"A dazzling achievement."
Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist, and Vladimir Lenin, the illiberal totalitarian, hand-in-glove unwound the old nineteenth-century order and redefined war as an existential and global struggle over ideas—with disastrous twentieth-century results. In yet another well-written and fascinating dual biography, the prolific and insightful historian Arthur Herman shows how Wilson’s naive good intentions and Lenin’s deliberate ruthlessness nonetheless had the same pernicious effect of using the state to defy human nature. A fascinating and entirely original explanation of the American and Russian origins of the modern world.
Until the calamities of 1939−45 prompted a name change, what we now call World War I was known as either the Great War or, wishfully, the War to End All Wars. A century later, it looks more like the true Mother of All Wars, including how its Ottoman Empire sideshow -- a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia and all that -- created the modern Middle East. This may explain why the big cataclysm's centennial commemorations from 2014 on have been so short on zest.1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder. It stands out in the glut of revisionist histories timed to World War I's 100th anniversary, not least because it's a terrific read. Even when you want to quarrel with Herman's interpretations, he's a whiz at organizing his complicated materials for maximum narrative clarity and dramatic effect. His provocative pairing of Lenin, the Soviet Union's inventor, with Woodrow Wilson, the most intransigently high-minded of U.S. presidents, as the joint architects of the chaotic planet we know today is never boring, no matter how irritated you may be by his ambition to turn "Tommy and Volodya" (one of his breezier chapter titles) into unwitting kindred spirits.1917 amounts to a prosecutor's brief against both on a charge of shared messianic absolutism.are oppressors," Lenin once bluntly said, because revolutions with no real popular backing can't work any other way.) However, Wilson doesn't really come off much better, at least aside from Herman's acknowledgment that Lenin's embrace of murderous violence would have horrified him.Commentary and National Review -- Herman is a man on a mission he plainly delights in: doing his bit to discredit the liberal tradition by giving one of the Democratic Party's bygone paragons feet of clay that reach, in Wilson's case, right up to his pince-nez. It doesn't even matter that Wilson is hardly a hero to the Woke Generation, as white supremacists with a virtuous hankering to impose America's will abroad aren't popular campus figures these days. Linking twentieth-century American liberalism to twentieth-century totalitarianism is an old game among conservative intellectuals, but Herman's originality is all in personalizing things by rooting his case in the similarity of Lenin's and Wilson's psychological makeup and depicting both as fanatics.P "Progressive," not merely a Democrat; while Wilson himself wouldn't have objected to the label, Herman rather scurries past the fact that it was a catchall term for reformists back then, with prominent proponents in both parties. The effect is to make unwary modern readers see Wilson as much more of a left-winger than he was, setting up broad-brush claims on the order of Herman's sweeping assertion that Wilson saw the war as an opportunity "to realize his Progressive dream of a nation that responded to the agenda and needs of government -- as opposed to the other way around." (Really? How very Leninist of him.) On the flip side, Herman breezily equates the Bolsheviks' creation of a state security apparatus to enforce ideological conformity with "what would come to be called 'political correctness,' " which is really pretty disgraceful as drive-by calumnies go.1917 's vast canvas are often stimulating as well. Alexander Kerensky, the head of the Provisional Government the Bolsheviks overthrew, emerges here as a more impressive, less feckless figure than the sad sack of caricature -- a man, in fact, with the gifts to have emerged as "the George Washington of the new Russia" if Lenin's greater wiliness hadn't thwarted him. (Charmingly, Herman mentions that he once met Kerensky, who didn't die until 1970, in the latter's old age.) A good deal less persuasively, Herman blames Wilson for dooming Kerensky's government by not pressuring his new European allies to end the war before Russia collapsed, a scenario that evaporates in the face of Britain's and France's likely reaction to the proposal. 1917 are in its energy and detail, not its ambitious but bungled aspirations to big-picture profundity. A two- time National Magazine Award winner during his stint as Esquire's "Screen" columnist, Tom Carson is currently a columnist at GQ. He is the author of Gilligan's Wake (2003), a novel .
Reviewer: Tom Carson
The Barnes & Noble Review
"A dazzling achievement." — Steve Forbes, Editor in Chief, Forbes Media
“Woodrow Wilson, the liberal idealist, and Vladimir Lenin, the illiberal totalitarian, hand-in-glove unwound the old nineteenth-century order and redefined war as an existential and global struggle over ideas—with disastrous twentieth-century results. In yet another well-written and fascinating dual biography, the prolific and insightful historian Arthur Herman shows how Wilson’s naive good intentions and Lenin’s deliberate ruthlessness nonetheless had the same pernicious effect of using the state to defy human nature. A fascinating and entirely original explanation of the American and Russian origins of the modern world.” — Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow, the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
“The pairing of these two diametrically opposed figures into one biography makes this illuminating read for anybody interested in World War I, the new political order it spawned, and the failures that led to the rise of Nazism and the horrors of World War II.” — Library Journal
"Deeply researched and engagingly written, this is a gripping account of great battles won and lost, of a triumphant war followed by a failed peace, and of clashing ideologies that shaped a century." — Robert Kagan, author of The World America Made
Arthur Herman writes with the artistic gifts of a novelist, and 1917 breaks new ground, plowing up the seminal event of the twentieth century, World War I. In his unique telling of this tale, the spotlight of interpretation falls on Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, the former a Russian ideologue of violent Bolshevik revolution, the latter an American academic ideologue of peaceful ‘progressive’ revolution. As the author makes clear, both millenarian politicians are determined to rule their revolutions, and to bend the existing social order to their abstract, even utopian, ideals.
Arthur Herman’s parallel biography of Lenin and Wilson will make the reader stop and think — about the great man theory of history and the cataclysmic events of 1917. Analyzing their legacies, Herman issues a clarion call for us to cast a wary eye on ideologues who want to remake the world, in 2017 as in 1917.
‘The wars of peoples,’ predicted Winston Churchill in 1901, ‘will be more terrible than those of kings.’ Arthur Herman has brilliantly identified the moment that that prediction came true, only sixteen years later. In his gripping account of the pivotal year 1917 – as seen through the world-changing decisions of its two crucial protagonists VI Lenin and Woodrow Wilson – Herman shows how Total War descended on Mankind, how ideology trumped the old European kingly concepts of Realpolitik, and how competing beliefs about dictatorship and democracy would lead to an even bloodier conflict only two decades later.
11/01/2017
2017-09-19
