front lines of Russia’s war in Ukraine. He’s filed for the London Times and briefed numerous Zoom conversations for American Purpose.

I was taken by Askold’s story of a jamón Ibérico that made its way from relatives in Spain to a soldier in the trenches near Bakhmut. It’s apparently commonplace for buses of Ukrainians traveling home from Western Europe to act as a transport for care packages for Ukrainian fighters. Moving special treats to western Ukraine is one step in the journey to get the morale of frontline troops boosted. “They all share delicacies wonderfully with their comrades,” reports Askold.

I was similarly impressed by Askold’s story of a Ford Explorer that made its way from London to Lviv, where it was serviced and painted camouflage green by the Ukrainian military and then driven to the front, where it was outfitted with a machine gun atop the cabin and repurposed as a troop transport vehicle. It was Askold who drove the SUV cross-country from Lviv, a favor to six officers with whom he had been holed up in an abandoned house near a battlefield in the east.

Ukrainians are resourceful. We’ll interview Askold this month on his experience in the war before he returns to Ukraine in February. Ukrainians keep winning on the battlefield, but at a tremendous price. Vladimir Putin will smash, mash, and terrorize the country until he is stopped. Ukraine still needs heavier weapons to end this brutal war.

The United States is now considering the supply of Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. A recent poll in Germany indicates that a majority of SPD, FDP, and Green voters — supporters of the political parties that comprise Berlin’s governing coalition — now support sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine. Fear of escalation continues to slow things down. Russian disinformation does its job in instilling fear in Western capitals. It’s long overdue that we consider carefully the myriad threats stemming from a protracted conflict.

We’re keeping an eye on the remarkable bravery and tenacity of the people in Iran, too.

• Today at 11 am ET, we host editorial board member Eric Edelman and Ray Takeyh by Zoom on how the West can support the people of Iran. Bill Kristol will moderate. You can read this week’s piece by Eric and Ray in Foreign Affairs here. You can still register to join today’s conversation here.

• Friday at 12 noon ET, we host Stuart Levey by Zoom on Iran sanctions, an event exclusively for members of our Leaders’ Circle. Stuart is arguably America’s foremost expert on sanctions. He’s a former Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. He was the top lawyer for HSBC and my neighbor in London when I was running the Legatum Institute. He’s now chief legal officer for Oracle.

• On January 9 at 12 noon ET, we host Oksana Kis, Elaine Showalter, and Sonya Michel on “Women in Wartime—Lessons from Ukraine.” American Purpose managing editor Carolyn Stewart will moderate. The discussion will provide context for the upcoming exhibit of work by contemporary Ukrainian women artists, “Women at War.” The exhibit, an American Purpose–Stanford University joint venture, will be on view at the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery from January 12 through March 19. For details and to join the January 9 conversation, click here.

• On January 11 at 12 noon ET, we host our own Craig Kennedy for a Meet the Masthead Leaders’ Circle discussion on “The Corrupting of Philanthropy.” Craig worked in the foundation space at the highest levels for years. He’s been thinking deeply and writing about a number of key problems over the past year.

• Read this week in our pages Michael Mandelbaum on microchips and Chris Miller’s important new book; Joe Joffe on Robert Conquest, a retroview of the great British historian’s 1986 study of Soviet collectivization and terror-famine; and Rich Barton on primary reform. Read Gary Schmitt on Kevin McCarthy — and Newt Gingrich’s legacy.

• Read Bill Kristol in the Bulwark on the chance to set crucial political and policy agendas in 2023; Jonathan Haidt on social media, political dysfunction, and Gen X (thanks to Paul Stebbins for bringing this to my attention); and Peter Rough and Luke Coffey in the Wall Street Journal on Russia’s deepening turmoil.

Next week, I’ll be in Berlinchairing the next in our series of roundtables with Renew Democracy Initiative on Ukraine, Russia, and regional security. I’ll report from Berlin and also share notes from Vilnius, where I’ll join RFE/RL CEO and fellow board member Jamie Fly in opening a new office in Lithuania. If you missed the recent CBS “60 Minutes” program on RFE/RL, you can watch it here.

Meanwhile, a Bit of Music

Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel started in the trenches—literally. Brendel was born on January 5, 1931, in Wizemberk, today’s Loučná nad Desnou in the Czech Republic. His family moved to Zagreb and later to Graz, Austria. Toward the end of World War II, the 14-year-old boy found himself digging trenches in Yugoslavia. He became a brilliant pianist.

A trademark of Brendel’s performances is devotion to the composer’s original intent. Here’s Brendel with Schubert. Here’s Beethoven. And with Mozart, elegant, clean, and crystal clear.

For me, Alfred Brendel is inquiry, study; pure curiosity. “The word ‘listen’ contains the same letters as the word ‘silent,’” he said, before retiring from the concert stage with his 81st performance at Carnegie Hall in February 2008. Here’s a short, lovely clip with photos — Brendel speaking about Beethoven and Schubert.

My best and happy new year,

Jeff

When Handel’s Messiah premiered, concert-goers came as much for the contralto as they did for the composer. The date was April 13, 1742. The place was Dublin. The singer was Susannah Maria Cibber, a mesmerizing vocalist and renowned actress, highest paid on the London stage. She was also at the center of a scandal.

Susannah was married to Theophilus Cibber, an actor, abusive husband, and spender well beyond the couple’s means. Theophilus had been selling his wife’s jewelry to satisfy creditors. But when this failed, Cibber took in a wealthy tenant named William Sloper to generate extra cash. The London rumor mill went wild. There was gossip about a ménage á trois. One tale had it that Theophilus forced his wife at gunpoint to sleep with the boarder. The fact was, in the end Susannah left with lodger Sloper. Lawsuits filed by Theophilus ensued. At the Dublin premiere, women took out the hoops from underneath their dresses to make space for attendees determined to squeeze in.

There were other controversies linked to Messiah’s premiere. Handel’s masterpiece was composed in 24 days. Handel’s librettist Charles Jennens fought with the composer over the haste and what he insisted was the composer’s general lack of care with the music.

The most enduring tale about Messiah stems from the first London performance. King George II, it is said, leapt to his feet during the stunning Hallelujah chorus. All present were obliged to stand, of course. From this day on started the tradition of audiences standing for this portion of Handel’s work. The only problem is that there’s no record of the king ever having attended any performance of Messiah.

Messiah, the Music

German composer George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) had become famous in Britain for Italian opera, but in response to changing English taste he turned his attention to oratorio. Messiah was his sixth work in this genre. It was originally intended for Easter. Part 1 starts with the prophesies of Isaiah. Part II begins with the Passion of Christ and concludes with the Hallelujah Chorus. Part III is the resurrection of the dead and Christ’s glorification in heaven. Think of an oratorio as modified opera without the acting. There are scenes, recitations, and choruses.

I’ve never been a fan of the massive Messiah performances with big orchestras and large, invariably unwieldy choirs. Here’s a clear and crisp full performance with Voces8 and the Academy of Ancient Music. It’s a chamber ensemble and likely the way Handel heard his music at his time.

Here’s a short, beautiful chorus under the baton of baroque expert John Eliot Gardiner. And here’s something that, when sung by Susannah Maria Cibber at the Dublin premiere, moved the audience to tears. The singer in this performance is Glasgow-born mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor (think of mezzo-soprano as between contralto and soprano). If you’re in Europe, you can hear her sing in the Mozart Requiem in Lausanne on February 9 and as a soloist in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in Lisbon on March 2 or 3. The twenty-nine-year-old Taylor performs regularly in opera houses across Europe. She deserves to be better known in the United States.

Beyond Messiah, a Playlist for the Holidays

For something joyful, listen here to William Byrd’s Laudibus in Sanctis, one of ten psalm settings among twenty-one pieces contained in the Cantiones Sacrae from 1591. The collection was published at a time when Byrd was leaving London and the praise he had enjoyed at the Chapel Royal was fading. This is gorgeous, too. It’s a short choral work by Orlande de Lassus (1532–94).

Here’s the joy of the fugue. A fugue is compositional technique that involves the introduction of a theme followed by several imitative parts that, beginning at staggered stages, join together to form a harmonic whole. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was a master of the fugue. He was also very well caffeinated when he worked, and he worked all the time. Bach drank as many as 30 cups of coffee a day.

Keep this in mind as you listen to this marvel of a fugue from the B Minor Mass. It begins at the one minute and five second mark. Anyone who’s struggled writing counterpoint — I suffered through this as an undergrad — or who’s sung the B Minor Mass knows how maddeningly difficult this sort of thing is. For the singers, a train wreck is always right around the corner. I know this from experience, too.

After exuberant Bach, try these Christmas carols. “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen” dates back to 1599. It’s sung here by the Olga Vocal Ensemble from the Netherlands. Here’s a wonderful French classic.

“I Saw Three Ships” is an English carol from the 17th century. Here’s Sting’s rendition. If you prefer a more traditional version, here’s the sparkle of King’s College Cambridge. And here, a 1966 classic recording by Nat King Cole.

“In Dulci Jubilo” dates back to the 14th century. Here, more perfect, pure tones from the choir of King’s College Cambridge. And “Riu, Riu, Chiu,” my Spanish favorite. I always come back to John Fahey. Here’s a lovely medley for guitar.

Six more recommendations for the holidays:

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his piano concerto No. 22 in mid-December 1785. Here’s a live performance with David Fray at the keyboard and Marin Alsop conducting. Mozart himself performed this concerto at least three times. Mozart was both traditionalist and innovator. This concerto is bursting with color and joyfulness. Said a contemporary, “His feeling, the rapidity of his fingers, the great execution and strength of his left hand particularly, and the apparent inspiration of his modulations, astounded me.”

• Johannes Brahms finished his “Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel” in autumn 1861. Brahms was 28 at the time. He once played the piece for Richard Wagner, who in turn attacked Brahms in the press. The “War of the Romantics” pitted Brahms and his friend Clara Schumann against radical progressives such as Wagner and Franz Liszt.

• Arnold Schoenberg cracked things open with his new, revolutionary musical technique. Don’t run away from the following piece fearful of off-putting atonality. It’s Christmas music from Schoenberg that might surprise you. Check out the wonderful still images and paintings from the composer as you listen. From 1908 to 1912, Schoenberg produced a number of sketches and paintings associated with the expressionist movement.

• Bill Evans is surely perfect for any time of year. Evans grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey. His father was of Welsh descent. His mother’s forebearers came from a coal-mining family in Ukraine. Harry ran a golf course, Mary was a seamstress. Bill grew up loving pinball machines and music. Here’s a “best of” album, jazz from Evans to sink into.

• Thelonious Monk did it all. He pushed boundaries like mad. Here’s his “San Francisco Holiday.” He recorded it first live at San Fran’s Blackhawk jazz club in 1960. Monk called jazz freedom, but fully understood structure and training (“You've been making the wrong mistakes,” he once said). For Christmas, try this.

• Have a listen to the American Purpose holiday playlist. It includes many of the pieces mentioned here, and more. Feel free to recommend and share.

* * *

Susannah and William Sloper went on to have a son and a daughter, while Theophilus Cibber died in a shipwreck off the coast of Ireland. Susannah had seen trouble in Cibber from the get-go. She insisted on a prenup — an unusual arrangement at that time — to protect her healthy earnings as singer and actress.

Handel composed 42 operas and 29 oratorios. Messiah is by far his most popular oratorio, but there’s other equally spectacular work in this genre. His Judas Maccabaeus is the story of the back-and-forth struggle in roughly 165 B.C.E. between the Jews in Judea and the Seleucid Empire. Judas Maccabaeus emerges as the leader of the Jews. Parts 1 and 2 of the oratorio convey twists and turns in the war. Part 3 deals with the hard-fought Jewish victory, ending with the Feast of Lights.

Here’s the dramatic overture to Judas Maccabaeus with gripping images as you listen.

Here’s a sensational anthem for orchestra, soloists, and chorus. “I Feel the Deity Within” is equally brilliant, with a wonderful rendition here by baritone and British Handel expert Jerome Knox.

Stay with us in 2023. There’s much more to come. If you support our mission and enjoy our content, please make a year-end tax-deductible donation. We depend on your support!

Warmest regards for this holiday season.

Jeff

Dear members,

We wanted to make sure you knew about a special Zoom event this coming Monday, December 19, at 12 p.m. ET: former Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko speaks to us on Reconstructing Ukraine. You can register here.

To be kept informed about our open-access Zoom events, you can register for our Events newsletter here (under "Newsletters" select "Event invitations"): 

Natalie Jaresko is a distinguished fellow with the  Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and the former minister of finance of  Ukraine. Currently, she is a member of the World Economic Forum Global  Agenda Council on the Future of Financing and Capital. Prior to joining  the Ministry of Finance, she was one of the co-founders and chief  executive officer of Horizon Capital.

We hope to see you there.

Best,
The editors

Fats Waller died on December 15, 1943, in Kansas City at the age of 39. He had contracted pneumonia on board the Super Chief, aka “train of the stars,” flagship of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway that ferried celebrities between Chicago and Los Angeles. What a life.

Waller was once kidnapped in Chicago. That was in January 1926 when, after a performance at the Sherman Hotel, four men shoved Waller into a car and took him to a place called the Hawthorne Inn, a joint owned by Al Capone. The 21-year-old musician was dragged inside at gun point. Waller was nervous. Who wouldn’t be? There was a piano in a room crowded with revelers. Waller was ordered to play. He was the “surprise guest,” it turned out, at a birthday party. Capone was turning 27.

There was another party, hosted by George Gershwin, that launched Waller’s career. Scroll down for more on that.

Meanwhile:

• Thanks to Michael Mandelbaum for bringing to my attention the new biography of J. Edgar Hoover by Beverly Gage. The work portrays the legendary FBI director as, among many other things, a serious, competent, and effective civil servant, arguably the type we need today and the shortage of which has been a topic in Frank Fukuyama’s recent writing. The Yale historian and Hoover biographer will join us for a Zoom discussion on January 9 at 12 noon ET.

• Thanks to Kate Epstein for introducing us to Matt Suarez, who has an interesting piece for us on Taiwan. Matt’s a first lieutenant and AH-1Z helicopter pilot in the United States Marine Corps. Recent supply-chain problems are likely to pale in comparison should China wage war on Taiwan, writes Matt. The United States is badly in need of a strategy.

• Thanks to Roya Hakakian for bringing Nima Rashedan to our attention. Nima is a former Iranian political prisoner currently working in Central Europe as a blogger-analyst. He’s invaluable as a conversation partner for a number of reasons, including for his study of what’s happening inside the Iranian regime. Nima joined our Leaders’ Circle members earlier today for a Zoom. Otherwise, please read Roya’s recent essay in The Atlantic. She continues to be one of the most eloquent voices urging the United States and its allies to do more to support the people of Iran. Human rights journalist Golnaz Esfandiari joins us by Zoom in early January. More about Golnaz and the date soon.

• We need to stick with Ukraine. George Will has warned all along about American tentativeness. He worries about our attention span. “Ukraine is looking to the West,” he writes in his Washington Post column, “away from Putin’s ethnoreligious, blood-and-soil notion of nationhood.… For the West to look away from Ukraine would be an apostasy foreshadowing a dark future.” Here’s Bill Galston’s call for steadiness in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s Frank’s assessment and appeal on Ukraine this week. Former Ukrainian finance minister Natalie Jaresko will join us by Zoom on Monday December 19 at 12 noon ET on Reconstructing Ukraine. You can register here.

• We need to stay focused on all that’s at stake. John Connelly writes about Ukrainian identity and a nation in the making. John sees in Ukraine an extraordinary example of language and memory, enlightenment values and imagination for a common liberal future. He argues there’s much to learn for the region and beyond. For more history on the making of a democratic nation, read Gabe Schoenfeld next week on Jeff Herf’s book on Israel’s founding.

• In January, American Purpose joins Stanford in Washington to cohost an exhibit on war and gender with works of art from female Ukrainian artists. Sonya Michel will lead a discussion in the run-up to the opening on January 12. Thanks to Sonya’s initiative in getting this project rolling. American Purpose arts and culture editor Syd Lipset leads from our side. Special thanks to Adrienne Jamieson for sponsoring and hosting the exhibit at Stanford’s Washington campus.

• In February, American Purpose engages with the Washington, D.C., public library system for a series on politics, culture, and American exceptionalism. We’ll include programs on Iran and Ukraine. Again, thanks to Syd and to Rob Schneider and his colleagues from the L Street branch library for their support and collaboration.

For the United States and the West, Russia’s war against Ukraine and Iran’s revolution come at an utterly inconvenient time, with inflation, polarization, and all the rest. Yet, if we can assist the Ukrainians and the Iranians in their struggles, we can help to take wind out of authoritarian sails. Carl Gershman writes about the Solidarity playbook. Carl’s piece is adapted from remarks he recently delivered to the Polish Senate.

Music Notes

Thomas Wright Waller was born in New York, the seventh of eleven children. His mother was a musician. His father was a truck driver and pastor. Waller dropped out of school as a teenager to play organ at the Lincoln Theater of Harlem (where Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey would later perform). Fats Waller loved playing jazz — and Bach. He got around. He played at the Vendome in Chicago for movies alongside Louis Armstrong. He ended up copyrighting some 400 songs, influencing a generation of jazz pianists, and becoming the first African American to write the music for a Broadway hit. John McWhorter had plenty to say about the musical Early to Bed in a 2013 essay for The New Yorker.

As for that soirée hosted by Gershwin, the year was 1936. Waller tickled the keys that evening, sang his heart out, told jokes, and dazzled the assembled. An executive of Victor Records at the party was so impressed that he arranged for Waller to record with the company, signing Waller to a deal that stuck until Waller’s death in 1943.

Here’s a Waller classic I like very much.

At that birthday party for Capone, Waller is said to have gotten a hundred bucks in tips for each song he performed along with endless champagne and a feast for three days. He loved his food and drink. He knew how to make the most of things.

Next week, I’ll share my holiday playlist, including best performances of Handel’s Messiah, Handel’s oratorio Solomon, and a lovely bunch of Christmas operas.

Plan now for January. Angel Gil-Ordóñez and PostClassical Ensemble have a wonderful concert planned for January 11 at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. The program includes African-American spirituals and works by Adolphus Hailstork, Samuel Barber, William Grant Still, and J. S. Bach.

Keep an eye on the work of the tireless Joe Horowitz. Joe’s first novel is due out in early 2023. It’s called The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. Joe is a wonderful critic, historian, and storyteller. We’ll never tire of tales about Gustav and Alma. We’ll invite Joe to a Zoom to talk about his book.

My best,

Jeff