10 books like Conversations with Gorbachev

Fascism and Communism purported to explain all social and political phenomena and, on that basis, justified their authoritarian or totalitarian rule. The term ‘fascist’ tends to be loosely applied to intolerant and autocratic political behaviour, but the outstandingly lucid, and highly readable, book by Robert Paxton not only surveys fascism in practice – in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and in fascist movements and parties in many different countries – it also shows what its distinctive components are. What he calls the ‘mobilizing passions’ of fascism include the glorification of war and violence, expansionism, racism, a fixation on national solidarity, rejection of the legitimacy of diverse interests and values within a society, and, not least, a cult of the heroic leader, with the leader’s instincts counting for more than reasoned, evidence-based argument.

Juan Linz (1926-2013) was one of the most insightful political analysts of the past hundred years. He was especially noted for his studies of how democracies can degenerate into authoritarianism and on the characteristics and types of authoritarian and totalitarian rule. The greater part of this work first appeared in 1975 (in a multi-volume Handbook of Political Science), but with its publication as a separate book a quarter of a century later, Linz added almost fifty pages of valuable ‘Further Reflections’. Authoritarian systems embrace a wide variety of non-democratic polities, among them absolute monarchy, military dictatorship, ‘sultanistic’ regimes, and theocracies. Totalitarianism is a still more extreme case of concentration of power, ‘a regime form’, as Linz puts it, ‘for completely organizing political life and society’. It is underpinned by an all-encompassing ideology justifying total control today with the promise of utopia tomorrow (though tomorrow never comes). Linz’s erudite analysis is… show more.

The last book on my list is on the transition from authoritarian rule. It draws on political leaders’ own understandings and perceptions of their political experience as distinct from the analyses of scholars. The latter are not entirely absent, for the interview with the leader of each of the many countries covered is preceded by an essay from a specialist on that country, putting the democratization process there in context. Among the most illuminating of the in-depth interviews are those with Fernando Henrique Cardoso, President of Brazil from 1995 to 2003, with former President of Chile (1990-94) Patricio Aylwin, with former Polish President (1995-2005) Aleksander Kwaśniewski, and with Felipe González, the head of the Spanish government from 1982 to 1996, who played a major part in consolidating Spain’s recently re-established democracy.

This is a highly relevant book for our time.

Conceived in 1948, Orwell reversed numbers to envision a dystopic world in 1984. I remember how it was in 1984, when I felt some sense of relief that the world “wasn’t as bad” as Orwell had predicted. But, in today’s politics? This novel told of a political party with the slogan “Ignorance is strength”. How far is that from silencing the history of racism in this country and trying to keep people from waking up (“woke”) to the injustices of the world?

The “Big Lie,” first practiced by Adolph Hitler, was standard fare in 1984, and has deeply infected our politics today. I take the warnings of this book seriously. 

This was one of the first books I ever loved as a teenager and it has always stayed with me.

A professor recommended it to me, and I didn’t know that it would heavily reference Beethoven’s last string quartet, which I was working on at the time.

I love the way Kundera can weave so many disparate things together, including Beethoven’s fate motif and the fate of the character’s relationships. It’s something I find very inspiring and try to do in my own works.

Is there a Czech theme going on here? Well, the Czech lands have always produced artists, musicians and writers of the highest calibre and although he may not be widely known, Škvorecký is one of them. From exile in Canada following the Russian invasion of 1968, he wrote this extraordinary and fantastic novel about a miracle (a holy statue is seen to bow its head) in a Czech village in the first year of communist rule. Of course such irrational things couldn’t be allowed and the priest is condemned as a hoaxer. But now we’re in 1968 and everything is up for discussion including this forgotten event. Seen through the eyes of the author’s picaresque character, Danny Smiřický (who was present at the original miracle but unfortunately had dozed off at the vital moment so never actually saw St Joseph move), the whole story is relived and discussed. Part farce,… show more.

There has never been (nor will there likely be) a runner like Emil Zatopek. His crowning achievement, a gold medal in the 5000m, 10000m, and the marathon in a single Olympics, has never been equaled, before or since. Yet the “greatest runner of all time” was more than just medals. Besides his Rocky Balboa-esque training regimen, Zapotek stood up to Soviet tanks during the Prague Spring. For this action, the runner was punished for years with a string of humiliating and strenuous jobs, before finally having his image rehabilitated in 1989. Known for his pithy quotes, the title of the book comes from a line he is said to have expressed to his fellow competitors before a race. 

Written in Soviet Russia in 1972, but only published in 1989, this is the story of a bizarre experimental city populated by strangers from all over the last century. All have made a deal with mysterious mentors who are trying to find out…something, by subjecting the city’s inhabitants to apparently arbitrary torments like plagues of baboons. Our hero, Andrei, tries to take it in stride like a good Soviet boy, but finds himself increasingly doubtful as the conditions of the experiment just get weirder and weirder. The humor and situations are very Russian while the emotions will be familiar to anyone dealing with seemingly incoherent orders from above. Reading it at the height of the pandemic was certainly a trip.

Socialist realism meets magic realism in this novel by Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, which took me by surprise when I came across it just over a decade after its publication in 1980. The Soviet literature I had read was staid, but this pushed the boundaries of both literary style and censorship. In parallel plots, a railway worker marches with his camel and dog across the Kazakh steppe to bury his friend, while two cosmonauts blast into space and go visiting extra-terrestrials. The themes are way ahead of the book’s time, touching on taboos such as Stalin’s repressions and even hinting at climate change: the extra-terrestrial planet is plagued by a cosmic version of global warming. A quirky tour de force that conjures up the spirit of Soviet-era Central Asia.

This book tells it like it is: The end of the Cold War was not the fulfillment of President Reagan’s grand plan to destroy communism, but neither was it the natural outcome of the decline of the Soviet Empire. In Wilson’s telling, based on an array of documents from both sides of the Iron Curtain, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism were, more than anything else, an accident. At crucial points, decision-makers on both sides made the right calls, but they had to respond to events that increasingly took on a dynamic of their own. I love this book because it emphasizes that history is chaos: Not random, but unpredictable!