The past beats inside me like a second heart
John Banville, The Sea
Why is this blog called In That Howling Infinite? It refers to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a magnificent study in mania and obsession:
“But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!” Moby–Dick, Chapter 23
In a figurative sense, it speaks of the themes and schemes that are addressed in the thoughts, ideas, songs, poems and stories that feature in this blog. We are, as Bob Dylan sang, “condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting”. And we like to hope that, as the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho said, “someone will remember us, I say, even in another time”
Here are the most recent articles in In That Howling Infinite.
Smyrna 1922 and the Ottoman endgame. The expulsion of the millennia long Greek presence in Anatolia was one of the last chapters in the extraordinarily violent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
Beside Strange Waters. The dark side of former Pink Floyd front man and currently, controversial political activist
Rasputin and the downfall of the Romanovs. To admirers he was a man of God; to his enemies, a charlatan, sexual predator, political manipulator and symbol of everything rotten within Russia’s last royal dynasty.
The featured picture at the head of this page is the interior of St George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Madaba, Jordan, home of the sixth century Madaba map, discussed in Maps, memory, and the myth of fingerprints
Sydney Sweeney has good jeans
Ten favourites:
A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the West. In one of the first essays published in In That Howling Infinite, we walked down what Welsh poet RS Thomas called ‘the long road of history”, beginning with the usual suspects: power and pride, greed, and aggrandisement, and as accessories after the fact, dolour, devastation, and death.
Blood and Brick … a world of walls. Hadrian’s Wall, the Theodosian Wall, the Berlin Wall, Northerm Ireland’s Peace Wall, Israel’s Separation Wall, George RR Martin’s Ice Wall, the wall you can see from space, and walls that most people have never heard of. If walls could talk, what take they woukd tell. While walls are destined to fall one day, people like them. They project a language of security – but they stem from a sense of insecurity, a fear of losing what you have.
One Land, Two Peoples: History, Memory, Continuity, and Inheritance. The history of Israel and Palestine does not yield to forensic neatness. This land holds layered attachment; Jewish longing and Palestinian dispossession; British imperial design and Arab nationalist pride; secular aspiration and religious revival; survival strategy and ideological fervour. None alone explains the whole. Together they form the sediment of a century.
The Twilight of the Equine Gods. An illuminating canter through the story of the “Centaurian Pact” between humans and horses. it is at once a ride and revelation. The horse, as German academic and cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff’s tells us, “has been man’s most important companion – forget cats and dogs – and the most durable of historical alliances – against which every other covenant into which we have entered has been fragile and ephemeral – not even our relationship with our gods has shown a comparable degree of stability”.
The Sport of Kings. CE Morgan’s “great American novel” is not a history book – nor is it an historical novel. But it is most certainly about history. And about identity. As Morgan puts it: “You would never escape the category of your birth”. It is also about memory and myth: “Repeated long enough, stories become memory and memory becomes fact”.
Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment. “Nostalgia”, literally the pain associated with the thought of home, or homesickness, is derived from the Greek “nostos” – a theme used in Ancient Greek literature most notably in the recently reimagined Odyssey, involving an epic hero returning home after a long time away. Nostalgia reveals the deep longing for a home that our younger selves took for granted, and bittersweet return to people and places that have changed forever. But it isn’t all it’s cracked out to be, and, indeed, can bring out the worst in us, becoming a millstone of bitterness and regret strung about the necks of discontented souls who drift off into a maze of memories, meanings and emotions.
A cowboy key – how the west was sung. My riding days are over, but I have been into westerns all my life, and the songs inspired by them – in films, musicals and popular song, from ghostly herds to outlaw chic, Frankie Laing to Leonard Cohen and Taylor Swift. And, as a onetime musician myself, I have, back in days gone by, penned songs in a cowboy key.
McGoohan’s Blues – sunbathing in the rain. How an eighteen minute digression from the concept if not the plot of an iconic if indecipherable ‘sixties’ television series made an indelible impression on an impressionable twenty year old who remains mightily impressed with this song by Britain’s high priest of angst.
The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir. “Fast forwaranother century, and I was “on the Holy Ground once more” attending the wedding of an old pal held in an old pub in the heart of Ireland. Getting there, we’d done a whistle-stop tour of the south, including Inis Córthaid (my mother’s hometown), Wexford and Ross, the heartland of the ‘98 rebellion … I was best man at that wedding, and in a speech largely devoted to the groom and our mutual, lifelong appreciation of Bob Dylan, I was able to relate to guests young and old tales of my Irish childhood, taking us all “down the foggy ruins of time”, and sang extracts from songs I actually did learn at my mothers knee, the song-lines of my Celtic twilight.
About the creator of this blog
Paul Hemphill is a British-born Australian songwriter, poet, and blogger.
Once upon a time, he was an accountant by profession, a manager, mentor and mediator. A long-time resident of Sydney, he is now living in the middle of the forest on the mid north coast of New South Wales, Australia, where he spends much of his time in the great outdoors.
His interests include music, poetry, politics and history. He has had a lifelong passion for the history, politics and people of the Middle East. Over the years, through study and travel, he has acquired a working knowledge of standard and colloquial Arabic.
Listen to some of Paul’s songs on SoundCloud and YouTube. Search under Paul Hemphill or HuldreFolk (but ignore the Flemish death metal band of the same name). He has assembled seven volumes of poetry and verse, and these can be read on this blog.
History has a habit of turning up unexpectedly in everyday life.
Some fifteen years ago, a muso friend of ours told us about his family’s Greek origins in Ottoman Smyrna. We were in the Black Sheep wine bar in King Street, Newtown, sitting down with a Greek Australian who’d just finished a great set of blues and soul standards talking about events that occurred almost a century earlier. Nationality, language, religion and ancestry did not always fit the neat boxes into which the twentieth century subsequently tried to place them.
We visited Smyrna – now modern İzmir – in May 2014. We walked along the harbourside promenade, looked across the Aegean Sea, and took photographs that we sent them to our friend. They were ordinary holiday snaps, in one sense: the waterfront, the sea, the city behind us. But they carried something else with them. We were standing in a place from which his Greek forebears, had once looked towards the same water in circumstances unimaginably different from ours.
It is one of the peculiarities of history that the past can sometimes feel closer through a family anecdote or a photograph than through a library full of books. The old cliché about history leaving fingerprints is, perhaps, not entirely a cliché. Places retain traces of people who have gone, even when almost nothing visible remains of the communities that once inhabited them.
Smyrna is an especially powerful example.
It was once an Ancient Greek city located at a strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, and was actually two successive settlements: Old Smyrna, founded around the 11th century BC as an Aeolian settlement before being taken over and developed by the Ionians during the Archaic Period, and Smyrna proper, the new city founded from the 4th century BC onward, whose establishment is associated with Alexander the Great. Due to its advantageous port conditions, its ease of defence, and its good inland connections, Smyrna rose to prominence, reaching metropolitan proportions under the Roman Empire, with most of its surviving remains dating from that era, largely following reconstruction after a 2nd-century AD earthquake. Since 1930, the city’s official name has been İzmir.
Modern Izmir, May 2014
In September 1922, the city’s waterfront became the final refuge of tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian civilians as Turkish nationalist forces entered the city and violence and fire engulfed its Christian quarters. Within a few years, the overwhelmingly Greek character of one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean had largely disappeared. But Smyrna was not the beginning of this story. It was one of the last chapters in the extraordinarily violent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
The story reaches backwards through the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman-Russian conflicts, the massacres of Armenians in the 1890s, the First World War and the destruction of Armenian and Assyrian communities, and forwards through the Greek Turkish and War, the Treaty of Lausanne and the compulsory exchange of populations. It is a story of imperial collapse and national self-determination, but also of refugees, massacres, deportations, competing territorial claims and the brutal desire of emerging nation-states to make populations conform to political borders.
It is therefore tempting to reduce it to a morality tale. There is certainly no shortage of moral horror in the record. But moral judgement and historical explanation are not alternatives. The challenge is to understand how a multi-ethnic empire that had survived for centuries gave way, through war and revolution, to a collection of more nationally defined states — and why that transformation was accompanied by such extraordinary human suffering.
That is the longer story of Smyrna, and of the Ottoman endgame.
The leaving of Smyrna, September 2022
Smyrna and the Ottoman Endgame
In September 1922, the cosmopolitan city of Smyrna became the final, terrible act in a drama that had been unfolding for more than a decade. The city’s waterfront filled with Greek and Armenian refugees as Turkish nationalist forces entered the city and Christian neighbourhoods were engulfed by fire. Behind them lay the ruins of communities that had existed in Anatolia for centuries; ahead was the Aegean and, for many, an uncertain escape to Greece.
The familiar account of Smyrna begins here, with the fire, the refugees and the ships of the Allied powers lying offshore, apparently unable or unwilling to intervene in one of the final acts in a war that they had effectively lost. But history did not begin in Smyrna. Nor did the destruction of Anatolia’s Christian communities begin with Turkish commander Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist movement. To understand what happened in 1922, one has to go back through the Balkan Wars, the Ottoman defeat in the First World War and, before that, the increasingly violent crisis of the Ottoman state’s relations with its subject peoples.
This is the broader story told, with considerable geographical and archival range, by Sean McMeekin in The Ottoman Endgame. It is also the story exploredin In That Howling Infinite’s The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye : the dissolution of an empire was not a single event but a succession of wars, revolutions, occupations, expulsions and attempts at national reconstruction. The First World War was the central episode, but it was also part of a much longer Ottoman endgame.
The wars before the war
It is convenient to imagine Europe as peaceful until August 1914. It was not. The Ottoman Empire had already been fighting for its survival.
Italy went to war with the Ottomans in 1911, seizing Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the territories that became Libya. Then came the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, in which the Ottoman Empire lost almost all its remaining European territories. Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro expanded at Ottoman expense, while Albania emerged as an independent state. Romania, often included rather casually in this account, was already an independent kingdom, although it acquired territory from Bulgaria after the Second Balkan War.
The Balkan Wars were particularly important because they demonstrated what the disintegration of a multinational empire could mean in an age of nationalism. Armies advanced, borders changed and populations moved. Christians were expelled from territories conquered by Muslim powers and Muslims were expelled from territories conquered by Christian states. Villages were destroyed, civilians massacred and refugees displaced on a large scale. The demographic transformation of the Balkans was already underway before the First World War began.
This matters because the later violence in Anatolia did not occur in a political vacuum. Ottoman Muslims, many of them themselves refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus, had seen their homes and communities disappear. The Ottoman state increasingly came to regard the survival of its Muslim population as a matter of national security. At the same time, Christian minorities – particularly Armenians and Greeks – increasingly looked beyond the empire towards their own national movements and, in some cases, to foreign powers.
The result was a vicious feedback loop. Nationalism encouraged separatism; separatism encouraged repression; repression encouraged further separatism. War made the whole process considerably worse.
Armenians and the First World War
The Armenian catastrophe has to be treated separately from what happened to the Greeks and Assyrians, although there were connections between them.
The massacres of Armenians during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II in 1894–96 were already a warning of what could happen when imperial authority, Muslim majoritarian sentiment and fears of territorial disintegration collided. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed in massacres and associated violence. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 initially raised hopes of a more constitutional and inclusive Ottoman order, but those hopes deteriorated rapidly as the empire suffered military defeat, territorial losses and political crisis.
When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in late 1914 on the side of Germany and the other Central Powers, the Armenian question acquired an altogether more dangerous dimension. Ottoman forces were fighting Russia in the Caucasus, and some Armenian organisations and volunteers did indeed cooperate with the Russians. Armenian soldiers fought in Russian formations, while armed Armenian groups operated behind Ottoman lines. Ottoman fears of an Armenian fifth column were therefore not entirely invented.
But this context does not explain what followed, still less justify it.
In 1915 the Committee of Union and Progress government – what we know as The Young Turks (now a common term to describe ambitious young upstarts) – began the systematic deportation of Ottoman Armenians. Armenian political and community leaders were arrested and killed. Men were separated from their families and frequently murdered. Women, children and the elderly were deported southwards, many towards the Syrian desert. Deportation became a mechanism of destruction.
The death toll remains debated in detail, as such figures inevitably are, but the broad historical conclusion is not seriously in doubt: hundreds of thousands, probably well over a million Armenians, died through massacre, deportation, starvation, disease, exposure and deliberate deprivation. Many women and children were forcibly converted or absorbed into Muslim households. Sexual assault was commonplace. Armenian property was confiscated. An ancient community was not merely displaced; its institutional, demographic and economic foundations were systematically dismantled.
The Ottoman government and its successors have contested the term genocide and have emphasised the extraordinary circumstances of wartime collapse, Armenian collaboration with Russia and the deaths of Muslim civilians. Those Muslim deaths were real and often horrific. But they do not negate the evidence for the organised deportation and destruction of the Armenians. Nor does acknowledging Armenian collaboration with Russia turn an entire ethnic population into a legitimate military target.
The same period brought massacres and deportations of Assyrian Christians in southeastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. The historical record is less comprehensive than for the Armenians, but the destruction of Assyrian communities belongs to the same wider story of wartime demographic violence.
The Greek catastrophe was different – and connected
The fate of the Ottoman Greeks followed a somewhat different chronology.
Greeks had lived throughout the Ottoman domains for centuries. In Anatolia they were concentrated particularly along the Aegean and Black Sea “Pontic” coasts, but Greek communities were also found in the interior. They were not simply recent immigrants or colonial settlers. They were part of the social and economic fabric of the late Ottoman Empire.
During the First World War, some Greek communities were deported or otherwise subjected to coercion and violence. In the Pontic region of the Black Sea, Greek nationalists and armed groups also became involved in conflict with Ottoman authorities and later with Turkish nationalists. The question of Greek communities in Anatolia consequently became entangled with the wider struggle over what would replace the Ottoman Empire.
The decisive change came after the Ottoman defeat.
The Armistice of Mudros in October 1918 effectively ended Ottoman participation in the war. Allied forces occupied strategic parts of the empire, including Constantinople. The victorious powers then contemplated a drastic settlement of Ottoman territory. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 proposed a severely truncated Ottoman state and envisaged Greek control or influence over substantial parts of western Anatolia.
The Greek military landing at Smyrna in May 1919 was therefore not an isolated act of Greek aggression. It occurred within the post-war Allied occupation and with Allied approval. Greece, was encouraged by its wartime territorial ambitions and by the vision of the Megali (great) Idea, – a Greek nationalist and irredentist vision that emerged after Greek independence (1821–1829) that called for the revival of the Byzantine Empire by uniting all regions with significant Greek populations – including parts of the southern Balkans, Anatolia, and Cyprus – still under Ottoman rule into a single Greek state.
Greece believed that it had an opportunity to incorporate territories containing substantial Greek populations and places of enormous symbolic importance to Greek history. But the settlement soon collided with another nationalism: Mustafa Kemal and the Turkish counter-revolution
Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the Ottoman commander who had become famous at Gallipoli, emerged as the principal leader of the Turkish nationalist movement. The movement rejected the partition of Anatolia contemplated at Sèvres and sought to establish national sovereignty over the Turkish heartland.
Mustafa Kemal and other Ottoman officers at Gallipoli
This was not simply an Ottoman army fighting a foreign invader. The Ottoman government in Constantinople accepted the Allied settlement; the nationalist movement centred in Anatolia rejected it. Turkey therefore experienced something approaching a war of national liberation combined with civil conflict.
The Greek army advanced deep into Anatolia. For a time, it appeared that Greece might achieve a substantial territorial settlement. But Turkish resistance stiffened. The nationalists defeated the Greek advance and, in August–September 1922, launched the offensive that drove the Greek army back towards the Aegean.
The Greek retreat was accompanied by atrocities and destruction on both sides. Turkish nationalist forces and irregulars committed massacres and expulsions against Christian civilians; Greek forces and retreating troops were themselves responsible for atrocities against Muslim civilians during their occupation and withdrawal. None of this is usefully understood through a simple morality tale in which one side was innocent and the other intrinsically barbarous.
There was, however, an important asymmetry in the final outcome: the Turkish nationalist victory made possible the consolidation of a Turkish nation-state in Anatolia, while the Greek population of much of the region was about to disappear.
Smyrna, September 1922
The events at Smyrna remain among the most contested episodes of the war, particularly regarding responsibility for the city’s fire and the precise number of people killed. The broad outlines are clearer.
Turkish nationalist forces entered Smyrna on 9 September 1922. The Greek Orthodox metropolitan, Chrysostomos, was murdered. There followed widespread looting, violence and attacks on the city’s Christian population. On 13 September a fire began in the Armenian quarter and subsequently consumed large parts of the Greek and Armenian districts.
The city contained a large Muslim population as well as substantial Greek and Armenian communities, and the precise course of the fire remains disputed. What is not disputed is the appalling predicament of the refugees trapped along the waterfront. Tens of thousands, probably far more, sought escape by sea. Allied warships were present. Their crews could see the fire. Their governments were reluctant to intervene militarily in what had become a Turkish nationalist victory and were constrained by the political circumstances of the time. Some Allied personnel and ships did rescue refugees; the larger failure was that the international presence did not prevent the catastrophe.
Smyrna was therefore both an atrocity and a symbol. It marked the end of a substantial Greek and Armenian presence in one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean.
But it was not, strictly speaking, the moment when that population vanished. Much of the Greek population had already fled or been displaced during the preceding years, and the final settlement was still to come.
The leaving of Smyrna, September 2022
The population exchange
The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 replaced Sèvres and internationally recognised the sovereignty of the new Turkish Republic over Anatolia and eastern Thrace. Mustafa Kemal, now Atatürk, had won the war.
Lausanne also gave international legitimacy to the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. Approximately 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were transferred from Turkey to Greece, while roughly 400,000 Muslims were transferred from Greece to Turkey, subject to various exemptions, including the Greek population of Constantinople and the Muslim population of western Thrace.
The exchange was presented as a solution to the problem of minorities. In reality, it was the formalisation of a demographic revolution already substantially achieved through war, massacre, deportation and flight.
It is important not to describe this simply as the expulsion of Christians from Anatolia. Muslims had also been expelled from territories lost by the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars, and the compulsory exchange itself displaced Muslim as well as Christian populations. Nor was the exchange an exclusively Turkish initiative: Greece and Turkey agreed to it, and the victorious European powers incorporated it into the Lausanne settlement.
It was nevertheless an extraordinary admission of failure. The ideal of a multi-ethnic Ottoman political order had effectively given way to the principle that stability could be achieved by separating populations according to religion and, increasingly, nationality.
The irony was profound. The Ottoman Empire had survived for centuries precisely because it did not require everyone within its borders to be Turkish, Arab, Greek, Armenian, Serbian or Bulgarian. Its subjects belonged to overlapping religious, linguistic and local communities. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries progressively replaced that imperial pluralism with nationalism. By the 1920s, population transfer had become one of the instruments by which the new states sought to make their populations conform to their national boundaries.
The longer Ottoman endgame
This is why I find McMeekin’s The Ottoman Endgame such a useful corrective to the conventional Western story of the First World War.
The war in the Ottoman world was not merely a sideshow to the trenches of France and Belgium. It stretched from Gallipoli to Gaza, Baghdad to Baku, the Caucasus to the Arabian Peninsula. Its consequences extended from the Balkans through Anatolia and the Levant to Mesopotamia. And it was intimately connected with the Russian war, the Russian revolutions and the subsequent Russian Civil War.
The Ottoman collapse also cannot be reduced to the familiar caricature of Britain and France simply carving up an otherwise coherent Middle East according to the lines of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Sykes–Picot was real and consequential, but it was one of several competing wartime schemes for the disposition of Ottoman territory. Russia, too, had imperial ambitions. Constantinople had long been an object of Russian strategic and religious aspiration. France had its own ambitions in the Levant. Britain was concerned with India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf and the routes linking them.
And the Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Turks and other peoples of the empire were not merely passive pieces on a European chessboard. They had their own political ambitions, national movements and armed organisations.
The same complexity applies to Gallipoli. The campaign was certainly a military disaster, and Churchill was one of its principal advocates. But it was not simply Churchill’s personal folly, as the mythology subsequently suggested. It emerged from a much wider strategic debate about how best to defeat the Ottoman Empire and assist Russia. Its failure helped establish Mustafa Kemal as a military leader of consequence.
That matters because the man who became the founder of modern Türkiye was not an outsider who suddenly appeared after the Ottoman collapse. He was an Ottoman officer, a product of the imperial military system and a veteran of the Balkan Wars, Libya and Gallipoli. The Turkish Republic was born not from a clean break with the Ottoman past but from its ruins.
A demographic revolution
There is a tendency, particularly in polemical accounts of this period, to describe the destruction of Anatolia’s Christian communities as a single uninterrupted campaign stretching from the Hamidian massacres through the Armenian genocide to Smyrna. The chronology is more complicated than that.
There were massacres under Abdulhamid II. There were the catastrophic deportation and destruction of the Armenians under the wartime Committee of Union and Progress. There were attacks on Assyrian communities. There were violence and displacement affecting Ottoman Greeks during and after the First World War. There were massacres of Muslims during the Balkan Wars and the Greek occupation and retreat in Anatolia. There was the Turkish nationalist war against Greece. There was Smyrna. Finally, there was the compulsory population exchange.
These events were not identical. Their perpetrators, political circumstances and immediate objectives differed. Nor should the existence of Muslim suffering be invoked to dilute the particular historical responsibility for the Armenian genocide.
But they belong to the same larger transformation: the violent passage from empire to nation-state.
What disappeared was not literally a civilisation that had remained unchanged for two thousand years. Anatolian Christianity itself had changed enormously over those centuries. Byzantine Christianity, Armenian Christianity, Syriac Christianity and Greek Orthodoxy had their own histories and communities. Ottoman society was neither a paradise of tolerance nor a permanent state of persecution. It was a hierarchical imperial order in which religious communities possessed considerable autonomy while remaining unequal before the state.
What disappeared in the early twentieth century was that plural Ottoman world.
By the middle of the 1920s, the Armenian presence in Anatolia had been largely destroyed; the great majority of Anatolian Greeks had gone; Assyrian communities had been devastated and dispersed; and millions of Muslims displaced from the Balkans and Caucasus had been absorbed into the Turkish heartland. The new Republic of Türkiye inherited an Anatolia that was considerably more homogeneous than the Ottoman Empire had been.
The transformation was accompanied by enormous human suffering and the appropriation of property on a vast scale. It also produced the demographic foundations of the modern Turkish state.
The wars of Ottoman succession
Seen from this distance, the Balkan Wars, the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence can be understood as parts of a longer sequence: the wars of Ottoman succession.
The Ottoman Empire had once encompassed much of southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Its disappearance created a succession problem of extraordinary dimensions. Who would inherit its territories? Russia, Britain, France, Greece, Italy and the emerging Arab states all had answers. So did the Turks. The Balkan peoples had already answered the question in their own way before 1914.
The wars did not end neatly in 1918. The Ottoman defeat was followed by the Greek-Turkish war; the Russian Revolution and Civil War transformed the Caucasus; Britain and France established mandates in former Arab Ottoman territories; the Turkish Republic emerged from the nationalist victory; population exchanges attempted to impose demographic order upon territories in which communities had been intermingled for centuries.
That is one reason the consequences remain visible today.
The modern Middle East was not simply invented at a European conference after the First World War. Nor was it simply the inevitable product of ancient ethnic and religious hatreds. It emerged from the interaction of imperial collapse, nationalism, local political movements, European intervention, Russian expansion, war, revolution and demographic engineering.
Smyrna was therefore not the beginning of the story, and neither was it quite the end. It was one of the last great convulsions of the Ottoman endgame.
The ships in the harbour in September 1922 were looking at more than a burning city. They were looking at the consequences of a political order that had been collapsing for generations. Behind the flames lay the Balkan Wars, the deportations of 1915, the battles between Greeks and Turks, the Russian-Ottoman struggle in the Caucasus, the Allied occupation, Sèvres and the nationalist revolt led by Mustafa Kemal. Ahead lay Lausanne, the population exchange and the Republic of Türkiye.
The Ottoman Empire had gone. The Greek presence in Anatolia had largely gone with it. So too had the Armenian communities that had survived there for centuries.
But the story was not one of an ancient world simply disappearing beneath the flames. It was the much messier story of modern nationalism being born from the wreckage of empire.
And that is perhaps the more uncomfortable historical lesson. Empires can suppress national conflict without resolving it. When they collapse, the suppressed conflicts do not necessarily disappear. They can return in a more radical form, as competing peoples attempt to turn mixed imperial territories into national homelands. Borders are drawn; populations move; minorities become suspect; refugees become instruments of politics; and, in the worst circumstances, demographic homogenisation becomes a military objective.
The Ottoman Empire was not the only empire to discover this. The Habsburg, Romanov and German empires would suffer their own violent disintegration. Timothy Snyder’s later description of the lands between Germany and Russia as the “Bloodlands” has a broader resonance here. The territories left behind by the collapse of Europe’s great empires became some of the most violent political spaces of the twentieth century.
The Ottoman endgame was one of them. And it is still playing its echoes.
Izmir, May 2014
When we stood on the Izmir waterfront in 2014, there was little to suggest what had happened there ninety-two years earlier. The promenade was busy; the Aegean glittered beyond the harbour and modern İzmir was very much a Turkish city looking confidently towards its future. There was no visible boundary between the city that had been and the city that is.
Yet somewhere in the photographs I sent to our friend back home in Australia was a connection between those two worlds. His family’s roots lay in a city whose Greek population had once been large enough to constitute one of its defining communities. The people themselves had gone, their neighbourhoods transformed, their institutions dispersed, their descendants scattered across Greece and the wider diaspora. But the sea remained.
That is the strange persistence of history. People disappear; places survive. Names change, buildings are demolished, languages fall silent and populations are exchanged. Yet descendants carry fragments of the vanished world with them. Sometimes it is a family story, sometimes a photograph, sometimes a surname whose meaning has travelled further than its bearers ever imagined.
A Greek family descended from Smyrna and living in Sydney is itself a reminder of the untidy human geography of the Ottoman world. It tells us something that maps coloured in the clean shades of modern nation-states cannot: people moved, intermarried, converted, fled, were expelled and reinvented themselves. Their identities were rarely as tidy as the borders that eventually enclosed them.
The history of Smyrna is therefore not simply the story of one massacre or one burning city, terrible though those events were. It belongs to the much larger history of the collapse of empires and the rise of nationalism. The Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian genocide, the destruction and displacement of Assyrian and Greek communities, the Greek advance into Anatolia, the Turkish nationalist victory and the compulsory population exchange were different episodes, with different actors and circumstances. Together, however, they transformed the demographic and political landscape of the eastern Mediterranean.
The Ottoman Empire had not been a harmonious multicultural paradise, and its dissolution did not produce violence from nowhere. But its disappearance removed an imperial framework within which different communities had lived, however unequally, alongside one another. The national states that replaced it promised sovereignty and security. Too often they sought both by making their populations more homogeneous.
That is the uncomfortable lesson of the Ottoman endgame. The twentieth century did not simply replace old empires with neat national democracies. It also produced refugees, minorities without homelands, homelands without their former minorities, and borders drawn through landscapes inhabited for generations by people who had never imagined themselves foreigners.
And yet history is not entirely erased by political transformation.
The harbour is still there.
In 1922, people crowded along that waterfront desperate to escape across the same Aegean. In 2014, an Australian friend of Greek Smyrna ancestry received photographs of that same waterfront from another traveller, standing there in very different circumstances. Between those two moments lies a century of catastrophe, migration and memory.
Perhaps that is what the old phrase about history leaving fingerprints really means. The fingerprints are not always found in monuments or memorials. Sometimes they survive in a surname, a family story, a photograph sent from a distant city — or in the simple recognition that, although the people have gone, you are standing where they once stood.
Roots and fruits.
The empire is gone. The city has changed. The people have dispersed.
I have admired Pink Floydsince the sixties. I still thrill to the memory of sitting in the darkness on Parliament Hill in the fall of 1968 as the lights of the city sparkled below us and as jet planes roared overhead on their descent to Heathrow airport to the accompaniment of Interstellar Overdrive and Careful With That Axe, Eugene. The Dark Side of the Moon remains, in my view, one of the greatest albums ever recorded: musically adventurous, philosophically rich, endlessly rewarding. Like much of Floyd’s best work, it explores madness, alienation, mortality and power with extraordinary subtlety.
That subtlety is precisely what seems missing from co-founder Roger Waters’ contemporary activism. Flying inflatable pigs adorned with Stars of David or swastika imagery; describing Israel as uniquely evil; dismissing inconvenient evidence about the atrocities of October 7, 2026; and denouncing former colleagues as idiots. All this may generate headlines, but they lack the complexity of the art that made him and Pink Floyd famous.
Perhaps that is the enduring irony. David Gilmour rarely pretended to be a political philosopher. Waters plainly believes he is one. Yet the songs they created together endure precisely because they resisted simplistic moral binaries. The Dark Side of the Moon recognises that human beings are contradictory creatures, capable of love and cruelty, sanity and madness, empathy and tribalism. Waters’ current politics increasingly divide humanity into those who possess truth and those who have been brainwashed.
The Haaretz article republished below unintentionally illustrates another uncomfortable truth. In 2006 Waters was still embraced by most Israelis despite his criticisms. Today he is regarded by many not merely as a critic of Israel but as someone who has crossed into demonisation. Whether one agrees with that judgement or not, the shift is real. His critics see not an artist speaking truth to power but a man whose empathy has become radically selective.
The music, however, remains untouched. It is still magnificent. One can treasure the album while concluding that its principal lyricist has become, to borrow one of his own titles, rather more comfortably certain than comfortably numb. The younger Roger Waters asked us to question authority. The contemporary Roger Waters often seems to demand that we accept his own. That is a curious destination for one of rock’s greatest sceptics.
One might attribute all this to a Momentary Lapse of Reason – the title of Pink Floyd’s 1987 album. Ther is a double irony here in tha, a song thereon, On The Turning Away, is a longtime favourite of mine – what is there to object to in the lyrics of what is a powerful, anthemic song: – and yet, the song was not written by Waters, who left the band in 1985, but by cofounder David Gilmour and Floyd collaborator Anthony Moore.
No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It’s not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there’ll be
No more turning away?
The dark side of Roger Waters
This is a fascinating article, not because it settles anything – it manifestly does not – but because it captures Roger Waters almost in the raw. Israeli music journalist Ben Shalev deserves credit for largely getting out of the way and letting his subject speak. The result is both revealing and, at times, deeply unsettling.
The article begins as a piece of rock-and-roll history. In 2006, Waters agreed to perform in Israel but, under pressure from the fledgling Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, cancelled the planned Tel Aviv concert and instead performed in Neve Shalom (Wahat al-Salam), the Jewish-Arab “Oasis of Peace” village near Latrun. The move required an extraordinary logistical effort: a chickpea field became a wheat field, then an amphitheatre for some 60,000 people. Traffic collapsed, helicopters ferried the wealthy, and the concert itself – a performance of The Dark Side of the Moon – became one of the largest and most memorable rock events Israel has ever hosted.
Around this entertaining backstage story swirl competing memories. Did Waters himself suggest Neve Shalom? Was it promoter Shuki Weiss? Did Waters witness armed Israeli soldiers at the separation barrier or not? Did security concerns prevent him attending a peace gathering, or did he simply go shopping? Almost every anecdote has two or three incompatible versions. Shalev wisely resists deciding who is right. Memory, ideology and self-mythologising have become inseparable.
The more interesting story is Waters’ own political evolution. He describes 2006 as the beginning of his radicalisation, crediting Qatari-Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti and the nascent BDS movement with opening his eyes to what he now regards as Zionism’s original sin. He claims his deceased father’s letters from British Mandatory Palestine anticipated these concerns decades earlier. Since then, he says, he has concluded not merely that Israeli governments have committed grave wrongs, but that Israel itself – and Zionism as such – is “a failed experiment.”
At that point the interview changes register entirely. It ceases to be about a concert and becomes a prolonged political jeremiad. Waters insists Israelis have been comprehensively brainwashed, dismisses Israeli society as morally corrupted, embraces armed struggle as historically necessary, rejects Nick Cave’s argument for cultural engagement, and repeats claims about October 7 that have been extensively challenged by independent investigations. His denial that Hamas committed rapes, despite substantial evidence collected by UN investigators, journalists and Israeli forensic teams, inevitably overwhelms everything else he says. Whether one is sympathetic to Palestinian suffering or highly critical of Israeli policy, this is where many readers simply stop listening.
That is perhaps the tragedy of Roger Waters. He undoubtedly possesses genuine moral passion. The anti-authoritarian themes running through Animals, The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon were always political, even when listeners preferred to hear only the music. But somewhere along the way, righteous anger seems to have hardened into absolute certainty. There is almost no room left for ambiguity, self-doubt or tragedy. Israelis become collectively brainwashed; Palestinians collectively embody resistance; every contradictory fact is assimilated into a single explanatory framework.
It is an oddly totalising worldview from a man who once warned us against “thought control.”
Postscript
On 4th September 2026, The Times of Israel Israel reported that Roger Waters, “a far-left conspiracist who has long been accused of antisemitism”, was scheduled to headline a New York City conference run by a group that raises conspiracies about the September 11, 2001 terror attack. “Waters and the group organizing the conference, the International Center for 9/11 Justice, have raised false allegations that Israel was involved in the al-Qaeda terror attacks”.
According to The Times, “The group identifies with the “truth movement” that raises alternative explanations for the attacks and calls the attacks an “inside job” orchestrated by the US government with assistance from Israel and other countries”. “9/11 was the first step in the plan for US-Israel hegemony in the Middle East,” the group said earlier this year.
The Times notes that Waters has endorsed conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2001, attacks, telling Tucker Carlson in July that the towers fell due to “controlled demolitions. “It fell down because it was demolished, and the question is, ‘Who placed the explosives in it? Who pressed the button?’” he said. He alleged Israelis had foreknowledge of the attacks, saying, “They were dancing around, sort of congratulating themselves”. He has also raised conspiracies or denied atrocities related to Hamas’s October 2023 invasion of Israel and has a history of anti-Jewish rhetoric.
Roger Waters: ‘My Songs That Israelis Love Are About Truth and Love. Israel Is the Complete Opposite’
Twenty years after his performance in the Jewish-Arab village of Neve Shalom, Roger Waters recounts his version of what really happened there – and what has changed for him since. ‘They went from, ‘Waaaah! Roger, Pink Floyd, we love you’ – to ‘What the fuck is he talking about?”
Shortly after 10 P.M. on June 22, 2006, as Roger Waters’ concert in the Jewish-Arab Israeli village of Neve Shalom was in full swing, a member of the production team mistakenly believed that police were preparing to arrest the Pink Floyd legend.
The employee, a member of Israeli producer Shuki Weiss’ team, thought he had heard over the radio that Waters would be arrested on suspicion of damaging IDF property the moment he stepped offstage. He alerted Amir Feingold, who was in charge of security for the production.
More likely, the radio report said that a complaint had been filed against Waters. The day before the Neve Shalom concert, the man who wrote “The Wall” had visited the separation barrier near Bethlehem and spray-painted the words “We don’t need no thought control” on it, quoting “Another Brick in the Wall.” According to Feingold, right-wing activist Itamar Ben-Gvir filed a police complaint against Waters for defacing the barrier. “He was already a public relations wizard back then,” Feingold says.
Already under immense pressure as the concert drew to a close and 60,000 attendees prepared to leave, Feingold took the report seriously. “We called the Jerusalem District commander, who was at the site, and asked him to look into it,” he recalls.
“Listen, we know how easily the police arrest people. Look at what’s happening today with protest activists.”
That was in 2006. The minister responsible for the police was not Ben-Gvir.
“If there was the slightest chance something would go wrong, we wanted to make sure it didn’t happen. The district commander reassured us. He said, ‘I’m with you.’ At the same time, Shuki and I went to Waters’ manager and told him, ‘Listen, here’s the situation. There could be problems.’ As soon as Waters got off stage, we put him in a car, even before giving the order to turn on the lights in the facility. Shuki said a few words to the audience while the man was already on his way to Ben-Gurion International Airport, escorted by special police patrol unit vans.”
Rogers Waters spraying graffiti on the separation wall, 2006. Credit: AP
The story about the complaint against Waters is an insignificant anecdote, but it illustrates how much Israeli reality has changed in the 20 years since that performance.
In 2006, Ben-Gvir was a serial offender who belonged to the lunatic, ostracized fringes of the far-right, far outside the bounds of public legitimacy. Today, he is the national security minister. Waters is the one who has moved far beyond the bounds of Israeli legitimacy in the past two decades. In 2006, he was still a huge cultural hero, unconditionally loved and admired. His arrival in the country was seen as a historic event.
Pink Floyd’s music is still very much loved in the country, but Waters himself is probably among the most hated people in Israel. The possibility of him setting foot in the country today is beyond imagination. This makes the memories of his performance here, exactly 20 years ago, particularly charged and interesting.
What does Waters himself remember from that visit to Israel and the performance in Neve Shalom? What is the most significant thing that stuck with him?
“Very, very comfortable, shabby chic white sofas arranged backstage. Not the most meaningful memory, but you said, how do you remember it? But the main memory, obviously, is the memory of when I made the little speech at the end where I said, you are the generation of young Israelis who must make peace with your neighbors and blah blah blah,” Waters says in a Zoom interview from his New York home.
He then mimics a screaming, fawning audience: “They went from, ‘Waaaah! Roger, Pink Floyd, we love you’ – to ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’ Wow. It was something of a surprise. I went back the next year and I learned a lot more about Israeli psychology. But that first year, it was still a bit of a surprise.”
Waters is not precise with the timing: He returned three years later, in 2009.
Was the change in audience reaction really that extreme?
“It went from ecstasy to silent horror in a split second. And I thought, whoa, that was by far the most important bit. The rest was just a gig, with an adoring audience.”
Israel is waiting for Roger
One need not accept Waters’ recollection. I asked several people who were there how they remembered that moment. Some didn’t recall Waters’ statement at all. Others said the audience reacted supportively. No one remembered a reserved response, certainly not “silent horror.”
A significant discrepancy between different accounts of the same events characterizes the entire story of Waters’ performance and his 2006 visit to Israel. Whose idea was it to move the concert from its original venue in Yarkon Park to Neve Shalom’s chickpea field? What did Waters see during his visit to the separation barrier? Why didn’t he attend the meeting organized for him with intellectuals and peace activists?
The answer to all these questions is: It depends on whom you ask. So we asked. To mark 20 years since the most complex and charged performance in the history of international rock concerts in Israel, we will try to tell its story in the most reliable and interesting way.
This story has two protagonists: Waters and producer Shuki Weiss. In the 1970s, before Weiss became one of the country’s biggest concert producers, he managed record stores in Tel Aviv and was one of those responsible for introducing Pink Floyd’s music to Israelis. Later, when he owned the Dan Cinema Club in Tel Aviv, he used to hold record listening evenings there. One time he played “The Wall.”
“People would come to listen,” he recalls. “Many people.”
In the early 1980s, Weiss and Miron Rechtman, the owner of the Betty Bam event equipment company, bought the sound system that Pink Floyd used on its “The Wall” tour. In the mid-1980s, Weiss tried in vain to bring David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s guitarist, to Israel as a solo artist. Toward the end of the 1980s, after Waters had left the band, he negotiated to bring Pink Floyd to perform in the country in its trio lineup (Gilmour, keyboardist Rick Wright and drummer Nick Mason. But that attempt also failed.
The crowd waiting for Waters to perform. Credit: Oren Levin
“I stalked them, so to speak,” he says.
In early 2006, Weiss learned that Waters was planning a world tour based on the album “The Dark Side of the Moon.”
“I went to London, met his agent, and offered a huge sum, much more than he received anywhere else,” Weiss recalls. After the contract was signed and the planned performance in Yarkon Park was announced, he traveled to Paris for a brief meeting with Waters. “I told him that Israel was excited for him,” he says. “He was perfectly fine.” Weiss says ticket sales were excellent, with 35,000 sold three months before the show.
A couple of weeks later, Weiss was vacationing with his family in the Netherlands, when Waters’ manager, Mark Fenwick, called him. He told Weiss that pro-Palestinian activists were exerting heavy pressure on Waters. A few hours later, Fenwick called again to say that Waters had decided to cancel the performance.
“I got lots of emails from my brothers and sisters after the announcement of Hayarkon Park. But the important one was from Omar Barghouti,” Waters recalls about changing his mind, referring to one of the founders of the BDS movement. “We had a conversation, and then I eventually cancelled Hayarkon Park. Organizing this concert instead was a compromise with Omar and with the rest of the people who had just started the BDS movement, because obviously even doing Neve Shalom broke the boundaries of the cultural boycott.”
Waters describes that exchange as “a huge moment” in his political thinking.
“You know, in this song that Mona Miari and I have just released, a re-imagination of my song ‘Comfortably Numb,’ I sing, ‘We never knew about the Nakba. I was only 5 years old in ’48.’ And we didn’t,” he says. “And the lie that is Zionism had been spread all over the world since the Second World War. So I wasn’t alone. Very, very few people quite got it.”
Waters says that one of the few people who “got it” before the war was his father.
Shuki Weiss giving an interview ahead of the concert.Credit: Oren Levin
“My father taught at St. George’s School in Jerusalem from 1934 to 1936,” he says. “And he wrote letters home to my grandmother, which I have, saying how worried he was about the influx of American money, mainly, to buy up land, and about the establishment of the settlements that he saw going on, and how desperately worried and concerned he was,” he recounts, referring to the pre-state Jewish communities. “Of course, he was killed in the war, so I never got to talk to him about these things. but it’s a fascinating fact.”
Following the deepening of his awareness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict due to the appeal of the BDS movement, Waters made his second visit in 2009. “My travels around the occupied territories … were deeply, deeply moving and very informative,” he says. “I’ve tried never to shut my mouth from that moment. And things have only got worse, obviously, except that it’s becoming clearer and clearer to the vast majority of people all over the world now that this is a failed experiment, and it should be stopped.”
What is the failed experiment?
“Israel is the failed experiment. Zionism is the failed experiment. and this is becoming increasingly a position taken up by a huge majority of human beings all over the world, because we witness and are appalled by the horrific policies of the state of Israel in its massacre of the indigenous people whose land it stole in order to create itself. And so it’s a terrible, terrible, terrible tragedy, and it remains to be seen: Will I see the end of the story in my lifetime? Probably not. I’m 82 years old.”
Waters performing in Neve Shalom in 2006. Credit: Assaf Evron
Field of wheat
In response to Waters’ decision to cancel the Yarkon Park concert, the most monumental improvisation in the history of performances in Israel occurred. Thanks to the move to Neve Shalom, Weiss says he was called “The King of the Chickpea Field” for years by people in the global music industry.
“When Waters’ manager informed me of the cancellation, I told him: ‘What if I move the show to a place for Jews and Arabs?’ I don’t know where that came from,” Weiss says. ‘I knew Neve Shalom. David Broza’s grandfather was one of the first residents there. I had done performances there many years before this show, events for peace. But nothing of this magnitude. Performances for a few thousand people. I had no idea if a huge concert could be held there. I left my family in the Netherlands and returned to Israel. That night, Waters’ manager called me back and said: ‘We checked what Neve Shalom is. If you can do it there, and if you invite Arabs to the show and arrange meetings with peace activists, we’re in.’ I told him: ‘Yes, yes, yes.”
Rayek Rizek, a Neve Shalom resident, offers a different version of the events that led to the Neve Shalom performance. “Sometime in late March 2006, I heard two employees in the community’s secretariat talking about Roger Waters,” recalls Rizek who was the community’s secretary general in 2006. “I’ve loved Pink Floyd since high school. I still listen to them today. When I was studying at university in the United States, around when “Animals” (the band’s 1977 album) came out, I missed a performance of theirs in Houston. By the time I managed to look for a ticket, everything was sold out. I was very sorry,” Rizek says as an aside.
“So when I heard the employees in the office talking about Waters, I asked what was going on. They said his manager had sent us an email. Waters was interested in Neve Shalom and was asking for information about the village,” he says. “As soon as I saw I had a direct connection with the manager, I sat down and wrote him a long email telling him about Neve Shalom and inviting him to hold the concert with us. I didn’t know about the pressure being exerted on him. Two days later, Shuki Weiss came to the village and told me, ‘This morning, Waters’ manager called me and asked about the possibility of moving the concert to Neve Shalom.’ I imagine the manager received my letter and understood that such a possibility existed.”
Rizek’s version doesn’t necessarily contradict Weiss’s entirely. Perhaps Weiss suggested the idea to Waters’ manager, and then the manager sent an email to Neve Shalom. But it’s also possible that the initial email to Neve Shalom was sent to explore the option of holding some separate activity in the community. In this scenario, when the Yarkon gig was canceled amid Rizek’s offer to hold a concert in Neve Shalom, Waters and his manager adopted the proposal. Rizek recounts that during one of the preliminary meetings with police officers at the event site, one of the commanders got annoyed over some details and asked, “‘Why are we even holding the concert here? Why didn’t it stay in Tel Aviv?'”
Rizek recalls: “Shuki looked at me and told the commander: ‘Blame him.’ As for me, all I did was send a letter.”
Waters himself doesn’t remember the history of the concert’s move to Neve Shalom. “Shuki Weiss, bless him, he’s just another promoter,” he says with a smile. “I don’t know him at all. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I can spit.”
On the other hand, he stresses, “I loved the idea of Neve Shalom, of this agricultural community.” He says fondly: “It’s like this is the dream that we have of how Palestine could go, could go back to being, where everybody lives together, and there’s no supremacists, there’s no racism. Whatever it may be that has caused this great catastrophe, there was none of that in Neve Shalom. I hope it’s still doing well.”
Flyers for the Roger Waters concert in IsraelCredit: Oren Levin
Weiss picked the new concert site’s location with Giora Porter, who designed the producer’s concert venues for many years. “There was only one area that came into consideration, with a certain slope, a kind of natural amphitheater,” Porter recalls. “It was a chickpea field owned by two brothers from one of the local moshavim. I located the field owners and said: ‘I want to buy your chickpeas.’ They said: ‘Okay, we’ll harvest in May.’ I said: ‘No, now.’ They understood they could make a killing off me. I bought the chickpea field, the crop they wouldn’t harvest, for $100,000. They were nice guys, but they knew how to bargain.”
“But there was a problem with the crappy soil in the Latrun area,” Porter says. “Exposed soil in June is all dust. It’s terrible. I suggested sowing grass, but the moshav resident said: ‘No, that will ruin my land.’ I said: ‘I can’t do a show on dirt.’ I think he was the one who suggested sowing wheat. He said: ‘It’ll sprout and be green like grass.’ So we went to see wheat sprouting elsewhere. I told him: ‘It’s terribly sparse.’ He said: ‘We’ll double sow it, increase the density.’ And that’s what he did. Shuki paid for it. And that entire huge area turned green within days. It was a miracle.”
Weiss and Porter recount that various state authorities created numerous difficulties for the show. The Israel Antiquities Authority remembered that salvage excavations needed to be carried out on the site and delayed the work. The Israel Land Authority charged several hundred thousand shekels to rezone the land for commercial use, even if only for one night. Meanwhile, the Health Ministry prohibited watering the compound with reclaimed water and forced Weiss to bring tankers. “It didn’t matter that we used reclaimed water at night, but I showed them we had tankers,” Weiss says.
“Quite cunning bodies,” Porter says of the authorities that created difficulties and collected payments. Weiss adds, laughing: “They know their job. That’s governance!”
Weiss and Amir Feingold, who was his security officer, have mostly praise for the police’s conduct. Some officers, Weiss says, were Pink Floyd fans. The event morphed into a kind of national project that the police wished to see succeed. There was, however, a dispute over the number of paid police officers the production was required to fund. The Jerusalem District commander demanded 1,000, including several dozen detectives to hunt for pot smokers among the crowd.
“We argued with them about it,” Feingold recalls. “I told the district commander: ‘In the end, it’s rock and roll. Are you bringing 80 detectives to arrest the pot smokers? Let them enjoy themselves.” The police, he says, complied and eased the demands.
Waters landed in Israel two days before the concert. The morning after his arrival, he visited the separation barrier near Bethlehem, where he protested against its construction with spray paint and words. Weiss says Waters gave interviews after his visit in which he said he was shocked to see “soldiers with drawn weapons” near the wall.
“A lie. There wasn’t a single soldier there, certainly not with drawn weapons,” Weiss says. Feingold, who accompanied Waters’ entourage on the trip to the wall, confirms no soldiers were present.
Fans at the concert in 2006. Most did not arrive by helicopter: Assaf Evron
No-show in Neve Shalom
Waters laughs when he hears this claim. “So which story rings truer, Shuki Weiss’ story, no weapons, no soldiers, just a nice wall, or my story? I’ll tell you which one is true: my story,” he insists. “Shuki Weiss is a lying schmuck, obviously. I’m sure he’s very smiley, and he likes to make a lot of money. Good luck to him, but he’s just making stuff up.”
Another claim by Weiss concerns Waters’ non-attendance at an event organized in his honor in Neve Shalom. It was to be a meeting with intellectuals, peace activists, and village residents. Singer David Broza “helped me bring artists, writers, very serious people,” Weiss recalls. “They brought an olive tree for him to plant. There was a children’s orchestra. Tons of excitement. Everyone was already there, but he wasn’t. No Roger. They called him. He didn’t answer. His manager didn’t know where he was. In the end, David planted the tree in his place. Later it turned out he went to Kikar Hamedina to buy jewelry for his partner.”
Not only an olive tree was prepared for Waters, but also a sculpture of the famous prism from the cover of “The Dark Side of the Moon,” Rayek Rizek recounts. “I went to an artist in the Rehovot area, he told me 20,000 shekels ($4,500 in 2006). In the end, we made it from marble-coated concrete. It cost 4,000 shekels. Shuki paid,” Rizek says. “We waited and waited. In the end, someone on Waters’ behalf came and said he couldn’t come. There were too many people.”
Weiss says Waters was a no-show in Neve Shalom the day before the concert, but the event took place the afternoon of the show. “He was supposed to go to the community from the backstage area,” Feingold says. “His security guard came and looked around. I told him: ‘Tell me what you need. We’ll sort it out.’ He didn’t say a word and left. Later, he announced, ‘We’re not coming.’ I don’t know if he or Waters decided. He just said, ‘Security problems.’ What security problems? First-graders and 30 other people from the left. Where was the threat?”
Rogers says “of course” he didn’t come. “You don’t do anything on a gig day, except the gig,” he says. “I’m glad I’ve had this career and that I’ve been able to do multiple shows all over the world to fabulous audiences, but it’s very rare to do other things on show days.”
“And I’m absolutely, totally against the Nick Cave school of thought that, oh, we should all go and talk to people in meetings and that’ll do it,” he stresses, parodying hippie naivete. “No, it fucking won’t, you prick. No people has ever freed themselves without armed struggle, ever. It just doesn’t happen. It reminds me of the best interview that any of us have ever seen. (Palestinian writer) Ghassan Kanafani gave that fabulous interview where he talks about the conversation between the hatchet and the neck. What a wonderful writer.” He adds, referring to one of Kanafani’s books, “I can still remember almost every word in ‘Returning to Haifa.'”
A few weeks after the Neve Shalom concert, Waters wrote Rizek. “Dear Rayek, I’m deeply saddened that I was unable to plant the olive tree, but our efforts to reach the site were thwarted by the sheer numbers of people surrounding the vehicle in which I was travelling,” he wrote. “I know how upset you are that this did not take place and I hope that will not blight the memory of our visit to your land.” It sounds like something Waters would write, not his agent or manager.
“You see, Ben? I’m not just evil,” Waters comments.
The wheat field that replaced the chickpea field near Neve Shalom, Oren Levin
When I sent him an email a few weeks ago asking if he would agree to be interviewed for this article, I didn’t expect a positive answer. But it was positive and even cordial. When I told him during the Zoom call that I was pleasantly surprised, and that the conventional wisdom here is that he has no desire for dialogue with Israelis, certainly not after October 7, he responded: “Yes, I am. I’m just having one with you now.”
However, some things he said were difficult to hear and didn’t seem very open-minded.
“You, as a country, Israeli people have been brainwashed, and consequently you are now subjects, nationals of the most evil thing that has happened in the world since the Nazis and the Second World War. And you can’t seem to grasp it, and that is so sad,” he said.
“You used the two magic words: Gideon and Levy,” he continued, referring to my email mentioning Gideon Levy as my Haaretz colleague. “It’s only these words that got you the ability to get to me, and even Gideon got the whole October 7th thing wrong. We almost fell out over it, because he was so brainwashed. He believed all that crap about burning babies and raping women and stuff, and it’s all complete nonsense, and everybody knows it’s complete and utter nonsense. There was no rape by Hamas on October the 7th. However, there have been documented multiple rapes by the IDF, of men and women and children.”
After pushing back that I did believe these things happened, I asked Waters to change the subject. It was unbearable to hear him say these things. I knew that any attempt to continue responding to him would blow up the interview. But he continued.
“Your position is indefensible, and no amount of talking intelligently to any of you is going to change any of this. You’ve been Ben-Gvir’d until you can’t accept any reason,” he retorted. “Your state, Israel, is psychotic, psychopathic, criminally insane, and the only way out of it is for you to re-establish connection with the rest of the human race. Stop thinking that you are superior in some way and should rule the world, and join in with the community of the part of the world you’re living in. Until you do that, you are doomed, but you may well drag the rest of the world down with you. You know, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if suddenly some lunatic was to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran or something, and that’s the end of the world. You, Israel, and the United States, the U.K., France and Germany, and all the people in that cabal are dragging the whole globe towards its extinction, extinction of all life on the planet. And that’s what I complain about. It’s not weird to complain about that.”
Aviv Geffen arrives by chopper
Back to the concert, enormous traffic jams formed on the way to Neve Shalom in the afternoon and evening, and on the way from it that night. “The biggest traffic jam of 2006, perhaps of the entire decade,” Feingold asserts.
“A massive transportation failure. To this day, people are still stuck there trying to get out,” Porter laughs. Still, he acknowledges the huge traffic jams were unavoidable. “That’s the geography. We invested a lot in finding access roads, dirt roads,” he says. “We rented entire fields from nearby kibbutzim and leveled them for parking. And still, in the end, everything converged on one turn off the main road. Like everyone coming to Tel Aviv in the morning. It’s an unmanageable rush hour.”
David Gilmour. “He’s dumb as shit.”Credit: Gregorio Borgia/AP
So, did you bear responsibility for the failure, or did you say “it couldn’t be prevented”?
“Both,” Porter says.
Those who didn’t suffer from the traffic jams were the affluent who could afford 3,000 shekels for helicopter transport to the concert venue. A special helicopter line operated from Sde Dov airport in Tel Aviv. “Rani Rahav rented two helicopters for himself and the group that came with him,” Weiss says, referring to the PR consultant. “Aviv Geffen also arrived by helicopter. They told me afterward: ‘You don’t understand what a sight unfolded before us from above. It was worth every shekel.”
As for the concert, the quadraphonic sound was excellent. The superb backing band, which included acclaimed guitarists Snowy White and Dave Kilminster, was flawless. Waters occasionally used playback or excellent backing vocalists. It wasn’t a spontaneous or surprising performance, but it was clearly going to be that way. For the fortunate few who had the luck to see Pink Floyd perform, it was necessarily a diluted version. (Weiss is one of them, saying, “It was a poor man’s Pink Floyd. It wasn’t the real thing.”). But a straw poll I took last week among people who were there suggests that the enjoyment was complete, overwhelming and enthusiastic.
Musician Oded Tamsoot came to the concert from Ma’ale Gamla in the Golan Heights. “The entire event, the performance itself, was an amazing experience, beyond imagination,” he says. A year later, he formed the Pink Floyd tribute band Ummagumma.
Yael Ori, a former teacher and kindergarten teacher from Jerusalem, says Pink Floyd’s messages, which deeply influenced her as a teenager, inspired her to choose the teaching profession. “My high school was a nightmare,” she says. “I decided I wanted to be a teacher so my children wouldn’t suffer what I suffered.” Singing “We don’t need no education” with Waters and the masses was a wonderful experience, she says.
Dvir Zhorno from Jerusalem was 16. “The concert’s timing was perfect for me. It was shortly after I discovered Pink Floyd and started delving into their music,” says Zhorno, now a finance professional. “After the show, I heard critiques that he performed the songs exactly as they were on the albums, but that style suited me. That’s what I wanted to hear. ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ live, exactly like on the album – it was awesome.”
David Broza at the tree planting ceremony at Neve Shalom. Credit: Oren Levin
Truth and love, lies and hate
Toward the end of the interview, I asked Waters what he thought about the enormous, unbridgeable gap between the deep love hundreds of thousands of Israelis feel for Pink Floyd’s music and the extreme hatred most Israelis feel toward him, his views and his statements.
“This is their problem,” he sighs. “All my work, all that work that they love, all those songs I wrote for Pink Floyd – “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” “Comfortably Numb,” “Wish You Were Here,” – are all about truth and love. And all of my work that I do now is about truth and love. The State of Israel and what the children of Israel are taught to believe from the minute they’re grown up is the exact opposite. You’ve been brought up to believe the lies about October 7th. That’s not true. That’s just pure evil lies. And you’ve been taught to hate Arabs and Palestinians. That’s the opposite of love. So you live in a world that’s built on lies and hatred. … My music is built on love and truth, and that’s why there’s a dichotomy – oh, we love his music, but we hate him.
“I’m so sorry that even talking to you, I can see that you have been brainwashed, my brother Ben, completely. And I know you’re laughing at me now, but it’s really not funny. It’s sad. Israel is the saddest thing on earth, with the possible exception of the Trump White House. It’s sad because human beings are better than this. There is a capacity within every human soul for an attachment to love and truth. So for us to be persuaded that lies and hatred are a better alternative is why I go on working and expressing myself in my great songs.
“You think that ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘The Wall’ and ‘Animals’ weren’t political? Are you fucking stupid? Yes, they are stupid. If they don’t get that, they’re very, very stupid. You can’t really blame them. There were people in the band who don’t get it. David Gilmour doesn’t get it. He’s dumb as shit. He never understood a single bit of any of it. … That’s why he was miserable. And he was miserable with the band, because he never understood what I was doing.”
Waters started to say another sentence but then stopped and said: “Well, no, I’m not gonna [there]. Good luck with getting them to print any of this.”
Thank you very much.
“You’re welcome. Thank you for still having a smile on your face at the end of this conversation.”
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guildsu struck a Map of the Empire which size was that of the Empire, and coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science (1946)
Forward: the limits of cartography
I have always had a weakness for maps. Occupying and inordinate amount of space on my bookshelf are Collins historical atlases* – heavy in both the literal and figurative sense. They are magnificent volumes, and over the years I have spent many hours tracing their pages, following the movement of armies, adventurers and archeologists, the rise and fall of empires, the migration of peoples and the shifting frontiers that have so often redrawn the world. They offer a visual way of understanding history: not simply what happened, but where it happened, how territories expanded and contracted, and how the political landscape changed beneath the feet of successive generations.
Yet maps have their limitations, and perhaps that is particularly worth remembering when maps become arguments. They can show movement and geography with remarkable clarity, but they cannot tell us everything about the people represented upon them. My Collins atlases cannot tell me a person’s ethnicity or DNA, their beliefs or ideology, their loyalties or aspirations, or what motivated them to move, conquer, settle, flee or remain. They show the where, and often the when, but not necessarily the why. A boundary drawn in ink may look definitive on a map while being porous, contested or meaningless to the people who lived on either side of it. That tension – between the map and the territory, between geography and human experience – lies behind what follows.
It is particularly relevant when looking at Palestine, a landscape whose names, boundaries and meanings have accumulated over centuries and whose maps are now routinely recruited into arguments about history, identity and belonging. We must be mindful that maps are historical artefacts before they are political weapons. They tell us how successive generations imagined and described a landscape, but they are not, by themselves, title deeds to it.
The temptation with historical cartography is to look backwards with twenty-first-century eyes and ask a map to settle questions that its maker never intended it to answer. Maps preserve layers of memory and geography. They can reveal what people called places, how they understood their surroundings and how their conception of territory changed. But they require interpretation, context and, above all, a little humility.
Perhaps that is why I remain fascinated by them. Those Collins atlases taught me to look at history spatially, to see events not as isolated episodes but as movements across landscapes. The older I become, however, the more conscious I am that the map is only the beginning of the story. Behind every line, colour, border and place name are human beings, with memories, identities, ambitions, fears and attachments that no cartographer can fully capture. To understand the history of a place, we must therefore learn to read both the map and the people who inhabit it.
Old maps are not title deeds – a contemplation of cartography
What we take from a book, a review or an opinion piece often tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the author. That is no criticism; it is simply the way reading works. Every reader arrives carrying luggage: political commitments, cultural assumptions, emotional investments, historical knowledge, blind spots and aspirations. Reviewers are no different. Nor, for that matter, am I. The aspiration to complete objectivity is a noble fiction. We are all interpreters before we are judges.
That was my instinctive reaction to British activist Tony Greenstein’s review in the leftwing ezine Mondoweiss, republished below, of British-based American author and researcher Thomas Suárez’s Palestine Mapped.
Even before reaching the conclusion, I suspected where the review was heading. Greenstein is an experienced anti-Zionist campaigner whose intellectual commitments are well established, and they inevitably shape what he finds most valuable in the book. The giveaway comes in the closing paragraphs. He praises what he calls the book’s “apolitical” opening almost as a tactical device, admires the middle section for preparing the reader culturally, but clearly regards the final political chapter as the destination towards which everything else has been travelling. The cartography becomes, in effect, a prelude to contemporary advocacy. That may well be Suárez’s intention too, but Greenstein’s enthusiasm reveals his own priorities every bit as much as the author’s – as is apparent when he describes Suarez’ previous publications about Israel and Palestine.
Yet I suspect the book itself may be richer than the review allows.
Suárez appears to be asking an intriguing question that extends well beyond Israel and Palestine: maps are not merely representations of territory; they are representations of thought. They encode assumptions about power, religion, legitimacy and belonging. Medieval Christian maps centred Jerusalem not because it was geographically central but because it occupied the spiritual centre of Christian cosmology. Islamic geographers such as al-Idrisi organised space differently because they inhabited a different intellectual universe. Renaissance maps reflected the explosion of European exploration, while Protestant biblical scholarship encouraged increasingly detailed attempts to reconcile scripture with physical geography. None of these maps simply described reality. Each reflected the worldview of its makers.
That, it seems to me, is the genuinely fascinating proposition. Cartography becomes a history of imagination as much as a history of measurement. Where I become more cautious is when historical maps are enlisted as political witnesses in twenty-first century arguments. Which is what Greenstein does.
One of Suárez’s most interesting observations, as reported by Greenstein, is actually directed against a habit found on both sides of the contemporary conflict. Zionists produce archaeological sites, biblical kingdoms and ancient place names as evidence of enduring Jewish sovereignty. Pro-Palestinian activists respond with Ottoman maps, Roman maps, medieval maps or British Mandate maps labelled “Palestine”. Suárez apparently argues that both are trapped within the same conceptual framework. They assume that an ancient geographical label somehow validates or invalidates modern political rights.
I would take it one step further.
For a long while, I have contemplated what I call the “myth of fingerprints”, the belief that if only we can place our finger on precisely the right point in history, identify the first inhabitants, recover the original map, establish the authentic name, isolate the pure ancestry or locate the primordial kingdom, then modern political legitimacy somehow reveals itself in a neat, straight line stretching from antiquity to today.
History almost never behaves so obligingly.
Old maps certainly tell us something important about the land. I treasure my own Collins historical atlases, those magnificent, oversized volumes that chart the migrations of peoples, the campaigns of armies, the rise and fall of empires, the routes of explorers and the shifting frontiers of kingdoms. They are among the finest visual tools historians possess. But they tell us remarkably little about the people themselves.
A coloured arrow sweeping westward across Europe labelled “Goths” tells us almost nothing about the genetic diversity within those groups, their languages, their changing identities or the beliefs they carried with them. A shaded region marked “Canaan”, “Judaea”, “Palestina”, “Syria”, “Ottoman Syria” or “Mandatory Palestine” identifies an administrative or geographical concept, not a homogeneous nation. Maps can identify where events occurred. They cannot fully explain who the participants were and what compelled them to remain or wander.
Ethnicity itself is a moving target. DNA reveals endless mixing rather than purity. Languages evolve, religions spread, populations intermarry, conquerors assimilate, migrants settle, identities are invented, forgotten and reinvented. The very categories with which we argue today would have puzzled many of the people who supposedly embodied them centuries ago.
This is one reason why I remain sceptical whenever someone reaches triumphantly for an ancient map as though it were a title deed.
The Romans renamed Judaea as Syria Palaestina. Does that settle anything? Of course not. The Byzantine Madaba mosaic depicts Palestine. Does that settle anything? Again, no. Medieval Christian maps centred on Jerusalem in sacred geography. Ottoman maps organised provinces differently. British Mandate surveys imposed modern administrative precision. Each map tells us something true about the intellectual world in which it was created. None provides a final moral verdict on contemporary sovereignty.
Indeed, Suárez’s own broader argument may unintentionally reinforce precisely this conclusion. If maps embody cultural assumptions, then every historical map deserves to be interpreted rather than worshipped.
Greenstein continually circles back to Zionism, Christian Zionism and Israel’s contemporary use of historical imagery. Those are undoubtedly important subjects, and Suárez appears to have assembled considerable evidence for the influence of biblical geography on Western understandings of Palestine. Certainly, Christian millenarianism, evangelical theology and nineteenth-century imperial romanticism all played significant roles in preparing Western audiences to view Palestine through biblical rather than contemporary political lenses. Theodore Herzl himself undoubtedly benefited from Christian Restorationist sympathies.
But there is a wider lesson here that transcends this particular conflict.
Every nation engages in historical cartography. Vladimir Putin’s Russia speaks of Novorossiya and Russkiy Mir not simply as geographical expressions but as historical claims carrying contemporary political force. Chinese maps in the South China Sea Chinese maps invoke imperial precedents, the Nine-Dash Line and ancient tributary systems. Serbian nationalism continually remembers Kosovo Polje – “the Field of Blackbirds”. Irish nationalists remember King James I’s plantations and the partition of 1922 as Irish republicanism and unionism each produce their own historical maps of belonging. America’s has exceptionalism long rested upon maps of westward expansion under Manifest Destiny, as though the movement of a frontier line itself conferred legitimacy, whilst Confederate memory endures still. Australian history has increasingly become a contest between colonial cadastral maps and Indigenous maps of Country, each representing profoundly different understandings of what land means.
Historical geography is always political because memory itself is political. The danger comes when maps cease to illuminate history and begin adjudicating morality.
Ultimately, maps are magnificent servants but poor judges. They reveal where rivers flowed, roads were built, towns and cities grew, frontiers shifted and kingdoms expanded. They help us visualise change across centuries. They expose forgotten worlds and vanished assumptions. But they cannot tell us who possesses superior historical virtue, nor can they determine which descendants inherit exclusive political rights today.
Perhaps that is the deepest weakness of that “myth of fingerprints”. It mistakes continuity for purity, geography for identity and nomenclature for legitimacy. Human history is untidy, layered and recursive. It resembles less a straight line than a palimpsest, where each generation writes over earlier inscriptions without entirely erasing them. The old text remains faintly visible beneath the new. Maps help us read those layers. They do not resolve them.
In that sense, whether one approaches Palestine Mapped as a work of cartographic history, a study of religious imagination or an intervention in the politics of Zionism, its greatest contribution may not lie in proving who was “there first”. Rather, it reminds us that every map is itself an historical artefact, reflecting the assumptions of those who drew it. The irony is that this applies not only to the maps reproduced in Suárez’s book, but also to the intellectual maps brought by its readers and reviewers. We all chart the landscape according to our own compass bearings. The challenge is not to pretend otherwise, but to remain aware that our own map, however detailed, is never quite the same thing as the territory itself.
Coda: maps cannot be manifestos
One of the limitations of reading about maps is that like maps themselves. they flatten experience.
I’ve visited the church of St. George at Madaba in Jordan and stood next to the sixth-century mosaic of the Holy Land (pictured at the head of this post). It is a thing of beauty, of history, and of humanity. One is struck not only by its artistry but by its humanity. It is not a political manifesto disguised as a map. It is an act of devotion. The craftsmen who laid those tesserae were not anticipating twenty-first century debates over sovereignty. They were trying to depict the sacred geography through which they understood God’s world. Their “facts on the ground”, to use a phrase now freighted with controversy, were the footprints of Jesus and his Apostles.
Our Jordanian guide is part of that story. A Palestinian Christian, proud of a Byzantine mosaic in modern Jordan, her job is to guide visitors through a landscape that has been Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman and Hashemite. She herself embodies the layered history that the “myth of fingertips” tends to erase. Human beings are often palimpsests long before maps are.
As we have noted, there is habit of turning historical geography into moral geography. And yet, none of these are really arguments about geography – they are arguments about memory the stories nations and peoples tell themselves.
To borrow and invert the English poet John Donne, “no man (or map) is an island”. Maps are relational documents. They acquire meaning only through the people who draw them, use them and argue over them. Detached from those human stories, they become little more than coloured parchment. Attached to them, they become objects of extraordinary emotional power.
There is another irony lurking here – that prefigured in the quotation that opened this essay. In a short story, Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges imagined an empire whose cartographers became so obsessed with accuracy that they eventually produced a map at the scale of one-to-one, covering the entire empire itself. The map became indistinguishable from the territory and therefore useless. Political history sometimes commits the opposite error: we mistake the map for the territory. We argue over symbols as though they were reality itself.
My Collins atlases, the Madaba mosaic, Ptolemy, Ordnance Survey maps, Google Earth – all are ways of seeing. None is the land itself. The land has always contained more languages, more memories, more ancestors and more contradictions than any map can accommodate.
“The myth of fingerprints” captures the seductive belief that somewhere, if only we point to precisely the right place on precisely the right map at precisely the right moment in history, all our moral and political arguments will dissolve into certainty.
History has never been that obliging. It is less a straight line than a palimpsest. The fingertips point confidently enough. It is the ground beneath them that refuses to stand still.
The Map on the Wall
It is an education to view an old map that was not so long ago a snapshot of the world as it was geographically: Bacon’s Standard Map of the World, dating from about 1930 and drawn on the old Mercator projection. It is, at first glance, merely an antique map. In fact, it is a portrait of a vanished world.
The first thing that strikes the modern eye is the colour. The great pink expanses are British; the green ones French. Empire is not something the map explains because, in 1930, it scarcely needed explaining. It just was! .
Africa is largely divided between European powers. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are the Raj. China is a republic. Iran is Persia. The Baltic states are independent. Germany includes Konigsberg in East Prussia, now Kaliningrad. Lemburg is Lemburg, in Poland, rather than Lviv, in Ukraine. Even the names have become historical artefacts.
Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq are tiny pieces of the British imperial jigsaw. The map predates the State of Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian national struggle in its modern form and the territorial arrangements that emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the end of European empire. The great arguments that now seem immemorial were, when this map was printed, still largely unfinished arguments. New states have now appeared where old ones disappeared; boundaries that once seemed immutable are redrawn, sometimes peacefully and sometimes in blood.
That is one of the great lessons of cartography. We tend to mistake the map we inherit for the world itself. Borders acquire the appearance of permanence; names acquire the authority of fact; colours make political control look geographical and geography look natural.
Mercator himself was not attempting to deceive anyone. His projection was designed for navigation, where maintaining accurate bearings mattered more than preserving the relative size of continents. Yet every projection makes choices, and every map consequently tells only one version of the world. The Bacon map adds another layer: it colours the world according to the political realities of its time. Geography and power are superimposed upon one another.
The map is a kind of silent witness to the contingency of history. What appears to us as the settled political geography is, viewed from the perspective of 1930, only one moment in a much longer process of imperial collapse, national awakening, migration and territorial invention.
Perhaps that is why old maps are so strangely affecting. They show us not merely where the world was, but what people once imagined the world to be. And once we recognise that, the boundaries on our own maps begin to look a little less eternal.
Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, July 2026
Thomas Suárez is a New York–born author, historical researcher, lecturer, and accomplished concert violinist and composer, now based in London. He writes and speaks frequently on Palestine, and his critically acclaimed book Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea has been hailed by historian Ilan Pappé as “a tour de force”. His other works include Writings on the Wall: Palestinian Oral Histories and Palestine Mapped: From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought.
The featured picture at the head of this blog post of the interior of St George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Madaba, Jordan, home of the sixth century Madaba map.
* A list of Collins abd Harper Collins historical atlases follows Greenstein’s review.
How the West’s earliest mapping of Palestine continues to shape its understanding of Zionism today
The World According to Ptolemy (2nd century), an Italian manuscript, 1460. (National Library of Naples, Library of Congress)
Palestine Mapped. From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought
Thomas Suárez
Tom Suarez is one of the most meticulous and careful researchers on Palestine and Zionism although he is relatively unknown. His first book, which the Zionists did their best to prevent being publicized, disrupting his speaking tours, The State of Terror was a majestic tour de force of the Zionist terrorism that created the Israeli state and their strategies for the future ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Suarez’s second book, ‘Palestine Hijacked – How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from the River to the Sea’ was another tour de force. As Ilan Pappe wrote, Suarez showed how “The use of terror was deliberate and sustained, carried out or supported by the same leaders who then established and led the Israeli state. We are still living this history: The book proves that Israel’s regime of Apartheid against the Palestinians and the continued expropriation of their country are not the result of complex historical circumstances, but the intended, singular goal of Zionism since its beginning.
It is not surprising that Suarez’s latest book is in the tradition of his previous books even if it concentrates mainly on the visual rather than the verbal.
Palestine Mapped guides the reader through the Greek and Roman concepts of Palestine, the various medieval Mediterranean civilizations and the European Christian “Holy Land” mapping that has dominated since the Reformation and continues to inform modern political thought. This isn’t simply a book about cartography or map making but how notions of the ‘Holy Land’ and Palestine informed the maps and visual representations that were produced.
A beautifully illustrated book on the mapping of the river to the sea might seem a luxury disconnect given that Palestinians are being massacred daily. Suárez is very much aware of this. He explains in his Introduction why the ongoing genocide in fact makes the topic all the more relevant. Perhaps key to this is the subtitle’s final word, geographic thought.
Much of the West’s fanatical support for Israel is rooted in Evangelical messianism, the psychosis (to use the author’s word) that the Israeli state is the place in the Biblical Genesis, “placing it apart from the realm of all other earthly nations and securing wide Christian devotion.”
Suarez argues that this collective elite and religious mindset is powered by our own geographic wiring, and that the book is intended in part as an antidote to what he calls the “mapping of the Holy Land” narrative.
Al-Idrīsī, map of the Levant, mid-12th century (National Library of France; Image Library of Congress)
Since the book is organized roughly chronologically, its real-world relevancy is borne out mostly in the final chapter — though the Israeli state’s manipulation of ancient maps is already demonstrated with the sixth century ‘Madaba’ map.
The book begins with the earliest extant mapping of the Levant, that of the Greeks and Romans, then devotes two chapters to the medieval period. The first addresses mapping by Europeans in which Palestine is a focus: those from the distance of the Church, and that of on-the-scene pilgrims.
The interior of the Church of St. George, Madaba, Jordan, and the remains of a mid-6th century mosaic map of the Levant.
The second addresses mapping in which Palestine was not the focus, but through which the mapping — and Western perception — of Palestine nonetheless evolved: sea charts, advanced world maps, Ptolemy’s Geography, and what the author calls ‘Arabic’ mapping, a term used in place of the usual ‘Islamic’ mapping of academia, which he considers to be flawed terminology.
The book then arrives at what is described as the pivotal year of 1500. Three revolutions of the period are said to influence Palestine’s future: Europeans’ dramatically widened world view, the advent of printing, and above all, Lutheranism.
World map in the Fasciculus Temporum of the Carthusian monk, Werner Rolewink, 1484. Woodcut.
The future stage is set during that century, and Suárez gives short shrift to the years 1600-1800, other than to establish the rise of proto-Zionist ideology.
European mapping of Palestine during that period is said to be stuck in a time warp, Biblically oriented no matter the variety of renderings, in stark contrast to Europe’s mapping of the rest of the world, which was a quest for the latest, the most accurate. It is, however, here that today’s manipulation of geographic thought is first addressed, because a 1714 work of one Adriaan Reland is cited today to erase Palestinians (for which Reland is said to be blameless).
The final, long chapter begins at the year 1800, at which simmering Christian Zionist ideology takes active form with the confluence of Christian millennialism, Western imperialism, and advanced mapping techniques.
The end of the century brings of course Theodor Herzl and the advent of Political Zionism. Suárez cites both Herzl’s 1896 Der Judenstaat and a map from his 1897 newsletter, Die Welt, to argue that Herzl failed to understand the opportunity Christian Evangelicalism offered his project. I’m not so sure that this is true. One of his main supporters was William Hechler, the Chaplain at Britain’s Vienna Embassy, where Herzl was living.
Star of David with a map of the Eastern Mediterranean, on the heading of the weekly Die Welt, June 4, 1897.
Hechler believed firmly that the Jews must be enabled to resettle in Palestine in order to hasten the second coming of Christ. He was constantly looking forward to a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy along these lines. He presented a memorandum to Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister, urging him to take up the cause of the Jewish return to Palestine even before he had met Herzl or read the “Jewish State”.
Hechler had been a tutor to the Grand Duke of Baden, and he introduced Herzl to him and also to the ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II. He also accompanied Herzl to Palestine where he met Kaiser Wilhelm II in Jerusalem.
Herzl had an instructive meeting with the Grand Duke April 23 1896 in Karlsruhe and he noted in his diaries that Grand Duke
‘took my project for building a state with the utmost earnestness. His chief misgiving was that if he supported the cause, people might accuse him of anti-Semitism’.
As Francis Nicosia, the Raul Hilberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University observed:
‘whereas today non-Jewish criticism of Zionism or the State of Israel is often dismissed as motivated by a deeper anti-Semitism, in Herzl’s day an opposite non-Jewish reaction, one of support for the Zionist idea, might have resulted in a similar reaction.’
With Herzl’s death, Zionism continued to receive the enthusiastic endorsement of Christian Zionism and its millenarian supporters. Prominent supporters included Arthur James Balfour who combined antisemitism and Zionism effortlessly.
The 1947 UN Partition map receives its due attention: the author deconstructs it as a scam intended to produce the opposite result.
Suarez analyses the manipulation of geographic thought employed by Israel’s propagandists and argues that the ‘pro-Palestine’ community defeats itself by engaging with this propaganda on its own terms.
Put in its crudest form, when Zionists say ‘there was never such a place as Palestine’, we respond with an old map in which the entire land is called ‘Palestine’, or other such ‘evidence’.
Suárez argues that this is a mistake, a trap, the result of cultural conditioning:
we are geographically hard-wired to accept [that] the ancient origins of a place-name has the power to grant or deny personhood today, to justify the expulsion of anyone to whom that geographic name is or is not attached.
This is a heavily cross-disciplinary work, and it is hard to imagine anyone with Suárez’s background in the Palestinian issue who is so experienced in the history of cartography. It strikes me that this might be a book that can bring the Palestinian issue to a wider audience: Everyone, it seems, loves old maps, and perhaps this book is the perfect Trojan Horse gift for acquaintances who believe they are fair-minded but can’t quite make the break from Israel.
The reader is disarmed by the earlier ‘apolitical’ part of the book, gradually drawn into cultural conditioning addressed in the middle part, and already long engrossed when encountering the final chapter. But it is also a cautionary work for those long active in the issue of Palestinian liberation, who, as with all aspects of the issue, often disempower themselves by responding to Israel’s propaganda on its own terms.
Tony Greenstein
Tony Greenstein is a longstanding Jewish anti-Zionist and an anti-fascist activist from Brighton. In 1982 he was a co-founder of Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Tony was suspended from the Labour Party in 2016 and expelled in 2018 as a result of the antisemitism witch-hunt–the first Jewish person to be expelled. Tony is the author of The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast. He has written extensively on Palestine and Zionism for, amongst others, the Guardian’s Comment is Free, the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, Tribune and the Weekly Worker. Tony was the child of an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and when young a member of the religious Zionist Bnei Akiva, now part of the Greater Israel movement.
Historical Atlases
My collection of Collins and Harper Collins historical falls into five broad groups:
General World History
Collins Atlas of World History – Geoffrey Barraclough, Collins
HarperCollins Atlas of World History – Geoffrey Barraclough, HarperCollins
History of the World in Maps: The Ultimate Cartographic Exploration of Our Past – Philip Parker, Collins
The Times Complete History of the World – The Times / Collins
Military, Political and European History
The Times Atlas of the Second World War
Atlas of the Crusades – edited by Jonathan Riley-Smith
Atlas of European History
Archaeology and Exploration
Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of Archaeology – also published as the HarperCollins Atlas of Archaeology
The Times Atlas of World Exploration
Biblical History and Geography
HarperCollins Atlas of Bible History – James B. Pritchard
HarperCollins Atlas of the Bible
HarperCollins Concise Atlas of the Bible
5. Biblical Geography – Evangelical Reference
NIV Atlas of the Bible – Zondervan / HarperCollins
There are 13 titles, although a couple represent different editions or titles of essentially the same work: The Collins Atlas of World History and the HarperCollins Atlas of World History are essentially the Barraclough atlas in different editions/imprints [Henry Barraclough was a renowned British historian, historiographer, and medievalist. I read his The Meaning of History back when I was in Sixth Form at Moseley Grammar School] Past Worlds and the HarperCollins Atlas of Archaeology anre alternative titles/editions of the archaeological atlas. The HarperCollins Atlas of the Bible and Concise Atlas of the Bible are related but distinct editions. The HarperCollins Atlas of Bible History is a separate, more specialised biblical-history work.
In chronological and subject breadth the collection isn’t simply a collection of history books with maps. It is almost a cartographic library of human history:
Prehistory → Archaeology → Ancient Near East → Biblical world → Greece and Rome → Christianity → Crusades → European kingdoms and empires → exploration → global history → the Second World War → the modern world.
And that perhaps explains why the physical atlases mattered to me in the first place. Their great virtue was not merely the information contained in them but the ability to see history spatially: peoples moving, empires expanding and contracting, frontiers shifting, trade and exploration routes opening, armies advancing and retreating, and religious and political worlds overlapping.
They are heavy both literally and figuratively, providing a way of understanding history that a conventional chronological narrative often cannot: history as movement across landscape and time.
For our old friend and co-founder of HuldreFolk, the acclaimed bandurist Victor Mishalow, Ukrainian composer Hryhory Kytasty’s Echo of the Steppes (Гомін Степів) was much, much more than a piece of music; it was an evocation of a lost homeland.
It was Victor’s signature piece, and when introducing it in our concerts – an eclectic combination of stories, songs and music – he would describe the boundless Ukrainian steppe: waves of tall grass bending beneath an endless wind, and beneath it all the legendary black chernozem, among the richest soil on earth, so deep it seemed almost without end. In his telling, the bandura was “the soul of Ukraine”, its shimmering strings giving voice to the wind, the grasses, the little creatures that dwelt within them, and the immenseness of the plains.
The music also carried folk memory: of open frontiers where the Kozaks once found refuge from oppression, where freedom could still be breathed beneath an enormous sky, and where the landscape itself became part of the nation’s identity. Listening to Victor play, one did not simply hear an instrument; one heard the echo of the steppes – a vast, living landscape in which earth, wind, history and people were bound together in a single, resonant voice.
Fingerprints, ghosts and the long arm of History
In an illuminating essay in the e-zine Unherd, republished below, former war-correspondent Aris Roussinos begins an extensive and expansive review of Australian archeologist Warwick Ball’s The Eurasian Steppe with three mute stone figures – Cuman balbals – standing beside the road between Sloviansk and Bakhmut in Donetsk, watching the endless movement of armies across what is now Ukraine’s disputed and devastated Donbas. They are ancient witnesses in a landscape where Russians and Ukrainians now fight over ground that, for most of human history, belonged to neither, and yet, for countless people over millennia, became pasturelands and polities, battlefields and burial grounds.
This is history as I like it: the historian as storyteller, where landscapes become characters and the past refuses to remain buried.
Long before Slavic speech reached these plains, the steppe was the domain of nomadic peoples: Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Turks, Mongols and many others whose empires rose and vanished like storms over the grasslands. They left few cities and fewer written records, but their fingerprints are everywhere: in languages, military traditions, political institutions, myths and identities. The grass remembers what libraries often forget.
Roussinos’ central argument is that we have misunderstood Europe by looking too exclusively westward, towards Rome. The steppe was never merely a barbarian wilderness beyond civilisation, waiting to burst through the gates. It was one of the great engines of European history. Europe was shaped not only by the legacy of Rome and Christianity but also by repeated encounters with the peoples of Inner Asia. The old frontier between “Europe” and “Asia” dissolves under closer inspection. What appears on a modern atlas as a dividing line was, for centuries, a vast zone of movement, exchange, conquest and adaptation.
The present war in Ukraine unfolds across precisely this ancient geography. The early Russian thrust towards Kyiv moved through forests and marshes that belonged historically to the old Slavic world. The grinding war of attrition in the east is being fought across the open “Wild Fields”, the immense Eurasian grasslands where mounted nomads once travelled with astonishing speed and where empires repeatedly collided. Roussinos draws parallels with the mechanised battles of the twentieth century – Kursk, Kharkiv, Stalingrad – where tanks replaced horses, but the strategic significance of the landscape remained unchanged. Geography, as Napoleon is said to have observed, is often the most enduring ally in war.
It is an enticing argument because it encourages us to look beneath the familiar surface of European history. Perhaps Europe itself carries far more of the steppe within it than we usually acknowledge. Hungary and Bulgaria were founded by peoples of the steppe. The Polish nobility cultivated a proud Sarmatian ancestry. The Magyars’ memory of their eastern origins helped shape nineteenth-century nationalism. Even the nation state, so often presented as an entirely European invention, may owe something to political traditions carried westward across the grasslands by mounted confederations whose influence extended far beyond the horizon they inhabited.
There are historical echoes scattered throughout this story. The Sarmatians and Alans revolutionised warfare with armoured cavalry, heavy lances and mounted tactics that would eventually blossom into the chivalric traditions of medieval Europe. Even the Arthurian legend may preserve a distant resonance of the steppe in the enduring image of the sword planted in the earth, waiting for the rightful king to draw it forth.
Filmmakers, naturally, could not resist. The 2004 film King Arthur, for example, stitched together Romans, Celts, Sarmatians, Picts and enough historical liberties to make any medievalist wince. Clive Owen wandered through a fictional Northumbria Britain as a brooding half-Roman, half-Sarmatian Arthur, while Keira Knightley appeared as an improbably glamorous and scantily clad Guinevere whose Pictish origins seemed less convincing than her plummy English accent. It was glorious nonsense, but enjoyable, nonetheless. The Irish landscapes were striking, the horses magnificent, the ‘Knights’ (the picture at the head of this essay) with their “Rus! Rus!” war cry (and they actually do sit at a round table) improbably photogenic. A battle fought across a frozen lake owed as much to Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky as it did to any surviving historical source. Ridley Scott later recycled much the same visual conceit in his disappointing Napoleon. History often survives in cinema not because the facts are accurate but because certain images possess extraordinary emotional truth.
The Cossacks offer a far more convincing example of the cultural blending that characterised the frontier. They emerged not from ethnic purity but from mixture. Runaway serfs, adventurers, escaped peasants and soldiers settled the borderlands, adopting the customs, military practices and vocabulary of the Turkic peoples who had occupied the steppe before them. Even the word “Cossack” derives from a Turkic root meaning “to roam”. The frontier was never a wall separating civilisations. It was a workshop in which entirely new identities were forged.
It is here that Roussinos, following Warwick Ball, arrives at his most provocative claim. Muscovite Russia, he argues, cannot be understood without recognising the formative influence of the Mongol world. Moscow’s rise was anything but inevitable. The Golden Horde required dependable tributaries capable of collecting taxes, maintaining order and supplying troops. The princes of Moscow proved remarkably efficient servants of the khans and, in doing so, transformed what had once been a relatively insignificant Rus’ principality into the nucleus of a future empire. The irony is delicious. Mongol domination helped create the very Russian state that would eventually conquer the steppe itself.
The fingerprints remain visible today. Administrative practices, institutions of government, systems of taxation and even elements of the Russian language bear traces of Mongol influence. Yet fingerprints are curious things. They tell us that contact occurred; they do not tell us everything that followed.
That question lies at the heart not only of Ball’s thesis but also of historian Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia, which, by happenstance, I am reading at the moment. It is one of those literary coincidences in which two writers, approaching the same landscape from different directions, find themselves asking precisely the same question. What made Russia, Russia?
Figes is, in many respects, the perfect companion to Roussinos because he shifts our attention from inheritance to interpretation. He readily acknowledges that the Mongol conquest of the Rus’ principalities in the thirteenth century was one of the defining ruptures in Russian history. It destroyed Kyiv’s political centrality, subordinated the northern principalities to the Golden Horde and created the circumstances in which Moscow could eventually emerge as the dominant power. Like Roussinos, he recognises the profound irony that Mongol domination did not simply interrupt Russian state formation but helped shape its eventual character.
Yet Figes is ultimately less interested in what Russia inherited than in what Russia chose to become. The Mongols bequeathed methods of rule: taxation, military organisation, communications and a conception of authority that differed markedly from Western feudalism. Russia’s imagination, however, was nourished elsewhere. Orthodox Christianity, Byzantine political theology, the doctrine of Moscow as the “Third Rome” and the almost mystical conception of the Tsar as God’s anointed gave Russia a vocabulary through which it understood itself. Its civilisation emerged not from a single source but from the convergence of many.
This distinction is important because it rescues history from determinism. Fingerprints reveal contact; they do not reveal intention. They cannot tell us why someone picked up the knife, wrote the letter or opened the door. Likewise, cultural inheritance explains possibilities, not inevitabilities.
Figes presents Russia as a civilisation assembled from multiple traditions: Slavic, Byzantine, Mongol, European and imperial. The country’s enduring paradox is that it has persistently imagined itself as both European and somehow apart from Europe. Peter the Great attempted to drag Russia westward, shaving beards, importing European science, founding St Petersburg (a German name, which was changed to Petrograd during World War I for the same reasons the British royal house changed its German name to Windsor) embracing Enlightenment ideas. Yet beneath these reforms older structures of autocracy survived. Later generations reversed the argument entirely. Slavophiles celebrated Russia’s uniqueness while Westernisers lamented its failure to become sufficiently European. The debate has never really ended. It merely changes its vocabulary.
Maps have always encouraged these arguments. A glance at any atlas suggests that Russia occupies an almost impossible position: a European power that expanded across Asia until it became the largest contiguous empire on earth. The geography itself tempts us into historical mythology. Is Russia European? Asian? Eurasian? The answer has varied according to who was asking and what political purpose the answer was intended to serve. Geography creates opportunities, constraints and temptations. It does not dictate outcomes.
Figes’ also explores of recurring Russian archetypes: the Holy Tsar, the Holy Fool, the suffering nation, the belief that Russia possesses a unique historical destiny. These are not immutable characteristics embedded in some mystical national DNA. They are stories Russians have told about themselves across the centuries – including Vladimir Putin’s house ideologue, philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. Stories matter because people act upon them. Nations, no less than individuals, become attached to narratives that explain who they are and why they exist.
Juxtaposed against Ball, Roussinos and Figues is a comment on Roussinos’ essay by Alexander Morrison, a historian of Russian history at Oxford University. Every grand historical narrative requires its sceptic. Elegant theories are seductive precisely because they reduce complexity to a single organising principle. Morrison accepts much of Ball’s argument while quietly resisting its more deterministic conclusions. It is an exemplary piece of historical criticism because it neither dismisses nor genuflects. Instead, it refines.
He readily acknowledges that Muscovy inherited important administrative practices from the Mongol world and points out that Russia was far from unique. The Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and Qing all incorporated Chinggisid or Timurid political traditions alongside older local institutions. Borrowing across Eurasia was commonplace. Civilisations have always learned from their neighbours, even while claiming absolute originality.
Where Morrison parts company with Ball is over the temptation to confuse influence with destiny. Muscovy borrowed bureaucratic structures connected with taxation, communications and administration. Indeed, the Russian language still preserves Mongol echoes in words such as kazna for treasury, den’gi for money and yam for the postal relay system. Yet the ideological foundations of the state remained overwhelmingly Byzantine and Orthodox. Ivan IV became Tsar by invoking the legacy of Caesar and the vision of Moscow as the Third Rome, not by presenting himself as the heir of Genghis Khan. Administrative inheritance did not erase cultural identity.
That distinction becomes even more important when considering the modern world. It is tempting to explain Putin’s Russia by reaching back to the Mongols, Ivan the Terrible or some timeless Russian soul. Such explanations possess an undeniable elegance because they transform political choices into historical inevitabilities. Morrison rejects this outright. Contemporary Russia, he argues, is shaped above all by decisions made by particular elites drawing upon nineteenth-century nationalism, memories of the Soviet collapse, selective readings of Russian history and modern political ideology. The past provides the vocabulary; it does not dictate the speech.
His discussion of Ukraine is equally persuasive. Southern and eastern Ukraine were settled comparatively recently by a remarkable mosaic of peoples: Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Bulgarians and many others. The region’s history is therefore extraordinarily layered. Yet historical complexity does not undermine modern sovereignty. Ancient settlement patterns explain why memories remain contested, but they do not invalidate internationally recognised borders. History illuminates’ claims; it does not automatically legitimise them.
This strikes me as one of the most important lessons historians can offer our own age. We are living through a period in which politicians, nationalists and activists increasingly seek legitimacy by reaching deeper into the past. Ancient kingdoms, medieval battles, archaeological discoveries, linguistic survivals and genetic studies are all recruited into contemporary arguments about identity and territory. History becomes less an investigation than a courtroom brief.
Yet the past is a notoriously unreliable witness.
Landscapes accumulate memories without issuing verdicts. The Donbas bears the fingerprints of Scythians, Greeks, Sarmatians, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Mongols, Tatars, Cossacks, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Armenians and countless others. None of those fingerprints constitutes a title deed. They testify to presence, movement and encounter. They remind us that almost every place we imagine possessing an eternal identity has, in reality, been shaped by successive waves of migration, conquest, adaptation and coexistence.
Perhaps that is why I find Roussinos’ essay so compelling. Like the best historical writing, it restores movement to landscapes that modern maps often freeze into static national colours. It reminds us that frontiers have rarely been fixed and that civilisations have always been more entangled than their later myths would admit. Europe did not simply civilise the steppe. The steppe helped create Europe.
Equally, Morrison reminds us that historical explanation should never become historical imprisonment. Institutions endure, languages preserve old borrowings, myths outlive empires and landscapes retain astonishingly long memories. But people still make choices. Nations inherit the consequences of the past without becoming its captives.
The three weathered balbals still stand beside the road to Bakhmut. They have watched Scythians ride westward, Huns descend upon Europe, Mongol tumens disappear into the distance, Cossacks patrol the frontier, imperial armies march beneath Romanov eagles, Wehrmacht panzers advance across the wheatfields, Soviet tanks return in triumph and, today, drones circle silently above the same ground. Every generation has believed its struggle to be unique, its empire enduring, its victories permanent. The stones know otherwise.
History leaves fingerprints everywhere. It leaves them in words, in institutions, in ruined cities, in forgotten roads, in songs, in legends and in the memories of peoples who continue to argue about what happened centuries before they were born. Those fingerprints deserve to be studied because they tell us where we have come from and how our worlds were made. But fingerprints are not destiny. They record contact, not ownership; inheritance, not inevitability; memory, not command. The ghosts of the steppe still whisper across Eurasia, but they do not write the future. That task, as it always has been, belongs to the living.
Coda. The myth of fingerprints.
History leaves fingerprints.
That may seem an odd metaphor, but I have found myself returning to it again and again. Archaeologists brush them from shards of pottery, linguists discover them buried inside forgotten words, historians recognise them in institutions, laws, customs and myths. They are the traces left behind whenever peoples encounter one another, whenever empires rise and fall, whenever civilisations borrow, conquer, imitate or remember.
Fingerprints fascinate us because they appear to promise certainty. In a criminal investigation they identify who touched the weapon. Yet they tell us remarkably little about what actually happened. A fingerprint cannot reveal motive, explain intention or determine guilt. It records contact, not consequence.
History is much the same.
Every landscape is covered with fingerprints. They survive in place names and languages, in ruined cities and forgotten roads, in religions, legal systems, songs, frontiers and collective memory. The three ancient balbals still standing beside the road to Bakhmut are surrounded by them. For nearly a thousand years they have watched Scythians ride westward, Huns descend upon Europe, Mongol tumens disappear into the distance, Cossacks patrol the frontier, imperial armies march beneath Romanov eagles, Wehrmacht panzers cross the wheatfields, Soviet tanks return in triumph and, today, drones circle silently overhead. Every empire believed its moment would endure. Every generation imagined itself to be the culmination of history. The stones know otherwise.
And this is where I arrive at what I have come to think of as the Myth of Fingerprints.
The fingerprints themselves are not mythical. They are real. History leaves them everywhere. The myth begins when we misunderstand what they are telling us.
A fingerprint is evidence that someone was here. It cannot tell us why they came, whether they belonged, whether they acted justly or what rights their descendants may possess centuries later. In a court of law, a fingerprint may place someone at the scene; it cannot, by itself, decide the case. History works in much the same way. It explains how we arrived here, but it cannot by itself determine who ought to possess the future.
Too often we ask it to do precisely that.
Ancient maps become modern borders. Archaeological discoveries become political manifestos. Genetic inheritance becomes moral entitlement. Historical suffering becomes an enduring licence for vengeance. We confuse explanation with justification, inheritance with ownership, memory with legitimacy. That confusion – the transformation of historical evidence into historical entitlement—is what I mean by the Myth of Fingerprints.
It is a myth because it is one of the oldest stories nations tell themselves. Every people constructs narratives from the traces left by earlier generations. Sometimes those stories preserve genuine memory; sometimes they simplify; sometimes they become propaganda. But they all begin with the same temptation: to believe that because history explains the present, it therefore authorises it.
This question lies beneath far more than the current war in Ukraine. It echoes through the history of Palestine and Israel, through Australia’s History Wars, through debates over monuments, migration, frontiers and national identity. Again and again we encounter the same temptation: to search the past not for understanding, but for permission.
That is why Aris Roussinos’ essay on Warwick Ball’s The Eurasian Steppe struck me so forcefully. Ball demonstrates how profoundly the Eurasian steppe shaped Europe. Orlando Figes traces the inheritance of Byzantium, the Mongol world and the frontier in the making of Russia. Alexander Morrison reminds us that inheritances are never destinies. Together they illuminate a larger truth. Geography creates opportunities. Culture bequeaths inheritances. Myths provide meaning. Only human beings make choices.
The ghosts of the steppe still whisper across Eurasia, just as the ghosts of every civilisation whisper through the landscapes they once inhabited. Historians should listen carefully to those whispers, for they reveal how the world came to be. But they should resist the temptation to mistake echoes for commands. The past deserves understanding rather than obedience.
History leaves fingerprints everywhere. They are among our most valuable clues to the human story. They reveal connections, influences, migrations and memories that would otherwise be forgotten. Yet they are not title deeds, nor verdicts, nor chains binding the living to the ambitions of the dead. They explain inheritance without dictating destiny.
That is the real lesson of the Myth of Fingerprints.
Paul Hemphill and In That Howling Infinite, August 2026
This essay was written in conversation with books I’ve read, ideas formed and half-formed, and, more recently, in sustained dialogue with an AI language model, which contributed to drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation.What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: selected, tested, revised and revised again, and owned.
I highly recommend Ukrainian scholar Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe, a well told and fascinating story of the origins of Ukraine and Belarus, and how their histories were intertwined, and entwined with those of of Poland, Lithuania (which was a large and powerful state once) and Russia. Ukraine has historically been the border between the catholic west and the orthodox east, the division running virtually down the middle. The name Ukraine is Slav for border land. Its geopolitical location and natural resources have led to the land being inflicted by invaders, civil wars, man-made famine and repression. See, in In That Howling Infinite, Borderlands – Ukraine and the curse of mystical nationalism
And, finally, who or what were HuldreFolk? Named for the mythical and mystical ‘hidden people’ of Icelandic legend, for two years in the early nineteen eighties, they played throughout Australia. Their fame was short-lived; after two years they pursued their own paths and projects. But during the following decades, they would pop up in unexpected places, like their namesakes, in ones, twos, threes, and on occasions with guest HuldreFolkies. Their last outing as a trio was in October 2007 at the North By Northwest Poetry And Folk Club. Google the videos on YouTube. See also, Yuri The Storyteller … We’ll sure miss the old bastard!
Roussinos’ essay follows, and also, for readers with time on their hands, more on Figes’The Stiry of Russia and on Morrison’s critique.
The fate of Europe lies in the steppes Warwick Ball: ‘The Eurasian Steppe’
Aris Roussinos, Unherd 28 July 2022
Genghis has won (Dean Conger/Corbis via Getty
On the road between the frontline cities of Sloviansk and Bakhmut, in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, three stone statues stand mutely by the side of the road, observing the coming and going of military traffic with impassive detachment. Known as balbals, they are funerary monuments erected by the Cuman Turks, known in Russian archaeology as the Polovtsians, who once ruled this vast sea of grass, long before Russian or Ukrainian speech was ever heard in this region.
For thousands of years, the empty, spreading steppe, stretching from Hungary to Mongolia, was the home of nomadic peoples, speakers of Iranic, Turkic and Mongolic languages, who drove their herds across the vast plains in search of fresh pastures. They founded great empires, which time and the steppe grasses would soon swallow up, leaving barely a trace. Their constant irruptions into Europe sounded the death knell in turn for other, settled civilisations, part of the endless cycle of growth, invasion and collapse that has shaped our continent’s history.
The war in Ukraine has taken place in two very different climatic and cultural zones: its initial phases saw Russian armour wend its way through the dark forests and marshes of northern Ukraine, the ancient homeland of the first Slavic peoples, to be destroyed in close fighting on the narrow wooded roads in a stunning and unexpected Ukrainian victory. Yet the gruelling war of attrition in the country’s east is taking part in a very different landscape, in the open steppe that was once the home of nomadic peoples.
The expansion of Slavic peoples, both Ukrainians and Russians, into the open steppe was a very recent historic event, broadly contemporaneous with the European settlement of the Americas, its fertile plains, now the breadbasket of the developing world, Europe’s equivalent of America’s Midwest. These open plains, the “Wild Fields” of local historiography have always been a contested space, where great empires wrestled for control: in the great Second World War battles of Kursk, Kharkiv and Stalingrad, Europe’s entire fate hinged on the battle between the two great tank armies wheeling and clashing like nomad hordes.
But then, as The Eurasian Steppeby the archaeologist Warwick Ball makes clear, rather than a semi-wild anteroom to the continent, “the history, languages, ideas, art forms, peoples, nations and identities of the steppe have shaped almost every aspect of the life of Europe”. Europeans from further west have for centuries been prone to viewing the steppe as the haunt of wild tribes, and the source of occasional, fearsome destruction.
But what if the Europe of today is in fact the product of steppe dynamics? As Ball argues, rather than being a product of 19th century nationalism, some historians trace the origin of Europe’s oldest nation states to the steppe, observing that “Peoples newly arriving from the east were also among the first to create nationally defined states, such as kingdoms of the Bulgars or Magyars”. “In some ways,” Ball argues, “the incipient idea of a nation state might have been stronger with the nomadic groups from the steppe, who were bound more closely by tribal loyalties” than among the polyglot peoples of the imperial Roman successor states they conquered.
Did the steppe peoples then create the fractious patchwork quilt of nationalities that we understand as Europe? Ball cites the archaeologist Hyun Jin Kim who claims that: “The political and cultural traditions of Inner Asia brought to Europe by Central Asian immigrants, the Huns and the Alans, were just as fundamental to the formation of western Europe as the rich legacy left behind by the Roman Empire. The political and cultural landscape of early medieval Europe was shaped by the fusion of Roman and Inner Asian influences.”
While Hungary and Bulgaria were directly founded by steppe nomads, the influence of steppe rulers also helped shape the political forms taken by Poland (whose szlachtanobles claimed Sarmatian descent well into the 19th century), Bohemia, Denmark and even, it is claimed, France. Even into the 19th century, as Ball notes, it was the Hungarian awareness of their steppe Magyar ancestry that helped bring about the rise of nationalism which shook apart the great Austro-Hungarian empire. “In the long evolution of the idea of the nation state,” then “from their beginnings in late-antique Europe to their emergence in the nineteenth century, we must look east as well as west”.
Viewed in this light, the war in Ukraine, a battle between a European nation-state and a vast Eurasian empire, is resonant with all manner of strange echoes of the steppe’s dimly-understood history. The colossal earthern ramparts of the “serpent walls” outside Kyiv, erected by early Slavic kingdoms to guard against invasion by steppe nomads from the Huns to the Mongols, fulfilled their ancient role admirably earlier this year when they prevented the movement of Russian armour towards the capital’s suburbs, corralling the latest wave of invaders into killing zones to be picked off at leisure by guided missiles.
The Cossack heritage both sides claim is the result of earlier Slavic peoples, runaway Ukrainian and Russian serfs, claiming the freedom of the open steppe and adopting the customs, lifestyle and much of the vocabulary of their nomadic Turkic predecessors. The very word Cossack, Ball notes, “derives from the Turk root qaz, ‘to roam’”, and is cognate with the ethnonym Kazakh further east, as the Cossacks “comprised mainly Russians — usually renegades, escaped serfs or criminals — but they also included Turks, Tatars and remnant Polovtsi.” Even now, Ukrainian is sprinkled with Turkic words, a legacy of the two cultures’ long history of interaction and competition. One Ukrainian commander I met went by the nom de guerre “Duman”, or fog, deriving from the Turkic word for smoke or mist. Even now, Ukrainians refer to Russians with the dismissive Turkic epithet Katsab, or butcher.
On the Russian side, the war effort has been marked by the use of steppe peoples as infantry, with many of the heaviest casualties borne — and apparently some of the worst war crimes committed by — the Buryat Mongols of the Russian steppe, along with the Kalmyks of the lower Volga, Europe’s only Buddhist nation, who once watered their horses as far west as Paris following the defeat of Napoleon. Similarly, among the many subject peoples of the Russian empire deployed to Ukraine are Ossetians from the Caucasus, a tiny Iranic-speaking nation who are all that remain of the Alans, who once fought the Romans across Central Europe, settling as far west as France and Spain: some of their descendants, now Magyarised, still live in Hungary as the Jasz people. Their Iranic speech is now heard in Ukraine’s steppe for the first time in a thousand years, dragged along into a war of European conquest by another great Eurasian empire.
The very concept of chivalry which defined Europe’s medieval history was the product of Iranian-speaking steppe peoples like the Sarmatians and the Alans, whose innovations in the use of cavalry — stirrups, lances and long chainmail coats — changed the face of late Roman warfare and set the stage for the knights of the High Middle Ages. Even our own medieval romances may owe something to their distant steppe traditions, after the border forts of what is now northern England became the garrison home of Sarmatian levies in Roman service. As Ball notes: “Sarmatian warrior worship of a sword fixed in the ground has been suggested as furnishing the origin of the Excalibur legend. This appears to have been a long steppe warrior tradition: Ibn Rusta in the tenth century, for example, describes how the Viking Rus ruler — whom he calls by the steppe title of Khagan or khāqān — would plant a naked sword in the earth pointing towards his newborn son.” Perhaps it is not mere coincidence, then, that the Azov Regiment’s torchlit ceremonies in the southern steppe city of Mariupol took place beneath three giant swords embedded in the ground, a striking symbol that has now become the group’s emblem.
Again and again, these strange resonances between the steppe’s ancient nomad past and its bloody present swim to the surface like long-forgotten memories. The great statue to Mother Russia, sword in hand, that rises above Stalingrad’s Hill 102, where tens of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers were ground into the soil by artillery possesses the grim grandeur of some ancient steppe monument. And indeed, Hill 102, the crucial position of the battle that decided the war’s outcome, is perhaps better viewed by its alternate name as the Mamayev Kurgan, the burial tumulus of a long-forgotten Tatar khagan. From the ancient past to now, Russia’s history was written on the steppe, and without the steppe Russia’s imperial past and present is simply impossible to understand. Indeed, as Ball observes, without the historic domination of steppe nomads, there would be no Russia as we understand it.
As Ball observes: “The future of Russian greatness was both a response to and a legacy of the Mongols… Indeed, to a large extent Muscovite power was a creation of the Golden Horde: the khans required a stable central authority as a client state which could be relied upon to raise auxiliaries for the khan’s armies and to collect and deliver taxes and tribute. Moscow fitted the bill, so the Golden Horde deliberately strengthened it against the other Russian cities and appointed its prince as their chief tax collector.” Without the Mongol-enforced primacy of Muscovy, the land that is now Russia may well have remained a series of disunited kingdoms and city states, just like medieval Italy or Germany: “The Mongols, in other words, brought about the emergence of Russia.”
Even the great king Sviatoslav of Kyivan Rus, whose legacy is claimed by both Ukraine and Russia, extended his rule across the steppe by defeating the great Jewish Khazar kingdom and in doing so, “adopted the techniques and warfare of the steppe nomad: in other words, Kievan Rus was at first simply another steppe nomad state, albeit with a Scandinavian element. Sviatoslav never decisively defeated the Pechenegs and was killed by them in 963, and his skull was made into a cup in steppe tradition.” Medieval Russia was, then, as much a steppe polity as a European state, perhaps more so. After all, “up until 1480 Muscovite coins still carried inscriptions in Arabic. As late as 1531 Vasili III of Moscow was still paying tribute to the successors of the Golden Horde: Crimea, Kazan and Astrakhan”, and the eternal symbol of Russian power, Moscow’s St Basil’s Cathedral, was modelled on Kazan’s Great Mosque, in thanks for the conquest of the great Tatar capital.
Tracing Muscovy’s traditions of governance, and then those of imperial Russia, to the Mongol and Tatar customs of the inner steppe, Ball observes that “Even by the fourteenth century the civil and military institutions of Muscovy ‘were overwhelmingly Mongol in origin’… Ivan IV, the first Russian to proclaim himself Tsar (in Russian the title is actually Tsezar), added Ulugh Khan, ‘Great Khan’, to his titles.” Though he dismisses the “Mongol Yoke” hypothesis of Russian historiography, Ball nevertheless traces Russia’s unique and terrible form of autocratic rule to steppe customs, deep into the modern period: “Ivan also adopted the Mongol policy of ‘collective guilt’ where all male relatives and retainers of a guilty man would be executed, a policy even extended to entire communities. Stalin’s similar policy was a continuation of this.” The steppe’s long influence stretches deep into the cultural DNA of our modern world: even such a giant 20th century figure as Lenin, destroyer of one great Eurasian empire and founder of another, was of part-Kalmyk descent, after all.
Imperial Russia’s second largest minority after the Ukrainians, whose post-independence relationship with their giant neighbour is today a source of such bloodshed, was the Muslim Tatars, from whose Russified nomad aristocracy some of the greatest names in Russian culture — Rachmaninoff, Turgenev, Nureyev and Akhmatova — claimed descent. “The list [of Tatar surnames] covers all walks of Russian life: artistic, religious, scientific, literary, military, political and royal. The list is virtually endless,” Ball notes, and even today “the descendants of the Mongol ‘hordes’ — the Tatars — are the second-largest minority in Russia after the Russians themselves, and the Republic of Tatarstan is the second-largest republic in European Russia.”
Written for a general audience, Ball’s book nevertheless synthesises the latest archaeological research and historical debate on the steppe’s ancient and modern peoples, archaeological research on the steppe’s history, delving back into the deepest mists of time. The burgeoning community of esoteric archaeology and anthropology posters on Twitter will surely appreciate his summarising of the latest research on the origins of the Indo-Europeans, the fate of the Khazars and the birth and decline of the great Scythian kingdoms, who’s exquisite goldwork was the highlight of the British Museum’s recent blockbuster exhibition.
Noting that St Petersburg’s great Hermitage Museum was founded primarily as a place to store the newfound Scythian treasures unearthed by Russian colonists in Crimea, Mariupol and the rest what is now Ukraine’s contested southern steppe, and alert to the theft of Scythian treasures from Ukrainian museums by their new-old Russian conquerors, we realise that the relentless cycle of history has brought a new relevance to Ball’s book, even since its publication last winter. Just as in the Middle Ages and in the bloodiest battles of the Second World War, the fate of Europe is once again being written on the endless, grassy steppe.
Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.
Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia
That is a very happy coincidence, because Roussinos’ essay and Figes’ The Story of Russia are really circling the same enormous question from different directions: what made Russia Russia?
Figes is, in many ways, the antidote to the more sweeping “fingerprints of the steppe” argument. He certainly does not deny the Mongol inheritance – quite the opposite. The Mongol conquest of the Rus principalities in the thirteenth century was one of the decisive ruptures in Russian history. It destroyed Kyiv’s old political centrality, subordinated the northern principalities to the Golden Horde, and created the conditions in which Moscow could eventually rise. The irony, as both Roussinos and Figes emphasise, is that the Mongols did not simply delay Russian state formation; they helped create the particular form of state that emerged.
But Figes is interested less in what Russia inherited than in what Russia made of those inheritances. The Mongols supplied mechanisms of rule – taxation, military organisation, hierarchy, a relationship between ruler and subject that was very different from Western feudalism. Yet Russia’s self-understanding was built around other ideas: Orthodox Christianity, Byzantium, the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome”, and the notion that the Tsar was not merely a monarch but a sacred figure.
This is where it links beautifully with Morrison’s critique. The danger is that we see the Mongol “fingerprints” and assume they explain everything. But fingerprints do not tell you why the person picked up the knife, wrote the letter or opened the door. They tell you something about contact and inheritance; they do not reveal intention.
Figes’ Russia is a civilisation built from multiple inheritances: Byzantine, Slavic, steppe, European and imperial. The great Russian paradox is that it has often defined itself simultaneously as both European and apart from Europe. Peter the Great famously tried to drag Russia westward — shaving beards, building St Petersburg, importing European science and manners — yet the deeper structures of autocracy, hierarchy and imperial expansion remained. Later Slavophiles rejected the West and celebrated a distinct Russian path, while Westernisers argued that Russia’s tragedy was precisely its failure to become sufficiently European.
This also connects with our earlier discussion of maps and historical memory. Russia is, geographically, an extraordinary historical anomaly: a European state that expanded across Asia until it became a continental empire. The map itself creates the tension. Is Russia Europe? Asia? Eurasia? The answer has shifted depending on who was asking and what political argument they wanted to make.
One of the things I suspect you will appreciate in Figes is his attention to recurring Russian archetypes: the Holy Tsar, the Holy Fool, the tension between obedience and rebellion, the recurring belief that Russia has a unique destiny. These are not “genes” or immutable cultural DNA; they are traditions — stories Russians told about themselves. And stories matter enormously because people act upon them.
That brings us back to Roussinos’ evocative phrase, “the echo of the steppes”. Echoes are fascinating precisely because they are not the original sound. They are altered, refracted and carried forward. The Mongol conquest echoed through Muscovy; Byzantium echoed through the Tsars; Soviet power echoed through Putin’s Kremlin. But each generation chooses which echoes to amplify.
There is also a pleasing connection with your earlier fascination with maps and atlases. A physical map of Russia looks almost inevitable: the enormous landmass stretching from Europe to the Pacific. But Figes and Morrison both remind us that geography creates possibilities, not destinies. The Russian Empire was not simply “there” waiting to happen. It was built by choices — by princes, tsars, revolutionaries and commissars who made decisions within particular historical circumstances.
So perhaps the combined lesson of Figes, Roussinos and Morrison is this:
Russia is not merely a European country contaminated by Asia, nor an Asian empire wearing European clothes. It is a civilisation formed in the meeting place of worlds. The tragedy is not that it has a complicated past; all great civilisations do. The tragedy comes when a complicated past is reduced to a single myth of inevitable destiny.
Which, interestingly, brings us back to your recurring theme: the power – and danger – of maps. Every map is an argument about the past. Every empire is a story it tells about itself. And every story leaves fingerprints. The historian’s job is to work out which ones are real, which ones are imagined, and which ones have been deliberately placed there.
Alexander Morrison’s critique
Alexander Morrison, a historian of Russian history at Oxford University, specialising in the Russian conquest of Central Asia, commented on Roussinos’ essay in Unherd. Here it is in full.
Roussinos, seems to have made good use of Ball’s research. Some of these arguments are completely uncontroversial when applied to the Asian neighbours of the Eurasian steppe in the early modern period: the Ottomans, the Safavids of Iran and the Qing all made use of Chinggisid and TImurid political repertoires in building their states alongside other elements (Byzantine heritage for the Ottomans, the existing Chinese imperial tradition in the Qing case, Sufi religious charisma for the Safavids). The Mughals were of course actually of Timurid (and in the female line of Chinggisid) descent, and it was at the core of their dynastic ideology in India.
However the steppe political tradition seems to have produced ever larger polities in Asia, which makes it hard to explain why it would instead produce political fragmentation in western and Central Europe – I think that part of Ball’s argument is a bit overstretched.
The Muscovite example seems to fit the Asian pattern better, and Roussinos is spot on in saying that it was the willingness of the Princes of Moscow to act as particularly loyal and effective satraps and tax collectors for the Golden Horde that allowed what had previously been a minor Rus’ princedom to rise to pre-eminence.
However we need to be clear about what it was that Muscovy took from the Mongols: it was largely bureaucratic structures linked to taxation or communication. This why key Russian words such as kazna (treasury), den’gi (money) and yam (postal service) are of Mongol origin. On the cultural side the ruling ideologies of the state were all to do with Orthodox Christianity and the semi-mythical link to Byzantium (the ‘Third Rome’), which was what Ivan IV (the Terrible) was evoking when he took the title of Tsar (Caesar) – he may have added the title of khan for good measure but this was largely for the purposes of communication with steppe peoples.
Many Tatar nobles of Chinggisid descent did become incorporated into the Muscovite aristocracy after the fall of Kazan in 1552, but you need to be careful about 19th and 20th-century claims to this ancestry, which are often bogus (it was fashionable at the time). In the case of Akhmatova it was her nom de plume (she was born Anna Gorenko – in fact a Ukrainian name). In any case Chinggisid descent did not give you any kind of claim to the throne of Muscovy, which had its own dynastic legend in the Rurikids. A better guide to the relationship between Muscovy and the Mongols than Ball is Donald Ostrowski.
There is also a bit too much cultural determinism in all of this to my liking – it suggests that neither Russia nor Ukraine can ever shake off this bloody past etc. etc. Nowhere in the world is simply a prisoner of its past. What is happening now is a result of very specific political choices made by Vladimir Putin and Russia’s ruling elite. Their thinking is rooted partly in their reading of 19th-century Russian historians (who first came up with the idea that Russians and Ukrainians were the same people), vicious forms of anti-semitic Russian nationalism of the early 20th century and the emigration (the Black Hundreds, Ivan Il’in), a particular, tendentious interpretation of both Soviet history and their own memories of the Soviet collapse.
What is perhaps more relevant is that this steppe past means that most of southern and eastern Ukraine was only relatively recently settled – not just by Russians and Ukrainians, but by the whole range of peoples of the empire (Greeks, Jews, Bulgarians, Armenians…probably also some Ossetians). They are certainly not ‘ancient Russian lands’ as Putin has claimed, but they are part of Ukrainian territory under international law and the Budapest memorandum assuring the country’s territorial integrity which Russia signed.
A couple of other corrections – the Buryats are not a steppe people, they live East of Lake Baikal. I am a bit queasy about the implication that they and the Kalmyks are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the Russian army because of their ‘savage’ steppe nature – it is simply because these are some of the poorest parts of the Russian Federation, and because the Russian regime is very deliberately trying to avoid recruiting troops from metropolitan regions of European Russia whose families might cause political trouble or have ties to Ukraine.
The ethnic Russians who are fighting are also disproportionately from Siberia or the Altai. The regiment which committed the atrocities at Bucha was from Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, and its commander appears to have been originally from Karakalpakstan. Most Ossetians speak Russian these days, and have long identified with Russian rule. A good piece though – not many outlets would allow as thorough and as thoughtful a review of a work on Eurasian History.
Morrison’s comment stands apart from most of the thread because it does what the best scholarly criticism should do: it accepts the broad thesis where the evidence supports it, corrects errors where necessary, and resists the temptation to replace one grand narrative with another.
The essence of Morrison’s critique is this:
He accepts the central proposition that Muscovy inherited important features from the Mongol world. Indeed, he strengthens it by pointing out that similar borrowing occurred across Eurasia. The Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and Qing all incorporated Chinggisid or Timurid political traditions into their own states. Russia was therefore not unique in absorbing institutions from the steppe.
Where he parts company with Ball is over determinism. Ball appears to argue that steppe political culture explains not only Muscovy’s rise but much of Russia’s subsequent history and perhaps even Putin’s Russia today. Morrison thinks this stretches the evidence too far. Administrative institutions can endure for centuries; they do not imprison nations forever. Modern Russia, he argues, is the product of choices made by a particular elite, drawing on nineteenth-century nationalism, Soviet memories and contemporary ideology, rather than the inevitable flowering of Mongol political culture.
He also introduces some valuable nuance. Muscovy borrowed bureaucratic techniques—taxation, communications, administration – from the Golden Horde, but its ideological heart remained Orthodox and Byzantine. Ivan IV’s claim to be Tsar rested on the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome”, not the successor of Genghis Khan. Even the Russian language preserves this administrative inheritance in words such as kazna (also in Arabic,treasury), den’gi (money) and yam (postal relay), all of Mongol origin, illustrating that institutional borrowing need not imply cultural subordination.
Morrison is equally careful about ethnicity. He rejects romanticised claims of Chinggisid ancestry, notes that many were fashionable nineteenth-century inventions, and cautions against portraying Buryats or Kalmyks as somehow naturally warlike. Their prominence in today’s Russian army is explained far more convincingly by economics and recruitment policy than by any inherited “steppe mentality”. That is a useful reminder that socio-economic factors often explain what cultural stereotypes merely decorate.
His discussion of Ukraine is similarly restrained. Southern and eastern Ukraine were indeed settled comparatively recently by a mosaic of peoples across the imperial period, making simplistic claims of ancient ethnic ownership difficult to sustain. Yet that historical complexity does not undermine Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders or Russia’s commitments under the Budapest Memorandum. History explains; it does not necessarily justify.
Finally, Morrison performs the historian’s essential task of distinguishing influence from destiny. States inherit institutions, myths and habits, but they are not condemned to repeat them. This is perhaps his strongest point. It is tempting to explain Putin’s Russia by reaching back to the Mongols, Ivan the Terrible or the “Russian soul”, just as earlier generations invoked “ancient Balkan hatreds” to explain Yugoslavia. Such narratives are elegant because they reduce contingency to inevitability. Historians, however, are generally suspicious of elegant explanations.
His recommendation of Donald Ostrowski is also telling. Ostrowski’s work has long argued that Muscovy’s relationship with the Mongol world was one of selective adaptation rather than wholesale inheritance. That is a subtler – and probably more persuasive – account than one that sees Russia as simply Europe’s most successful steppe empire.
In short, Morrison doesn’t demolish Ball’s thesis. He refines it. He accepts that the steppe mattered enormously, but insists that institutions are not destiny, that cultures borrow selectively, and that political choices remain more important than historical determinism. It is precisely the kind of intervention that lifts an online discussion from polemic into genuine historical
What Unherd Readers had to say about Roussinos’ essay
The comments divide into several broad themes rather than converging on a single interpretation, and in many ways become a debate about contemporary Russia as much as about history.
Many readers found the article fascinating and praised it for opening an unfamiliar chapter of Eurasian history. Several immediately ordered Christopher Ball’s book, while others supplemented the discussion with examples ranging from the Kalmyks’ influence on Austrian costume to the chess capital of Elista, the legacy of the Mongols in Central Europe, and the wider political traditions of the Eurasian steppe. A number of contributors recommended additional works, notably Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads and Donald Ostrowski’s scholarship on Muscovy.
A second group challenged aspects of the historical argument. Critics argued that the article overstated the influence of steppe culture on later European political development, confused mythology with history in discussing Poland and Hungary, and oversimplified the origins of the Cossacks and the Azov Regiment’s symbolism. Others objected to what they saw as cultural determinism: the suggestion that Russia’s present behaviour is somehow an inevitable product of its Mongol inheritance. Several historians in the discussion -Morrison particularly, stressed that Muscovy certainly inherited administrative and fiscal practices from the Golden Horde, but that its religious ideology and dynastic legitimacy remained fundamentally Byzantine and Orthodox. They argued that modern Russian policy reflects political choices by Vladimir Putin and his circle, not an inescapable historical destiny.
As often happens, the historical discussion quickly became a proxy for arguments over the war in Ukraine. One camp maintained that Ukraine is an artificial state whose disputed regions deserve internationally supervised referendums, criticising NATO expansion and Western military support while advocating diplomacy. The opposing view rejected these claims as Russian propaganda, pointing to Ukraine’s overwhelming vote for independence in 1991, insisting that no genuine referendum is possible under military occupation, and arguing that Russian aggression – not Western policy – is the central issue. A more extreme minority advanced familiar pro-Kremlin narratives, portraying NATO as the true aggressor and Russia as a defensive victim, provoking vigorous rebuttals from other commenters.
There was also a meta-debate about free speech. An inflammatory remark describing Russians in derogatory terms prompted accusations of hate speech and counter-accusations of “crybullying”, illustrating how discussions of Russia often slide into arguments over acceptable language as readily as they do over history.
The most substantial contribution came from historian Alexander Morrison, whose lengthy critique was widely praised by other readers. Morrison broadly accepted the article’s central insight – that Muscovy’s rise owed much to its role within the Mongol imperial system – but argued that the thesis was pushed too far. He emphasised the distinction between administrative inheritance and cultural identity, corrected numerous historical inaccuracies, warned against deterministic readings of history, and reminded readers that modern events stem from contemporary political decisions rather than immutable civilisational characteristics. His intervention effectively became the intellectual centre of the comment thread, with several readers declaring that it improved upon the article itself.
Overall, the discussion reveals both the appeal and the risks of grand historical narratives. Most readers accepted that the Eurasian steppe profoundly shaped Russia’s development. Where they diverged was over the extent to which that past explains the present, and whether history should be read as a story of enduring civilisational patterns or of contingent political choices. The resulting debate ranges from thoughtful historiography to contemporary geopolitics, with occasional excursions into conspiracy theory and internet polemics.
… theprotagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
The mystique of the mesmerising muzhik
For readers unfamiliar with him, Grigori Rasputin was a Siberian peasant, self-styled holy man and wandering mystic who somehow found his way into the innermost circle of the last Russian imperial family. Born in 1869 in the remote village of Pokrovskoye, he possessed no formal religious training yet acquired a reputation as a healer and spiritual adviser. His influence grew largely because Tsarita Alexandra became convinced that he could alleviate the suffering of her hemophiliac son, Tsarevich Alexei, whose illness threatened both the family and the succession itself. From that point onward, Rasputin became a lightning rod for public anger, rumour and scandal. To his admirers he was a man of God; to his enemies a charlatan, sexual predator, political manipulator and symbol of everything rotten within the late Romanov regime.
History has rarely been kind to him. The very name “Rasputin” conjures images of dark-eyed depravity, hypnotic influence and imperial decadence, making him one of those figures who seem destined to play the villain in the historical imagination.
My own first encounter with him came not through history but through Hammer Horror’s gloriously lurid Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966), in which Christopher Lee – already such a vampire icon that he’d earned the epithet “Draculee”. He played Rasputin with such operatic menace that it was not difficult to assume he must have personally engineered the fall of the Romanov dynasty between bouts of hypnotism, partying and priapic indulgence. The reality, as is so often the case, was both less theatrical and considerably more complicated. Like Boney M’s disco hit a decade later (more on that at the end if this essay), it was great entertainment, if not necessarily great history. [In later life, Christopher Lee played a suitably malevolent Saruman in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, resembling very much what Rasputin might have looked like had he reached old age. Lee really wanted to play Gandalf, but he was doomed to be typecast]
The mystical muzhik
Which brings us to acclaimed British historian Anthony Beevor’s latest book Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs.
As happens often In That Howling Infinite, what begins as a review ultimately becomes something larger than that. The book is the point of departure, but the essay then widens into a meditation on Russia itself and on historical continuity; and in this case, on the recurring problem of elites mistaking symptoms for causes, and on the peculiar human inability to recognise catastrophe even when its scent is already in the air.
I have read most of Anthony Beevor’s books and, on the whole, found them riveting, informative and refreshingly free of sensationalism. Stalingrad, Berlin, The Ardennes, Arnhem, Russia: Revolution and Civil War. Beevor is one of those rare historians who combines scholarship with narrative flair, making vast and complicated events accessible without sacrificing seriousness. Which is why I came to Rasputin with high expectations, and why I finished it feeling vaguely disappointed.
Not because it is a bad book. It is not. It is readable, entertaining, meticulously researched and full of fascinating material. But compared with Beevor’s finest work, it feels curiously slight: overextended and underdeveloped at the same time. There is enough material here for a long magazine essay, a television documentary; but not quite enough analytical depth to sustain a truly great work of history.
The title itself is slightly misleading. This is not really a biography of Rasputin. The so-called Mad Monk looms over the narrative like a spectral presence, but remains oddly elusive. Readers expecting a deep exploration of his Siberian origins, religious beliefs, charisma, psychology, sexuality, or the mythology that has accumulated around him often come away unsatisfied. Rasputin functions less as a subject than as a lens through which Beevor examines the final years of the Romanov court. What the book actually delivers is the story of imperial collapse between 1914 and 1917.
And what a royal court it was. Beevor presents a world populated by sycophants, grifters, mystics, opportunists, flatterers, courtiers and assorted aristocratic parasites orbiting an increasingly dysfunctional monarchy. Ministers come and go with bewildering speed. Rumours swirl through Petrograd salons. Schemes flourish and collapse. Rasputin dispenses advice, Tsarita Alexandra dispenses influence, Tsar Nicholas retreats ever further into passivity, and meanwhile the empire bleeds. All of this makes for compelling reading. Yet one gradually begins to suspect that the court is being asked to carry more explanatory weight than it can reasonably bear.
Certainly Nicholas II was an inadequate ruler and often dominated by his spouse. Certainly Alexandra was politically naïve – though that didn’t deter her from meddling: “Lovey”, she wrote to him in August 1915 while he away with his army, “I am your wall in the rear. I am here, don’t laugh at old wifey, but she has ‘trousers’ on unseen.” And both were catastrophically dependent upon Rasputin.
Certainly, the dynasty had become detached from the realities of modern Russia. But the Russian Revolution was not simply the consequence of a dysfunctional royal family making poor decisions in a palace. Russia’s problems ran far deeper than the imperial nursery. By 1917 the empire faced enormous peasant land hunger, rapid but uneven industrialisation, militant labour unrest, revolutionary traditions stretching back decades, ethnic tensions across a vast multi-national state, a fragile constitutional settlement after the failed revolution of 1905, catastrophic military losses on what we call the Eastern Front to distinguish it from the brutal stalemate on the Western one, economic breakdown, logistical paralysis and food shortages. Above all, it faced the immense pressures of total war. Even a far more capable monarch would have struggled. The Romanovs were undoubtedly part of the problem. They were not the whole problem.
Indeed, one of the ironies of Beevor’s narrative is that the closer he gets to Nicholas and Alexandra, the less convincing they become as the sole explanation for the catastrophe unfolding around them. The real story increasingly lies beyond the palace walls.
And then there is the nursery talk. The surviving correspondence between Nicholas and Alexandra is authentic, and Beevor quotes it extensively – perhaps too much. Endless references to “Sunny,” “Hubby,” “Wifey,” “baby” (the sickly heir apparent), pet names, sentimental endearments and emotional dependency reveal a couple inhabiting a private emotional universe increasingly disconnected from the realities of the empire they ruled. The first few examples are illuminating. The next fifty plus merely reinforce the point. One understands quickly enough what Beevor wishes to demonstrate: that the Tsar and Tsarina had retreated into a cocoon of domestic intimacy and religious certainty while the state around them was disintegrating. Yet repetition eventually diminishes rather than strengthens the effect.
I found myself feeling less contempt than pity, particularly for Alexandra. Beevor’s portrait is harsh, and not without justification. She was deeply unpopular even before the arrival of Rasputin. Her German origins became politically disastrous during wartime. Her interventions in ministerial appointments were often disastrous. Her faith in Rasputin was politically suicidal. Yet behind the political incompetence stood a tragic figure: a woman consumed by anxiety over a hemophiliac son whose death seemed perpetually imminent, a husband she believed had been divinely appointed, and a political system she scarcely understood. Her mistakes were enormous. Her burdens were equally profound.
The children, meanwhile, are perhaps the saddest figures in the entire story. OTMA, the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. The family acronym itself has become strangely poignant, a small domestic joke preserved in history. Throughout the narrative I wondered how much they understood. Did they recognise that the dynasty was already doomed? Did they understand that the empire around them was beginning to crack apart? Olga especially emerges as a fascinating figure. Many contemporaries remarked upon her intelligence and seriousness. She often appears more politically aware than either parent. Had Russia permitted female succession, might she have made a better sovereign than Nicholas? It is impossible to know, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that several members of the younger generation among a myriad of dukes and duchesses possessed more common sense than the adults steering the ship of state.
As for Alexei, history has wrapped him in the melancholy glow reserved for doomed children. Understandably so. Yet had he survived to inherit the throne, one suspects he would have faced the same impossible contradictions that destroyed his father: autocracy confronting modernity, privilege confronting reform, dynasty confronting history itself.
The last of the Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas and his family, murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918
The road to Ekaterinburg
Let papa (Nicholas II) not plan war. It will be the end of Russia and
all of us. We shall be destroyed to the last man
Grigori Rasputin July 30, 1914
But if there is a deeper weakness in Beevor’s account, it lies not with the Romanovs, but with what overshadows them. The giant elephant in the room is the First World War. Without the war, Rasputin remains an eccentric holy man from Siberia. Alexandra remains unpopular. Nicholas remains mediocre. The Romanov dynasty perhaps limps on for another decade or two. With the war, every weakness becomes fatal.
Russia entered the conflict militarily, economically, politically and socially ill-equipped for the demands of modern industrial warfare. It possessed manpower but lacked organisation. It could mobilise millions of peasants but struggled to arm, supply and transport them. Railways buckled. Food shortages worsened. Casualties mounted on a staggering scale. Most importantly, the largely peasant army itself became fertile ground for revolution. The officer corps remained socially distant from the rank-and-file. Military disasters shattered confidence. Discipline deteriorated. Radical ideas spread. By 1917 the army was not merely losing battles. It was losing faith in the system it served. When revolution finally arrived that February, not with a bang but a slow-mo disintegration, it was little wonder that, encouraged by agitators in its ranks, the Russian Army did what we like to imagine most soldiers would like to do: lay down their arms and head for home – often first shooting their officers.
This, surely, was the real story. The gossip in Petrograd salons and restaurants drawing mattered. But millions of armed peasants questioning the legitimacy of the state mattered rather more. One occasionally wishes Beevor had spent less time recounting the latest court scandal and more time examining the immense structural forces pulling the empire apart.
Because by 1916 some observers could already smell danger. The writer Mikhail Lemke, serving at Stavka, the army headquarters, captured the mood perfectly: “Oh, the holy stupidity of the Romanovs. We are moving at full speed towards some terrible abyss, a dreadful end that is not clear to anyone but is inevitable… It is clear that the finale is going to be terrifying and in its haphazard nature.” It is a remarkable observation insofar as it captures something larger than the Romanovs themselves.
History is full of such moments. Barbara Tuchman encountered them repeatedly. Christopher Clark found them among the sleepwalkers of 1914. One finds them before the collapse of Austria-Hungary, before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, before Yugoslavia’s descent into war. People sense that disaster is approaching. The clouds gather, the pressure changes, the atmosphere becomes electric, even if the precise lightning strike remains unseen.
Beevor quotes Russian poet Alexander Blok expressing something similar when he wrote of the “peculiar merry horror that sits in the Russian soul.” It is one of those observations that sounds simultaneously profound, unfair, insightful and impossible to verify. Yet it evokes a Russia that appears repeatedly in its literature and history: exuberant and despairing, mystical and brutal, comic and tragic, capable of extraordinary creativity and extraordinary destruction, often simultaneously.
Reading these passages, I found myself thinking not only of Beevor but of my university tutor Tibor Szamuely who has featured often in In That Howling Infinite. Szamuely believed that Russia punished simplification. Its history moved in circles rather than straight lines. Revolutions proclaimed liberation only to rediscover autocracy in new forms. The Romanovs fell; the Bolsheviks inherited the imperial reflexes. The Soviet Union collapsed; empire returned draped in Orthodoxy, nationalism and Eurasian destiny. Beneath the turbulence remained what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, now out of print: centralised power, messianic consciousness, siege mentality and the recurring sanctification of suffering.
Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of 1917 and beyond – the February Revolution, the Bolshevik seizure of power in November, the Civil War, the creation of the USSR and Stalinism – often obscured the deeper continuities of Russian history. He did not live to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of Vladimir Putin or the war in Ukraine, but his argument remains strikingly relevant. The frequent upheavals that have overtaken this vast continent have often produced changes that were, at bottom, superficial, leading ultimately to the intensification of old authoritarian structures under new names.
One of the more revealing moments in Beevor’s narrative comes when Alexandra writes to Nicholas on December 14, 1916: “Be firm. Russia loves to feel the whip – it’s their nature – tender love and then the iron hand to punish and guide”. The observation is deeply revealing. It suggests a view of governance fundamentally at odds with constitutional politics. Whether one accepts Szamuely’s thesis or not, one cannot help noticing the irony. The Romanovs fell. Liberal democracy survived only briefly. The whip did not disappear. It merely changed hands. Lenin’s whip proved heavier. Stalin’s heavier still. Perhaps Alexandra was disastrously wrong about her own era and yet, in some darker sense, glimpsed something enduring about Russia’s future.
And that reminded me, oddly enough, of Deadwood. One of the reasons David Milch’s masterpiece remains such extraordinary television is that it understands something many historians understand and many politicians do not: catastrophe is usually visible before it arrives. Not in its precise form, certainly. Nobody sees the exact bullet, the exact revolution, the exact market crash. But the atmosphere changes. The clouds gather. The animals become restless. And somebody, somewhere, notices. Viewers who are paying attention notice too because the background music becomes jangly and minor key.
In the episode ominously titled Suffer the Little Children, world-weary Madame Joanie Stubbs asks the young opportunist Flora a simple question: “Can you smell danger?” Joanie, from experience, can. The fey and feckless Flora cannot. She sees only opportunity and the immediate game she is playing and fails to recognise the larger forces closing around her. The result is one of the most violent conclusions in a series notorious for its displays of wanton brutality.
The same pattern appears repeatedly in history. People like Lemke could smell danger. Alexander Blok could smell danger. Many officers, politicians, intellectuals and ordinary Russians could smell danger. But did Nicholas and Alexandra? The evidence suggests not. Or perhaps they did but convinced themselves otherwise. In that sense they resemble the tragic Flora. Not wicked. Not entirely foolish. Simply trapped within assumptions that prevented them from recognising reality. Every warning became another irritation. Every crisis was temporary. Every setback could somehow be managed through faith, loyalty and persistence. Meanwhile the empire was bleeding to death.
The Romanovs spent years mistaking symptoms for causes. Rasputin was a symptom. Ministerial instability was a symptom. Court gossip and innuendo was a symptom. The disease lay much deeper: a political system incapable of reforming itself, a society under immense strain, and a war exposing every weakness simultaneously. By 1916 the smell of danger was everywhere. The tragedy is that those best placed to act either could not smell it or convinced themselves that the storm would somehow pass.
Tsar Nicholas in captivity
Which brings us to where Beevor’s book ends. Rasputin is assassinated by nobles determined to save the dynasty itself – treating a symptom, not the disease (see below); the Tsar abdicates in March 1917; and the last of the Romanovs and his family disappear down the melancholy railway line to Ekaterinburg and death. The curtain falls. The reader must supply the rest. And the rest matters enormously. For all their failings, Nicholas and Alexandra were not succeeded by enlightened constitutional reformers. They were succeeded by the Bolsheviks. The road that began with Rasputin’s influence at court led through revolution, civil war, famine, terror, collectivisation, purges and the Gulag.
One leaves the book with an uncomfortable thought. The Romanovs were unquestionably part of the problem. But history’s eventual solution proved vastly more destructive.
Perhaps that is the most haunting aspect of the entire story. The downfall of the Romanovs solved one set of problems and unleashed others on an unimaginable scale. The train that Lemke saw hurtling toward the abyss did indeed reach its destination. But beyond the bend in the track lay not merely revolution, but decades of violence, repression and suffering.
In the end, Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs is worth reading. The story itself remains compelling. Yet it is a lesser Beevor work: repetitive where his best books are incisive, narrowly focused where his best books are panoramic, occasionally so absorbed by court intrigue that it loses sight of the immense forces gathering beyond the palace gates. Like the dynasty it describes, it becomes most interesting when viewed as part of a larger story.
And perhaps that is the final irony. Rasputin, Nicholas, Alexandra, the four princesses, poor Alexei, the plotting dukes, ambitious ministers and aristocratic parasites all occupy centre stage for a time. Yet beyond them looms the true protagonist of the drama: Russia itself – vast, restless, wounded, contradictory, moving, as it has so often moved, between reform and reaction, idealism and coercion, hope and catastrophe.
The revolution was coming regardless. The tragedy of the Romanovs was not merely that they failed to stop it. It was that, like Flora ignoring Joanie Stubbs’ warning, they scarcely seemed to understand it was happening at all. The smell of danger was everywhere. The locomotive was already gathering speed. And somewhere ahead, beyond the next bend in the track, lay Ekaterinburg, the Civil War, Stalin, the Gulag, the Soviet century and perhaps even the long shadows that still stretch across Russia today.
The passengers continued gossiping, plotting, arguing and reassuring one another. A few looked nervously out the windows. A few could smell the storm. But by then it was already too late.
Bolshevik recruiting poster 1917
Explaining Rasputin’s power – Russia’s peasant complex
Rasputin arrived in St Petersburg trailing not merely Siberian mud on his boots but centuries of Russian argument about the peasantry.
For much of the nineteenth century, Russia’s educated classes had romanticised “the people” from a respectful distance. The peasant was imagined as the keeper of Holy Russia’s soul: patient, devout, long-suffering, close to the land and somehow morally superior to the fashionable, French-speaking aristocracy that governed him. Tolstoy found wisdom amongst peasants. Dostoevsky found redemption there. Intellectuals went “to the people” in search of authenticity, only to discover that actual peasants could be suspicious, conservative, superstitious and decidedly unimpressed by visiting idealists from St Petersburg.
Out of this tension emerged the Narodniks, the great “to the people” movement of the later nineteenth century. Young idealists abandoned universities and cities and went into the countryside to live amongst the peasants, educate them, organise them and, in some cases, save them. The peasants frequently responded by assuming they were spies and reporting them to the police.
Russia has always possessed an unusual talent for disappointing its romantics
Rasputin landed squarely in this contradiction. To admirers, he was the authentic Russia that the salons had spent generations searching for: a wandering pilgrim, a holy fool, a man of the soil with the smell of birch forests and woodsmoke still clinging to him. To his enemies, he represented everything that modern Russia was supposed to leave behind: ignorance, mysticism, obscurantism and the triumph of superstition over reason.
The aristocracy had always liked peasants rather in the way that modern urbanites like farmers’ markets — as long as the mud remained somebody else’s problem. Then one of them walked into the Winter Palace and sat down with the Tsarita.
Even popular culture recognised the type. At one point, Christopher Lee’s wonderfully excessive and inebriated Rasputin, breaks into an exuberant Russian dance to Stenka Razin, the great folk lament about the rebel Cossack who throws his Persian princess into the Volga to prove his loyalty to his comrades. Watching it as a teenager, I remember thinking not of Cossacks and river pirates but: “Hang on! That’s The Carnival Is Over.”
One of the enduring ironies of Russian history – and indeed of history generally- is how often “all that is old is new again.” Revolutions announce themselves as clean breaks with the past, yet the past has a habit of returning through side doors and forgotten corridors. The symbols change, the slogans change, the uniforms change, but old habits, assumptions and institutions frequently re-emerge in unexpected forms.
Russia provides perhaps the most spectacular examples.
Much attention is paid to the persistence of the autocratic state: the succession from Tsarist secret police to Cheka, NKVD, KGB and FSB; the recurring preference for centralised authority over pluralism; the enduring suspicion of foreign influence; the tendency to frame political life as an existential struggle between order and chaos. These continuities are real enough.
Yet the return of older Russia extends well beyond the machinery of coercion. One of the most remarkable developments of the post-Soviet era has been the resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Church. The institution that survived persecution, marginalisation and attempted eradication under Soviet rule has re-emerged as one of the central pillars of contemporary Russian identity. Cathedrals demolished by the Bolsheviks have been rebuilt. Religious symbolism once dismissed as superstition now appears alongside state ceremonies and military rituals. Patriarchs once monitored by the Party have become influential public figures. Patriarch Kyril , the current head of the Russian Orthodox Church is a close political and ideological ally of Putin. Orthodoxy, once pushed to the margins, has returned to the centre of Russian public life.
And with Orthodoxy has come a reconsideration of the Romanovs, murdered along with their servants (and pet dogs) by bullet and bayonet by local Bolsheviks, on Lenin’s orders it is claimed, on the night of 16th and 17th July 1918 – ostensibly to prevent their rescue by Kolchak’s White forces who were closing in on Ekaterinburg. Many of their family and friends were executed in the days and months afterwards.
For much of the Soviet period, Nicholas II occupied a relatively simple role in the official story: a weak ruler whose incompetence justified the Revolution that swept him away. Post-Soviet Russia complicated that narrative. The Romanovs gradually ceased to be merely the defeated rulers of a vanished age and became, for many Russians, symbols of national martyrdom. Nicholas and Alexandra, together with their children, were canonised as Passion Bearers. Pilgrimages developed around sites associated with their imprisonment and murder. Their deaths came to be viewed not simply as a political execution but as a spiritual tragedy and a national wound.
The process was aided by the gradual revelation of what actually happened in the cellar of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg. Soviet accounts had long been evasive. The fuller story proved profoundly unsettling. The murder of Nicholas and Alexandra is one thing. The murder of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and the sickly Alexei is quite another. Whatever one’s judgement of the Romanov regime, if the witness statements gathered after the slaughter are reliable, it is difficult not to recoil from the sheer brutality of what occurred that night. The image of frightened young women surviving the first fusillade because jewels sewn into their clothing deflected bullets, only to be finished off with bayonets and revolvers in a chaotic mess of panic and gun-smoke possesses a dreadful power.
That sympathy has done much to reshape public memory. The Romanovs who emerge in popular imagination are often not the rulers of a vast empire but a doomed family. The focus shifts from Nicholas the inadequate monarch to Nicholas the husband and father; from Alexandra the politically disastrous empress to Alexandra the anxious mother. Martyrdom eclipses governance.
There was to be, however, no martyr’s crown for Grigori Rasputin, whom we had lost sight of when we widened the scope of our review of Beevor’s historical pot-boiler.
The death of Rasputin
To borrow from the Bard of Avon (Macbeth, that is), “nothing in his life became him like the leaving it”. Rasputin’s demise has passed into legend largely because it seems to belong less to history than to black comedy.
In December 1916 a group of aristocratic conspirators, led by Prince Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, decided that the self-styled holy man had become a mortal threat to the monarchy and must be removed. What followed has often been retold as a Gothic horror story in which Rasputin was poisoned, shot, beaten, drowned and somehow kept coming back for more.
Beevor, however, strips away much of the mythology and reveals something closer to a tragic farce. The conspirators were astonishingly amateurish, repeatedly losing control of events, contradicting one another, panicking and improvising as their carefully laid plan unravelled. Reading Beevor’s account, one is reminded less of a sinister political assassination than of a darkly comic Ealing caper performed by nervous aristocrats hopelessly out of their depth. Yet the absurdity only heightens the symbolism. Here was the Russian elite, convinced it was saving the Empire, bungling even a murder. Rasputin’s chaotic end became a grotesque metaphor for the regime itself: confused, incompetent, riddled with fantasy, and staggering towards disaster while imagining it was still in control.
No wonder it provided such irresistible material for a shonky Hammer Horror melodrama. Rasputin’s life already contained all the necessary ingredients: a mysterious peasant mystic, aristocratic decadence, rumours of hypnotic powers, political intrigue, sexual scandal and a violent death wrapped in myth and exaggeration. His assassination only added to the legend. Poison that apparently failed to work, bullets that seemed unable to stop him, panicked noblemen stumbling through a murder plot and a corpse eventually dumped into the icy Neva – it all reads less like sober history than a fever dream concocted by a screenwriter after too many vodkas.
Hammer simply leaned into the absurdity. With Christopher Lee glowering, glaring and generally chewing the scenery as only Christopher Lee could, Rasputin became less a historical figure than a gothic supervillain, somewhere between Dracula and a mad prophet. The remarkable thing is that the real story, stripped of its embellishments, remains almost as bizarre as the cinematic version. Indeed, one suspects that if a screenwriter had invented the entire affair from scratch, critics would have dismissed it as implausibly over-the-top.
History, as usual, had other ideas. And therein lies the enduring fascination of Rasputin: not merely the man himself, but the way his life and death seem perpetually suspended between fact and folklore, political history and popular mythology.
The book of the film?
Whilst reading Beevor’s account, I wondered if he had recently watched the 1971 British film Nicholas and Alexandra. It is an appealing fancy, and not an entirely implausible one.
Anthony Beevor is a serious historian, of course, and his account of the Romanovs, Rasputin, and the revolutionary years rests on decades of scholarship rather than any cinematic influence. Yet historians are also human beings, and good historians often have a keen sense of narrative, character, and scene. Reading some passages in Russia: Revolution and Civil War, one occasionally gets the feeling that Beevor can see the events unfolding before him in almost cinematic fashion.
The 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra remains one of the most ambitious attempts ever made to dramatise the collapse of Imperial Russia. Although it was something of a commercial disappointment, it assembled a remarkable cast of British acting royalty. Michael Jayston’s Nicholas II and Janet Suzman’s Alexandra are perhaps best remembered, but the supporting cast reads like a roll-call of twentieth-century British theatre and film: Laurence Olivier as Count Witte, Michael Redgrave as Sazonov, Jack Hawkins, Harry Andrews, Timothy West, Ian Holm, and a young Brian Cox in one of his earliest screen appearances as Leon Trotsky.
Then there is Tom Baker as Rasputin: wild-eyed, bearded, charismatic, unsettling, simultaneously ridiculous and strangely compelling. It remains one of the screen’s most memorable Rasputins, capturing something of the paradox that has fascinated generations- the peasant mystic who became confidant to an empress, faith healer, political liability, and eventually a figure of near-mythic notoriety. [Tom Baker reincarnated in 1974 as the Fourth Doctor, to become the longest serving time lord in that venerable television series, and, to hark back to our opening paragraphs, like Christopher Lee, he also pitched unsuccessfully to play Gandalf in The Lord of The Rings]
As for Ian Holm, His role is actually an interesting footnote. In Nicholas and Alexandra, he played Vasily Yakovlev, the Bolshevik commander who supervised the execution of the imperial family in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. Yakovlev survived the civil war and perished during Stalin’s Great Terrorin 1938 while Holm morphed into the devious cyborg Ash in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).
Whether Beevor recently watched the film is impossible to know. But if one were writing about the twilight of the Romanovs, it would be hard not to have the film somewhere in the back of one’s mind. For all its historical simplifications, it remains one of those grand old epics that lodged themselves in the cultural imagination.
And perhaps that is one reason the movie endures despite its reputation as a flop. It was not merely recounting history. It was staging the last act of an entire civilisation – the chandeliers still glittering, the uniforms still immaculate, the orchestra still playing, even as the floorboards beneath the Russian Empire were already beginning to crack.
When Josef met Vladimir
There is a scene in Nicholas and Alexandra that takes us down one of history’s intriguing rabbit holes where fact, folklore and political mythology sit together at the same table – perhaps even, over a pint.
It depicts the First Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Tampere (then part of the Grand Duchy of Finland) in December 1905. That conference is generally accepted by historians as the first documented meeting between Lenin and Stalin. Stalin himself later recalled it as their first encounter, describing how the younger Georgian revolutionary was somewhat disappointed to discover that the legendary Lenin was not the towering, commanding figure he had imagined, but rather a relatively ordinary-looking man who blended easily into the crowd.
And yet, according to a London tradition, the two had met earlier at the Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green, a pub situated opposite what became the headquarters of the Twentieth Century Press, where Lenin worked while editing Iskra during his London exile. The tale has enormous appeal. One can easily picture the scene: two future dictators of the twentieth century sharing a beer in a smoky London pub while discussing the fate of the Russian Empire, utterly unknown to the drinkers around them.
The problem, though, is evidence. Lenin certainly spent considerable time in Clerkenwell. Stalin certainly visited London in 1907 for the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP. Both men undoubtedly walked the same streets. The Crown Tavern proudly embraces the connection. Yet hard documentary proof that they actually sat down together there before the 1905 Finnish conference is elusive. Soviet historians, who were often eager to document Lenin’s revolutionary activities in minute detail, generally treated the Tampere meeting as the first confirmed encounter. Modern historians tend to do the same.
That does not necessarily make the pub story false. Revolutionary underground movements were not renowned for maintaining meticulous attendance records. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But it does leave the tale in that charming grey zone occupied by so much historical folklore.
There is also a delicious irony in the setting. Clerkenwell Green was one of the great centres of radical politics in Victorian and Edwardian London – a place where exiles, anarchists, socialists, trade unionists and political dreamers gathered. The British Empire, then at the height of its power, provided refuge to revolutionaries who were plotting the overthrow of other empires. London was simultaneously the capital of global capitalism and a sanctuary for those dedicated to its destruction.
If Lenin and Stalin really did share a pint at the Crown Tavern, neither man could have known that within two decades one would have created the Soviet state and the other would inherit it. Nor could the Londoners around them have guessed that two obscure Russian exiles would become among the most consequential figures of the twentieth century.
That, perhaps, is why the story survives. Whether true or not, it captures the peculiar magic of history: the possibility that world-changing events sometimes begin not in palaces, parliaments or battlefields, but in an ordinary corner pub on an ordinary London afternoon.
And, finally, from the surreal to the ridiculous …When it comes to exuberant absurdity, one cannot match that of German reggae, funk and disco group Boney M.
Ra- ra-ra Rasputin
For an entire generation, Boney M’s 1978 disco hit Rasputin probably did more to shape popular perceptions of the man than any serious work of history.
It is, of course, ridiculously inaccurate. Rasputin was not literally the “lover of the Russian Queen”; there is no credible evidence that he and Alexandra were lovers, despite endless rumours at the time. Nor did he “rule the Russian land and never mind the Tsar.” Even at the height of his influence he remained more symbolic than omnipotent, a trusted adviser whose access to the imperial family far exceeded his actual political competence.
Yet the song captures something important about how Rasputin entered popular mythology. He became less a historical figure than a larger-than-life archetype: part holy man, part conman, part libertine, part political puppet-master, wrapped in an aura of sex, mystery and impending catastrophe.
It compresses a complicated story into a memorable caricature. The real Rasputin was almost certainly less powerful, less sinister and less glamorous than legend suggests. But legends endure because they tell us something about the fears and fantasies of their age. To Russians watching their empire stagger towards collapse, Rasputin became a convenient embodiment of everything that seemed wrong with the Romanov regime. To the wider world, he became the bearded mystic with hypnotic eyes, impossible appetites and nine lives.
Boney M simply took that mythology, added a disco beat with a Russian flavour, Euro-pop chorus and a dash of Cold War exoticism, and produced one of the strangest historical stories ever to hit the dance floor.
Indeed, there is a curious progression in the way many of us first encountered Rasputin. First came Christopher Lee’s wild-eyed Hammer Horror incarnation in the 1960s; then Boney M’s improbable disco supervillain in 1978; and only much later the actual historical figure lurking behind both performances. By that stage, poor old Grigori scarcely stood a chance. History had already handed him over to popular culture, where villains, mystics and monsters invariably enjoy a much longer shelf life than ordinary men.
There lived a certain man in Russia long ago
He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow
Most people look at him with terror and with fear
But to Moscow chicks, he was such a lovely dear
He could preach the Bible like a preacher
Full of ecstasy and fire
But he also was the kind of teacher
Women would desire
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia′s greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on
He ruled the Russian land and never mind the Tsar
But the kazachok, he danced really wunderbar
In all affairs of state, he was the man to please
But he was real great when he had a girl to squeeze
For the Queen, he was no wheeler-dealer
Though she’d heard the things he′d done
She believed he was a holy healer
Who would heal her son
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on
But when his drinking, and lusting and his hunger for power
Became known to more and more people
The demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder
“This man’s just gotta go,” declared his enemies
But the ladies begged, “Don′t you try to do it, please”
No doubt this Rasputin had lots of hidden charms
Though he was a brute, they just fell into his arms
Then one night some men of higher standing
Set a trap, they′re not to blame
“Come to visit us,” they kept demanding
And he really came
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
They put some poison into his wine
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine
He drank it all, and he said, “I feel fine”
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen
They didn′t quit, they wanted his head
Ra-Ra-Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine
And so they shot him ′til he was dead
Oh, those Russians
Writer(s): Frank Farian, Fred Jay, George Reyam
Afterword
Being a longtime student of the Middle East, and having visited Jerusalem many times, whilst assembling this essay, I was surprised to discover a direct connection between the murdered Romanovs and the Holy City. Tsarita Alexandra’s sister, the Grand Duchess Elisabeth, who was executed along with other nobility on the sane night as The Tsar and his family, and later, interred in the incongruous and ostentatiously Muscovite Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in the Garden of Gethsemane on Mount Olive – which she and her husband had helped build – and in 1982, canonised as “new martyr” of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.
The Church of St. Mary Magdalene, viewed from the walls of Jerusalem. P.Hemphill, May 2014
The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes liked to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died.
WH Auden, The Shield of Achilles
Among the many phrases that echo through modern Iranian history, few are as chilling – or as elastic – as the charge of “corruption on Earth” (mofsed-e-filarz). Rooted in Islamic jurisprudence but broadened by revolutionary courts into a political instrument, it has served as one of the Islamic Republic’s most powerful and feared accusations.
It was among the charges levelled against the eleven Kurdish prisoners executed at Sanandaj Airport in August 1979, their deaths immortalised in Jahangir Razmi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph. In the years that followed, the same accusation would be invoked against Kurdish activists, political dissidents, monarchists, communists, members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, protesters, and others deemed enemies of the revolutionary state. The charge’s very vagueness became its strength. To be declared “corrupt on Earth” was not merely to have broken a law; it was to be cast as a threat to the moral and political order itself.
Nearly half a century later, the phrase remains woven into the fabric of Iranian political life. It resurfaced during the prosecutions that followed the Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022–23, and again in the trials and executions that have followed subsequent unrest and acts of political violence, and particularly, in the wake of the demonstrations and subsequent massacres of January 2026 and the US-Israeli aerial assault the began a month later. Governments change their rhetoric, revolutions age, and generations pass, yet certain words endure. In Iran, “corruption on Earth” has become more than a legal charge. It is a window into how revolutionary states define legitimacy, identify enemies, and justify the use of ultimate power.
The story that follows is, in part, the story of that phrase – and of the people whose lives have been shaped, and often ended, by its invocation.
Iranian photographer Jahangir Razmi’s famous image, later known as “Firing Squad in Iran,” won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography. It remains the only Pulitzer awarded to an anonymous photographer. Razmi’s identity remained concealed for twenty-seven years before being publicly revealed in 2006 with his consent. The photograph endures as one of the defining visual records of the violence that accompanied the consolidation of the Islamic Republic.
The Revolution Devours Its Own
The Red–Green Alliance, Iranian Edition
In early June 1983, the Kurdish city of Mahabad awoke to grim news. Fifty-nine Kurdish prisoners had been executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Many were young. Some, according to Kurdish human-rights sources, were still school students. Their crime was not murder, terrorism or armed insurrection in any conventional sense. Their offence was opposition to the revolutionary order that had emerged from the upheavals of 1979.
Amnesty International later documented the executions as part of a wider campaign of repression that was sweeping across Iran. By then, the Islamic Republic had moved beyond the revolutionary euphoria of its founding years and into a phase familiar to students of revolutions throughout history: the consolidation of power. The idealism, pluralism and competing visions that had animated the overthrow of the Shah were being replaced by something far narrower and far less forgiving.
The executions in Mahabad were not an aberration. They were part of a pattern.
History offers many examples of revolutions that begin as broad coalitions and end as monopolies of power. The French Revolution consumed Girondins, Hébertists and Dantonists before eventually turning upon Robespierre himself. On the scaffold, Manon Roland is said to have exclaimed “O Liberté! O Liberté! que de crimes on commet en ton nom”. The Bolsheviks devoured Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and later their own Old Guard (see in In That Howling Infinite, Stalin’s Great Terror). Revolutions often unite disparate forces against a common enemy; once victory is achieved, the question becomes who will rule. At that point, yesterday’s allies can quickly become today’s enemies.
Iran followed a similar trajectory.
The revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979 brought together an unlikely alliance. Liberals sought constitutional government. Nationalists hoped for greater independence from foreign influence. Marxists and socialists imagined a future shaped by class struggle and social justice. Religious activists envisioned an Islamic state guided by clerical authority. What united these groups was opposition to the Shah, whose increasingly authoritarian rule, close alignment with the United States and powerful security apparatus had generated widespread resentment.
Yet while many revolutionary factions viewed the alliance as temporary, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers possessed something their rivals lacked: a coherent vision of power and an organisational structure capable of seizing it. The mosques provided a nationwide network. The clergy enjoyed enormous social legitimacy. Religious symbolism offered a language that resonated far beyond university campuses and political cells.
Many on the secular left underestimated this advantage.
For some Marxists, political Islam appeared less as an ideological rival than as a useful partner in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism. The Shah was seen as a pillar of Western influence in the Middle East; therefore, any force capable of helping to overthrow him could be accommodated. The expectation, explicit or implicit, was that once the revolution succeeded, history would proceed along more familiar revolutionary lines. The clerics would either moderate, share power or eventually be superseded.
Events unfolded differently.
By 1980, universities were being purged and “Islamised” during what became known as the Cultural Revolution. Liberal and nationalist opponents were marginalised. Independent centres of authority were systematically dismantled. The Tudeh Party, Iran’s principal communist organisation and one that had initially supported the new regime, was outlawed. Its leaders were arrested, imprisoned and in some cases executed. Former revolutionary allies appeared on television delivering forced confessions. Political prisons filled. Revolutionary courts handed down death sentences with alarming speed.
The process was not unique to the Iranian left. Kurdish movements that had sought autonomy found themselves facing military campaigns. Women’s organisations that had supported the revolution discovered that many of their aspirations were incompatible with the state’s vision of Islamic governance. Student activists, secular intellectuals and minority groups encountered similar realities. The coalition that had overthrown the Shah steadily narrowed until meaningful opposition became impossible.
The Kurdish experience was particularly harsh. In regions such as Mahabad, Sanandaj and other Kurdish centres, resistance to central authority was met with military force and mass arrests. The executions of June 1983 were one episode in a larger struggle between the Islamic Republic and Kurdish political movements. For the families involved, ideological debates about revolution and anti-imperialism mattered little. The reality was imprisonment, exile and death.
The broader lesson is not confined to Iran, nor is it simply a story about the mistakes of the political left. Rather, it is a warning about the dangers of defining political movements primarily by what they oppose rather than by what they seek to build.
Opposition to a monarchy did not tell Iranians what kind of state would emerge after the Shah. Opposition to Western influence did not answer questions about civil liberties, minority rights, women’s equality or democratic institutions. Those questions remained unresolved until power was won—and by then it was largely too late.
This is one reason why the history of the Iranian Revolution continues to resonate.
Across the political spectrum there remains a temptation to view movements through the lens of a single conflict. If a regime opposes one’s enemies, its internal character can seem less important. If it stands against a disliked power, its treatment of dissidents, minorities or political opponents may receive less scrutiny than it deserves. Such thinking is hardly confined to any one ideology. Throughout modern history, people of varying political persuasions have excused authoritarianism when it appeared to serve a larger strategic or ideological purpose.
Iran offers a cautionary example of where that logic can lead.
Many who helped create the revolution imagined themselves as partners in a broad project of national liberation. Some believed they could influence its direction. Others assumed that shared opposition to the Shah guaranteed a shared future. Instead, they discovered that revolutionary coalitions are often marriages of convenience rather than communities of principle.
The tragedy of Mahabad, and of countless similar episodes in revolutionary history, is that those who helped bring down one form of authoritarianism often found themselves confronting another.
The revolution had succeeded. Then it began to consume its own.
Every picture tells a story
The story of Jahangir Razmi’s photograph is worth including because it captures, in a single frame, the moment when revolutionary justice gave way to revolutionary terror.
On 27 August 1979, at Sanandaj Airport in Iranian Kurdistan, eleven prisoners—most of them Kurdish militants or activists—were brought before a revolutionary tribunal. The proceedings reportedly lasted little more than half an hour. The charges ranged from weapons trafficking and murder to inciting unrest against the new Islamic Republic. There was no meaningful due process, no opportunity for appeal and no delay between verdict and sentence. Convicted by the revolutionary court, the prisoners were taken directly to a dusty section of the airfield, blindfolded and lined up before a firing squad.
Jahangir Razmi, a young photographer working for the Iranian newspaper Ettela’at, was present. Managing to position himself slightly behind and to one side of the execution squad, he captured the exact instant the rifles fired. The resulting image is extraordinary and horrifying in equal measure. Some of the condemned are already collapsing; others remain momentarily upright, suspended between life and death. The executioners stand almost casually, performing what the revolution had already normalised as an administrative task. There is no drama in the cinematic sense. That is precisely what makes the photograph so unsettling. It records death not as a battlefield tragedy but as bureaucratic routine.
The image appeared in Ettela’at the following day without a photographer’s credit. The omission was deliberate. In the volatile atmosphere of post-revolutionary Iran, public association with such a photograph could have endangered Razmi’s life. The picture was subsequently distributed internationally through United Press International and quickly became one of the defining images of the revolution’s aftermath. In 1980 it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography—the only Pulitzer ever granted to an anonymous photographer.
For more than a quarter of a century, the identity of the man behind the lens remained a secret known only to a handful of people. It was not until 2006 that Wall Street Journal reporter Joshua Prager traced the photograph’s origins and revealed, with Razmi’s consent, the identity of the photographer who had captured one of the twentieth century’s most haunting images.
Placed alongside the executions in Mahabad four years later, the photograph acquires an even deeper significance. It was taken not at the end of the Islamic Republic’s consolidation of power but near its beginning. The victims at Sanandaj were among the first casualties of a revolutionary process that would soon expand far beyond Kurdish militants to encompass liberals, communists, students, women’s activists, ethnic minorities and former revolutionary allies. In retrospect, the image serves as an early warning. The firing squad at Sanandaj was not an isolated excess. It was one of the first visible signs that the revolution had begun to devour its own.
As photographs go, it possesses the rare quality of becoming more disturbing the longer one studies it. It is not merely a record of eleven deaths on a Kurdish airfield. It is a glimpse into a larger historical pattern: the moment when a revolution, having seized power, turns from overthrowing its enemies to eliminating its competitors. The rifles are aimed at eleven men, but the photograph foreshadows the fate of thousands who would follow. In that sense, Razmi captured not just an execution but a prophecy.
Firing Squad in Iran. Jahangir Ramzi’s Pulitzer winning photo, 1980.
Death in the camera’s eye
The photo reminds me of Robert Capa’s The Falling Soldier (1936), the death of a republican soldier taken during the Spanish Civil War, and Eddie Adams’s photograph of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong prisoner on a during the1968; Offensive. [These pictures are not shown here so as not to detract from the immediacy and tragedy of Razmi’s photograph.
The comparison is a fascinating one because all three photographs have become shorthand for entire conflicts, yet each captures a very different relationship between photography, truth and death.
Robert Capa’s iconic photograph taken during the Spanish Civil War, purportedly shows the exact moment a Republican militiaman is struck by a bullet and collapses backwards. It became one of the most famous war photographs ever taken, embodying the courage and vulnerability of those fighting fascism. Yet for decades historians have debated whether the image was genuine, staged, or a reconstruction. The controversy has never been fully resolved. Ironically, the photograph’s power derives not only from what it may show, but from the uncertainty surrounding it. It sits on the uneasy border between journalism, art and myth.
Eddie Adams’s photograph of South Vietnamese General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street during the Tet Offensive in 1968 occupies the opposite end of the spectrum. There is no ambiguity about what happened. Adams captured the precise instant the bullet entered the prisoner’s head. The image is shocking because it is so immediate and undeniable. For millions of viewers, it crystallised the brutality of the Vietnam War. Yet Adams himself later lamented that the photograph reduced a complicated human story to a single frozen moment. The prisoner had allegedly participated in killings during the offensive; the general spent the rest of his life defined by one fraction of a second. “The general killed the Viet Cong,” Adams later wrote, “I killed the general with my camera.”
Jahangir Razmi’s photograph from Sanandaj belongs in the same company. Like Adams’s image, it records an actual execution rather than a symbolic representation of one. Like Capa’s photograph, it came to symbolise an entire conflict and a wider historical struggle. Yet there is something uniquely unsettling about Razmi’s image. Adams shows a single victim and a single executioner. Razmi shows eleven condemned men and a firing squad acting in concert. The killing is not spontaneous or personal. It is institutional. The state itself is pulling the trigger.
Viewed together, the three photographs almost form a visual history of modern political violence. Capa’s image represents the romantic age of ideological struggle, when young men went off to fight for causes larger than themselves. Adams’s photograph captures the moral chaos of Cold War counterinsurgency, where certainty dissolves into horror. Razmi’s image depicts something colder still: the machinery of revolutionary justice transforming human beings into categories—“counter-revolutionary,” “enemy of God,” “corrupt on Earth”—before extinguishing them.
All three photographs freeze the instant between life and death. But they also remind us of something else. Photographs rarely explain. They reveal, they shock, they haunt—but they do not provide context. Capa’s militiaman may or may not have been dying. Adams’s prisoner and general carried histories invisible to the camera lens. Razmi’s eleven Kurds had been reduced by the revolutionary court to a handful of accusations and a death sentence. The photograph records their end, but not the complexity of their lives.
And perhaps that is why such images endure. They force us to confront history in its most compressed form: a single irreversible moment, laden with all the arguments, ideologies, hopes and hatreds that brought it into being. The photograph captures the second. Understanding the story behind it can take a lifetime.
Twenty-six years ago, a picture of an execution in Iran won the Pulitzer Prize. But the man who took it remained anonymous. Until now.
December 6, 2006, The Wall Street Journal
TEHRAN — On Aug. 27, 1979, two parallel lines of 11 men formed on a field of dry dirt in Sanandaj, Iran. One group wore blindfolds. The other held rifles. The command came in Farsi to fire: “Atesh!” Behind the soldier farthest to the right, a 12th man also shot, his Nikon camera and Kodak film preserving in black and white a mass execution.
Within hours, the photo ran across six columns in Ettela’at, the oldest newspaper in Iran. Within days, it appeared on front pages around the world. Within weeks, the new Iranian government annexed the offending paper. Within months, the photo won the Pulitzer Prize.
Taken seven months after Islamic radicals overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah, the photo remains one of the most famous images of Iran. It is an icon of government terror, invoked in critiques of the regime from the 1979 poem “Screaming,” to the 1986 music video “Speak To Me From My Land, Iran” to the 1997 book “Kurdistan.” Davood and Davar Ghassemlouie, brothers who operate a photo shop in Los Angeles, say they have made tens of thousands of reprints for demonstrators, including 200 in late September when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the U.S.
Says Shahrokh Hatami, a pioneer of Iranian photojournalism: “It is the most revealing photograph of the beginning of the Iranian revolution.”
Ettela’at, however, didn’t print the photographer’s name, fearing his safety. The Pulitzer was officially awarded to “an unnamed photographer of United Press International,” the news service that distributed the photo in the U.S. It remains the only time the award has ever been given to an anonymous recipient.
In the years since, several people have falsely claimed to be “Anonymous.” When Iran’s most famous photographer died in 2003, his obituaries were filled with mentions of a Pulitzer some say he had insinuated winning. Last September, another prominent Iranian photographer living in France was quoted in Paris Match magazine claiming credit for the work.
In fact, nearly three decades after the epochal photograph first appeared, almost no one knows who took it.
Jahangir Razmi grew up in the industrial city of Arak, in central Iran, the first child of a housewife and military clerk. Governed by the Shah, the nation was at peace. The boy was shy and happiest in a local photo shop helping a cousin develop film and shoot portraits of brides and soldiers. In 1960, at the age of 12, he bought a Russian Lubitel-2 camera.
He quickly put it to use. When one day a boy shot a girl dead outside his studio, a reporter urged Jahangir to photograph the scene. He did, the skirt and shirt of a bloodied school uniform preserved in the newsprint of Ettela’at.
When his father died, Mr. Razmi says he found work in a Tehran photo shop. When he served in the army, he found reprieve from military drills in a darkroom on base. When he photographed a 20th birthday party, he found a wife. And when Ettela’at — Farsi for “Information” — hired him in 1973 to shoot breaking news, he found a career.
“Although we were colleagues and there was a competition, his pictures were better,” says Jafar Danyeli, then one of seven staff photographers. Razmi, as everyone called him, paid attention to composition and chiaroscuro, the interplay of light and shadow. He sat at the desk closest to the stairwell. “I was always the volunteer to go,” says Mr. Razmi, then 25. “I was quick. I was young. I was braver than anyone else.”
On Jan. 16, 1979, the Shah fled Iran following mass demonstrations protesting his rule. Sixteen days later, Ayatollah Khomeini, a radical Islamic cleric, returned from France and seized control. Mr. Razmi photographed Mr. Khomeini in his Qom headquarters so regularly that he came to greet the imam with a handshake. Using his favorite Nikon lens, a 28mm wide-angle lens with automatic exposure, Mr. Razmi chronicled the conversion of Iran to theocracy from autocracy.
By August, about 500 alleged counter-revolutionaries and officials of the former regime had been executed. The judiciary decreed it illegal to criticize Islam and Iran’s spiritual leaders. A holding company formed by the regime appropriated Kayhan, the only newspaper in Iran larger than Ettela’at. Journalists who pushed back at censorship under the Shah were petrified.
“Under Khomeini they would kill you,” says Amir Taheri, then editor of Kayhan and now a political analyst living in England. “It was a different ballgame.”
On Aug. 16, Mr. Khomeini called on Iranian troops to suppress restive Kurds hoping for autonomy. Thousands of soldiers headed 300 miles northwest to the Iranian province of Kurdistan. Mr. Razmi and Khalil Bahrami, an Ettela’at reporter, followed.
Ten days later, Mr. Bahrami received a tip that a judge he had befriended was set to try Kurds in an antechamber of the municipal airport at Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan. The reporter, then 37, had worked at Ettela’at for 22 years and was thankful he was paired with the young Mr. Razmi, whose father had lived in Sanandaj and had raised his son to admire the Kurds and their traditions. “He knew his responsibility,” says Mr. Bahrami, who lives in Iran and is retired. “And he was quicker than the others.”
At the airport, Mr. Razmi stood ready outside the makeshift courtroom as 10 handcuffed men filled a wooden bench before the judge, a black-bearded Shiite cleric named Sadegh Khalkhali. An injured 11th prisoner lay on a stretcher beside the door.
The judge removed his turban, Mr. Bahrami recalls. He removed his shoes. He put his feet on a chair. Scanning the prisoners through thick eyeglasses, he asked their names. Officers of the court told of the defendants’ alleged crimes — of trafficking arms, inciting riots and murder. The prisoners, some with leftward or nationalist leanings, denied the accusations.
No evidence was presented, Mr. Bahrami says. “It was pure speculation.” After roughly 30 minutes, Mr. Khalkhali declared the 11 men “corrupt on earth” — mofsedin fel arz — the Koranic phrase he cited before issuing a sentence of death. A few of the men cried.
Mr. Bahrami summoned his colleague Mr. Razmi. “It was Razmi’s luck that day that he was with me,” the reporter says.
Mr. Razmi withdrew from his green canvas shoulder bag a 35-80mm lens and attached the zoom to his Nikon FE. The handcuffed men were blindfolded. Each put his hand on the shoulder of the man before him and together they walked single-file through the airport’s concrete lobby, through a metal doorframe and toward an open airfield. Mr. Razmi darted ahead and shot, untroubled by security forces: “I was totally free,” he says. Unbeknownst to Mr. Razmi, a soldier present also was taking pictures, which were never published.
The caravan passed roughly 30 airport workers, both men say. Up front walked Mr. Razmi. In the rear, both men say, was Ali Karimi, one of the judge’s bodyguards, wearing white shoes, white pants, white shirt, sunglasses and twin hip holsters. After about 100 yards, an officer halted the condemned on a plain of dry dirt. All but one of the executioners tied about their own heads Iranian shawls called chafiyehs. Both the faces of the Shiites and the eyes of the Kurds were now concealed.
Mr. Karimi asked the prisoners if they had last words, the two journalists recall. The men didn’t, all silent save a man Mr. Bahrami later reported to be Essa Pirvali, who wept aloud. A sandwich maker, he belonged to no political party but possessed a handgun and had been accused of murder. “He was scared,” Mr. Razmi says. “He wouldn’t stand.” The soldiers instructed a fellow prisoner to hold him.
An afternoon sun shone behind the prisoners and Mr. Razmi reached for his 28mm lens. He sidled in behind members of the firing squad, who stood in brown leather boots laced to the calf. He thought, he says, only about “speed and angle.” The prisoners stood in plainclothes. The firing squad crouched in camouflage.
“Afrad mosallah!,” yelled the commanding officer, calling his troops to attention. His charges aimed their G3 rifles at the midsections of the men standing little more than a body’s length away.
Standing farthest to the right, Naser Salimi, an employee of the Sanandaj health department, raised his right hand to his chest. It was bandaged, injured in a street fight that had led to his sentencing, according to contemporary newspaper reports. Opposite him, the only soldier who wore no chafiyeh raised his rifle.
Mr. Razmi stood a few feet behind this unmasked gunman. He raised his camera. At 4:30 p.m., the command came to fire: “Atesh!” Eleven guns discharged. Eleven bodies dropped. “When they fell, it was dusty,” Mr. Razmi says. The photographer lowered his camera.
The soldiers eyed Mr. Karimi, the judge’s bodyguard, lifting a pistol off his right hip. Not all of the men were dead, the photographer recalls. The bodyguard leaned over Ahsan Nahid, the injured prisoner on the stretcher, and fired one bullet into his head. Mr. Razmi snapped his Nikon. Mr. Karimi stepped to the next man and shot him, too. He proceeded along — one bullet per body, both journalists say. (Recent efforts to locate Mr. Karimi were unsuccessful.)
WITHIN MINUTES, ambulances ferried away the 11 bodies, airport workers returned to work, the huddle of soldiers thinned and Mr. Razmi stowed his two rolls of Kodak 400 film in a pocket of his canvas bag. After a helicopter flight landed the pair too late to cover a second execution, Mr. Razmi left his colleague, flagged a passing minibus and returned to the airport in Sanandaj, where at 8 a.m. the only daily flight to Tehran departed.
The photographer fell asleep. He was awakened at a checkpoint by shouts from airport officers, the same men who had shared their lunch with him the previous afternoon as they awaited the Kurdish prisoners. “It’s me!” yelled Mr. Razmi. “Jahangir!” The men held their fire. Mr. Razmi told them he had film and an article that had to get back to Tehran. “I put it in an envelope and gave it to the flight attendant,” he says, needing to continue his work in the region.
Mr. Razmi called Ettela’at, which dispatched a courier to the airport. The man picked up the white envelope from Tehran airport and delivered it to the newspaper. Ali Akbar Moradi, head of the paper’s darkroom, says he knew the 70 exposures were taken by Mr. Razmi and that he turned them into two contact sheets with the help of a technician. An office runner gave them to the photo editor, the late Fereydoun Ebrahimzadeh, who marked the frames he wished turned into prints and delivered them to Mohammed Heydari, the chief Ettela’at editor, Mr. Heydari says.
Mr. Heydari was examining the layout of that day’s front page and flipped through the stills. At about noon, he says, he stopped, overwhelmed by a single image of the moment when some of the squadron had fired and some hadn’t. Bodies fell. Dust rose.
Mr. Heydari, then 35, had little time to think — the afternoon paper was about to go to print. He says he told himself that the country was conflicted over the killing of the Kurds and angry over censorship. He decided to publish the photograph, although not in the edition distributed in the Kurdistan province, where it would be tantamount to a call to arms. “Considering the political climate, I knew I could get away with it,” Mr. Heydari says.
The Ettela’at editor made another snap decision. The photograph would run with no credit. “I was aware that if I published his name, he would be in danger,” Mr. Heydari says. “I wanted to protect Razmi.”
By 2 p.m., newsstands across Tehran trumpeted word of the Kurdish executions. The banner headline read: “Forty People Executed in Sanandaj, Marivan and Saqqez.” The accompanying photograph was a sensation, the seven months of Iranian firing squads distilled to one image.
Copies of Ettela’at sold out and representatives of international news agencies hustled to Khayam Street to buy prints. The photo editor, Mr. Ebrahimzadeh, “sold it to everyone like he was selling French fries,” says Alfred Yaghobzadeh, 47, then a photographer for the Associated Press, now a photojournalist based in France.
The first to arrive at Ettela’at was Sajid Rizvi of United Press International. Mr. Rizvi, then 30, had seen the newspaper at his home, ordered a copy by phone and sped off in the company’s pistachio-colored sedan. He picked up the photo roughly 15 minutes later inside the Ettela’at newsroom.
“It was almost wet when I took it,” says Mr. Rizvi, now editor of an arts publishing house in London. “I don’t think I have ever seen a picture as moving as that,” he says. “It is a picture between life and death.”
Mr. Rizvi asked who had snapped it. “They said, ‘better not to give out the name of the photographer.’ ” Once home, he walked into the bathroom he had converted into a darkroom, dried the photo with a hairdryer, composed a caption on his yellow Olympus typewriter, phoned the UPI desk in Brussels and transmitted the print.
Genghis Seren, a photo editor in Brussels, sat transfixed beside the company UniFax. “The drama of that machine was that the picture took 15 minutes to complete,” recalls Mr. Seren, then 25 years old and in his first year at UPI. “It came a 10th of an inch after a 10th of an inch…. It was something!” Mr. Seren forwarded the photo to UPI bureaus in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, and to company headquarters in Manhattan.
“It was transmitted to us with no name,” says Larry DeSantis, the UPI managing editor who received the photo 11 stories above 42nd Street. “Not knowing who made it interested me.”
At about 3 p.m., several armed agents from the Islamic Revolutionary Council arrived at Ettela’at, ascended four flights and entered the office of the editor, Mr. Heydari. They asked for the negative of the photo and asked to speak with the photo editor, Mr. Heydari recalls.
Mr. Heydari refused. “I said, ‘No. I am the editor. I take full responsibility.’ ” Mr. Heydari says he told the men: “If I am arrested, the negative consequences will outweigh the effect of this photo.”
The chief agent backed off. Both men telephoned government and religious officials, and the judge who ordered the executions radioed the agent seated beside Mr. Heydari, the editor says.
Mr. Khalkhali, the judge, declared the photo a fabrication and told the agent to arrest the editor, Mr. Heydari says. He says he responded by offering to show the negatives to the agent “as long as you agree not to use force to confiscate them.”
The agent agreed and viewed the negatives with two fellow officials. “They were astonished,” recalls Mr. Heydari. The agent made another call and told Iran’s attorney general that “the newspaper has been considerate to only publish this one,” Mr. Heydari remembers. The agents left with one proviso: Upon their return from Kurdistan, Messrs. Bahrami and Razmi should come in for questioning.
THAT SAME DAY, Mr. DeSantis, the UPI editor, had prints of the photo distributed by motorcycle to the New York papers and by telephoto machine to thousands of papers across the country. On Aug. 29, the New York Times, Washington Post, Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin and the Daily Telegraph in London were among the many newspapers to run it. Nearly all credited UPI.
“Our play was fabulous,” exults Mr. DeSantis, now retired. “It was a once in a lifetime…. Like it was a movie set. One guy kneeling, aiming. One guy falling. A mass execution.”
Mr. Razmi remained in Kurdistan, where at a Sanandaj newsstand he came across a copy of Ettela’at featuring one of his other photos showing the blindfolded men standing in wait. He understood why his more incendiary photographs were unprinted but nonetheless was disappointed. “I expected my name to be published,” he says.
Two days later, reporter and photographer returned to the Ettela’at office in Sanandaj. The office manager lifted from his desk the Tehran edition of the paper that had reported the execution, they recall. He said copies brought to Kurdistan were selling for more than double the cover price. The manager was a Kurd and Mr. Razmi recalls him saying: ” ‘We have to build a statue of gold of you.’ And because of what he told me, I understood that this photo was dangerous.”
Close readers of Ettela’at could have surmised Mr. Razmi was the photographer. On Aug. 26, the day before the execution, the newspaper named him as one of three employees it had sent “to the Western portion of the country.” An Aug. 29, the day after the photo ran, the paper reported on its front page that he and Mr. Bahrami had been “sent to Kurdistan.”
Home in Tehran, after a long shower, Mr. Razmi spoke about the execution to his wife and again the next morning to curious colleagues in the newsroom. He says he asked Mr. Heydari why his photo had carried no credit and didn’t object when the editor explained his worry. “I told him jokingly that you would have also been executed in Kurdistan on the spot,” Mr. Heydari says.
Mr. Razmi walked to the newspaper darkroom and saw for the first time what had been the 18th exposure of his first roll of film. “There I realized what I had taken,” he says. Turning on the red safelights in the studio, the photographer made prints of eight stills and preserved on a contact sheet 27 of his 70 photographs.
Mr. Razmi asked the darkroom supervisor for his negatives and locked them in the middle of his three metal drawers together with his other prints. A few days later, he slipped the contact sheet and stills into the fold of a newspaper and hid them in his home, “somewhere no one would have noticed,” he says. The next morning, he returned to Kurdistan.
On Sept. 9, the Islamic Revolutionary Council published a notice in the Islamic Revolution newspaper: “we hereby draw your attention to the picture which was published on the front page of [Ettela’at] on 6/6/1358 and was objected to harshly by the public.” It continued: “If this occurs again, serious decisions will be made.”
A serious decision already had been made. The day before, the Foundation for the Disinherited — the holding company that in August had swallowed Kayhan, Iran’s largest paper — also seized Ettela’at. Overnight, the paper, privately held since 1920, became state-owned.
The image continued to spread. Reza Deghati, then 27, a free-lance Iranian photographer, had seen the photo. It is “the most stirring execution picture in the history of photojournalism, of the human being,” he says. Mr. Deghati says he procured five additional photos of the execution from an Ettela’at employee and mailed them to SIPA, the Paris agency that had been publishing his own photos since the revolution.
Goksin Sipahioglu says he received the prints from Mr. Deghati at his agency on Paris’s Rue Roquepine. Even though UPI had already published one, Michele Sola, photo editor of Paris Match magazine, paid 14,000 French francs (about $10,000 today) for the additional prints. Mr. Sipahioglu forwarded half that sum to Mr. Deghati in Tehran.
The magazine went on sale in Paris days before its Sept. 21, 1979, cover date. About 2,600 miles east, readers in Iran turned to page 66. Titled “Les Kurdes, sous les balles d’Allah” (“The Kurds, under Allah’s bullets”), the photos spread rapidly. People paid 20 times the cover price for the magazine, and dozens of Iranians tacked the photos about town.
No one, however, neither Mr. Razmi nor the Iranian brain trust, seemed to notice the magazine’s erroneous credit — “Reza (Sipa)” — printed in the lower left corner of the index page. “When someone sends a picture to us,” explains Mr. Sipahioglu, “we always credit him.”
Mr. Deghati says he sent SIPA a letter saying he didn’t take the photos and that SIPA sent out a news release via the AP retracting his name. Representatives at SIPA, Paris Match and the AP don’t recall Mr. Deghati clarifying the matter and didn’t find such a release in their archives.
Mr. Razmi returned from Kurdistan in late September and Mr. Ebrahimzadeh approached him at his desk. The photo editor asked for the negatives of the 70 photos and extended his hand. “I couldn’t protest,” Mr. Razmi says. “It belonged to him.” He unlocked his metal drawer. Mr. Ebrahimzadeh told the photographer the police wished to speak to him in Tehran’s Evin prison, Mr. Razmi recalls.
Mr. Razmi says he arrived at the prison with Mr. Bahrami and two Ettela’at editors, and quickly found himself alone with the late Asadollah Lajevardi, a future warden of the prison already notorious for torturing inmates. As part of his newspaper duties, Mr. Razmi had often photographed men housed in Evin whom the state would soon execute. “I had a right to be nervous,” he says.
Mr. Lajevardi asked him who had photographed the Sanandaj execution, Mr. Razmi says. When Mr. Razmi said he had, the guard asked why he had hidden his negatives in the drawer. “So that no one would take them,” Mr. Razmi recalls answering.
He told Mr. Lajevardi that he had permission from the judge to shoot the scene and that he hadn’t sent the pictures overseas. The interrogation was soft, and it became apparent to Mr. Razmi that he wouldn’t be harmed. Mr. Razmi returned to the paper, and a few weeks later was consumed with work when, on Nov. 4, Iranian students took hostages inside the U.S. Embassy.
The next month, UPI managing editor Mr. DeSantis sat down to submit his newswire’s best work of the year for awards. At the top of his list was the execution photo. “I was a very good picture editor,” Mr. DeSantis says, “but on this one you could be a dumb dog and pick this out.”
That neither he nor anyone at UPI knew who took the photo was of little concern. The agency had been the first to provide it to the press and presented it as the work of an unnamed UPI photographer, which, says Mr. DeSantis, he assumed it was. “It came on the UPI wire,” he explains.
“Because of the present unrest in Iran,” wrote the editor to the Pulitzer committee, “the name of the photographer cannot be revealed at this time.”
Mr. Razmi didn’t know his photograph had been nominated for the Pulitzer. He didn’t know the jury nominating finalists for Spot News Photography was overwhelmed by the entry UPI titled, “Firing Squad in Iran.” Robert Duffy, then an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and chairman of the jury, says he informally lobbied a member of the Pulitzer Board that spring to pick the photo. “We were hell-bent on giving the prize to ‘Anonymous,’ ” he says.
On April 14, 1980, seven days after the U.S. severed diplomatic relations with Iran, ‘Anonymous’ won the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Heydari told Mr. Razmi the news. But the same people who, in effect, had ordered the execution now owned his employer. Mr. Heydari says he was fired two months later. Representatives of the paper cancelled an August 2005 appointment at their Tehran head office and declined to be interviewed for this article.
Ettela’at didn’t report news of its prize-winning employee. Mr. Razmi says he “didn’t have the guts to celebrate.”
UPI did. The newswire flew its Tehran bureau chief Mr. Rizvi to the U.S. and had him speak to subscribers. “They were trying to show me off,” he says. Asked about the anonymous photographer, Mr. Rizvi recalls answering: “Eventually it will be revealed.”
IN THE SPRING, Ettela’at promoted Mr. Razmi, then 32, to photo editor. Iraq attacked Iran in September and Mr. Razmi covered the war. A mortar deafened his right ear in 1987. When months later Ettela’at asked him to work in Iraq, he decided he was tired of war. He quit his employer of 15 years, sold the home he had built by himself in a leafy neighborhood of northern Tehran, bought an apartment and opened a photography studio.
Forty years old, the photographer had come full circle, developing film and shooting portraits as he had as a boy. Says Mr. Razmi: “I was looking for a peaceful life.”
Mr. Razmi called the studio “Abgineh,” the Farsi word for glassware, which he says connoted for him the clarity of water. He didn’t advertise the studio. Still, six days a week, brides in gowns flocked to the shop, looked at Mr. Razmi and smiled.
Mr. Razmi thought often of Sanandaj. In his shop, he hung a large portrait of a boy wearing a Kurdish shawl and sash. Every summer, during the month of Shahrivar, he locked himself in his bedroom and looked at the execution photographs he had hidden.
On Aug. 3, 1997, three weeks before Shahrivar, Mohammad Khatami took office as president of Iran and hired Hashem Taleb to head his public relations. Mr. Razmi had met Mr. Taleb years before and saw a business opportunity. He drove to the office of the president, pronounced the headshots of Iranian officials unbefitting their rank and “suggested I take photographs of the president and the cabinet,” he recalls. Mr. Taleb hired him.
Days later, Mr. Razmi, the first “Official Photographer of the President and his Cabinet,” set up his flash umbrellas inside the Iranian presidential residence at the intersection of Palestine and Pasteur streets. He shot pictures of the new government. He developed the color portraits. Before mailing the prints to the president’s office, he stamped his name on the back of each.
The name Jahangir Razmi, however, remained unconnected to his most famous photograph. Monir Nahid, mother of two of the executed men, who has since settled in Los Angeles, says over time, “10, 20 people came to me and said, ‘I took the picture.’ ”
Among them, say Mrs. Nahid and her daughter, was Mr. Deghati, the stringer who in 1979 sent the photo to Paris Match. Mr. Deghati, who left Iran in 1981 and today lives in France working for Webistan Photo Agency, says he has never met the Nahids. Last September, Paris Match magazine quoted him saying he took the photo, adding in French that Mr. Khomeini “was furious.” Mr. Deghati says he knows Mr. Razmi took the photo, and that the magazine misquoted him.
Mr. Razmi says he first learned about a decade ago that others were claiming his work. Kaveh Golestan, Iran’s best-known photographer, reported to him that Mr. Deghati had said as much at a European photo exhibit. Mr. Razmi didn’t know that Mr. Golestan also had taken credit for the photo in classes he taught, according to several of his photojournalism students at Tehran University.
When Mr. Golestan died in 2003, after stepping on a landmine in Iraq, newspapers around the world reported that he had won a Pulitzer Prize. His widow, Hengameh Golestan, says her late husband never took credit for the photo and that the obituaries were mistaken. Mrs. Golestan says she knows Mr. Razmi took the photo.
On the fourth floor of a cement apartment building in northern Tehran, Mr. Razmi sat on a dimpled leather couch. His living room walls were barren of his work. Beside him on his couch, his son Ali sat rapt, tamping down a pinch of Cavendish tobacco in his father’s pipe. Mr. Razmi struck a match and puffed.
“My sons have told me a lot of times that I should go and prove that I am the photographer,” Mr. Razmi said, his voice soft and his eyes cast down. “I said, ‘No. Better not.’ ”
It is understandable why he feared claiming credit for such a public indictment of the Islamic Revolution. The hardline Mr. Ahmadinejad, elected in June 2005, shuttered Shargh, the country’s last large reformist newspaper, three months ago. Mr. Razmi also was still the official government photographer and returned the next morning to the presidential residence to shoot Mr. Ahmadinejad’s cabinet, including the defense minister who in 1979 helped quell the Kurds.
But Mr. Razmi, who is now 58, said part of him always wanted to step forward. He was disappointed when he first saw that his photo didn’t carry his name. He was irked when others took credit, people who “never feel the danger,” he said. And all the time, he was weighted by his secret, that of an ordinary man witness to extraordinary events. “Without this picture,” he said, “I wouldn’t be anything.”
Emboldened by time and dismayed by the opportunism of his fellow photographers, Mr. Razmi decided the moment was right to tell his tale after this newspaper approached him. “My name should be there,” he said.
Minced lamb and baghali polo — a dish of green rice and beans — awaited Mr. Razmi at home, and he sat down to eat with his wife and sons, his sister, two nephews and his father-in-law. They talked about Mr. Razmi identifying himself, for the first time, as the anonymous photographer.
Mr. Razmi had done nothing wrong, they reasoned. He photographed the execution with the permission of the judge. He turned over his negatives to the photo editor. He described his work to the prison guard. He wasn’t the one who sent the six images abroad. He didn’t earn a single rial or credit from his photo, the rights to which had passed from UPI to the Bettmann Archive to Corbis Corp.
The family approved of his decision to come forward. Voicing hope that it wouldn’t harm Mr. Razmi, eight people around the table spoke as one: “Inshallah,” if Allah wills it.
Past midnight, Mr. Razmi retreated to a bedroom closet and lifted his canvas camera bag by the faded strap that had hung over his shoulder during the 1979 revolution. Here in pale black ink on the inside flap of a pocket was written in Farsi, “Jahangir Razmi, Ettela’at, 328 331” — the newsroom number to phone in the event of his death.
Mr. Razmi returned to his living room. He had unearthed his contact sheet and stills for his annual look back at the execution. “I have pictures that have never been published,” he said.
The photographer held in his right hand a sheaf of black-and-white photographs, 27 images that were 26 years, five days old. He withdrew from a plastic sleeve a furling photo of the sandwich maker who cried as he waited to be shot.
Mr. Razmi thrust it forward. “Who has this picture?” he asked, his voice rising. “Nobody.” He thrust forward a photo of the dust that rose over 11 fallen men. “Who has this picture?” he asked. “Nobody.” He thrust forward a photo of the bodyguard surveying the men he had shot. “Who has this picture?” he asked. “Nobody.”
Mr. Razmi returned the photos to the sleeve that had held them since 1979. And for the first time since he had secreted them home in a folded newspaper, he put them in a Samsonite briefcase he had long used to store chosen photos from his career.
Revolution, civil war and the horseman of the Steppe
The Russian Civil War was one of the great catastrophes of the twentieth century, although it is often overshadowed by the world wars that framed it. Between 1917 and 1922, across the vast territories of the collapsing Russian Empire, perhaps ten million people died from combat, famine, disease, terror, and reprisal. Reds fought Whites, Whites fought Greens, and Greens fought everyone. Autocrats fought anarchists, nationalists fought internationalists, peasants fought cities, and villages fought armies.
The conflict stretched from Poland to Vladivostok, from the Arctic Ocean to the Caucasus, and drew into its vortex Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Cossacks, Tatars, Armenians, Greeks, Mennonites, Germans, Czechs, Poles, and dozens of other peoples caught between competing visions of the future. and foreign powers inserted themselves into the chaos including Britain, Australia, the United States, and Japan.
As I wrote in an earlier essay, Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war, this was not one war so much as many wars occurring simultaneously. It was less a civil war than a kind of World War 1.2: a continental struggle in which the old order died, and several incompatible new worlds attempted to be born.
The civil war was infamous for its cruelty, Fratricidal wars are bound to be cruel because of the lack of definable front lines, because of their instant extension into civilian life, and because of the terrible hatreds and suspicions which they engender. The fighting ranged right across the Eurasian landmass was violent beyond belief, especially the unspeakable cruelty of the Cossack atamans in Siberia.
All too often, whites represented the worst examples of inhumanity, yet on that score, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable. Reds and Whites are both revealed as more than comfortable burning villages, shooting traitors, suspected or real, and torturing and massacring prisoners, and men women and children caught in the crossfire.
There were many instances of racist violence mainly on the White side – particularly towards Jews. The Whites’ antipathy towards Jews was to some degree due to their perception that most senior Bolshevik were Jewish, but mostly it was that old devil that never went away, antisemitism. Retreat from the major cities brought out the worse in the Whites, with terrible massacres of Jews – although they were not the only perpetrators. It is estimated that there were some 1300 anti-Semitic pogroms in the Ukraine during the civil war, with some 50000 to 60000 killed by both sides. There were pogroms in Belarus also, but these were not nearly as murderous as in Ukraine. A Soviet report of 1920 mentions 150,000 dead and as many again badly injured.
Among the prophets, executioners, bandits, ideologues, adventurers, warlords, saints, opportunists and dreamers thrown up by that upheaval, few were more remarkable than Nestor Ivanovych Makhno: charismatic Ukrainian anarchist insurgent, peasant revolutionary, cavalry commander, military opportunist, libertarian idealist, and larger-than-life folk hero.
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he survived. He survived the firing squads, the battlefields, the prisons, the epidemics, and the purges. Survived the tuberculous contracted in jail before the revolution and the many wounds inflicted throughout the war. The man who fought Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Ukrainian nationalists, Cossacks, White armies, Red armies and assorted local warlords eventually died not with a rifle in his hand but in a Paris hospital bed, impoverished and tubercular, an exile far from the black-earth steppe that had made him famous.
Or perhaps infamous – because Makhno belongs to that category of historical characters who stubbornly resist classification. The Whites hated him because he was a revolutionary peasant insurgent. The Bolsheviks hated him because he was a revolutionary peasant insurgent who refused to obey them. Ukrainian nationalists distrusted him because he placed anarchism before nationalism. Landowners feared him. Foreign occupiers hunted him. Even fellow anarchists sometimes regarded him with suspicion. Yet somehow this peasant from Huliaipole (now in the Zaporizhzhia Oblastof Ukraine) acquired an almost mythological stature.
A century later, artists still paint him, films are made about him, rock bands commemorate him. political activists still claim him, and historians still argue about him. Wikipedia’s entry about Nestor Makhno, is long, thorough, and extensively detailed, but makes for exciting reading with its comprehensive account of his colourful career during, before and after the civil war, and even, beyond the grave.
The two manga-style illustrations that prompted these reflections are themselves evidence of that enduring fascination.
Nestor Makhno, the Legend
The first thing one notices is that the artists are not attempting strict historical realism. The Makhno of these images is tall, windswept, and handsome, somewhere between a Cossack ataman, a samurai, and a western gunslinger. The black banner streams dramatically behind him. His gaze is fixed on some distant horizon. One expects a swelling Russian chorale to surge in the background panning across limitless grasslands.
The real Makhno was another man. Contemporary photographs show a relatively short, compact man, often clean-shaven, intense rather than imposing. His contemporaries remembered not his stature but his energy. He seemed perpetually in motion. Charismatic, restless, impulsive, brave, reckless, idealistic and pragmatic in equal measure. The sort of man who appears during periods of social collapse and seems almost generated by the turbulence itself.
Yet the artists understand something important: historical memory rarely preserves people as they actually were. It preserves them as they are remembered. The artwork therefore depicts not so much the historical Makhno as “Makhno the Legend”, the anarchist rebel rider of the Ukrainian steppe. And legends tell us as much about those who create them as they do about their subjects.
The flag in the first picture identifies his force as the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. One speech bubble proclaims: “My ne khochemo zavoyovaty vladu – my khochemo zruynuvaty yiyi nazavzhdy!” – “We do not want to seize power- we want to destroy it forever!” A poster declares: “No to authority! No to the Party! No to the State! Long live the free community!” Another slogan advocates “Free councils of free people.”
One can almost hear every bureaucrat in history grinding their teeth. For Makhno was that rarest of political creatures: an anarchist who genuinely seemed to mean it. Here was one who would have signed to Denearys Targaryen’s vow not to join the wheel but to break it.
A Kaleidoscope of Lost Futures
The popular memory of the Russian Civil War tends to reduce it to a struggle between Reds and Whites. Bolsheviks versus monarchists. Revolution versus reaction. Reality was considerably messier. The conflict resembled a kaleidoscope more than a chessboard.
The collapse of the Romanov Empire unleashed a bewildering array of competing visions. Monarchists wanted restoration. Liberals hoped for constitutional government. Socialist Revolutionaries dreamed of a peasant democracy. Bolsheviks sought proletarian dictatorship – with themselves as it unchallenged ruler. National movements emerged across the empire’s periphery. Foreign powers intervened. Countless local strongmen pursued their own ambitions. Entire regions changed hands repeatedly.
The lands between the Dnieper and the Don were particularly complex. They were never inhabited solely by Russians and Ukrainians in the neat modern national sense. These were borderlands in the deepest historical meaning of the word. Cossacks rode the steppe. Mennonite farmers cultivated colonies founded generations earlier. Jews lived in market towns and cities. Greeks inhabited settlements along the coast. Tartars maintained ancient communities. Armenians traded. Germans farmed. Merchants, smugglers, soldiers, pilgrims, revolutionaries and dreamers moved constantly through the landscape.
Every modern nation prefers neat origin stories. But history seldom cooperates.
Makhno emerged from this world of overlapping identities and competing loyalties. His Free Territory in southeastern Ukraine represented perhaps the most improbable political experiment of the entire Civil War: an attempt to create a libertarian society amidst one of the bloodiest upheavals in modern history.
Whether it could ever have survived is doubtful. The twentieth century belonged to states, bureaucracies, standing armies, intelligence services, and industrial administration. It rewarded those who could organise railways, requisition grain, count factory output and maintain prisons. Anarchism, though long part of Tsarist Russia’s political kaleidoscope, was a forlorn hope.
Makhno the Anarchist war lord had a precarious relationship with the ultimately ascendant Bolsheviks. Vladimir Lenin at one time looked upon him favourably. Leon Trotsky, commanding the Red Army, regarded him as a dangerous adventurer, an undisciplined partisan commander whose independence threatened revolutionary unity. Makhno regarded Trotsky as a would-be dictator masquerading as a liberator. Both men were, in their own ways, correct.
Their uneasy alliance against General Wrangel’s White Army in Crimea remains one of those moments when history briefly forces bitter enemies onto the same side before restoring them to mutual hostility. The Makhnovists helped defeat the Whites, but once that task was accomplished, the Bolsheviks turned on their troublesome allies.
The logic was almost inevitable. The Bolsheviks sought power. Makhno sought freedom from power. Those two projects could coexist only temporarily.
My old tutor Tibor Szamuely would undoubtedly have seen the episode as another illustration of what he called the Russian Tradition. Revolutions changed slogans and symbols, but the underlying gravitational pull of centralised authority remained remarkably constant. The old autocracy vanished. New forms emerged. Yet power continued to accumulate at the centre. The names changed. The structure endured. [See, in In That Howling Infinite, The Russian Tradition – Russia, Ukraine and Tibor Szamuely]
Yet for a brief moment Makhno’s movement offered a glimpse of a different possibility. That possibility was ultimately crushed, first by necessity, then by power, and finally by history itself.
Makhno and Anarchism
Makhno did not emerge from a vacuum. Like so much in Russian and Ukrainian history, he was both a product of his time and the inheritor of a much older tradition. The black banners that fluttered above the villages of southern Ukraine during the Civil War carried ideas whose roots stretched back decades, even centuries, nourished by peasant rebellion, intellectual dissent, and a deep suspicion of distant authority.
Russian anarchism emerged in the nineteenth century as a radical critique of both Tsarist autocracy and the centralising tendencies of socialism. Its two great theorists were Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, figures who remain among the most influential anarchist thinkers in history. Bakunin, the aristocratic revolutionary who spent years in prison and exile, rejected all forms of state power, arguing that liberation could never be achieved through a dictatorship, even one claiming to act on behalf of the workers. Kropotkin, the geographer and scientist, developed a more constructive vision, emphasising voluntary cooperation, mutual aid, and federations of free communities. Against the harsh Social Darwinism fashionable in his day, Kropotkin argued that cooperation was as important to survival as competition. Human beings, he believed, were capable of organising society without kings, bureaucrats, or party commissars.
These ideas found fertile ground in the Russian Empire. The vastness of the state, its bureaucratic inefficiency, and its often brutal methods of rule encouraged a culture of resistance. Anarchism attracted intellectuals, workers, and, perhaps most significantly, peasants. Long before Marxism became dominant, populist movements such as the Narodniks had romanticised the peasant commune as a foundation for a more egalitarian society. Although not anarchists in the strict sense, they helped create a political culture in which local self-government and suspicion of central authority were deeply valued.
The revolutionary years between 1905 and 1921 provided anarchism with its greatest opportunity. Across the empire, workers established councils, peasants seized land, and local militias sprang up with little regard for official authority. In the great cities anarchist groups were active among factory workers and sailors. The Kronstadt sailors, who would later revolt against Bolshevik rule in 1921 under the slogan “Soviets without Bolsheviks,” reflected many anarchist principles even if they were not uniformly anarchist in ideology.
It was in this turbulent environment that Nestor Makhno emerged. Born in 1888 into a poor peasant family in Huliaipole, a town in the steppe lands of southeastern Ukraine, Makhno encountered anarchism as a young man. Arrested for revolutionary activities after the 1905 Revolution, he spent years in Tsarist prisons where he came under the influence of anarchist intellectuals and immersed himself in the writings of Bakunin and Kropotkin. Prison served as his university.
When the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, Makhno returned home and transformed theory into practice. His achievement was remarkable. Amid the chaos of civil war he helped create what became known as the. Makhnovshchina (loosely translated as “Makhno movement”), a vast anarchist experiment encompassing large areas of southern Ukraine. Villages elected their own councils. Land was redistributed. Local communities enjoyed a degree of autonomy rare in wartime. Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine ,often called the Black Army, defended these territories against a bewildering array of enemies: German occupiers, Ukrainian nationalists, White armies, and eventually the Bolsheviks themselves.
Military historians continue to marvel at Makhno’s campaigns. His forces perfected the use of the tachanka – a machine gun mounted on a horse-drawn cart – which allowed extraordinary mobility across the open steppe. His army repeatedly outmanoeuvred larger and better-equipped opponents. In 1919 and 1920, Makhno’s forces played a crucial role in defeating General Anton Denikin and later Baron Wrangel, two of the most formidable White commanders. Ironically, these victories helped secure the survival of the Bolshevik regime that would ultimately destroy the anarchist movement.
Makhno was not alone. Other anarchists left significant marks upon the revolutionary era. Volin (Vsevolod Eikhenbaum), an intellectual and organiser, sought to develop anarchist theory and worked closely with the Makhnovists. Lev Chernyi advocated individualist anarchism and was later executed by the Bolsheviks. Grigori Maximoff became a leading anarcho-syndicalist thinker in exile. Internationally, figures such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, both born in the Russian Empire, carried anarchist ideas to global audiences and later became disillusioned critics of Bolshevik authoritarianism.
Yet none combined military leadership, mass peasant support, and revolutionary vision quite as successfully as Makhno. His closest parallels are perhaps not found in Russia but elsewhere: Emiliano Zapata in Mexico, Buenaventura Durruti in Spain, or even the medieval peasant rebels who periodically erupted across Europe. Like them, Makhno embodied a recurring historical phenomenon: the attempt to create freedom from below rather than impose it from above.
The tragedy of Russian anarchism was that it found itself squeezed between two powerful forces. The Whites regarded it as revolutionary chaos; the Bolsheviks regarded it as a rival source of legitimacy. Both sought centralised authority, disciplined armies, and hierarchical control. Anarchism offered something messier and more elusive: local autonomy, voluntary association, and a belief that ordinary people could govern themselves. In the brutal arithmetic of the Civil War, such ideas proved difficult to defend.
Yet the legacy endured. Makhno became a folk hero to some, a bandit to others, and a symbol of resistance to authority for generations of radicals. His black flag bearing the slogan “We wish for freedom” represented more than a military movement. It expressed a persistent current in Russian and Ukrainian history – a stubborn refusal to accept that power must always flow from the centre, from the capital, from the party, or from the state. In a land famous for tsars, commissars, and strongmen, that may have been the most revolutionary idea of all.
Makhno (centre) with other Insurgent command staff in Huliaipole (1919)
The Black Banner and the Long Shadow of Empire
Makhno’s story emerged from one of the great turning points of modern history: the collapse of empires. The Russian Civil War was not simply a struggle between Reds and Whites. It was also a struggle over what would replace the Romanov Empire. Across the former imperial territories, peoples sought to determine their own futures. Finns, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians and many others attempted to carve nation-states from the wreckage of imperial collapse. Some succeeded. Others failed. All became caught up in the wider maelstrom.
The tragedy of the twentieth century is that many of those hard-won freedoms proved fleeting. The new states born from the ruins of the Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Ottoman empires found themselves trapped between larger and more powerful forces. First came the Nazi storm. Then came the Soviet one. Much of Central and Eastern Europe spent decades living under one form of domination or another. The promise of national self-determination so evident in the years immediately following the First World War often ended in occupation, dictatorship or subordination.
Yet history did not stop there.
The Soviet Union eventually followed the Romanov Empire into the graveyard of failed political systems. One by one, nations that had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain re-emerged as sovereign states. Flags long hidden returned to public squares. Languages once marginalised regained official status. Historical memories suppressed for decades resurfaced. The old imperial map dissolved once again.
Seen from this perspective, the present war in Ukraine is not simply a dispute over territory. It is part of a much longer historical argument about empire, sovereignty and identity.
A century after Reds, Whites and Greens fought across the same black-earth steppe, war once more rages in the lands where Makhno made his name. Huliaipole itself has found itself close to the front line. Mariupol, Melitopol, Berdyansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson appear both in histories of the Civil War and in contemporary battlefield reports. The same landscape that once carried cavalry columns, tachanki those iconic horse drawn machine gun wagons )and, as this is Russia, sleighs), and armoured trains now carries tanks, drones, missile batteries and mechanised brigades.
The present conflict is not a replay of the Russian Civil War. Historical analogies are useful servants but dangerous masters. Yet the recurrence is striking. Once again Ukraine finds itself at the centre of a struggle shaped by the afterlife of empire.
At its heart lies a question that has echoed through East European history for more than a century: who has the right to determine Ukraine’s future?
An increasingly irredentist Russia, drawing heavily upon imperial memory and historical grievance, has launched an assault upon a former imperial possession that insists upon its own sovereignty and right to choose its own path. The arguments are framed in terms of security, history, ethnicity and geopolitics. Beneath them lies a much older issue. The Russian Empire fell. The Soviet Empire followed it. Must Ukraine forever remain part of another state’s historical imagination, or may it exist fully as itself?
It is impossible today to read about the Russian Civil War without occasionally experiencing moments of historical déjà vu. The geography is hauntingly familiar. Kharkiv. Kherson. Mariupol. Melitopol. Odesa. Kyiv. A century ago, armies advanced and retreated across these landscapes. Reds, Whites, Greens, nationalists, foreign interventionists and local militias fought for possession of the same territory. Entire populations found themselves trapped between competing visions of political destiny.
The circumstances are very different today and historical analogies always have limits. Yet the persistence of geography and geopolitics is striking. The lands between the Dnieper and the Don remain what they have long been: a frontier between competing narratives of the past and competing visions of the future.The same rivers flow. The same cities endure. The same questions of identity, sovereignty, memory and belonging continue to reverberate across the region.
History does not repeat itself exactly. But it often revisits old addresses.
One suspects Makhno would have found the question both familiar and irritating.He was never a nationalist in the conventional sense. Unlike Bandera and later Ukrainian nationalists, Makhno did not fight for a Ukrainian nation-state. He fought for something simultaneously larger and smaller: local autonomy, peasant self-government and anarchist freedom. He distrusted all states, whether Russian, Ukrainian, Bolshevik, White, German or otherwise.
This has made his legacy awkward for modern Ukraine. States generally prefer heroes who wanted states. Makhno wanted free councils of free people.
As a consequence, he occupies an unusual place in Ukrainian memory. Unlike Bandera or Shukhevych, he has never become a central pillar of official state mythology. Unlike the controversial legacy of the OUN-UPA or the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, debates surrounding Makhno are not primarily about nationalism. Instead, he exists in several overlapping forms at once: the historical insurgent commander, the libertarian icon celebrated by anarchists across the world, the regional folk hero of southern Ukraine, and increasingly, the son of Ukraine who resisted domination from distant centres of power.
None of these versions fully captures the man.
The historical Makhno remains elusive. His movement opposed antisemitic pogroms more consistently than many contemporary forces and included Jews within its ranks, yet it operated amidst the appalling violence and carnage of the Civil War and was never entirely untouched by it. His Free Territory represented one of the most ambitious anarchist experiments in modern history, yet it was also shaped by the brutal necessities of war. Admirers romanticise him. Critics emphasise the contradictions. Both have evidence on their side.
Perhaps that ambiguity explains his enduring fascination.
The unknown artist who created the image at the head of this essay gave his Makhno a modern Tryzub or trident belt buckle, a symbol of today’s Ukrainian resistance and resilience. It is a striking touch and a thoroughly anachronistic one. The symbol derives from the seals of Volodymyr the Great and modern Ukrainian statehood. Makhno himself never wore it.
The artist is making a statement. This is not merely Makhno the anarchist. This is Makhno the Ukrainian hero. The image therefore fuses three different figures into one. There is the historical insurgent Makhno of the 1918-21 Civil War. There is the anarchist her of libertarian mythology. And there is the modern Ukrainian patriot Makhno recruited into the story of national identity – retrospectively enlisted into a national story that he himself might have regarded with considerable scepticism. He spent much of his life rejecting national labels in favour of anarchist ones.
The anachronisms are historically dubious but symbolically powerful. But history rarely asks permission before appropriating its characters in an ongoing contest over memory.
Makhno in Red Army uniform, 1919
Twilight in Paris
And then there is the final act.
What happens after the war is over? Most stories conclude when the hero rides away. Real life begins afterwards. Makhno’s cavalry charges, victories, defeats and escapes belong to legend. The more intriguing question is what became of the dream once the banners were lowered.
Defeated but not destroyed, Nestor Makhno escaped the fate that overtook so many of his contemporaries. Unlike countless White and Red commanders, he did not perish on a battlefield, before a firing squad, or later in Stalin’s Great Terror. Unlike John Brown, Custer, and Davy Crockett or the Australians Ned Kelly and another horseman Harry “the Breaker” Morant, he did not die with his boots on. Miraculously, given the odds against him, he survived.
And improbably, the horseman of the steppe ended his days in Paris.
One imagines him there during the 1920s and early 1930s, sitting in smoky cafés among White émigrés, ex-Bolsheviks, anarchists, monarchists, refugees and stateless wanderers arguing about futures that had already vanished. The thunder of cavalry had faded into memory. The revolutionary epic had dissolved into reminiscence.
Nestor Makhno died on 25 July 1934 at the age of forty-five, worn down by tuberculosis, old wounds and years of hardship and, latterly, poverty. He was cremated and his ashes placed in the columbarium of Père Lachaise Cemetery. Not beneath a black banner. Not in the black earth of the Ukrainian steppe. Not in the town where his rebellion began. His ashes were placed not in the Ukrainian black earth but in niche 6686, a small compartment among thousands of others.
There is something wonderfully ironic, literary even, about that. The anti-clerical anarchist who spent his life fighting states, hierarchies and institutions, who once commanded tens of thousands of insurgents and rode across southern Ukraine pursued by enemies on every side, ends his journey among the famous dead of France, surrounded by poets, musicians, revolutionaries and dreamers.
History possesses a sense of humour.
Yet perhaps the final irony belongs to memory itself. For the world has turned another circle since his death.
The Black Army vanished and the Free Territory of the Makhnovshchina disappeared. They survive only in memory. Stalin’s Soviet Union rose and fell. The nations that struggled for freedom amidst the ruins of empire endured decades beneath first Nazi and then Soviet domination before re-emerging as sovereign states. The world that produced Makhno passed into history, and now, in the lands where Makhno once rode beneath a black banner, another war is being fought over questions of empire, identity, memory and self-determination.
What would Nestor Makhno make of it all? We cannot know. But one suspects he would recognise the landscape immediately. And perhaps that is why he refuses to stay buried. The ashes remain in Père Lachaise. The legend still rides the steppe.
There is a Russian word, toska, which Nabokov famously described as a spiritual anguish without precise object. A longing for something absent. A yearning that cannot quite be named. One suspects Makhno understood it. So did Chekhov. So did many of the exiles who haunted Paris in those years. For what is exile if not a prolonged conversation with vanished possibilities?
The revolutionary epic dissolved into memoirs, arguments and recollections. The thunder of cavalry became stories told over coffee and cigarettes. The dream survived. The dreamers grew old.
Yet Makhno remains. Not exactly as he was. Not exactly as he would have wished to be remembered. But alive nevertheless in paintings, songs, novels, political arguments, historical debates, and manga-inspired artwork.
The artist who gave him a Tryzub belt buckle and the physique of a cinematic hero understands something essential. Historical memory is not an archive. It is a conversation between past and present. Each generation creates the figures it needs. And so the anarchist who rejected states has become part of a national story. The peasant insurgent has become a folk hero. The historical man has become a legend.
The ashes rest quietly in Père Lachaise. The legend still rides the steppe. And somewhere beyond the horizon, beneath a black banner snapping in the wind, Nestor Makhno continues his endless charge toward a freedom that history never quite allowed him to reach.
For the dear departed, Père Lachaise is the best address in Paris. Some 300,000 people reste ici. A cavalcade of French cultural and political history, with a few foreign entombments, including the playwright Oscar Wild and Doors front-man and zeitgeist icon Jim Morrison.
I have always loved the place. I have wandered its avenues among the celebrated and the forgotten, the visited and the unvisited. It occurs to me that perhaps there is a verse yet to be written about those whose names draw no pilgrims and whose flowers have long since withered. Next time I find myself there, I think I shall seek out niche 6686 and offer a quiet dobryi den to the old anarchist.
The singers, and the dancers, and the actors, and the chancers,
The rebels and the statesmen, and the fallen communards,
Napoleonic Generals and politicians’ wives.
The poets and the dreamers, all those other famous lives.
Paul Hemphill, Chanson – living next to Jim
Coda: The Wall
History occasionally produces coincidences so perfect that a novelist would be accused of over-writing them.
Nestor Makhno spent his final years in Paris and today rests in the columbarium of Père Lachaise Cemetery. Visitors come to see Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Édith Piaf, Chopin, Proust and a host of other luminaries. Few seek out the old anarchist from Huliaipole. Yet not far from where his ashes lie stands one of the most potent revolutionary monuments in Europe: Le Mur des Fédérés, the Wall of the Federals.
It was here, on 28 May 1871, that the last defenders of the Paris Commune made their final stand. After a week of savage street fighting- the Semaine Sanglante, the Bloody Week – surviving Communards retreated through the eastern districts of Paris, fighting among the tombs and avenues of Père Lachaise itself. Cornered among the graves and monuments, they were overwhelmed. One hundred and forty-seven prisoners were lined up against the wall and shot. Thousands more would be executed in the days that followed.
The image possesses an almost unbearable symbolism. Revolutionaries making their last stand in a cemetery, fighting among the dead before joining them.
For later generations of socialists, communists and anarchists, the Paris Commune became something far greater than its brief seventy-two-day existence. Marx regarded it as the first example of proletarian government. Lenin studied it obsessively. Trotsky drew military lessons from its failure. Bolshevik revolutionaries saw in the Commune both an inspiration and a warning. It represented what revolution could achieve, but also what happened when revolution hesitated.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 they consciously invoked the Commune’s memory. Lenin famously noted with satisfaction when the Soviet regime survived longer than the Commune’s seventy-two days. Soviet propaganda elevated the Communards into secular saints of the revolutionary tradition. Streets, factories and institutions were named in their honour. Their red banner became one of the sacred relics of international socialism.
The symbolism endured even into the Space Age. The Soviet Union, which liked to present itself as the culmination of all previous revolutionary struggles, repeatedly invoked the Commune as a precursor to October 1917. A banner associated with the Paris Commune was ceremonially carried aboard an early Soviet space mission – a remarkable journey for a symbol born in the barricades of nineteenth-century Paris. One could scarcely imagine a more dramatic arc: from the cobblestones of Belleville to orbit around the Earth.
And here, perhaps, lies the final irony.
The Commune inspired the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks built the Soviet Union. Makhno spent much of his life fighting the Bolsheviks. Yet in death he came to rest within walking distance of the Wall of the Federals, among the ghosts of the very revolutionaries whose memory helped shape the revolutionary tradition that ultimately hunted him into exile.
The layers fold into one another like a Russian matryoshka doll. Open Makhno and one finds the Civil War. Open the Civil War and one finds the Revolution. Open the Revolution and one finds the Commune. Open the Commune and one finds the old dreams of liberty, equality and fraternity that first burst forth in revolutionary France. Each generation inherits the visions of those who came before, and each generation remakes them, sometimes beyond recognition.
One wonders what Makhno would have made of the Wall. He might have admired the courage of the Communards while distrusting those who later appropriated their memory. He might have reflected that revolutions, like nations, are often most attractive in defeat. Victors build institutions. Martyrs become legends.
And perhaps there is another lesson in Père Lachaise itself.
The cemetery gathers together monarchists and republicans, communists and anarchists, believers and atheists, poets and soldiers, dreamers and executioners. The quarrels that once seemed world-shattering now coexist in uneasy silence beneath the trees. The dead no longer argue.
Yet their stories continue to speak.
So when I eventually return to Père Lachaise and seek out niche 6686, I shall also walk to the Wall of the Federals and salute the ghosts of the old revolution. Between them lies much of the history of the modern age: revolution and reaction, hope and disappointment, dreams of freedom and the realities of power. The Communards fell there. Makhno rests nearby. The Soviet Union that claimed their inheritance has itself vanished into history.
And still the questions remain. The wall stands. The ashes remain. The legend rides on.
Le Mur des Fédérés, Pere Lachaise
Epilogue. Midnight in Paris (with apologies to Woody)
There is one final irony to Nestor Makhno’s story that deserves mention, because it reminds us how strange history can be.
When one thinks of Paris in the 1920s, one tends to think of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, that charming fantasy in which a modern writer wanders the streets of Montparnasse at night and stumbles into the city’s golden age. There are Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter at the piano, Salvador Dalí being magnificently Salvador Dalí, and a parade of artists, poets and dreamers whose names would come to define the twentieth century.
The film is whimsical, nostalgic and perhaps a little romanticised. But the extraordinary thing is that it is not entirely wrong. Paris really was like that.
The city into which Nestor Makhno arrived in exile was arguably the most intellectually crowded place on earth. Somewhere in Montparnasse, Ernest Hemingway was learning how to write short sentences and long silences. F. Scott Fitzgerald was turning glamour and self-destruction into literature. James Joyce was wrestling with language itself. Gertrude Stein was hosting salons where painters, writers and poets mingled late into the evening. Picasso and Matisse were redefining art. Stravinsky and Ravel were reshaping music. Josephine Baker was electrifying audiences. André Breton and the Surrealists were busy dismantling reality and rebuilding it according to dream logic.
And scattered among them were thousands of exiles.
The collapse of empires had turned Paris into a gathering place for the displaced. White Russian aristocrats who had fled the Revolution. Former tsarist officers reduced to driving taxis. Poets, philosophers and theologians trying to reconstruct vanished worlds. Jews escaping pogroms. Political refugees from every corner of Europe. Revolutionaries who had won and revolutionaries who had lost. Monarchists, liberals, socialists, anarchists, nationalists and stateless wanderers all sharing the same cafés, boulevards and boarding houses.
One can almost imagine the scene.
At one table sits Ivan Bunin, the future Nobel laureate, lamenting the Russia that had vanished. At another, the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev debates faith and freedom. Across the room a young writer named Vladimir Nabokov quietly works on stories that few people yet read. Somewhere nearby Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman are arguing about anarchism. Victor Serge is reflecting on the revolution’s betrayal. Trotsky occasionally passes through the émigré world like Banquo’s ghost, carrying with him the memory of power and the certainty of future assassination.
And then there is Makhno.
Not the manga hero with the flowing coat and trident buckle. Not the legendary ataman galloping across the steppe beneath a black banner. Just a tired, impoverished former insurgent commander, his lungs damaged by tuberculosis, surviving on odd jobs, writing memoirs, arguing politics, and trying to make sense of a world that had moved on without him.
It is difficult not to feel a touch of svetlaya grust’ – that luminous melancholy the Russians understand so well – in contemplating the image. Somewhere in the city Hemingway is inventing modern prose while Makhno is remembering cavalry raids across the Donbas. Picasso is dismantling perspective while former White officers reminisce about the Crimea. Joyce is transforming literature while exiled revolutionaries debate futures that have already vanished.
The worlds scarcely intersect, yet they coexist in the same city.
And perhaps they were not as far apart as they appear.
For all their differences, many of these figures were grappling with the same underlying question. The old world had collapsed. What would replace it? The question haunted the artists as surely as it haunted the revolutionaries. Some sought answers through politics, some through nationalism, some through religion, some through art. All were living among the ruins of certainties.
History often encourages us to imagine neat compartments: politics here, literature there, art somewhere else. The reality is usually messier and more interesting. The horseman of Huliaipole, the author of Ulysses, the creator of Cubism, the composer of The Rite of Spring, the future Nobel laureates, the forgotten exiles, the dreamers, the drunks, the philosophers and the refugees all inhabited the same city at the same moment.
Paris was large enough to contain them all.
Which means that somewhere, perhaps on a damp evening in Montparnasse, while jazz drifted from a nearby club and rain glistened on the pavement, Nestor Makhno may have walked past Hemingway on his way to a café argument, or crossed paths with Picasso without either man recognising the other.
Woody Allen would have appreciated the coincidence.
History, after all, often writes better stories than novelists.
Author’s note: Paris has a myriad of attractions for history tragics. For me, there are three ‘must sees’ that are at the top of the ‘out there’ list. Les Catacombes de Pariss are one. The folk cabaret Au Lapin is another. and the third is La Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the most famous cemetery in the world.
President Donald Trump has described the US bombing campaign against Iran as “a little excursion,” then a “skirmish,” then a “mini-war” – ostensible breaches of a subsequent ceasefire are called “trifles”. He was doing something powerful men have always done: reach for a word small enough to sit comfortably in a sentence while the fires it describes are still burning, without actually committing to the potential political consequences calling the conflict a war. The gesture is familiar. Vladimir Putin called his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.” History, in the end, has usually insisted on its own vocabulary. What begins as euphemism tends to end as a chapter heading.
The US-Iran conflict – a sustained bombing campaign, a naval blockade constricting a fifth of the world’s oil supply, and an increasingly fragile ceasefire – is, by any honest accounting, a war. That we have not yet fully agreed to call it one is itself revealing. Language shapes the choices we are willing to contemplate; the choices we refuse to contemplate have a habit of being made for us, usually at greater cost and on someone else’s timetable.
But naming the war is only the first act of reckoning. The second – and more treacherous – is understanding it. And here, almost instinctively, we reach backwards. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, the analogies arrive.
For this is what nations do when confronted with uncertainty: they search the past for usable maps. Yet wars are not equations, and analogies illuminate only by partial light. Gallipoli warns of overconfidence and the fantasy of the decisive stroke. Crimea evokes mismanagement and systemic incoherence. Vietnam and Iraq conjure the slow dread of entanglement – wars that move, expensively and violently, without ever quite arriving at conclusion.
We rarely encounter a new war on its own terms. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, it is already being narrated through the past – the Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – names invoked less as history than as instruments of comprehension. This reflex is not mere intellectual laziness. War, in its immediacy, is too vast, too contradictory, to grasp without scaffolding; analogy supplies the frame. It tells us where to look for overconfidence, where to suspect mismanagement, where to anticipate drift. Yet it also does something subtler, and more dangerous: it invites us to believe that the present can be read off the past, that by matching patterns we might master outcomes.
The essay that follows proceeds from that tension. It does not treat these conflicts as competing verdicts on America’s confrontation with Iran, but as different lenses trained on different moments of a war’s life: conception, execution, and duration. Each captures a recognisable failure mode – the decisive stroke that overreaches, the system that cannot align means to ends, the conflict that persists beyond its rationale. To “refight” these wars in argument is not simply to indulge historical memory; it is to reveal how deeply our strategic thinking remains shaped by unresolved experiences. The past, in this sense, is not behind us. It is the grammar in which we continue to write the present.
Seeking storylines to explain the present
The quest begins, as these often do, reaching backwards in search of a usable past, a storyline that suits the present and what is now unfolding between America and Iran.
No war arrives naked; it comes draped in analogy. War is too large, too chaotic, to apprehend all at once; analogy shrinks it to something graspable. Analogies, like maps, tell you where to look, but also, just as often, where not to. Gallipoli (1915–16) is summoned, and Crimea (1853–56), and then, inevitably, Vietnam (1955-75, the war of my generation, though one that we British chose not to join) and Iraq (2003-11), those twin lodestars of modern American unease. Each is offered up as a key. Each, in its way, fits a lock. None, taken alone, opens the door.
Start with the British campaign during WWI to seize the strategic Dardanelles straits with the aim of threatening Istanbul and taking the Ottoman Empire out of the war. That analogy tends to be invoked by those who see overconfidence at the top: a belief that a bold stroke – decapitation strikes, limited escalation, a sharp application of force – can produce a decisive political outcome in a complex theatre. Gallipoli was conceived as a shortcut around stalemate; it became a lesson in underestimating geography, logistics, and the enemy’s will. If the critique is that Washington imagined a controlled, almost surgical confrontation with Iran that would bend reality to its design, then Gallipoli fits – particularly in its early optimism curdling into stubborn, costly entanglement.
There is something almost aesthetic about the Gallipoli temptation. It promises clarity. A narrow strait, a defined objective, a hinge upon which the whole great mechanism might turn. Strategy reduced to geometry. Yet wars have a way of refusing such elegance. The Turkish defence stiffened; the terrain asserted itself; the timetable dissolved into dust and flies and blood. The decisive stroke became an extended ordeal. And here the analogy deepens: not merely in the initial miscalculation, but in the dawning realisation that what was meant to be quick has become something else entirely – sticky, resistant, unyielding.
The Crimean War comparison is subtler, and in some ways more damning. Ostensibly a campaign by Britain and France (ironically, the architects of the Dardanelles venture) to challenge Czarist Russia’s design on the ailing Ottoman Empire – the so-called Eastern Question. Crimea was not just a military muddle; it was a war of misaligned systems: unclear objectives, poor coordination, inflated rhetoric masking administrative incompetence, and a media environment that amplified both heroism and absurdity (the Charge of the Light Brigade as both myth and indictment). If the Iran conflict appears strategically incoherent – multiple actors, shifting goals, allies pulling in different directions, public narratives outpacing operational reality – then Crimea begins to look uncomfortably familiar. It’s less about one disastrous decision and more about a system that cannot quite align means with ends.
Here the failure is quieter, but more pervasive. Not the single grand error, but the accumulation of smaller ones: supply chains that falter, commands that overlap, allies who agree in principle but diverge in practice. Crimea is what happens when the machinery of war – bureaucratic, logistical, political – fails to mesh. The guns fire, the troops advance, the dispatches glow with rhetoric, but somewhere beneath it all the connection between effort and outcome frays. One might say, borrowing that withering line in the 1960 Encyclopedia Britannica, that it becomes “perhaps the most ill-managed campaign in English history” – and the sting lies precisely in that word managed. Not conceived, not fought, but managed: as though war were an administrative exercise that has slipped its clerical bounds.
And then, inevitably, we arrive at America’s misbegotten wars in Indochina and Iraq. When people reach for these, they are usually pointing to something deeper: not the opening moves, but the trajectory. Vietnam is the archetype of gradual escalation into a conflict that cannot be cleanly won because its political premises are flawed. Iraq (particularly post-2003) adds another layer: the illusion of quick victory followed by insurgency, fragmentation, and the long tail of unintended consequences. If Iran becomes a drawn-out contest of proxies, asymmetric retaliation, and domestic fatigue – where tactical successes accumulate but strategic clarity recedes – then Vietnam/Iraq is the more predictive analogy.
Vietnam was once called “chaos without a compass,” and the phrase endures because it captures the feeling of the war more than its formal doctrine. There was, in fact, a compass – containment, credibility, dominoes – but it spun uncertainly, pointing in several directions at once. Washington oscillated between coercion and restraint, escalation and negotiation, measuring progress in tonnage dropped and bodies counted, even as the political centre of gravity drifted further out of reach. The war moved, violently and expensively, but it did not arrive. It accumulated.
Iraq echoes that pattern but begins differently – with a burst of clarity that dissolves into ambiguity. The regime falls; the statue topples; the map is redrawn in a matter of weeks; victory is declared. And then the afterlife begins. Insurgency, sectarian fracture, proxy entanglement- the slow discovery that winning the war is not the same as securing the peace. Iraq is what happens when the end state is assumed rather than constructed. It is, in that sense, less a campaign than a condition.
Set beside these, the earlier analogies sharpen. Gallipoli was not “chaos without a compass” at the outset; it had a very clear aim. Nor was it quite Crimea’s administrative farce, though elements of mismanagement crept in as the campaign stalled. Its distinctive flaw was the belief that a bold, limited stroke could shortcut the hard arithmetic of war – geography, supply, enemy adaptation. When that belief failed, the campaign slid, almost reluctantly, toward something more protracted, more wearing, with flashes of Crimean dysfunction flickering at the edges.
And this is the point at which the analogies begin to overlap, to blur into one another. The opening may be Gallipoli: confident, compressed, persuasive in its apparent simplicity. The conduct may drift toward Crimea: systems straining, coordination fraying, rhetoric outrunning reality. The trajectory may lengthen into Vietnam or Iraq: time stretching, purpose thinning, the war becoming less an event than an environment.
So which is most apt? If you’re judging initial strategic conception: then it is Gallipoli. If you’re judging systemic dysfunction and coalition incoherence: it’s Crimea. If you’re judging likely long-term dynamics and risk of quagmire: look to Vietnam and Iraq.
Forced to choose one, the most useful analogy is probably Iraq (with a Vietnam shadow). It captures both the confidence of the opening act and the chronic instability that can follow when political end states are ill-defined. Gallipoli was a failed gamble; Iraq became a condition. And it is the risk of becoming a condition – open-ended, absorbing, resistant to tidy resolution – that should trouble policymakers more than the memory of any single historical blunder.
For there is something peculiarly modern in that transformation. Nineteenth-century wars could be mismanaged; early twentieth-century campaigns could be disastrously conceived; but late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century conflicts have a habit of enduring. They slip their temporal bounds. They resist conclusion. They persist in the form of insurgencies, proxy struggles, regional destabilisations, so-called “forever wars” – echoes rather than endings.
History, in this sense, does not repeat so much as it offers a set of recurring traps, each labelled in a different hand. The names change – Lone Pine and The Nek, Balaclava, Khe Sanh, Fallujah – but the pattern is recognisable: ambition outruns understanding; institutions struggle to keep pace with intention; time erodes clarity; and strategy discovers, too late, that the map was never the territory.
The past, obligingly, provides the metaphors. The present decides which of them it is willing to become.
Forever wars and the persistent Eastern Question
Ironically, the repercussions and ricochets of the Crimea and Gallipoli linger still in the “forever wars” of the Ottoman Succession that continue to be fought in the Levant. Though the “sick man of Europe” has long gone, so-called “Eastern Question” that he precipitated is with us still. And the irony is not merely poetic, it is structural.
The Crimean War and Gallipoli were not just episodes in the long decline of the Ottoman Empire; they were moments in which the European powers tried, and failed, to manage that decline without resolving it. The Eastern Question – what to do with a weakening empire whose territories sat athwart trade routes, faiths, and ambitions – was never answered. It was deferred, patched, internationalised, moralised, and, when necessary, fought over. But never settled.
Crimea was, in essence, a war about containment without clarity. Britain and France fought not to destroy the Ottoman Empire, nor to reform it decisively, but to prevent Russia from exploiting its weakness. The result was a kind of geopolitical holding operation – costly, confused, and inconclusive. The patient survived, but the illness deepened. The war did not solve the Eastern Question; it ensured that it would return, more complicated than before.
Gallipoli, sixty years later, was almost the inverse: an attempt at decisive intervention that miscarried. Where Crimea sought to stabilise the system, Gallipoli tried to break it open – knock the Ottomans out of what became known as The Great War, reorder the strategic map, and force a resolution. It failed, and in failing, prolonged the life of the very problem it aimed to solve. When the Ottoman Empire did finally collapse in 1918, it did so not through elegant strategy but through cumulative exhaustion – and the settlement that followed (the infamous Sykes–Picot agreement, the Treaty of Lausanne that ended the Great War and shaped the modern Middle East, the mandates, improvised borders, and the legacies inherited by Israel and Palestine, by Syria and Lebanon, and by Iraq carried within it the seeds of future instability.
And here is the connective tissue to the present: the “forever wars” of the Levant are, in a very real sense, the afterlife of those unresolved choices.
The Ottoman system, for all its inequities, provided a kind of imperial coherence – a loose, often improvised order that managed diversity through hierarchy rather than uniformity. Its removal created a vacuum that external powers attempted to fill with lines on maps and imported state structures, often indifferent to local realities, including religious and ethnic divisions. The mandates were not solutions; they were transitional fictions that hardened into permanence. The Eastern Question did not end; it metastasised.
Thus the region becomes a palimpsest of earlier interventions:
The Crimean instinct persists in modern coalition warfare – external powers seeking to contain instability without fully committing to its resolution, managing symptoms rather than causes.
The Gallipoli impulse reappears in periodic attempts at decisive intervention – strikes, invasions, regime-change strategies – each promising to reset the board, each discovering the board is more complicated than imagined.
And over all this hangs the long shadow of Vietnam and Iraq: the recognition that once engaged, these conflicts do not conclude cleanly, but evolve into layered, persistent struggles involving states, militias, proxies, and narratives.
What we call “forever wars” are, in this sense, not aberrations but continuations – the modern form of an old, unanswered question. The Ottoman Empire is gone, but the strategic problem it embodied remains: a region where internal fractures intersect with external interests, where no single power can impose order, and where every intervention alters the conditions for the next.
There is a quiet, almost melancholic symmetry in this. Nineteenth-century statesmen spoke of the “Sick Man of Europe” as though the problem were a patient to be diagnosed and treated. But the illness was never confined to the patient; it was embedded in the system around him. Remove the patient, and the condition does not disappear – it redistributes itself.
So when modern observers reach for Gallipoli, or Crimea, or Vietnam, or Iraq, they are not merely searching for analogies of method. They are circling, perhaps without quite naming it, the persistence of a problem without closure.
The Eastern Question was never answered. It simply changed its language.
Challenging the analogies
You can’t really make sense of the analogies – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – without restoring Iran itself to the centre of the frame. Otherwise the country becomes a backdrop, a stage upon which other powers replay their historical anxieties. But Iran is not the Ottoman Empire in decline, nor Iraq in 2003, nor Vietnam in 1965. It is an old state with a long memory of being acted upon – and that memory shapes how it acts now.
What changes, once you bring Iran back in, is the direction of the analogy. The earlier comparisons mostly describe how outside powers misjudge wars. Iran’s history reminds you how those same powers are often experienced from the inside – as intrusion, manipulation, or existential threat.
Iran enters the story not as an abstraction – “the enemy,” “the regime,” “the theatre” – but as a historical actor formed in the crucible of the very system the earlier analogies describe.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Persia was itself entangled in a version of the Eastern Question, pressured by Russian and British imperial competition, its sovereignty compromised, its politics penetrated. The First World War and its aftermath did not dismantle Iran as they did the Ottoman Empire, but they confirmed its vulnerability to external design. The Second World War made that vulnerability explicit: Anglo-Soviet occupation in 1941, the removal of Reza Shah, and the installation of his son – an early demonstration that great powers could, when required, rearrange Iran’s internal order.
From there, the pattern sharpens. The 1953 coup against the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh – engineered by Britain and the United States – lodges itself in Iranian political consciousness as a defining moment: not simply a change of government, but a lesson about the limits of independence in a world of larger powers. The Shah’s subsequent rule, modernising yet authoritarian, Western-aligned yet domestically brittle, becomes the next act in this long drama of externally entangled sovereignty.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 then reads, in part, as a rupture with that pattern- a violent reassertion of autonomy, clothed in religious language but grounded in political memory. “Neither East nor West” was not just a slogan; it was a rejection of the very dynamics that had shaped Iran’s modern history. Yet revolutions do not escape geography. The new regime inherits the same strategic environment, the same pressures, the same suspicions.
The Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) is crucial here. For eight years, Iran fights a brutal, attritional conflict against Saddam Hussein – largely isolated, facing external support flowing to its adversary. This is Iran’s Vietnam, one might say, but with a different lesson drawn: not the futility of war, but the necessity of endurance. The war entrenches a doctrine of asymmetry, resilience, and proxy capability – precisely the features that later confound American strategy in the region.
From that point on, the Islamic Republic is not simply surviving; it is adapting. It builds networks – Hezbollah, militias, regional alliances – not as ideological ornaments but as strategic depth. It becomes, in effect, a state that has internalised the lessons of the very wars others use as analogies. Where outside observers see Vietnam or Iraq looming, Iranian planners see something else: a long game in which time, patience, and indirection offset conventional inferiority.
To reinsert Iran into the narrative is to complicate every analogy. Gallipoli assumes an opponent who will react predictably to a decisive blow; Iran’s history suggests otherwise. Crimea assumes mismanagement on one side; Iran’s experience reminds us that what appears as dysfunction externally may be met by coherence internally. Vietnam and Iraq warn of quagmires; Iran has, in many respects, built its strategy around drawing others into them.
In that sense, the question is not only which past war America risks refighting, but which past experiences Iran believes it is reliving – or avenging. The 1953 coup, the isolation of the 1980s, the long memory of foreign interference: these are not background details, but active ingredients in the present.
And so our frame subtly shifts. It is no longer simply about the hazards of analogy, or the repetition of strategic error, but about the collision of historical memories. One side reaches for Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq- warnings drawn from its own past misjudgments. The other carries a different archive: intervention, resistance, survival.
Between those two archives lies the present conflict – less a replay of any single war than a convergence of many, each side reading from a different script, each convinced, in its own way, that history has already shown it how this story goes.
Conclusion
To refight old wars in the mind is, at one level, an act of prudence. It reminds us that others have stood at similar thresholds, armed with confidence, intelligence, and good intentions – and have nonetheless misjudged the terrain, the enemy, or themselves. But there is a fine line between learning from history and being governed by it. Analogy can clarify; it can also constrain. It can sharpen perception, or it can trap us in inherited scripts, seeing Gallipoli where the problem is administrative, or diagnosing Vietnam when the flaw lies in the opening wager.
The deeper unease running through these comparisons is not simply that wars go wrong, but that they linger – that they slip their boundaries and become conditions rather than episodes. From the mismanaged campaigns of Crimea to the failed gambles of Gallipoli, from the disorientation of Vietnam to the long aftermath of Iraq, one sees not repetition but recurrence: ambition outrunning understanding, institutions straining to keep pace, time eroding clarity. And beneath it all, especially in the Levant, the longer echo of an older, unanswered question – how to order a region where external power and internal fracture are perpetually entangled.
History does not offer a single, authoritative mirror. It offers a cabinet of them, each slightly warped, each catching a different angle of the present. The task is not to choose one reflection and mistake it for reality, but to recognise the distortions for what they are – and to ask, with some humility, whether we are illuminating the path ahead or merely retracing, with greater eloquence, the steps that led others into the same uncertain ground.
The Western cabinet of mirrors – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – captures recurring pathologies: the overconfident opening stroke, the misaligned machinery, the war that lingers beyond its logic. Yet these are, inescapably, insider narratives. They describe how campaigns look from the bridge, the штаб, the situation room. They are diagnoses of our own errors.
What the Iranian story, set against the longer afterlife of the Eastern Question, forces back into view is the perspective from the other shore. The Young Turks, confronting encroachment and dismemberment, did not experience Gallipoli as a misjudged Allied gamble; they experienced it as a defence of survival. Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese did not inhabit “chaos without a compass”; they pursued a coherent, if costly, struggle against a foreign presence. Iraqi insurgents, and later ISIS in its own brutal and aberrant way, did not parse the war as a case study in post-conflict planning; they resisted, adapted, endured, and exploited.
They did not conduct war games about us. They fought.
Iran belongs in that lineage – not as an analogue, but as an heir to a particular historical consciousness: one shaped by intervention, by imposed settlements, by long wars of attrition, and by the conviction that time can be turned into a weapon. From that vantage, what appears to Western observers as drift or dysfunction may look like opportunity; what is feared as quagmire may be cultivated as strategy.
And so the question shifts. It is no longer simply which past war America risks refighting, but whether the very act of choosing among Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, and Iraq obscures the more important reality: that the other side is not reading from the same book – or as many commentators are reminding us today, “the enemy has a vote”. One side searches its history for warnings about overreach; the other draws from its own past a repertoire of resistance.
History, then, does not just offer competing analogies. It offers competing memories. And where those memories diverge – where one side analyses and the other endures – there lies the most persistent danger: not that we will repeat the past, but that we will misunderstand the present, even as we describe it with perfect historical fluency.
Forward. The Gravest Crime – and selective conscience
On March 25, the UN General Assembly declared the transatlantic slave trade the “gravest crime against humanity.” 123 countries voted in favour, three against, and 52 abstained – including the UK, all 27 EU member states and Australia.
The moral core is unobjectionable. The slave trade was monstrous, its consequences did not end with abolition, and saying so plainly is not theatre – it is history. But UN resolutions are not history lectures. They are political instruments.
This one was carefully engineered. Its most controversial element was the recognition of slavery as a violation of jus cogens – peremptory norms of international law binding on all states. Not a historical observation, but a legal foundation for future liability claims. The EU noted the resolution’s “unbalanced interpretation of historical events” and legal references inconsistent with international law, including retroactive application of rules that simply did not exist at the time.
The 123 who voted yes include states with active, present-tense records of forced labour and ethnic persecution. Their zeal for condemning 18th-century European slave traders carries a faint whiff of convenience. And the Western abstentions were the diplomatic equivalent of leaving before the bill arrives – not endorsement, but not courage either.
Slavery was real. The suffering was immense. But a resolution shaped by reparations politics and the arithmetic of bloc voting is not the act of collective moral reckoning it claims to be. It is politics, dressed, as so much UN business is, in the language of justice.
Whitewashing slavery’s deep and dark history
Slavery sits in the human story like a dark, deep river that refuses to keep to its banks. It runs from the Assyrian deportations and Roman estates, mines and galleys, through the markets of old Baghdad and the longships on the rivers of Keven Rus, down into the Atlantic crossings from Africa to the Americas and thence to Europe. and out again into the contract-labour regimes and hidden rooms of the present. Names change – thrall, concubine, slave, servant, “sponsored worker” – but the underlying grammar is stubborn: power converting vulnerability into utility, often with a theory to justify it and a market to sustain it.
Into this long, uneasy history steps the modern urge to judge it – to apportion blame, to rank crimes, to extract from the past a usable morality for the present. The UN resolution is one such attempt: part commemoration, part indictment, part politics by other means. A counter-brief insists that this particular ledger has been selectively drawn, that some entries are inked in heavily while others are left in the margin or omitted altogether. Between them lies not a settled account but a contested one, in which the Atlantic system with its Islamic trades, and African agency, “King Cotton” and John Brown, and modern forms of coercion all jostle for place and proportion.
The following essay does not endeavour to tidy that argument into a single verdict. It widens the frame without dissolving the particulars; to hold in view both the universality of slavery and the distinctiveness of its forms; to recognise the rarity of abolition without mistaking it for completion. History, in this register, is less a courtroom than a map – dense, overlapping, and resistant to clean lines.
The deep and dark river
That UN resolution formally condemned slavery as a universal crime – indeed, the “gravest crime”. But, in practice it narrows its indictment to the transatlantic trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, presenting it as a distinctively Western, racialised, and capitalist enterprise.
It is precise, almost prosecutorial, assigning blame, embedding the trade in a narrative of structural injustice that echoes into the present. Yet it grows evasive when confronting the forces that ended slavery: the Enlightenment, abolitionist movements, legal reforms – reduced to a kind of historical afterthought.
More significantly, as economist and commentator Henry Ergas argues in an article in The Australian, republished below, the resolution omits the long and substantial history of slavery in the Islamic world – trans-Saharan, Red Sea, Indian Ocean – systems that endured for centuries, moved millions, and in many places persisted well into the modern era. Unlike in the West, he contends, there was no sustained, institutionalised moral revolt against slavery at scale; abolition came late, often under external pressure, and in some cases remains incomplete in practice.
He pushes further. By declaring the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity, the resolution risks collapsing distinctions – most notably between exploitation and extermination – thereby, in his reading, relativising the Holocaust. And finally, he notes the political choreography: strong support from authoritarian states and those with troubling contemporary records, contrasted with the hesitant abstention of many Western democracies.
That is his case – straightforward, and cleanly drawn – perhaps a little too cleanly. Because once we widen the frame, the lines begin to blur in ways that resist both the UN’s moral staging and Ergas’s counter-brief.
Slavery is not an aberration of one civilisation but a near-constant of many; and it spans millenia. The Assyrians and Persians deported whole populations as instruments of empire. Sennacherib and other potentates would empty a conquered land of its indigenous peoples and replace them with deportees from another conquest. The Romans built an economy on servile labour whilst the Byzantines continued the practice. Muslim caliphates and emirates, including the Abbasids and Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans, sustained vast networks of concubinage and domestic and military slavery.
The Vikings – often reduced in popular memory to picturesque if violent raiders – operated something closer to a transcontinental syndicate. The river systems of the Rus, threading south through the Volga and Dnieper, connected the Baltic to the Black Sea and Baghdad. Silver flowed north; human beings flowed south. This was not episodic plunder but a business model – structured, repeatable, and profitable. And conducted across astonishing distances. Baghdad and York sat at the far ends of a human supply chain. [The illustration at the head of this article is that of a young Slavic woman being sold into slavery by Vikings to a Persian merchant (Image: Tom Lovell / National Geographic)]
So, in short. Salvery has existed in some form in almost every known civilisation. In the ancient world, captives were routinely taken, bought, sold, and traded. Greek city-states enslaved defeated populations; Rome built much of its economy on slave labour; raiding societies from the Eurasian steppe to the Atlantic world, and across the ocean, among the First Nations people of the Americas, treated slavery as part of warfare and survival. For most of human history, slavery was seen less as a moral evil than as an accepted social institution, however tragic it might be for those caught within it.
It is necessary therefore to resist any account that isolates the Atlantic trade as if it emerged sui generis from European wickedness. The Islamic world sustained large-scale slave systems over a long durée; and African polities were not merely passive victims but active participants in capture and sale; Arab traders were integral intermediaries. The Atlantic system, or “the Middle Passage” and “Triangular Trade” as it was euphemistically described, depended in its operation on a web of local agency as well as European demand. To acknowledge that is not to dilute culpability but to complicate it – uncomfortably, but necessarily.
And yet – here the counterweight – the Atlantic system was not merely one more iteration of an ancient practice. In the Americas – north and south – fused race, heredity, and commerce into something peculiarly rigid and self-reproducing. Slavery became not just a condition but a caste, encoded in law and biology, and scaled through plantation economies that fed a global market. Cotton, sugar, coffee and tobacco were not marginal commodities but engines of early modern capitalism. The system’s brutality was not incidental; it was structural.
It is here that the North American story assumes its central, paradoxical role. Chattel slavery became both foundational and explosive – so deeply embedded in the economy that its removal threatened the entire edifice, and yet so morally corrosive that it generated its own opposition. The American Civil War was among many things, the moment when that contradiction could no longer be managed rhetorically or regionally; it was settled, instead, in blood. Abolition here was not simply argued into being; it was fought into being.
Slavery was America’s original sin, and its malign influence ricochets still through its politics and society. [See American historian Sarah Churchwell’s.chilling account of darkest Dixie in In That Howling Infinite’s The Wrath to Come. Gone With the Wind and America’s Big Lie]
Which brings us to what may be the most historically unusual feature in all of this: not slavery itself, but the sustained movement to abolish it. The West generated, from the 17th century onward, a mounting moral and political challenge to slaver, in legal cases, religious agitation, popular campaigns – that eventually dismantled it – significant help from the Royal Navy. Comparable, system-wide movements were less evident in the Islamic world, where dissent existed but did not crystallise into mass abolitionism with similar force or effect.
The distinction matters. Saying it did not happen is a statement of fact; suggesting it could not have happened, or that its absence reflects some deeper civilisational failing, goes beyond the evidence. The divergence likely owes as much to political economy, state structure, and the contingencies of modernity as to theology alone. Which is where English historian and The Rest is History podcaster Tom Holland’s excellent doorstop of a book Dominion hovers, suggestively, over the argument [See In That Howling Infinite’s Getting back to the garden – Tom Holland’s Dominion
Holland’s claim – broadly put – is that the moral vocabulary underpinning abolition in the West owes much to a Christian inheritance: the elevation of the weak, the insistence on the equal worth of souls, the suspicion of unrestrained power. Even as the Enlightenment secularises these ideas, it carries their imprint. One need not follow him into every chapel of that argument to see the outline: abolition is historically anomalous, and anomalies tend to have genealogies. The West did not simply stumble into anti-slavery; it argued its way there, drawing on intellectual and moral resources that had been accumulating, often ambivalently, for centuries.
One must exercise caution here. Moral discomfort with slavery existed elsewhere and earlier, even if it did not produce mass abolitionist movements in the same way as in the West. Nor does the existence of Western abolition somehow erase the brutality or scale of European colonial slavery, particularly the Atlantic slave trade and plantation economies. The West occupies both roles in history: architect of the largest racialised slave system in modern history, and birthplace of the most influential abolitionist movements against it.
History is often untidy like that.
Old poison, new bottles
The story end in the 19th century however much resolutions might prefer it to. The Gulf states remind us that abolition in law does not always mean abolition in practice. The kafala system – sponsorship, contract labour – operates in a grey zone where dependence can harden into coercion. Passports withheld, mobility constrained, recourse limited: not chattel slavery, but an echo, or perhaps a mutation. History rarely repeats itself verbatim; it adapts, keeping the structure while altering the terminology.
And then there are the moments when the past returns not as echo but as revival. ISIS, with its enslavement of Yazidi women, did not merely exploit chaos; it articulated a doctrine. Slavery, and most particularly, sexual slavery, was justified, systematised, and bureaucratised with price lists, allocations, and rules, and even, trans-national trafficking: one captive ended up in Gaza where she was eventually rescued from a war zone. It was, in the grimmest sense, a reactivation of an old logic under modern conditions. Old poison in new bottles. If abolition was an anomaly, here was the reminder that anomalies can be reversed.
Governments and citizens of ostensibly westernized states should look to their self-awarded laurels. We should be wary of treating coercion as something that happens “over there.” The exploitation of domestic workers – underpaid, over- controlled , sometimes effectively trapped – appears not only in the Gulf but in Lebanon, Israel, and also parts of Western Europe and North America, where immigration status and private households create shadows the law struggles to reach. And closer still, in our own economies, sweatshop labour, debt bondagea and various forms of servitude persist at the margins, along with physical violence and sexual exploitation – which is precisely why regulation, inspection, and enforcement remain not moral luxuries but necessities.
Against this broader canvas, the UN resolution begins to look less like a statement of history than a negotiation, negation, even – of memory. Its selectivity – foregrounding Western guilt, backgrounding Western abolition, omitting other systems – is not unusual in such documents; it is, in some sense, as we have often seen, their defining feature. They are less concerned with completeness than with consensus, less with analysis than with alignment. Countries with difficult presents often find it convenient to condemn curated pasts.
Ergas is justified in objecting to that selectivity. Where he overreaches is in answering it with a counter-selectivity of his own – one that risks understating the distinctiveness of the Atlantic system and overstating the clarity of civilisational contrasts. History, inconveniently, refuses to stay within either brief.
On the question of the Holocaust, however, his warning lands. To rank atrocities – to declare one “the greatest” – is to turn history into a macabre competition. More importantly, it obscures differences of intent. Most slave systems, however brutal, were premised on exploitation; the Holocaust was premised on annihilation. That distinction is not a matter of moral bookkeeping but of historical substance.
And so we arrive, circuitously, at a position that satisfies no one entirely – which is probably how one knows it is closer to the truth.
Slavery is not the property of any one civilisation; it is a recurrent human institution, appearing wherever power, profit, and permission align. The Atlantic trade is distinctive but not unique; Islamic and African systems are substantial but not singular; modern forms persist under altered names and legal veneers. What is genuinely unusual is the emergence of sustained, organised movements that declare slavery illegitimate and succeed – partially, unevenly – in abolishing it.
Between the UN’s moral narrowing and Ergas’s corrective widening lies a more uncomfortable landscape: one in which culpability is diffuse, agency is shared, and progress, where it occur, is contingent, fragile, and slow. The past does not arrange itself into neat indictments or tidy vindications. It lingers, instead, as habit and warning.
And, if one is honest, as a question still not fully answered.
On the Holocaust comparison, Ergas is on firmer ground. Collapsing all historical crimes into a single ranked category – the greatest” – is less analysis than moral theatre. The distinction between exploitation and extermination is not pedantic; it goes to intent. The Nazi project was annihilatory in a way most slave systems, however cruel, were not. History flattens at our peril.
And then there is the politics of the thing. UN resolutions are not monographs; they are negotiated texts, shaped by blocs, interests, and the quiet arithmetic of votes. Selectivity is almost baked in – as is prejudice. Countries with uncomfortable presents often find safety in condemning selective pasts. Western abstentions, too, are rarely acts of intellectual surrender; more often they are the diplomacy of not quite wanting to pick a fight that cannot be cleanly won.
Unfinished business
So we end where we began, with a familiar tension. Yes, slavery is a near-universal inheritance, and any telling that singles out one civilisation to the exclusion of others is suspect. But neither does the universality of the crime dissolve its particular forms. The Atlantic system, the Islamic trades, ancient chattel systems – they rhyme, but they are not identical verses.
And there remains a broader, less comfortable truth: the story of slavery is not a morality play with a single villain, but a long human habit, periodically challenged, never entirely extinguished, and always ready, given the right circumstances and excuses, to return.
History, in other words, refuses both the courtroom brief and the absolution. It is messier than Ergas allows, but also less conveniently moralised than the resolution he criticises.
It leaves us not ranking guilt, but paying closer attention. The Atlantic system was distinctive; the Islamic and other trades were vast and enduring; African rulers and Arab merchants were participants as well as intermediaries; the West generated powerful abolitionist movements even as it profited from what it eventually condemned. None of these claims cancels the others. Together they form a picture that is, at once, more accurate and less flattering than any single narrative allows.
And the present refuses to sit quietly beneath the verdicts we pass on the past. The exploitation of domestic workers in the Gulf, Lebanon, Israel, and parts of Western Europe; the persistence of sweatshop labour, debt bondage, and coerced work within Western economies themselves – these are not historical footnotes but contemporary reminders. Laws and conventions matter, but so do inspection, enforcement, and the unglamorous work of closing the gap between principle and practice.
Which is why the most suspect posture, at the end of such an inquiry, is self-congratulation. There is no stable ground here for laurel wreaths, no civilisational vantage point from which to survey a completed moral victory. At best there is a difference in degree – of scrutiny, of institutional capacity, of willingness to act. And even that requires constant renewal.
Slavery, in its older forms, has been dismantled in many places; in its newer guises, it adapts. The question is less who was worst than who is still looking, and still prepared to do something about what they find.
Postscript: Etymology
The history lingers, as it often does, in the words. They carry within themselves their own freight.
“Slave” in English carries within it a map of early medieval Europe. The term is widely traced to the Latin sclavus, itself derived from Sclavus – “Slav” – a reflection of the large numbers of Slavic peoples captured and sold through the trading networks that ran from the Baltic down the great river systems to Byzantium and the Islamic world. What began as an ethnonym hardened into a condition. By the High Middle Ages the word had shed its geographic specificity and settled into general use- esclave, schiavo, esclavo, slave – the person eclipsed by the status, the origin story buried in the syllable. The modern word is not, in itself, a slur; but its lineage is a reminder of how readily a name can be stripped of personhood and repurposed as a category of subjection.
Arabic offers a parallel, though not an identical one. The root ʿabd (عبد) denotes a servant or slave, but in its primary register it is theological: ʿabd Allāh, servant of God – a posture of submission before the divine rather than a description of worldly bondage. Yet the plural ʿabīd (عبيد) – once a straightforward term for slaves – acquired, over time and in certain contexts, a sharper edge, used for Black slaves and, by extension, Black people more generally. In modern usage it can carry derogatory force, depending on context and intent, illustrating how a neutral descriptor can drift into insult as it absorbs the hierarchies of the societies that use it.
In both cases, language records a quiet transformation. A people becomes a condition; a condition gathers associations; those associations harden into overtones that may wound long after their origins are forgotten. The vocabulary survives the systems that shaped it, carrying their traces forward – compressed, half-visible, but still there for those inclined to listen.
Afterword: Thraldom, it’s unwinding and its afterlives
A final turn of the lens, back to northern Europe, where the language and the practice briefly align – and then, tellingly, reappear in altered guises.
In Anglo-Saxon England, þræl – thrall – named a condition within a broader spectrum of unfreedom. These were the captured, the indebted, the born into it: men and women who laboured in households and on estates, who could be bought and sold, though not yet within the fully racialised, hereditary system that would later define Atlantic chattel slavery. The boundaries were hard but not always impermeable. Manumission occurred; over generations, absorption was possible. It was a system of subjection, but not yet a totalising one.
The British port of Bristol stands as a reminder of how visible and organised that system could be. It became wealthy with the transatlantic slave trade. But in the 11th century it also functioned as a significant slaving port, exporting captives – often from Wales and the Welsh borderlands – into Irish and wider networks. This was not an anomaly but a node in a broader medieval traffic in human beings, linking the British Isles to circuits that extended, directly and indirectly, toward the Mediterranean and beyond.
Nor was England unique. Across medieval Europe, slavery persisted in varied forms: Italian city-states drew on Black Sea supplies; Iberian polities, both Muslim and Christian, trafficked in captives amid the long wars of the Reconquista; eastern Europe fed human cargo into Byzantine and Islamic markets. The word “slave” itself, with its Slavic root, is a linguistic fossil of that traffic (see below)..
And yet, in England at least, something shifted – and the Norman Conquest appears to have hastened it. On the eve of 1066, Domesday would soon record servi in significant numbers, perhaps around a tenth of the population. By the 12th century, however, chattel slavery had largely withered. The causes were less a single decree than a convergence. The Norman regime imported a more continental feudal logic, in which labour was bound to land rather than owned outright; a villein, fixed, dues-paying, and reproductively stable, was often more useful than a saleable slave. The Church, already critical of slave trading – Wulfstan of Worcester’s condemnation of the Bristol trade is emblematic. – found firmer footing in the new order, aligning moral pressure with institutional power. Trade patterns shifted too, as England’s orientation tilted across the Channel, loosening older Irish Sea networks that had sustained export markets.
None of this amounted to abolition in the modern sense. What replaced slavery was serfdom: a different architecture of dependence, less overtly transactional but hardly free. The change was real, but it was also a translation—from one form of unfreedom into another, quieter one.
And, as if to underline the point, elements of the older logic resurfaced later under new names. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain exported large numbers of indentured labourers – many English, but also Scots and Irish, including prisoners of war and political rebels after uprisings – to the American colonies and the Caribbean. Bound by contract rather than owned outright, they nonetheless occupied a coercive world of limited rights, harsh discipline, and restricted movement. The loss of the American colonies in 1783 did not end this habit of displacement; it redirected it. Transportation – of convicts and dissidents – to Australia became the next imperial outlet for managing surplus and troublesome populations, a system different in law but recognisably akin in its logic of removal and compelled labour [see in In That Howling Infinite, Farewell to Old England forever … reappraising The Fatal Shore
Meanwhile, further east, a different trajectory prevailed. In eastern Europe and Russia, serfdom did not wither but intensified. From the late medieval period into the early modern era, landlords consolidated control over peasant populations, binding them ever more tightly to the land and to service. In Russia, this culminated in a system that, by the 18th century, bore striking resemblances to slavery in practice, if not always in name – serfs bought, sold, and mortgaged along with estates, their mobility sharply curtailed, their obligations exacting. Emancipation would come late: 1861 in Russia, and even then imperfectly, leaving behind structures of dependency that proved stubbornly durable.
Which is, perhaps, the thread worth keeping in hand. Systems of coercion rarely disappear cleanly; they evolve, recur and rephrase. From thrall to serf, from market to manor, from indenture to transportation, from eastern estate to western plantation. The names change; the grammar does not. Waiting, as ever, for the conditions that allow it to harden once again. waiting, as ever, for the conditions that allow it to harden once again.
In that Howling Infinite, May Day 2026
This essay was written in conversation with an AI language model, which contributed to researching, drafting, phrasing, and conceptual articulation.What appears here is not unmediated thought, but considered thought: directed and selected, revised and revised again, and owned.
When this essay was published on Facebook, it elicited several comments that amounted to a polemical defense of the West that began with a legitimate historical observation – slavery was historically near-universal and abolitionism emerged most powerfully from Enlightenment Europe – but then overextended the claim into a triumphalist narrative about Western moral uniqueness and non-Western incapacity for self-criticism. Its tone is combative, culturally chauvinistic, and marked by sweeping generalisations about “the Third World,” Islamic societies, Arabs, and Asian civilisations.
Intellectually, they mixed valid historical points with selective history, rhetorical exaggeration, and resentment politics. They treated “the West” as unusually self-critical and morally generative, while caricaturing other societies as conformist or authoritarian. The result is less a sober historical analysis than a reaction against contemporary anti-Western discourse, expressed through broad-brush civilisational language.
A more balanced critique might read as follows:
Slavery has existed in some form in almost every known civilisation. In the ancient world, captives were routinely taken, bought, sold, and traded. Greek city-states enslaved defeated populations; Rome built much of its economy on slave labour; raiding societies from the Eurasian steppe to the Atlantic world treated slavery as part of warfare and survival. For most of human history, slavery was seen less as a moral evil than as an accepted social institution, however tragic it might be for those caught within it.
One of the major intellectual shifts of the Enlightenment era was the emergence, particularly in Western Europe and North America, of the idea that slavery itself was morally illegitimate. Philosophical ideas about natural rights, combined with religious and humanitarian movements, helped give rise to organised abolitionism. Britain, France, and the United States were deeply implicated in the Atlantic slave trade, yet they also produced influential movements that eventually challenged and dismantled it. Modern international norms against slavery owe much to these developments.
At the same time, slavery was not uniquely Western, nor was opposition to injustice confined solely to the West. Different forms of servitude and human bondage existed across Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, and criticism of oppression has emerged within many cultures and traditions. The historical record is complex: societies can simultaneously perpetrate injustice and generate the ideas that challenge it.
Contemporary debates about slavery and colonialism sometimes oversimplify history by treating Europe and the West as uniquely culpable, while overlooking the broader global history of slavery. But responding to that simplification with sweeping condemnations of non-Western societies is equally reductive. A more useful approach is to recognise both the universality of slavery in human history and the particular historical significance of the abolitionist movements that emerged during the Enlightenment and after.
UN resolution on slavery falsifies history by ignoring Islamic world’s role
Henry Ergas, The Australian, 1 May 2026
The UN resolution sparks debate over historical interpretation: Getty Images
Henry Ergas, The Australian, 1 May 2026
That the African slave trade was a monstrosity, inflicting unspeakable cruelty on millions of innocent victims, is beyond dispute. But the resolution the UN General Assembly passed two weeks ago, marking the trade’s commemoration, is nothing less than an appalling falsification of history.
Formally, the resolution condemns the African slave trade as a whole. Substantively, every concrete reference targets the transatlantic trade, fixating on a “racialised capitalist system” and its purported Western antecedents. The cumulative effect is unmistakeable: to brand the trade a distinctively Western crime. To sustain that impression, the resolution parades a sequence of decrees, starting with the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455, which it casts as the founding charters of the enslavement and “structural racism” that still unjustly impoverishes Africa, thereby grounding a claim to substantial reparations.
Yet, having been forensically specific about blame, the text turns conspicuously evasive when it confronts the forces that brought the Atlantic trade to an end. The Enlightenment, the abolitionist movements, and the Western legal and political campaigns that culminated in the trade’s eventual demise are, it appears, unmentionable.
While the offending decrees are named, dated and indicted, the tide of opposition to slavery, which gathered momentum in the 17th century, is dismissed as “certain legal challenges and judicial developments in the 18th century” that “questioned the legality and morality of chattel enslavement”.
That descent into vagueness reflects a deliberate strategy: to particularise the guilt while diluting the credit. Merely cataloguing the misrepresentations, confusions and factual errors this strategy produces would require far more space than is available here. What is especially striking, however, are the omissions.
It is, for example, intellectually dishonest to invoke the papal bulls of 1452 and 1455 while ignoring Pope Paul III’s bull of 1537, which denounced as an invention of the devil the idea that native peoples “should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service”, and affirmed “that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty”.
Paul III’s exhortations had limited immediate effect; so too did Cartwright’s Case (1569), which declared that England’s air was “too pure for slaves to dwell in”. What matters is what they reveal: an unceasing moral interrogation of slavery within the West itself – an interrogation that gave abolitionism the bedrock on which to build.
Here, too, the resolution’s selectivity is purposeful. It allows it to avoid an obvious and crucial comparator: the long history of slavery under Islamic rule, which it ignores altogether. From the Arab conquests to the early 20th century, some 14 million black slaves were transported into the lands of Islam via the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes, with nearly a million more carried beyond the East African coast. Add to these more than a million white slaves, and the total comfortably exceeds the 10 million to 12 million who landed in the Americas.
Yet the numbers are not what is most significant. The salient fact is the absence of any sustained doctrinal or institutional challenge to the morality and legality of the slave trade within the Islamic world – even where it starkly contradicted the Koranic prohibition on enslaving Muslims. As Bruce Hall shows in his study of Saharan and Sahelian slavery, by the 19th century – when the West was vigorously suppressing chattel slavery – the operative presumption among Maliki jurists was that black Africans, routinely described as “savages”, were enslavable by default, whatever their faith.
There were individuals who objected strenuously to chattel slavery, such as Syrian reformer Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855-1902); but no Muslim opponent of slavery ever forged those concerns into a mass movement. Bernard Lewis’s verdict that “even the most radical Muslim modernists” fell well short of matching the fervour and effectiveness of Western abolitionists retains all its force.
It is therefore unsurprising that Islam’s leading theologians, far from championing abolition, actively resisted it – beginning with the infamous 1855 fatwa, issued with the full authority of Mecca’s Shaykh Jamal, which declared any prohibition of the slave trade “contrary to the holy law of Islam” and any official who attempted to enforce it “lawful to kill”.
Nor is it surprising that Saudi Arabia and Yemen abolished slavery only in 1962, the United Arab Emirates in 1964, Oman in 1970, and Mauritania – after repeated ineffectual measures – in 2007. Moreover, even where slavery was formally abolished, forms of vassalage have remained firmly in place: of the 10 countries with the highest incidence of “modern slavery”, eight are majority-Muslim.
But the resolution does not merely distort history by pretending Islamic slavery didn’t exist. It declares the slave trade “the greatest” crime against humanity ever committed. Although not explicitly stated, a central purpose of this travesty – which converts the horrors of the past into a “suffering Olympics” – is again transparent: to relativise the Holocaust.
It is frankly obscene to degrade moral evaluation into a body count, with medals of ignominy awarded by a show of hands. Yet even in so repulsive a spectacle, realities should have been allowed to intrude. Those realities are well known. Death rates in the Holocaust – whose unrelenting aim was the complete extermination of Jews – were close to or above 90 per cent. So complete was the indifference to fatalities that the German railways were paid whether the Jews being shipped by them lived or died during their transport – and the few who survived the journeys were killed, on average, within days of arrival.
In contrast, as investor Thomas Starke wrote to Captain James Westmore in 1700, “the whole benefit of the voyage lyes in your care of preserving negroes’ lives”. As a result, strenuous efforts were made to ensure slaves remained alive and saleable, including by granting handsome bonuses to captains for high survival rates and imposing stiff penalties for excess mortality.
Although those efforts hardly eliminated the trade’s horrors, they did mean that by the late 18th century, death rates for black slaves on the “middle passage” had declined dramatically, to the point where they were only marginally greater than those for crews. To pretend otherwise is to erase the distinction between exploitation and extermination: for there was nothing in the slave trade even remotely comparable to the systematic mass murder at the heart of the Holocaust.
But to acknowledge those facts – which flatly contradict the assault on the standing of the Holocaust – might have eroded the overwhelming support the resolution secured. And the composition of that support says everything one needs to know about the resolution.
Thus, every one of the 20 countries that have the highest incidence of modern slavery and forced labour cynically voted in its favour; so did all the authoritarian states that participated in the vote, with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; and, again with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it received the active backing of every Muslim-majority country.
Yet that is not the real tragedy. Rather, it is that only three Western countries – the US, Israel and Argentina – had the decency to vote against the falsification of history, instead of abstaining, as Australia and the European Union did. Those three were willing to oppose this charade. Why weren’t we?
The World According to Ptolemy (2nd century), an Italian manuscript, 1460. (National Library of Naples, Library of Congress)
In That Howling Infinite 
That the African slave trade was a monstrosity, inflicting unspeakable cruelty on millions of innocent victims, is beyond dispute. But the resolution the UN General Assembly passed two weeks ago, marking the trade’s commemoration, is nothing less than an appalling falsification of history.