pumpkinstrokemarrow

To recover from this mishap, akin perhaps to getting out of the wrong side of the bed, we took ourselves off to http://www.enzoatkingwilliamiv.co.uk/ for lunch, an establishment which had had a long history as a boozer in Ewell village, before the trade fell off in the late nineties. Now converted, by a couple rather than a chain, into an Italian eatery where we did very well. They clearly saw me coming as, inter alia, they managed to cook their own bread in their pizza oven. At least I suppose that is where they cook it. Some bread bores can get quite excited about the difference between stone baked and steel baked bread - although most of the good bakers I have used in a regular way were definitely in the steel baked camp. In any event, a far superior item to the soggy warm brown stuff which restaurants usually manage when the DIY bread mood grips them.

As part of my festive reading I have finished off the biog. of Stalin by Deutscher (see 1 December above). A good book which, I think, has stood the test of time well. It would be interesting, if one had more quality time, to read a well thought of modern version and see how much the picture has changed, apart from giving a lot more space to Siberian, Ukrainian and other atrocities.

So I find that, in addition to backing the wrong side in 1918, England and France were still at it in 1939, by which time it would have been better had they moved on. That is to say, England and France thought it would be a good wheeze if Hitler and Stalin beat each other up, leaving them free to pick up the spoils, while Stalin thought it would be a good wheeze if England, France and Germany beat each other up, leaving him free to pick up the spoils. As it was, Stalin did a last minute deal with Hitler which he thought bought him useful time before the inevitable punch up. In the round, we all lost out as a result, not least the Germans. And Deutscher argues that Stalin did not even make very good use of the time that he had bought. He might have done better to fight a couple of years earlier. Interestingly, he also says that Russia's industrial production had more or less caught up that of Germany by the late thirties. OK so Russia was a much bigger country but it was still quite an achievement given their starting point. Unfortunately, 40% of this production was located in parts of Russia scheduled to be overrun by the Germans.

He goes on to argue that, unlike Hitler, Stalin was a committee man. OK, so if his generals did not agree, he would make the decision. But, on the whole, when they did agree, he would agree with them. Also that, instead of interfering with front line minutiae, he gave quality time to production and logistics, making sure that those thousands of tanks were in the right place, fuelled up and ready to go, at the right time.

Another feature of Stalin was that, while not a Russian, he was a man of the people, the son of a man born as a serf, unlike the old Bolsheviks, most of whom came from middle class or better backgrounds. Maybe this stood him in good stead too.

Which, together with the airplane news of yesterday, reminds me of a pitch which I have made here at least once. To the effect that so long as the world is full of inequality it will also be full of trouble. A pitch which is clearly wrong to the extent that people from good backgrounds are drawn to the extremism - or terrorism - of their day. To which I retort, not wrong but complicated by. The extremism of their day will only thrive to the extent that it is rooted in real and sustained poverty, injustice, cruelty or whatever. Although, thinking aloud, once the tree has taken good root, it might acquire a life of its own and survive for years or decades without what one might have thought was the necessary nourishment.