Category Archives: History

Arts, Books, History

Book Club: The Ticket Collector from Belarus

SYNPOSIS

BRITAIN’S only war crimes trial began on February 9, 1999. The defendant at the Old Bailey was a 78-year-old former British Rail ticket collector known as Tony the Pole.

In fact, he was Andrei Sawoniuk, born in Domachevo, now part of Belarus. When the Nazis arrived there in 1941, Sawoniuk was quick to join their cause.

Among the crimes he was accused of was the killing of 15 Jewish women. The prosecution witnesses included Sawoniuk’s former childhood friends, whose families were murdered by the Nazis.

Convicted and sentenced to life, Sawoniuk died six years later. Based on interviews with survivors and witnesses, this is a moving and compelling account of the meticulous workings of the legal system in the face of crimes no less terrible for having been committed so long ago.

– The Ticket Collector from Belarus is co-authored by Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson. Published by S&S, 384pp

. Recommended

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Arts, Books, History, Russia, Ukraine

Book Review: Overreach

RUSSIA-UKRAINE

Intro: Owen Matthews is a writer with close family ties to Russia, but a disturbing portrait of the Russian president’s propaganda is swallowed whole by his own people. The Russian despot’s lies are working. Overreach is the inside story of Putin’s war against Ukraine

READERS of foreign affairs’ news will know the name of Owen Matthews, a veteran Moscow correspondent, from articles and pieces he has written about Russia and Ukraine.

But his book on the war now raging between those two countries – an act of pure and vicious choice by President Putin – reveals for the first time the depth of his own family’s involvement in the complex background of conflicting national identities.

Or as he puts it: “We all like to believe that we think with our rational minds. But a little bit of us, a deep bit, thinks with our blood.” For Matthews’ mother, Lyudmila Bibikova, was born in Kharkiv, a predominately Russian-speaking city, at the heart of the Ukrainian territories Putin is determined to annex; and her own parents were both born in what is now, legally, Ukrainian land.

Yet as Matthews goes on to explain: “The Bibikov family did not consider themselves Ukrainian. For two centuries the Bibikovs played a significant role in Russia’s imperial role in Ukraine, first as servants of the Tsars and later as loyal lieutenants of Soviet power. Whether I like it or not my family history – my blood – is intimately linked not only to Ukraine and Russia but to the history of the Russian Empire.”

Although Putin is widely regarded as being highly motivated by a desire to reassemble the Soviet Union – and the secession of Ukraine in 1991 marked the end for the USSR – the Russian president sees himself as the heir to Catherine the Great, who brought most of Ukraine under the Kremlin’s rule.

And, as Matthews recounts, his ancestor, Captain Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bibikov, was “one of the Russian officers who accompanied the empress on her first imperial progress through the newly conquered lands of south and west Ukraine”.

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Arts, Christianity, History, Philosophy, Science

Christianity and philosophy

RENAISSANCE

THE doctrines of the Christian Church dominated the philosophy of medieval Europe. Christianity, especially in its early period, placed less emphasis on philosophical reasoning and more on faith and authority. Philosophy was regarded with suspicion, and the ideas of the Greek philosophers were initially considered incompatible with Christian belief.

The Church had a virtual monopoly on scholarship, but some Christian thinkers introduced elements of Greek philosophy, especially that of Plato and Aristotle. After careful examination by the authorities, many of these ideas were gradually integrated into doctrine. From the end of the Roman Empire to the 15th century, a distinct Christian philosophy evolved, starting with Augustine and culminating in the comprehensive philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

With the Renaissance, however, the authority of the Church in particular, was challenged by a resurgence of humanist views. Scientific discoveries contradicted core beliefs, and the invention of printing meant the Church could no longer control access to information.

The Scientific Revolution

Although the Renaissance was primarily an artistic and cultural movement, its emphasis on free thinking challenged the authority of religion and paved the way for an unprecedented age of scientific discovery.

Tradition undermined

The Scientific Revolution began with the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), which presented evidence contradicting the notion of a ‘geocentric universe’. That same year, Andreas Vesalius published De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body), which overturned many orthodox ideas in anatomy and medicine. What followed was a profound change in the approach to enquiry into the natural world. Conventional wisdom, including the dogma of the Church, was no longer blindly accepted, but challenged. Even the work of Aristotle, who had initiated the idea of natural philosophy based on methodical observation, was subjected to scientific scrutiny.

At the forefront of this scientific revolution were philosophers such as Francis Bacon, whose Novum Organum (New Instrument) proposed a new method for the study of natural philosophy – systematically gathering evidence through observation, from which the laws of nature could be inferred. But there was also a new class of thinkers and scientists, including Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei. Galileo challenged dogma more than most by proving that the Earth orbits the Sun, and fell foul of the Church for his efforts.

The discoveries made by these scientists, and the methods they used, laid the foundations for the work of Isaac Newton in the following century, and also influenced philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, who helped to shape the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment.

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