Peter Kadhammar’s trilogy about communism is very readable
“The rise and fall of European communism” by Peter Kadhammar
Maybe that’s Hard to imagine now. But at the end of the 190s, Russia was a country that was mainly associated with one thing in Sweden: YouTube clips on real, really full men.
In the perhaps well -known, a miner is interviewed by a TV team. Behind him his colleague appears as the old man in the box. The face is covered with clay and the level level seems to be around seven. The interview continues as if nothing happened.
While I read “Stalin’s Dream City”, I start thinking about those clips. It is one of the three books of Peter Kadhammar which is now released in a common volume under the name “The Rise and Fall of European Communism”, and the only ones who have not been published before.
Here the journalist depicts A journey he made in 1999 to the Russian city of Magnitogorsk. The community is located in Ual Mountains and is built in the order of Stalin In the early 1930s with one thing in mind: steel.
Building the city in rocket speed leads to great human victims, but it will also be a thinning success. With weapons of Magnitogorsk-Staal, it is the Red Army that wins the Second World War.
In the late nineties, only memories of this honorable history remain. Visiting the city of Kadhammar is one where corruption prevails and where the alcohol changes every night to something similar Hieronymus Boschs Hell paintings (or video clips with names such as “Drunk Russian guy chooses a fight with a tree”).
The book is written with a low, almost laconic style. It is far from the Cross -Secure World Reporter that you are used to reading in the columns, but it fits perfectly for the subject.
Everything is comical in the way you feel bad about laughing. Kadhammar goes around and asks people what they think is best about Magnitogorsk. Nobody knows what to answer.
The second book of the collection, “We who were so happy”, came out in 2017 and are perhaps the most ambitious.
Kadhammar’s own voice is hardly included. Instead, the story is told by quotes from in fact any non-dead person who held an important position in the Albanian dictatorship from the mid-40s to the fall of the wall.
They all live more or less comfortably in a part of the capital for the public tirana – and they are all more or less terrified of each other and one -violence Enver Hoxha.
A single error can lead to labor camps or implementation. It agrees with Hoxha one day can lead to death. The dictator may have changed.
The book is an amazing document from the center of power in a totalitarian society and deserves to be read for a long time.
“Mrs Anna and General” From 2009 he does not reach the same high level. Here is the story of the solidarity of the trade union movement and the collapse of Polish communism.
Kadhammar has interviewed the most important people on both sides, but as a reader I don’t get so close to one of them.
The author is just as busy writing a popular scientific representation of a long historical event when the people involved are in -depth. Especially compared to “we were so happy”, this makes the book a bit superficial.
However, it is possible to understand the temptation to put everything together in a large trilogy, and the images of Russia and Albania make “the rise and fall of European communism” in a very readable Luda.
Footnote: Since Peter Kadhammar is the employee of Aftonbladet, his book is assessed by Teodor Stig-Matz, critics in days etc.
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