The Franks were German Jews who had emigrated to the Netherlands a decade earlier, following Hitler’s rise to power. A lively and vivacious girl, Anne was given a red-checked cloth-bound book on her 13th birthday. Addressing her first entry “to Kitty,” she hoped that “I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great comfort and support to me.”
The German occupation of the Netherlands was two years old when Anne began her diary. By 1942 Jews were subject to a curfew and made to wear yellow stars on their clothing. They were forbidden to take the tram, to ride bicycles or to take pictures. On July 5, 1942 sixteen-year-old Margot received papers ordering her to report for transportation to a work camp. At 7.30 the following morning the Franks left their house.
The Annex’s occupants had prepared themselves for a long stay. Anne’s parents had been making secret trips to the hiding place for months. But nothing could have prepared them for the oppressive reality of hiding away from the world. Their survival was dependent on their “helpers,” four loyal employees of Otto Frank who risked their lives to bring them food, clothes, books and news. Absolute silence had to be maintained during the day to avoid arousing the suspicions of the workers in the store downstairs. “We are as quiet as baby mice,” wrote Anne in October 1942. “Who, three months ago, would have guessed that quicksilver Anne would have to sit still for hours—and what’s more, could?”
Anne was a talented writer, funny, quick and possessed of a somewhat caustic eye. But her diary is also the work of a normal teenager—bright, impetuous, moody and impatient. She struggled between the “good Anne” she would like to be and the “bad Anne” she felt she more often was. She was insightful, unstintingly honest and, increasingly, wise.
“There is no way of killing time,” she wrote in 1943. But she refused to give up hope. “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out,” she wrote on July 15, 1944. “Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
Three weeks later the German police stormed the Secret Annex. It is still unknown who betrayed them. The Annex’s inhabitants were sent to Westerbork, then to Auschwitz. In October Anne and Margot were transferred to Bergen-Belsen. They died of typhus within days of each other in March 1945, just a few weeks before the British liberated the camp.
Otto Frank was the only one of the Annex’s inhabitants to survive. When he returned to Amsterdam after the war, Miep Gies, one of their loyal helpers, gave him the diary that she had found scattered on the Annex’s floor. Asked later for his response on first reading his daughter’s diary, Otto replied: “I never knew my little Anne was so deep.”
While she was in hiding, Anne became convinced that she wanted to be a writer. Anne was not the only Jewish child diarist of the Holocaust. Probably there were many. A gifted Czech boy, Peter Ginz, kept a witty diary in Prague during 1941–2: “When I go to school,” he wrote, “I counted 9 ‘sheriffs’”—referring to Jews made to wear the yellow star. He was gassed in Auschwitz in 1944. These gifted diarists were not the only ones to turn hell into literature: Night by Elie Wiesel (b. 1928) and If This is a Man by Primo Levi (1919–87) are the two masterpieces of this European dark age.
A year before she died, Anne Frank wrote of her desire “to be useful or give pleasure to people around me who yet don’t really know me. I want to go on living even after my death!”
GORBACHEV & YELTSIN
1931– & 1931–2007
We are not abandoning our convictions, our philosophy or traditions, nor do we urge anyone to abandon theirs.
Mikhail Gorbachev
The fall of communism, the break-up of the Soviet empire, the liberation of eastern Europe from Soviet oppression and the emergence of a new Russia were the achievements of two rival Russian leaders, both of whom had decent intentions that were ruined by the pressures of real politics. Neither of them intended things to turn out as they did. Both of their careers ended in failure—and both actually produced effects that were the very opposite of their intentions. Indeed the achievements of each were counterproductive—and yet world changing.
A communist believer during his entire active career and indeed a believer in one-party rule, Mikhail Gorbachev, son of a combine harvester driver from Stavropol in south Russia, swiftly entered the top stream of Soviet leadership: he qualified in law and then climbed the Communist Party hierarchy to become first secretary of Stavropol in 1970. Early on in his life he married Raisa, who was to be his partner and adviser in power: both of their families had experienced Stalin’s Terror in their own families—yet neither lost their faith in the party.
By the 1970s, the reign of Leonid Brezhnev had produced economic stagnation, political sclerosis and falling prestige for the communist regime. In a party ruled by octogenarian Stalinist bureaucrats, the dynamic, cheerful and highly intelligent Gorbachev was noticed: in 1979 he was promoted to the Politburo in Moscow and placed in charge of agriculture under the wing of the KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, probably the most capable politician in the leadership during the last decades of Soviet rule.
After Brezhnev’s death Andropov succeeded to the top post but was too old to reform the USSR. On his death in 1984, Gorbachev did not push for the leadership: the senile and exhausted Konstantin Chernenko assumed power and survived just a few months. With this death it was clear that a new and young leader was needed: Gorbachev became first secretary and took control.
Swiftly he changed both the tone and facts of Soviet rule: he declared perestroika—restructuring—and glasnost—openness; but as a devout communist committed to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the party on which his power depended, he was no Western liberal democrat. He simply hoped to reform, consolidate and strengthen the Soviet dictatorship but instead unleashed forces he could not control. His economic mismanagement undermined his own achievements: his ban on alcohol deprived a desperate budget of key funds. Gorbachov’s tinkering with the command economy produced instant shortages and discontent—he did not understand how capitalism worked.
But he did gradually open up a semi-free press and allowed limited free elections—though he did not risk any kind of vote on his own role, relying on the party for his legitimacy. To Russians, he came to stand for a dangerous experiment, his tone—so charming to Westerners—sounded pompous and lecturing to his own people.
Abroad his achievements were truly revolutionary and titanic: he overturned the Brezhnev Doctrine of intervention in eastern European satellites: in partnership with his Georgian foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, he negotiated arms control agreements with US President Ronald Reagan; more amazingly he offered to free countries like Poland after decades of tyranny. In 1989, he withdrew Soviet troops from their catastrophic war in Afghanistan and allowed eastern Europeans to grasp freedom: Soviet client regimes fell in every country. In Germany, he allowed the Berlin Wall to be brought down—and Germany to be reunited. Reagan had confronted the Soviet Union with powerful democratic rhetoric and rising American defense spending—both of which certainly played a part in the fall of the Soviet imperium—but the achievement of this was overwhelmingly thanks to Gorbachev’s conviction that this could be done peacefully. At home Gorbachev was determined to promote communist rule and the coherence of the Soviet Union but his own actions had undermined both fatally: the elections of leaders in the separate republics had produced a more legitimate leadership than that of the party.