Back in the spring, Jan Smigmator's swing band was playing at New York's famous Carnegie Hall.

Late one night in 1958, a man named Liu Bingshu whispered to his wife, the mother of their four young children, “There is no escape. I could be taken away … If I can come back, we will see each other again.” Liu would soon be the victim of a massive policy change by the Communist leader of China, Mao Zedong. Just a year earlier, Mao had famously demanded that “a hundred flowers bloom,” actively inviting criticism and suggestions from the public. But those who spoke up were soon labeled “rightist” enemies; the party estimated that they amounted to 5 percent of the population. Some half a million intellectuals, including Liu, were ordered to undergo “reeducation.” Thousands were dispatched to three labor camps in the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu. The deadliest of them was Jiabiangou, where less than half of the inmates are reported to have survived. Liu’s family never saw him again.

This intimate and devastating nighttime discussion between Liu and his wife has been preserved because Liu’s oldest son, 12-year-old Liu Tianyou, woke up and overheard it, and decades later, in his modest apartment in Gansu, the documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming recorded his memory. Ai spent two years interviewing dozens of Jiabiangou survivors as well as the families of victims. She traveled to the former camp site and filmed the shallow graves with skulls still poking out of the sand. In 2017, 60 years after Mao launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Ai released her seven-hour film: Jiabiangou Elegy.

People such as Ai Xiaoming—Chinese filmmakers, writers, and artists, those who are looking to uncover and expose the darkest episodes in China’s history, often at great risk to themselves—are the subject of the long-time China correspondent Ian Johnson’s new book, Sparks. Johnson considers these individuals to be engaged in the ancient Chinese tradition of producing yeshi, or “wild history”—accounts of the past that strayed from official dynastic court history, or zhengshi. In the China of today, Johnson contends, this practice continues with a sparse but committed underground insisting on yeshi in the face of a digitally reinforced version of zhengshi.

The Communist government considers the official narratives of the past sacrosanct, and control over them as essential to the maintenance of power. Attempts to challenge any aspect of the accepted history of Communist rule have become particularly dangerous in the past decade, under the rule of Xi Jinping. Johnson himself was among a group of foreign correspondents who were suddenly expelled from the country in 2020, amid the COVID-19 outbreak and growing animosity between the Trump and Xi administrations. Especially at a time of renewed repression, Johnson argues, the fight against collective amnesia is an important front line. The work of these documentarians is to better understand the past, but it has also become “a battleground for the present,” Johnson writes.

In this sense, Johnson’s work is not unlike that of his subjects: They ask their audiences to shift their vantage point and to reconsider an overlooked group or a sanitized past to truly comprehend the country they live in. Johnson captures a range of grassroots historians carrying out this work, including the Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser, who conducted oral-history interviews in order to piece together the destruction of her native land during the Cultural Revolution, and the anthropologist Guo Yuhua, who documented the suffering of peasants in the enduring regional famines in rural Shaanxi province in northwestern China.

Every ideology creates its own origin myths. Mao and his fellow idealists canonized their memory of brotherly love in Yan’an, the Communists’ homebase in the 1930s and ’40s, which in reality was dominated by fierce power struggles punctuated by executions. Americans don’t have to search far to find examples of such airbrushing, like the belief in the unwavering fair-mindedness of the American Founding Fathers, many of whom were slave owners. Recent years have seen a global “memory boom,” Johnson writes, an attempt to correct the record. And in China, this push has its own urgency: The government sees self-reflection and criticism as a form of lethal weakness, justifying its oppressive policies and persecutions. For the country to break free from the cycles of injustice and violence, zhengshi and yeshi have to first make peace.

After the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the mid-1950s, which swept up Liu Bingshu and so many others, Mao launched a series of utopian experiments. The Great Leap Forward, a crash industrialization program, soon led to the Great Famine, from 1959 to 1961, in which an estimated 45 million people starved to death. The Cultural Revolution soon followed; Mao, uncertain of his grasp on power, declared that enemies of the regime were preparing for a counterrevolution. In July 1966, he urged students and other young people to attack authority figures around them. The next month, in Beijing alone, more than 1,700 people were killed. The upheaval ended only shortly after Mao’s death, in 1976.

When Deng Xiaoping rose to power as Mao’s successor, he was confronted with the seminal task of reframing the deadly chaos from which the country had just emerged. In 1980, he convened a committee to work on a draft resolution about this turbulent recent history. But Johnson writes that Deng was reportedly livid when the committee submitted its first draft, because he found the criticism of Mao far too blunt. Deng himself had suffered under Mao: He had been purged twice. His oldest son was tortured and had jumped off a building, becoming paralyzed. However, Deng felt that to reject the legacy of the Great Helmsman so thoroughly would undermine the Communist Party’s own legitimacy.

[Read: The China model is dead]

Ultimately, a more conciliatory version was distributed to a few thousand senior officials that September, triggering complaints that the draft had failed to address the period’s mass fatalities. Deng managed to prevent a full-blown denunciation of his predecessor, and nine months later, the resolution was officially ratified. It acknowledged that the Cultural Revolution was a costly error and blamed it on the “anti-revolutionary” Gang of Four, a faction of party officials who had become notorious during that era. It reaffirmed Mao’s status as “a great leader and mentor,” vaguely concluding that “his contributions were primary, his mistakes secondary.”

President Xi Jinping, who has led the country since 2013, has sanctioned this paving over of difficult history. And he has explicitly pointed to the Soviet Union and what he calls its “historical nihilism” as a cautionary tale. Xi saw the Soviet leadership’s decision after Stalin’s death to allow a degree of criticism of his reign and its bloody repressions as the beginning of the end of Soviet power. The permission to reassess history in this way, Xi believes, opened the floodgates to demands for increased liberalization. To get ahead of this “historical nihilism,” on the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth, in 2013, Xi instructed party members to see Mao in his historical context. “We can’t use today’s circumstances,” he said, “to measure our predecessors.”

Over the years, party commentators have echoed Xi’s thoughts. In 2018, the Central Committee journal Qiushi published an article on “historical nihilism” and blamed Nikita Khrushchev specifically for his infamous 1956 secret speech in which he acknowledged some of Stalin’s crimes. Khrushchev “failed to analyze the historical background,” the article argued. “And disproportionately focused on Stalin’s shortcomings and mistakes.” The author also warned against the subversive “information explosion” that the Soviets underwent. In the 1960s, memoirs from victims of Stalin’s Gulags, petition letters, underground journals, and books by dissidents circulated in a period known in the Soviet Union as “The Thaw.” “We must unequivocally oppose and resist historical nihilism,” Xi said at a Central Committee meeting in 2021. The same year, party theorists called on the public to “dare to struggle against” this “historical nihilism,” which one of them said was aimed at “removing the spinal cord” of the Chinese race.

One of the survivors Ai Xiaoming followed in her documentary was Zhang Suiqing, who took it upon himself to erect a tombstone of sorts for his less fortunate Jiabiangou peers. In 2013, he obtained approval from local authorities. When the modest memorial was finally built, the officials changed their minds and had it dismantled. What happened to Zhang’s project is reminiscent of a passage in Georgi Gospodinov’s 2020 novel, Time Shelter, about post-communist Bulgaria. When a character set about trying to build a museum dedicated to the role of the country’s state security, he met endless obstacles: “We don’t want to divide the people,” he was told. “It wasn’t the right moment,” others said. Finally, he gave up, noting, “You can’t make a museum to preserve something that has never left.”

With charming modesty, China experts from the United States and Europe sometimes call themselves “students of China.” Ian Johnson has been “a student of China” in the best sense of this phrase. In his first book about the country, Wild Grass, published in 2004, he traced the possibility of liberalization at the turn of the century, by pursuing—literally, by train and taxi, or down a hallway—underdog figures who became accidental activists as they tackled problems such as police brutality and the overtaxation of farmers.

Those who have read Wild Grass may feel a wistfulness for it while reading Sparks: For many, the hopefulness of the early 2000s has evaporated. The country feels much further away from the sense of potential he was describing then. Johnson’s writing, too, has changed over time, shifting from the conventions of narrative long-form to a more documentarian style. His cast of characters has grown and no matter how brief the appearance is, he diligently notes each person’s name as if he, too, is fending off erasure. The landscape has widened, and he insists that readers see China the way he sees it: how the sprawling geography, history, and people who animate it are intricately intertwined. In Dao County, one of the worst sites of the Cultural Revolution, an elderly man, Tan Hecheng, showed Johnson around. Tan spent four decades researching and documenting the thousands of local killings. At a scenic spot by a local river, he showed Johnson saber marks on the parapet of a bridge—a sickening trace of the executions. Johnson sees not only the physical wounds of the past but also the psychic toll on the historian: “His mind is overloaded with horrific images. As he gets older, they overwhelm him, becoming more real than ever.”

[Read: How China sees the world]

Authoritarians have an instinct to try to control a nation’s historical memory. This impulse emerges out of fear. They are convinced that their power will be weakened if they allow a more accurate and nuanced vision of the past, worrying that discussions of guilt, accountability, and reparation will be required if they get too far. But such a binary calculation in dealing with a nation’s history is “the opposite of thought,” as the novelist Zadie Smith recently put it in an interview. When Ai Xiaoming’s film was released, she and her subjects were harassed by the authorities. “Aren’t today’s events enough for you to believe the veracity of the Jiabiangou stories?” she asked on WeChat in 2017.

“Without the Anti-Rightist Campaign there would have been no Great Leap Forward; without the Great Leap Forward, people would not have starved to death. If people didn’t starve to death, there would not have been the Cultural Revolution. Without the Cultural Revolution, there would not have been Tiananmen,” Huang Zerong, who went to prison for publishing an underground journal, told Johnson. In the imprisonment of Huang and the harassment of Ai, the vicious cycle repeats. China’s underground historians use writing like a time shelter: Through manuscripts saved in drawers, informal lectures on tucked-away staircases, and magazines circulated by PDF file to evade the government’s eye, they want to memorialize those who came before them and to deliver a message to the future.

Eugene Stoner was an unassuming family man in postwar America. He wore glasses and had a fondness for bow ties. His figure was slightly round; his colleagues called him a teddy bear. He refused to swear or spank his children. “Boy, that frosts me,” he’d say when he was upset. He liked to tweak self-important people with a dry sense of humor. He hated attention.

A lifelong tinkerer and a Marine veteran, he was also fascinated by the question of how to make guns shoot better. When an idea came to him, he scribbled it down on anything he could find—a pad of paper, a napkin, the tablecloth at a restaurant. He had no formal training in engineering or in firearms design. Yet it was inside Stoner’s detached garage in Los Angeles, during the 1950s, that the amateur gunsmith, surrounded by piles of sketches and prototypes, came up with the idea for a rifle that would change American history.

Today, this weapon is the most popular rifle in America—and the most hated. The AR-15 is a symbol of Second Amendment rights to millions of Americans and an emblem of a violent gun culture run amok to millions more. With a lightweight frame and an internal gas system, the military version can be fired as an automatic, unleashing a stream of bullets from a single pull of the trigger, or as a semiautomatic, allowing for one shot per trigger pull. The civilian semiautomatic version is now the best-selling rifle in the country; more than 20 million such guns are in civilian hands. And it is a weapon of choice for mass shooters—including the white supremacist who killed three Black people last month at a store in Jacksonville, Florida, armed with a handgun and an AR-15-style rifle emblazoned with a swastika.

[Juliette Kayyem: The Jacksonville killer wanted everyone to know his message of hate]

The consequences of the AR-15’s creation have coursed through our society and politics for generations in ways that Stoner never foresaw. He created the gun with a simple goal: to build a better rifle for the U.S. military and its allies during the Cold War. He wanted to protect the country he loved. Now his invention is fused in Americans’ minds with the horror of people going about their daily tasks—at school, the movies, the store, a concert—and suddenly finding themselves running for their lives. Few of the participants in America’s perpetual gun debate know the true, complicated history of this consequential creation—or of the man behind it. The saga of the AR-15 is a story of how quickly an invention can leave the control of the inventor, how it can be used in ways the creator never imagined.

We interviewed Stoner’s family members and close colleagues about his views of his gun. They gave us insight into what the inventor might have thought about the way the AR-15 is being used today, though we’ll never know for sure; Stoner died before mass shootings with AR-15s were common. Later in life, after years of working in the gun industry, he was asked about his career in an interview for the Smithsonian Institution. “It was kind of a hobby that got out of hand,” he said.

As a boy growing up in the Coachella Valley, in Southern California, in the 1920s and ’30s, Stoner was fascinated by explosions. Before the age of 10, he had designed rockets and rudimentary weapons. On one occasion, he begged a friend’s father for a metal pipe and the local drugstore owner for magnesium. Stoner built a primitive cannon and pointed it at a house across the street, but before he could open fire, his father ran to stop him. “I told you to do this at the city dump,” scolded Lloyd Stoner, a veteran of the Great War who had moved the family to California from the farmlands of Indiana in search of a better life.

Eugene Stoner never went to college. He joined the Marines during World War II and was tasked with repairing weapons on aircraft in the Philippines. When he came home, he brought his wife, Jean, an adventurous woman who idolized Amelia Earhart, a special present: gun parts from Asia that he assembled into a rifle. She loved it. The couple often went hunting and shooting together. “He was a very quiet person,” Jean said in an unpublished interview that the Stoner family shared with us. “But if you talked about guns, cars, or planes, he’d talk all night.”

After the war, Stoner got a job as a machinist making aircraft parts. Every day after he came home, he would eat the dinner that Jean had prepared (beef Stroganoff was his favorite), take a quick nap, and then walk to the garage to work on his gun designs. Like other hobbyist inventors of the era, he believed he could move the country forward by the power of his ingenuity. “We were like the 1950s family. It was California. It was booming after the war,” his daughter Susan told us. “I knew from my dad—I felt from him—the future was wide open.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The California dream is dying]

Stoner had the ability, common among inventors, to imagine engineering solutions that others stuck in the dogmas of the field could not. For centuries, gunmakers had built their rifles out of wood and steel, which made them very heavy. At the time, the U.S. military was searching for a lighter rifle, and Stoner wondered if he could build one using modern materials. If humans were soaring into the atmosphere in airplanes made of aluminum, he figured, couldn’t the lightweight metal tolerate the pressures of a gun firing? By the early 1950s, he had figured out how to replace one of the heaviest steel components of a rifle with aluminum. Then he devised a way of using the force of the gas from the exploding gunpowder to move parts inside the gun so that they ejected spent casings and loaded new rounds. This allowed him to eliminate other, cumbersome metal parts that had been used in the past. The first time he tried firing a gun using this new system, it blew hot gas into his face. But he perfected the design and eventually received a patent for it.

In 1954, Stoner got the opportunity to bring his radical gun concepts to life. That year, as Stoner later recalled, he had a chance encounter at a local gun range with George Sullivan. A relentless pitchman, Sullivan was then the head of a Hollywood start-up called ArmaLite, a subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Aircraft Corporation whose mission was to design futuristic weapons. Impressed with the homemade guns Stoner was shooting, Sullivan hired him as ArmaLite’s chief engineer.

The small yet brilliant ArmaLite team worked at a fevered pace, designing a series of lightweight guns made of aluminum and plastic. Most went nowhere. Nevertheless, the ambitious Sullivan set the firm’s sights on an improbable target: the U.S Army’s standard-issue rifle. The Eisenhower administration’s “New Look”—an effort to rein in Pentagon spending and shift it toward newer technologies—opened the door for private companies to get big military contracts. The outsiders from Hollywood decided to take on Springfield Armory, the military’s citadel of gun making in western Massachusetts that had equipped American soldiers since the Revolutionary War. Springfield’s own efforts to develop a new rifle had resulted in a heavy wood-and-steel model that wasn’t much more advanced than the M1 Garand used by GIs in World War II.

Eugene Stoner, wearing his trademark bow tie, holds his creation the AR-10. The AR-15 was a scaled-down version of this gun. (Photograph courtesy of Susan Kleinpell via Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

ArmaLite’s first serious attempt at a rapid-fire rifle made of plastic and aluminum was the AR-10—AR for ArmaLite or ArmaLite Research (accounts differ), and 10 because the weapon was the company’s tenth creation. The rifle combined the efficient internal gas system Stoner had devised in his garage and lightweight modern materials with a design that made the gun easy to shoot and keep on target. In December 1956, Time heralded the AR-10 as a potential savior for the bumbling U.S. military and listed Sullivan as the gun’s inventor, a claim that infuriated Stoner’s wife. Sullivan had also meddled with the design, insisting that more aluminum be used in making the gun’s barrel, a move Stoner resisted. During military trials, the AR-10 fared poorly. At one point, a bullet erupted from the side of the gun’s barrel, just missing the hand of the soldier firing the weapon—and seemingly dooming ArmaLite’s chances of landing a military contract.

But within the Pentagon, a cabal of high-ranking officers led by General Willard Wyman launched a back-channel effort to save Stoner’s gun. Wyman was a legendary military leader who, at age 46, had joined the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach as an assistant commander of the First Infantry Division. He knew that the United States needed better firepower as the Cold War flashed hot. America’s enemies around the globe were being armed by the Soviet Union with millions of rugged AK-47s that could spray bullets in automatic mode and were highly effective in guerilla warfare. Wyman was certain that modern wars would be won not by long-range marksmen but by soldiers firing lots of bullets in close combat. They needed a rifle that used small-caliber bullets so they could carry more ammo. And he was worried that the tradition-bound gun designers at Springfield Armory weren’t innovative enough to meet the challenge. When Wyman’s superiors brushed him off, he secretly flew to Los Angeles and stunned Stoner and his team by striding into the ArmaLite office unannounced. Wyman told Stoner that he wanted ArmaLite to build a new version of the AR-10 that fired a smaller bullet.

[James Fallows: Why the AR-15 is so lethal]

Stoner and an ArmaLite draftsman named Jim Sullivan (no relation to George) set about designing the gun. It was simple, efficient, and easy to use. Early versions of the AR-15 weighed just more than five pounds unloaded, less than the hedge trimmers and handheld vacuums of the era. With all of Stoner’s innovations—lighter material, fewer parts, and the gas system, as well as an in-line stock and a pistol grip—Jim Sullivan found shooting the prototype AR-15 to be easy, even after he flipped the selector switch to automatic. “That made it so well handling,” he told us. “If you’re firing full auto, you don’t want a gun that lifts.” Sullivan found the rifle’s recoil to be minimal. As a result, follow-up shots were quick when he switched it to semiautomatic. “It looked a little far-out for that time in history,” Stoner later said in the Smithsonian interview.

As Stoner and his backers sought to persuade the military to adopt the AR-15 in place of Springfield’s rifle, they were often met with skepticism about the gun’s small bullets. During secret military hearings about the rifle in the winter of 1958, Stoner explained to a panel of generals that the AR-15 had “a better killing cartridge with a higher velocity” than the Soviet AK-47. The generals asked Stoner how a smaller bullet fired from his rifle could do so much damage. “The wound capability is extremely high,” Stoner answered. “It blows up on contact rather than drilling a nice neat hole.” A slower .30 caliber round, similar to the one used by Springfield’s wood-and-steel rifles, “will go right through flesh,” but the faster, smaller bullet from the AR-15 “will tumble and tear,” he said.

Those in the military who wanted Springfield’s rifle to prevail tried to sabotage Stoner’s gun, rigging tests and shading reports so that it would seem like it wasn’t ready for the battlefield. During official trials in Alaska, Stoner arrived to find that the aiming sights on his guns had been replaced with bits of metal that were badly misaligned, causing soldiers to miss their targets. The guileless inventor was caught up in the murky world of Pentagon intrigue.

[From June 1981: James Fallows’s ‘M-16: A Bureaucratic Horror Story’]

Eventually, through persistence and luck, and with the help of a cast of lobbyists, spies, and analytics-driven military leaders, Stoner’s rifle would be adopted. At a key moment when it seemed that the AR-15 would be killed off by military bureaucrats, the powerful, cigar-chomping Air Force General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the U.S. bombing campaign in Japan during World War II, was asked if he wanted to shoot the gun. On July 4, 1960, at a birthday party for Richard Boutelle, the onetime head of Fairchild, the gun’s backers set up ripe watermelons as targets at Boutelle’s estate in western Maryland. LeMay fired, causing a red-and-green explosion. The general marched into the Pentagon soon after and demanded that the military purchase the weapon. It would become the standard-issue rifle—renamed the M16, for the prosaic “Model 16”—just in time for the rise of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.   

A U.S. Marine holds his M16 rifle alert after being fired on by North Vietnamese soldiers in the jungle southwest of Da Nang on April 22, 1969. (Yvon Cornu / AP)

In Eugene Stoner’s and Jim Sullivan’s minds, their work was not just intellectually engaging but also noble, a way to help America defeat the Communists. At school, in the 1950s, the Stoner children learned what to do in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. Sirens and bells went off regularly, and teachers ordered kids to hide under their desks and cover their heads, Stoner’s daughter Susan recalled. For her father, the task of making the best rifle for the U.S. military wasn’t burdened with moral quandaries. Many weapons inventors at the time thought about the technical challenges of their weapons first, and wrestled with the consequences of their creations only afterward. “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead developer of the atomic bomb, said almost a decade after bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[From February 1949: J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘The Open Mind’]

After Stoner created the AR-15, he continued designing guns and artillery for a variety of gunmakers. Through a company he co-founded, he worked on antiaircraft weapons for the Shah of Iran, before the 1979 revolution scuttled the deal. He helped design a handgun for the venerable gunmaker Colt that the company tried to sell on the civilian market, without much success. But none of his creations came close to the prominence of the AR-15. By the 1990s, he’d become a superstar in the gun world. Royalties from the M16 made him wealthy; Colt, which purchased the rights to the gun from ArmaLite, sold millions of the weapons to the military. Stoner was “a Second Amendment guy,” his daughter said, but he didn’t talk much about the messy world of politics, either privately or publicly. He preferred thinking about mechanisms.

Throughout his life, Stoner was troubled by losing control over the production of his most famous gun. In the 1960s, as the U.S. ramped up production of the rifle for the war in Vietnam, a Pentagon committee made changes to the gun and its ammunition without proper testing. The results on the battlefields in Vietnam were disastrous. Stories of GIs dying with jammed M16s in their hands horrified the public and led to congressional hearings. The shy inventor was called to testify and found himself thrust into an uncomfortable spotlight. Declassified military documents that we reviewed show that Stoner tried in vain to warn Pentagon officials against the changes.

Stoner paid far less attention to the semiautomatic version of his rifle that Colt began marketing to the public in the 1960s as “a superb hunting partner.” Even after Stoner’s patent expired, in 1977, the rifle was a niche product made by a handful of companies and was despised by many traditional hunters, who tended to prefer polished wood stocks and prided themselves on felling game with a single shot. But the rifle’s status shifted after 9/11. Many Americans wanted to own the gun that soldiers were carrying in the War on Terror. When the 1994 federal assault-weapons ban expired after a decade, the AR-15 became palatable for mainstream American gunmakers to sell. Soon, it was a symbol of Second Amendment rights and survivalist chic, and gun owners rushed to buy AR-15s, fearful that the government would ban them again. By the late 2000s, the gun was enjoying astounding commercial success.

AR-15 style weapons are displayed for sale at the 2022 Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, an open-carry event to celebrate the Second Amendment, in Greeley, Pennsylvania. (Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty)

When Stoner died from cancer, in 1997, obituaries hailed him as the inventor of the long-serving military rifle; they made no mention of the civilian version of the weapon. Stoner left clues about his thoughts about the gun in a long letter, sent to a Marine general, in which he outlined his wishes for his funeral and burial at Quantico National Cemetery, in Virginia. He saw the creation of a rifle for the U.S military as his greatest triumph. He didn’t mention the civilian version. The government had wanted a “small caliber/high velocity, lightweight, select fire rifle which engaged targets with salvos of rounds from one trigger pull,” Stoner wrote. “That is what I achieved for our servicemen.”

[Ryan Busse: The rifle that ruined America]

The inventor wouldn’t get to control how his proudest achievement would be used after his death, or the fraught, outsize role it would come to play in American society and politics. Since 2012, some of the deadliest mass shootings in the nation’s history—Sandy Hook, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Uvalde—have been carried out by men armed with AR-15s. Now children practice drills to avoid being gunned down by attackers with AR-15s at their school.

The last surviving member of that ArmaLite team, the draftsman Jim Sullivan, was at times haunted by the invention’s later impact. When we visited him at his workshop in Arizona in 2019, Sullivan pulled out the original drawings for the AR-15 and smiled broadly as he described how he and Stoner had designed the gun. He picked up parts to demonstrate how it worked, explaining its functions like an excited professor. He was proud of the weapon and loved Stoner. He said that his years working at ArmaLite were the best of his life. After hours of talking about barrels, bolts, receivers, and Stoner’s gas system, he paused and looked down at the floor. He said he’d grown deeply disturbed by the violence being wrought with the invention he had helped create. He said that mass shooters wouldn’t be able to do what they do without weapons such as the AR-15.

“Every gun designer has a responsibility to …” he said, pausing before finishing his thought, “to think about what the hell they’re creating.”

This article has been adapted from Zusha Elinson and Cameron McWhirter’s book, American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15.

“President Joe Biden has made a statement about the situation in Bakhmut”: If anyone had said this sentence to me two years ago, I would have laughed. Back then, most Ukrainians couldn’t have found Bakhmut on a map.

Now, when I tell people that I come from Bakhmut and permanently left it in February 2022, on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, their faces change. They start talking to me as though we are standing at a graveside. The name of my home city suffices for this.

I carry my town inside me and mark it on Google Maps with a heart and the word home. Russia has physically erased it from the face of the Earth and made its name a byword for destruction, for street battles of a ferocity hardly seen since World War II.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien and Mykola Bielieskov: What the battle in Bakhmut has done for Ukraine]

Sometimes, I stare for hours at new photos of ruins published in local chat groups. I’m looking for the city I remember: I’ve walked this street hundreds of times on my way to school; my classmate lived in that building; my dentist worked in the neighboring one, where I had an appointment on February 24, 2022, that I never made. When I identify the neighborhood, I feel relief: I haven’t forgotten everything. My town is imprinted in me.

In peacetime, I gave tours of Bakhmut when friends visited from other cities. But I’ve never tried to do this virtually, to walk someone through a city that effectively no longer exists. Few buildings survive here, only ashes, and tons of broken concrete that people once considered their homes. No life remains, or almost none: Visible in drone footage are chestnut, apricot, and cherry trees that miraculously withstood the Russian onslaught, although Bakhmut itself did not.

Let me take you to my Bakhmut.

Bakhmut is small, roughly 40 square kilometers, and just a little more than an hour by bicycle from end to end. In the summer, the steppe gets hot, no matter the time of day. But by October, the leaves have turned and fallen in the light wind.

Stupkey, to the city’s north, sits on massive salt deposits that made Bakhmut a mining town for hundreds of years. Once, I came here with Mark van den Meizenberg, the scion of a Dutch family that established a salt mine called “Peter the Great” 140 years ago. We walked through tall grass until we came to a ravine and a salt lake, near the site of the old mine. Mark’s family lived here until the beginning of the First World War and the revolution, burying their dead in the local Dutch cemetery.

The Bolsheviks put an end to “Peter the Great,” and salt extraction soon moved to richer deposits in Soledar, just 10 kilometers away. I’ve ventured into those industrial salt mines about a dozen times, always finding new marvels: a subterranean church; intricate salt sculptures; galleries with ceilings soaring up to 30 meters, where symphony orchestras have played; a grand tree festooned with garlands; a therapeutic sanatorium; even a football pitch. I brought my friends to see these things—and to feel beneath our feet a seabed from 250 million years ago, whose salts have seasoned the meals of every Ukrainian household.

Once I went with a group that included a local artist, Masha Vyshedska, who brought her ukulele. We nestled into a secluded corner of an expansive gallery, under the soft glow of the lights we’d carried. Masha strummed, and I captured the moment on video. The salt walls reflected her towering shadow and returned echoes of her ukulele as the sound traveled through the underground caverns. So engrossed were we in the moment that we lost track of our group and nearly found ourselves stranded in the mine overnight. Now that enchanted space has slipped behind the front line, inaccessible.

Starting in April 2014, when Russia made its earlier play for eastern Ukraine, militants stormed a military base near Tsvetmet, an industrial area just south of Stupkey, five times, hoping to capture the 280 Ukrainian tanks there. The Russian-backed militants brought guns, grenade launchers, and tanks. Local activists smuggled supplies and essentials over the fence to the Ukrainian soldiers. The militants occupied parts of Bakhmut that spring, but by July, our special forces had repelled them.

I lived near the base at the time. Tsvetmet is mostly factories and private houses, but not long before the war, a much-loved recreational area had sprung up here, called the Alley of Roses for the hundreds of different-colored rose varieties that bloomed from spring to late fall. The park bordered on a lake where we picnicked and fed the ducks and swans.

I remember sitting in the hallway of my apartment building, listening to the rumble of tanks on the asphalt under my window and waiting for the sound of automatic fire to subside. My husband and I were expecting a child. When the streets quieted, I ventured out, just to make sure that the Ukrainian flag still flew over the base. It did, though the base lay in ruins, and when the sun rose, we took our cameras and set out to report. A Ukrainian soldier defending the post saw my look of despair and embraced me, assuring me that, thank God, everyone was alive and everything would be okay.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

My son, Tymofiy, was born in February 2015. The very next day, we felt the vibrations of Russian shells exploding on the outskirts of Bakhmut. A nurse told me to take the baby to the maternity hospital’s basement: “They’re going to shell again,” she said. There we huddled, seven frightened mothers and their infants, as well as silent men and staff members. A girl who had just given birth a few hours earlier was brought down on a stretcher. I started to panic, calling relatives and friends to say that we were being evacuated. I imagined fleeing with my son in my arms. But the rumor of renewed shelling was false, and soon we returned to our rooms.

Being afraid eventually becomes tiring. You start to respond skeptically to warnings of possible shelling, but the tension doesn’t dissipate, even when weeks go by without the sound of cannons and without new rumors that feed on your fear. The Ukrainian flag flying over the tank base always comforted me.  

Yan Dobronosov / Global Images Ukraine / Getty

When Tymofiy was small, we would take him to the local supermarket for ice cream before riding our bikes to the promenade along the Bakhmutka River. The park was another new one: Before the riverbed was cleaned and its banks strengthened, this place was neglected, overgrown with reeds. Now local fishermen climbed over the fence and sat by the water waiting for a catch, and children gathered on playgrounds with swings and basketball courts. Adults hid in the shade of young trees and took photos with green sculptures of dinosaurs, elephants, and bears.

The Bakhmutka gave its name to our city. Around it, in the wild fields, a fortification against Tatar raids from Crimea appeared first, and later, the Cossack saltworks. The fortress of Bakhmut shows up on maps starting in 1701. It sat behind a wooden wall, with straight streets leading to gates, a church, houses, and the saltworks.

In our local museum, a model of the fortress had pride of place. I liked to look at it as a child: The houses were made of matches, and you could see the river that divided the fortress in half. After 500 years, speeches and songs in Ukrainian once again refer to Bakhmut as a fortress—a place whose function is to stop the enemy and to protect.

Bakhmut’s central square has the usual things: a town hall, a fountain, shops and restaurants. But I can’t help lingering on the empty pedestals—granite podiums of history on which no one stands.

One plinth used to hold a statue of Lenin, typical for any Ukrainian city: tall, gray, ugly, constantly soiled by pigeons that left their white traces. Under that statue in 2014, a crowd gathered with Russian flags, agitating against the Revolution of Dignity that had just driven Viktor Yanukovych’s Russian-backed government from Kyiv.

I was an editor for a local website at the time, and I brought my camera to the square. I saw buses parked nearby with Russian plates; they had carried demonstrators over the border. But many in the crowd were also locals, and their presence pained me. One protester told me I was forbidden to film, but I kept on. Little did my colleagues and I know that our fellow journalists in an occupied city nearby would be abducted and held hostage for doing the same.

Just 100 meters away from Lenin, on another granite pedestal, stood Artem, a Bolshevik revolutionary who did nothing especially beneficial for Bakhmut, yet for some reason, the town bore his name during the Soviet era. Only in 2016 did Artemivsk become Bakhmut again. That year, cranes lifted the stone replicas of Artem and Lenin and transported them to an industrial zone for storage. But the residents of our town couldn’t agree on who or what should replace them, so the spots remained vacant.

Tymofiy, 4 years old, posed on Artem’s pedestal for a photo in 2019. I compared him to the project “Inhabiting Shadows,” by the artist Cynthia Gutierrez: She installed stairs that allowed anyone to climb the pedestal of a toppled Lenin in Kyiv. There, one could experience the flux of historical symbols, from ascension to decline, and then oblivion.

On summer evenings, my family liked to gather for dinner on my parents’ veranda, at their house not far from the city center. My parents had come to Ukraine as refugees from Armenia in 1989, fleeing the Nagorno-Karabakh war to start anew in Donbas. In the 1990s, the four of us lived in a single room, my parents working tirelessly to raise my sister and me. Thirty years on, they envisioned spending their twilight years in the modest house with the veranda. Their grandson came to see them there and played in the yard, under a large cherry tree.

That house and its veranda are gone. Missile strikes first obliterated the roof, then the courtyard. We learned this from satellite images. Our family had taken nothing from the house except documents. Everything my parents had built was destroyed.

South of the city, past the landfill where the city failed to build its waste-recycling plant, are the gypsum mines that, along with salt, made Bakhmut attractive to industrialists. Mikhail Kulishov, a local historian, used to give tours here even for children, taking care to hand out yellow helmets in case the rock crumbled.

[From the October 2022 issue: Ukrainians are defending values Americans claim to hold]

The gypsum galleries are alive with bats, which are a protected species in Ukraine. Parts are flooded and attract extreme cave divers. The story of the mines begins at the end of the 19th century, when a German engineer named Edmund Farke contracted with the government of Bakhmut to extract gypsum for alabaster factories. His gypsum works created an extensive cave system, part of which was later used to mature the local sparkling wine. Tourists would go there for tastings.

But for me, the gypsum caves were more of a place for mourning. During World War II, the Nazis used the mines to wall up 3,000 Bakhmut Jews alive. People gathered there yearly to remember the victims. During the Russian occupation of Bakhmut in 2023, the Wagner Group set up its headquarters in the tunnels of the winery.

On the southern edge of Bakhmut, in the year 2023, you'll see nothing but the ruins of my city, the skeletal remains of its burned-out buildings and bombarded streets. There are no longer any people here. For my part, I began our tour with insomnia, nights in Kyiv punctured by air-raid sirens announcing Russian drone and missile attacks. My work for the Ukrainian press brought me to Sloviansk, just 20 kilometers away from Bakhmut, but I could get no closer: Artillery was (and is) still booming there.

Mostly, I offered you this tour from a fortress on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in Portugal. I came here with Tymofiy, now 8 years old, for a retreat so that we could get some sleep—yes, Ukrainians travel now for sleep. The place is ideal, I think, because it is as far away from Russia as you can get in Europe. I climbed the walls of this ancient Portuguese fortress and raised my Ukrainian flag, with the name of my hometown, Bakhmut, written on it.

We are returning to Ukraine, my son and I. Our Bakhmut no longer exists, but one way or another, we’re still there.

By Beijing’s reckoning, the U.S.-led global order is in turmoil, and a Washington in decline has no answers to the world’s mounting problems. Fortunately for the future of humanity, however, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping does. He would like to replace Washington’s “rules-based” world order with a framework of his own—one whose most sacred principle is national sovereignty, or the right of states to govern themselves, free from outside interference.

In the world Xi envisions, nations will no longer have to endure Washington’s preaching about democracy and human rights. All governments, no matter how repressive, will be equals, with their sovereignty assured. Xi enshrined the protection of sovereignty as the very first plank of his Global Security Initiative, an ideological blueprint for a new global system that he introduced, probably not coincidentally, several weeks after the start of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

That war has posed a bit of a problem for China’s professed position, however. Russia, China’s strategic partner, trammeled an international border to invade a neighboring country in what could hardly be a clearer violation of that country’s sovereignty. But rather than sympathize with Ukraine’s desperate struggle to preserve its independent existence, Xi cemented his partnership with the Russian invaders intent on annihilating it.

“You can’t be helping Russia conduct this war and say you believe in Ukraine’s territorial integrity,” John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told me. “Obviously, you can’t square that circle.”

Yet Xi has tried to do so. His contradictory stance on the war has forced his diplomats to tap dance, seeking to preserve Beijing’s pretense of principled neutrality even to the point of staging a purported peace mission. Meanwhile, the war has raised serious questions about the place of sovereignty in Xi’s vision for a new world order, and, relatedly, about his ability to achieve his grandiose plans.

In practically every diplomatic statement, Communist China affirms its commitment to honoring the sovereignty of other countries. It expects no less in return: Sovereignty, China’s leaders claim, confers upon the Communist Party the authority to govern as it wishes within China’s borders. Sovereignty, from the Chinese viewpoint, gives Beijing the right to lock up Uyghurs in Xinjiang and democracy advocates in Hong Kong, and it forbids Washington from interfering in China’s internal affairs by complaining about its human-rights record. Beijing rejects the notion of  “universal values” that apply to all people, no matter where they live.

[Read: Xi Jinping is done with the established world order]

Beijing’s fixation on sovereignty is inseparable from its claim that Taiwan is part of China: By so much as interacting with Taiwan’s government, other countries are violating China’s sovereignty, Beijing maintains. Because they believe the country is not yet completely unified, says Maria Adele Carrai, an international-law expert at NYU’s Shanghai campus, Chinese leaders “feel very sensitive and also partly fragile about their sovereignty.”

Xi’s position on sovereignty holds obvious appeal for other autocrats intent on suppressing dissent without interference. But it also attracts adherents in the developing world, where many leaders still contend with the persistent, detrimental legacy of Western colonialism. For those leaders, says Jonathan Fulton, a specialist in Chinese relations with the Middle East at Zayed University, in Abu Dhabi, “when they hear a great power say, ‘We’re not going to do the kind of stuff that the West did to you,’ that resonates.”

The deeper Xi wades into international affairs, however, the more his purported principles come into conflict with his strategic goals. His government routinely intrudes on other countries’ sovereignty; witness the Chinese spy balloon caught floating in American airspace, or the scandal over alleged Chinese interference in Canada’s national elections. But little has challenged Xi’s ideological framework more than the Ukraine war. His choice was stark: Stand with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Xi has called his “best” friend, and sacrifice his supposed commitment to sovereignty, or stand for sovereignty by siding with Ukraine, thereby breaking a partnership that he perceives as crucial to his campaign against U.S. hegemony.

At the war’s outbreak, Chinese leaders seemed ambivalent, even conflicted. Though Foreign Minister Wang Yi asserted that Putin’s security concerns were “legitimate,” he also came out clearly in defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty. “All countries’ sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity must be safeguarded,” he told the Munich Security Conference only days before the invasion began. “This is also what China has been upholding, with no exception regarding Ukraine.”

As the war has ground on, Xi has strengthened his relations with Russia. He has done so without directly aiding Moscow’s war effort but by supplying political and economic support as Russia has become isolated from the West. Chinese diplomats still sometimes talk about sovereignty, but they do so with greater ambiguity. In a March press briefing, then–Foreign Minister Qin Gang reiterated Beijing’s position that all countries’ sovereignty should be respected but brought up Ukraine’s specifically only to criticize Washington: “Why does the U.S. talk at length about respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity on Ukraine, while disrespecting China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity on China’s Taiwan question?” he asked rhetorically.

[Read: What is Putin worth to China?]

Last February, Xi issued a 12-point proposal for ending the Ukraine conflict. The first entry asserts that “the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively upheld”—but it does not mention Ukraine in this regard. In an April conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Xi stressed—apparently without irony—that “mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity is the political foundation” of relations between the two countries, but he did not pledge to ensure Ukraine’s or offer any specific proposal for preserving it, at least according to the official Chinese summary of their talk.

For the Ukrainians, the principle of sovereignty affords no ambiguity. Zelensky told Xi in April 2023, “We did not start this war, but we have to restore the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our country.” He added that “there can be no peace at the expense of territorial compromises. The territorial integrity of Ukraine must be restored.”

If Zelensky’s words made Xi uncomfortable, the Chinese leader did not let on. Just days earlier, the Chinese diplomat Lu Shaye had let slip a remark that opened a window on Beijing’s thinking. Then serving as China’s ambassador to France, Lu claimed that the sovereignty of the countries formed from the ruins of the Soviet Union—such as Ukraine—had no basis in international law, because no international agreement had specified their status. They had asserted their own sovereignty, and Lu’s comments suggested that he did not recognize such a path to independent statehood. His words sparked outrage across Europe. China’s foreign ministry clarified that the government officially recognized the sovereignty of those states—but Chinese diplomats rarely stray far from approved talking points. More likely than not, Lu’s ideas carry some currency among the Chinese leadership.

Chinese leaders could possibly see Moscow’s assertion of control over territory once included in the Soviet Union as parallel to its own yearning after lands, including Taiwan, that were once ruled from Beijing under the Qing dynasty. In both cases, earlier political entities claimed these territories, suggesting that sovereignty can be a slippery idea when aggressive or nationalist leaders wish it to be.

Will the incipient allies attracted to Xi’s sovereignty rhetoric be put off by China’s lack of regard for Ukraine? Herbst believes that the leadership’s contradictory stance “certainly makes it harder for them to present themselves as some new sort of power representing something even better than the Western-organized international system.” But he did not think the inconsistency would cost China much in the global South.

Many developing countries lie far removed from Ukraine’s crisis and are not much invested in it. And according to Fulton, the countries of the global South are less interested in Xi’s transgressions of avowed principles than in its promise of counterbalance: Many leaders “want to see a shift in the distribution of power so the West doesn’t get to behave the way it has in the past and the global South has more influence,” he told me.

In that sense, Xi may be onto something. The United States has set aside its commitment to democracy to promote its strategic interests on any number of occasions, but its ideals have still given common cause to a worldwide network of alliances and inspired many of those suffering under oppressive regimes to dream of greater liberty—including within China. Perhaps Xi’s ideological blueprint, no matter how unworkable or compromised, could play the same role: that of a glue binding partnerships opposed to American ideals and American power. Perhaps in global diplomacy, what leaders say can matter more than what they do.

After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, an underground joke from my Moscow youth declared, the Politburo found three envelopes on the Soviet dictator’s desk. The first, inscribed “Open after my death,” contained a letter telling his successors to place his body next to Lenin’s in the Red Square Mausoleum. “Open when things get bad,” read the second envelope, and the note inside said, “Blame everything on me!” The third envelope, marked “Open when things get really bad,” commanded, “Do as I did!”

Things must be really bad for Russian President Vladimir Putin, because he is resorting to one of Stalin’s preferred ways of holding on to power: appealing to anti-Semitism. Recently, Putin has made a series of remarks dwelling on the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. And in a discussion at an economic forum earlier this month, Putin mocked Anatoly Chubais, a half-Jewish former Kremlin adviser who fled Russia after its invasion of Ukraine last year and is reportedly living in Israel. “He is no longer Anatoly Borisovich Chubais,” Putin said, using his former aide’s first name and patronymic. “He is Moshe Izrayilevich, or some such.”

As a scholar who has been studying Soviet and Russian politics for decades; who discusses that subject regularly with friends, family members, and professional colleagues; and who keeps tabs on what Putin’s critics say about him, I cannot remember him publicly trafficking in anti-Semitism before now. Indeed, his seemingly benevolent attitude toward his Jewish subjects made him unusual among Russian leaders. For more than a century until 1917, Jews in the Russian empire were confined to the Pale of Settlement, mostly in what today is Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Lithuania, and were terrorized by periodic pogroms. Early in the 20th century, the czar’s secret police propagated (and are widely suspected of sponsoring) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a vicious anti-Semitic forgery that purported to expose a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and has inspired generations of violent anti-Semites.

[Gal Beckerman: What Putin’s treatment of Jews reveals about Russia]

Stalin capitalized on that history to consolidate his own control of the Soviet Union. Beginning in the late 1940s, after 20 million Soviet citizens had died in World War II and millions more were starving and homeless, he unleashed a national anti-Semitic campaign, complete with the frenzied unmasking of “rootless cosmopolitans”—whom everyone understood to be Jews—in newspapers. Well-known members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, formed during the war to organize international support for the Soviet military effort, were arrested, tortured, and executed. In what became known as the “Doctors’ Plot,” a predominantly Jewish group of physicians ministering to the Kremlin leadership was accused of poisoning or deliberately mistreating patients; the medics were tortured, some to death, to extract “confessions.” During that period, tens of thousands of Jews were fired from their jobs, and even graduates of prominent educational institutions became unemployable. (My mother, just out of the Moscow Medical Institute No. 2, was among them.)  

Putin’s recent rhetoric has been jarring because, despite everything else he has done, he has not tried to whip up public sentiment against Jews. During his 2005 visit to Israel—the first ever to the Jewish state by a Soviet or Russian leader—Putin had an emotional reunion with Mina Yuditskaya-Berliner, his high-school German teacher, and bought her an apartment in central Tel Aviv. He made Arkady and Boris Rotenberg—two brothers of Jewish heritage who have been among Putin’s judo sparring partners—into billionaire oligarchs.

Although he spoke at the unveiling of two monuments to Russia’s penultimate czar, Alexander III—a notorious anti-Semite who encouraged pogroms—Putin not only refrained from wielding Judeophobia as a political tool but upbraided those who did. He ordered the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, to retract a statement by an agency aide who had described the Chabad-Lubavitch ultra-Orthodox movement as a “sect” whose adherents believed in their “supremacy over all nations and peoples.” (The offending official was fired a few months later.) The Russian president apologized in a phone call with then–Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov opined that some Jews were notoriously anti-Semitic. And even as Russian television and social-media outlets have abounded with mad-dog chauvinists and warmongering propagandists since Russia invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin appears to have embargoed anti-Semitic themes.

At every turn, Putin seeks to legitimize his war in Ukraine by linking it with Russia’s triumph over the perpetrators of the Holocaust. That Zelensky is Jewish obviously complicates that story. In a discussion at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, the moderator Dimitri Simes invited Putin to explain the issue away.

Putin replied that many of his childhood friends are Jewish, and that they all think Zelensky is not a Jew but a disgrace to the Jewish people. He then recounted, from notes, the details of the execution of a Jewish Ukrainian family during World War II, and showed video clips alleging massacres of Jews and ethnic Poles by Ukrainian nationalists of that era.  

[Yair Rosenberg: Russia is not the first to blame Jews for their own Holocaust]

Earlier this month, though, Putin’s allusions to Zelensky’s Jewishness grew sharper. The “Western sponsors” of the Ukrainian government, he told an interviewer, had deliberately chosen a Jewish president of Ukraine to camouflage the “antihuman” essence of the Kyiv regime. It’s “utterly despicable,” Putin concluded, to see a Jew covering up the “glorification of Nazism and those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine.” While still purporting to be ridding Ukraine of Nazis, Putin is zeroing in on a flesh-and-blood culprit: The Russians and the Ukrainians are killing one another because of a Jewish schemer.    

Last week, Putin found another target: Chubais, his former special envoy to international organizations, who walked off his job a month after the invasion of Ukraine. After some meandering, Chubais, whose mother is Jewish, landed in Israel (which does not require entry visas for Russian citizens), along with tens of thousands of other Russian immigrants. Initially, his departure caused nary a ripple. Yes, Chubais quit on his own accord, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in March 2022, adding, “As to whether he left Russia or not, that’s his personal business.”

Not anymore. Why did Chubais run off to Israel? Putin mused last week, employing a derisive word, udral, that translates to something like “absconded.” Why is he “hiding” there? And by the way, Putin went on: Although no criminal charges have been brought against Chubais, “a huge financial hole” has been uncovered in the state nanotechnology corporation, Rusnano, which Chubais headed until 2020.

Russians steeped in anti-Semitic tropes could effortlessly read between the lines: A cowardly and probably thieving Jewish bureaucrat had bolted, abandoning the motherland in its hour of tribulation.  

Political anti-Semitism—that is, the kind promulgated and encouraged by the authorities—is never just about Jews. It portends rot and insecurity at the top of a government, signifying the need to distract, obfuscate, shift the blame. By twisting Zelensky’s Jewishness into a cause of war and portraying Chubais as a craven deserter, Putin is also revealing the Kremlin’s growing anxiety about its grip on power.

He keeps sinking deeper into the quagmire of a war he cannot win and cannot walk away from. The Wagner mutiny debunked the official myth of national unity in the face of the alleged “Western aggression” against the motherland. To the extent that Putin has a genuine personal aversion to stirring up anti-Semitism, his political needs are now urgent enough for him to overcome it.

In the mosaic of militaristic tyranny that Putin has been assembling, one major tile had been notably missing. He has now begun putting it in place—reviving not only a defining feature of the Stalinist state but also a distinctly ugly part of Russian history.

“Should I mention that I saw Anne Frank in Belsen? Do you think they’d be interested in that?” I was in my late teens when my mother was first asked to give a talk about her experiences as a German refugee and Dutch Jew in the Second World War. Until the late 1970s, people rarely asked her about it, and she didn’t want to be a bore.

Then things began to change. Within a few years of her first speech, she was giving lectures in schools quite regularly. She was invited to Downing Street and talked with the prime minister about knowing the Franks, and about her father’s work fighting fascism and his encounter with Hermann Göring. The BBC made a documentary in which my mother met the daughter of a prominent Nazi. She was forever telling her story.

No one, however, ever asked Dad to tell his. The interest in what happened to him never came. It still hasn’t come.

Yet my father was the victim of one of the war’s greatest crimes: Stalin’s attempt to eradicate the Polish nation by murdering its elite and scattering its leadership. It was a crime that saw hundreds of thousands of people expelled from their homes and deported to become slave laborers, and saw hundreds of thousands more imprisoned in terrible conditions. It’s a story little told, often denied, and, even now, to most people, entirely unknown. My father’s story is one that history has half hidden.

Decades later, we are living with the consequences of this occlusion.

[Nicholas Burns: The lasting lesson of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact]

In 1938, my grandparents—Dolu and Lusia Finkelstein—moved into a beautiful contemporary house on a hill in the city of Lwów in what was then eastern Poland (today, the city is known as Lviv and is in western Ukraine). The house was a symbol of their wealth, their progressive spirit, and their solid confidence in the future. Finkelsteins had been in the area for hundreds of years; now they had built a home that the family could live in for hundreds more. They would live in it for little more than a year.

Dolu and Lusia had built more than just their own house. They had played a big part in building the city in which it was located. During the First World War, Lwów had been fought over by Austrians, Russians, and Poles in conflicts that had destroyed its economy, infrastructure, and social life. Dolu’s iron-and-steel business and his membership in the city council helped with the reconstruction, while Lusia made her mark in Lwów high society.

They expected their one son, Ludwik, my father, to inherit the business and the social obligations. He would come of age, they anticipated, in a modern European city, liberal in spirit and prosperous.

All of this, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were to destroy. All of this, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was to destroy.

When my nephew Simon was about 10 years old, he took part in a television documentary in which young British people returned to the places their family had come from. The filmmakers took him back to where my dad was born. They filmed him at what had been the Finkelstein business premises and at the lovely house on the hill.

In the film, the narrator informs viewers about the Nazi takeover of the city and how they had killed all the Jews who lived there. And this was indeed a fate that befell many members of my family. My grandmother was one of seven children—and the only one to survive the war.

Yet, on what had actually happened to my father, Simon’s grandfather, the documentary is silent. This silence is typical of so many accounts of the place and the period. Viewers are not told that when the Germans originally invaded Poland, they did so in cooperation with the Soviets. Under the nonaggression pact agreed upon between Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and signed on August 23, 1939, the two powers secretly arranged for the city of Lwów to come under control of the U.S.S.R.

Barely a week later, Hitler’s forces invaded western Poland, and Stalin’s army soon followed suit, taking over the east. So it was that, within weeks, my father’s city was overrun by Soviet soldiers. The Polish officers who resisted were captured and later secretly shot. The bodies of thousands of Poles eventually turned up in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk in western Russia. For decades afterward, the Soviets lied about what they had done.

[Jonathan Freedland: The unheeded warning]

The truth of what happened to my own family I was able to learn from the video testimony my father provided after the war and from a cache of letters, kept in a plastic bag, that I found in the study at my parents’ home when they both had died. Scraps of paper with Polish writing all the way to the edge, which had traveled to hell and back. Together with my dad.

Within months of the Soviet takeover, Polish Lwów had become Soviet Ukrainian Lviv, the Finkelstein business had been nationalized, the family had been evicted from their home, and Dolu had been arrested. He was found guilty of being “a socially dangerous element” under Article 54 of the Ukrainian Criminal code, which dealt with “counterrevolutionary” offenses, and sent away to the Gulag in the Arctic Circle to begin a sentence of eight years’ hard labor.

Following my grandfather’s arrest, my 10-year-old father and his mother were arrested too. The Soviets deported all the families of the civic leaders they had shipped to the Gulag. Hundreds of thousands of people were sent to work on state-run collective farms. This was both a means of suppressing dissent and a way of populating the Soviet interior. On the day of my father’s departure to the frozen wastelands, every other person packed into the cattle truck with him was, like him and my grandmother, either a woman or a child.

Many of the deportees died on the journey to the border of Siberia; others died in the fierce winter to come. But living in a hut they had made of cow dung, entirely without fuel and almost entirely without food, my father and grandmother somehow made it through the winter.

They were still alive when, in the summer of 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact collapsed. Forced to make a deal with the Allies, Stalin agreed to an amnesty for the Poles he had deported and imprisoned. Told that they were free to go but given no money or help to leave, many Poles remained stranded in the Soviet wastelands. Attempts to reunite families were hazardous and usually doomed. But there was one source of hope.

[Alex Zeldin: The other history of the Holocaust]

Stalin had agreed to the establishment of a Polish free army under General Władysław Anders, a Polish officer whom, quite by accident, he hadn’t had shot. Deportees who got lucky linked up through Anders, and that is what my father and grandmother were able to do: In the fall of 1941, Dolu—by then a second lieutenant in Anders’s army—learned that his wife and son were still alive, and the family was reunited.

Anders somehow persuaded Stalin to let his army leave the U.S.S.R. and come under British command. Thus my family made it to Iraq, and, eventually, after much political argument, to England.

My father died in 2011, but what lessons would he have been able to impart to his audiences if he were still alive and the silence was broken? What would he have said if ever he had been asked to speak about his experiences?

First, that although the fascists and the Communists of the 1930s and ’40s are seen as counterposed, they in fact shared many of the same doctrines and interests. And this was what their pact reflected. Fascists and Communists both believed that the will of the people was being thwarted by elites, and that the individual members of these elites needed to be eliminated by force. Fascists and Communists each had their own particular notion of who these elites were, but many of these ideas converged. The Soviets might regard as suspect the Jewish owner of a shop, because he owned a shop while happening to be Jewish, while the Nazis regarded him as suspect because he was Jewish while happening to own a shop. And for both groups, the concept of the elites was broad enough to encompass my father and mother—even though, at the time the pact was signed, they were under the age of 10.

Second, that the populist idea of sweeping away institutions, denying property rights, and elevating the “spirit of the nation” over the rights of individuals is calamitous. The bombastic claims of would-be dictators must always be resisted and the rule of law upheld.

Third, that because the Soviets found themselves on the winning side in the Second World War, they have never been held to account for their crimes. When the Nuremberg Tribunals were celebrated, on their 75th anniversary in 2020, as the birth of international justice, it wasn’t much commented on that the crimes the tribunal had determined the Nazis were guilty of, the Soviets were guilty of too.

The Nuremberg defendants had been charged with crimes against peace; the Soviet invasion of Poland was a crime against peace. They had been charged with crimes against humanity; the Soviet deportation of my father and the enslavement of Dolu were crimes against humanity. They had been charged with war crimes; the murder of the Polish officers found at Katyn was a war crime. They had been charged with a conspiracy to commit these crimes; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is among the many documents that prove a Soviet conspiracy.

[From the December 1946 issue: Nuremberg in retrospect]

Already under Soviet occupation at war’s end, Eastern and Central Europe fell fully under Moscow’s sway after Nuremberg. Because the Jews of Lwów had been massacred and its remaining Polish residents had been driven westward, the city became Lviv and its population almost entirely Ukrainian. The Soviets smoothly moved into the road where my father had once lived, and closed it off to all except senior officials. They used Dolu and Lusia’s home and neighboring houses as residences for Soviet leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and his comrades when they visited from Moscow.

Lastly, I’m sure that if my father were speaking to audiences now, he would explain that the long silence over the Soviets’ crimes had its consequences. My mother and father were never much interested in trying to establish a moral equivalence between what the Nazis did and what the Soviets did. “It’s not a competition,” my mother always used to say. The point is that there has simply never been any reckoning over what the Soviets did. (Even a belated acknowledgment of the Katyn massacre came without an apology.) They have never been forced to see what they did as shameful. This vacuum of historical truth and accountability has allowed Vladimir Putin to write his own version of Russian and Ukrainian history. That in turn has helped him justify, at least to himself, a new war against the people of my father’s city.

The thunder of war in Ukraine drowns out a lot of other news from Russia. A few days ago, however, the Russian foreign intelligence service quietly did something rather odd. Sergei Naryshkin, the director of the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, or SVR (the Russian version of the CIA), unveiled a statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police.

At first sight, this seems another sign of President Vladimir Putin’s nostalgia for the good old days of Soviet repression, when an aspiring young secret policeman could live a comfortable life by intimidating his neighbors and tormenting his fellow citizens. But the reappearance of a monument to this hated figure in Soviet history might be related more to Russia’s elite politics than to Putin’s nostalgia.

Before we get into the modern Kremlinology, let’s look back at the early days of the Soviet intelligence services.

Dzerzhinsky was a Polish national with a long history of revolutionary activity. He joined the Russian Bolsheviks, and shortly after the 1917 revolution, Vladimir Lenin put him in charge of creating a secret-police organization. (The czars had one, of course; the Bolsheviks wanted their own.) He became the director of the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, known by the Russian initials VChK, soon abbreviated to its last two letters, pronounced “che” and “ka,” which is why the secret police were called “the Cheka.” To this day, Russia’s spooks proudly call themselves “Chekists”—as do their enemies, pejoratively.

[Read: How to repurpose a bad statue]

Dzerzhinsky died in 1926 after gaining a reputation as a ruthless, incorruptible fanatic and setting the tone for his successors in the secret police. Over the years, the Cheka mutated into various Soviet government entities, some of them famous in Cold War lore (such as the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or the dreaded NKVD). For a time, Joseph Stalin split the foreign and domestic intelligence agencies into two ministries. As with many countries’ intelligence organizations, something of a rivalry existed between the cops who did internal security and the secret agents who operated against the Soviet Union’s enemies abroad. The Soviet military, too, had its own spy service, the coldly brutal GRU, which still exists today. To put this in American terms, think of the traditional tensions among the FBI, the CIA, and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (minus any democratic oversight).

In 1954, the Soviets decided to combine all of these organizations into a giant interagency group called the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security, or KGB—an acronym well known to Americans during the Cold War and the organization that Putin joined in 1975. The foreign spies and the domestic goons were in different departments, and worked in different buildings, but they were all under one director.

After the fall of the U.S.S.R., in 1991, the new (and short-lived) Russian democracy decided to weaken the Soviet-era police-state monolith by once again splitting up the foreign and domestic services. The foreign spy agency became the SVR and remained in its modernist digs out in the southern reaches of the Russian capital, in Moscow’s Yasenevo neighborhood. The domestic service—the thugs whom Russians fear on a daily basis—became the Federal’naia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and it stayed in the old KGB building in central Moscow.

[Read: Is Stalin making a comeback in Russia?]

Here’s where the story of the new statue gets interesting. The original monument—at 15 tons, a hunk of metal so large that Muscovites attached Derzhinsky’s nickname, “Iron Feliks,” to the statue itself—was erected in front of the downtown KGB headquarters in 1958. (The imposing building in Lubyanka Square was also across the way from a big Soviet toy store called Child World, and Soviet citizens would joke darkly that someone in trouble with the authorities had “gone to Child World.”) After the 1991 coup attempt against the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, the statue was torn down on the demand of Moscow’s citizens.

So when I read the first reports that a new statue was being raised, I thought it was an aggressive message from Putin to the people of the capital. In 2021, the Moscow city government had scheduled a vote on whether to bring Iron Feliks back to the downtown location or to erect a new statue in its place of the 13th-century Russian saint and hero Alexander Nevsky. The city’s mayor, citing “deep divisions,” canceled the popular poll. To return Iron Feliks to his place of honor in front of Moscow’s most notorious stronghold of repression would have been heavy-handed symbolism even from Putin.

But Feliks isn’t back in his old neighborhood; he’s out in Yasenevo. (He’s also not as tall or as heavy as he used to be; the new statue is a replica of the original, but smaller.) So what’s going on? And who is this stunt’s intended audience?

One clue might be found in the remarks that the SVR’s director, Sergey Naryshkin, made at the unveiling. Instead of celebrating Dzerzhinsky’s harsh legacy, Naryshkin praised his honesty and dedication, and gushed that Dzerzhinsky “remained faithful to his ideals to the end—the ideals of goodness and justice.” He then noted that the statue was facing toward the NATO members neighboring Russia—Poland and the Baltic states—which he identified as the source of foreign threats:

The erected monument is an exact, somewhat scaled-down copy of the famous monument of an outstanding Soviet sculptor, and that’s why we simply didn’t have the right to change the direction of the view of the monument’s hero. And the fact is that threats remain to our country, to our citizens, from the northwest—yes, this is obvious.

Dzerzhinsky is a progenitor of sorts of the foreign intelligence agency, but this bit of theater is strange—something akin to the CIA erecting a statue of the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in front of its headquarters and extolling Hoover’s noble struggles against the Soviet enemy. (In case you’re wondering, a statue already stands outside the agency’s Langley front door—of America’s first spy, Nathan Hale, from the Revolutionary War era.) You could argue, I suppose, that Hoover did his part by setting the bureau’s agents on Soviet spies in America, but looking east and facing down the Reds is not really how we remember him.

[Read or listen: How Putin thinks]

Without getting too in the weeds, other clues about what’s going on may lie in recent machinations within the Russian government.

In a February 2020 meeting just days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin humiliated Naryshkin on national television when the SVR chief seemed caught off guard by Putin’s questions during an audience with the president. The FSB, at that moment, was riding high; its spies were supposed to have paved the way for the collapse of Kyiv that Putin expected in the first days of the war.

We all know how that went, and Putin turned his fury on the incompetent agents in Lubyanka Square who had promised much and delivered nothing. Possibly, then, Naryshkin is now making a play for the SVR to eclipse the FSB as Russia’s premier intelligence service. Or he might be signaling his agency’s commitment to opposing NATO as part of fighting the war in Ukraine. Or maybe he’s just reminding everyone that he hasn’t forgotten that his job, regardless of the Ukraine war, is to combat Western spies. Either way, Naryshkin may be doing a bit of “managing up.”

Who knows, though? Perhaps the SVR had a spare copy of the Iron Feliks statue sitting in the basement and just decided to make a day of it. (Or perhaps Dzerzhinsky’s admirers hope it’s less likely to be vandalized out in Yasenevo.)

One thing is certain: Neither Naryshkin nor Putin—nor indeed the FSB’s chief, Alexander Bortnikov, who remains close to Putin despite his agency’s colossal screwup over Ukraine—risked putting Iron Feliks up in central Moscow. Putin’s power is not limitless, and he would have nothing to gain by antagonizing citizens in the capital with a statue few of them would want. And perhaps not even the president wants to see Iron Feliks through his limo window and be reminded of better days, when the Soviet Union still existed, the KGB was nearly omnipotent, and Vladimir Putin wasn’t one of the most hated people in Russia.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Our excerpt from a forthcoming biography of Mitt Romney has many people talking about the Utah senator’s principles and character, but we should be deeply alarmed by Romney’s warning about the Republican Party.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

“The only productivity hack that works on me” The truth about Hunter Biden’s indictment America just hit the lithium jackpot. Why are women freezing their eggs? Look to the men.

The End of Pretenses

My colleague McKay Coppins has spent two years talking with Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, former Massachusetts governor, and 2012 Republican presidential nominee. An excerpt from McKay’s forthcoming book confirmed the news that Romney has had enough of the hypocrisy and weakness of the Republican Party and will be leaving the Senate when his term expires; other stunning moments from their conversations include multiple profiles in pusillanimity among Romney’s fellow Republicans. (I am pleased to know that Senator Romney holds as low an opinion of J. D. Vance as I do; “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more,” he told McKay.)

But I want to move away from the discussion about Romney himself and focus on something he said that too many people have overlooked.

“Some nights he vented,” Coppins wrote of their conversations; “other nights he dished.” And then came a quiet acknowledgement that should still be shocking, even after seven years of unhinged right-wing American populism:

“A very large portion of my party,” [Romney] told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—­people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

I think every decent Republican has wondered the same thing. (The indecent ones have also wondered about it, but as Romney now accepts, people like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz have figured out that playing to the rot in the GOP base is a core skill set that helps them stay in Washington and far away from their constituents back home.)

Simon & Schuster

But enough about the hollow men of the GOP. Think about what Romney is saying:

Millions of American citizens no longer believe in the Constitution of the United States of America.

This is not some pedestrian political observation, some throwaway line about partisan division. Leave aside for the moment that Romney is talking about Republicans and the hangers-on in the Trump movement; they are also your fellow Americans, citizens of a nation that was, until recently, one of the most durable democracies on Earth. And they no longer care about the fundamental document that governs our lives as Americans.

If Republicans no longer care about the Constitution, then they no longer care about the rule of law, secular tolerance, fair elections, or the protection of basic human rights. They have no interest in the stewardship of American democracy, nor will they preserve our constitutional legacy for their children. Instead, they seek to commandeer the ship of state, pillage the hold, and then crash us all onto the rocks.

It would be a relief to find out that some of this is about policy, but for many of the enemies of the Constitution among the new right, policy is irrelevant. (One exception, I suspect, might be the people who, if faced with a choice between a total ban on abortion and the survival of the Constitution, would choose theocracy over democracy; we’d all be better off if they would just admit it.)

The people Romney is worried about are not policy wonks. They’re opportunists, rage-junkies, and nihilists who couldn’t care less about policy. (Romney describes one woman in Utah bellowing at him, red-faced and lost in a mist of fury while her child stood nearby, to the point where he asked her, “Aren’t you embarrassed?” She was not.) What they want is to win, to enjoy the spoils and trappings of power, and to anger and punish people they hate.

There is no way to contend, in a rational or civic way, with this combination of white-hot resentment and ice-cold cynicism. Romney describes multiple incidents in which his colleagues came to him and said, You’re right, Mitt. I wish I could say what you say. I wish we could stop this nightmare. And then all of them belly right back up to the table in the Senate Dining Room and go on pandering to people who—it bears repeating—no longer care about the Constitution.

This is the seedbed of authoritarianism, and it is already full of fresh green shoots. And yes, at some point, if someone is clever enough to forge a strong and organized party out of this disjointed movement, it can become a new fascism. So far, we should be grateful that Donald Trump and those who surround him have all been too selfish and too incompetent to turn their avarice into a coherent mass movement.

If you’ve ever served in the military or as a civilian in the U.S. government, you’ve taken the oath that requires you, above all—so help you God—to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Romney is warning us that many of his Republican colleagues and much of their base will do no such thing. They would rather turn their personal misery and resentment into mindless political destruction—even to the point of shredding one of humanity’s greatest political documents.

I have written before that we can no longer indulge Republicans and their various media enablers in the fantasies that Trump is a normal candidate, that we are heading into a normal election, that the Republican Party is a normal party (or, indeed, a political party at all). How we each defend the Constitution is an individual choice, but let us at least have no pretenses, even in our daily discussions, that we live in normal times and that 2024 is just another political horse race. Everything we believe in as Americans is at stake now, and no matter what anyone thinks of Mitt Romney, we owe him a debt for saying out loud what so many Republican “leaders” fear even to whisper.

Related:

What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate This is the case.

Today’s News

Donald Trump will not be tried next month in the Georgia-election-interference case after a state judge rejected a request by prosecutors to try all 19 co-defendants together. Hunter Biden has been indicted on felony gun charges after a plea agreement that would have allowed him to avoid prosecution fell apart in July. A lawyer for Biden said that the new charges were unwarranted. The Seattle police officer Daniel Auderer is under investigation after his body camera captured him appearing to joke about the death of Jaahnavi Kandula, a graduate student who was hit and killed by another officer’s vehicle in January.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks: Do you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Martin Parr / Magnum

The Curious Personality Changes of Older Age

By Faith Hill

You’ve probably heard the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” An awful phrase, I know, but it speaks to a common belief about older adulthood: that it’s a time of stagnation. A time when we’ve become so set in our ways that, whether we’re proud of them or not, we’re not likely to budge.

Psychologists used to follow the same line of thinking: After young adulthood, people tend to settle into themselves, and personality, though not immutable, usually becomes stabler as people age. And that’s true—until a certain point. More recent studies suggest that something unexpected happens to many people as they reach and pass their 60s: Their personality starts changing again.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Cover Story: I never called her Momma. Alabama Republicans think the Supreme Court is full of partisan hacks. Biden’s labor-climate dilemma

Culture Break

United Archives GmbH / Alamy

Read. A Garfield comic or two. For well over 40 years, a fat orange cat has been a linchpin of American culture, and it’s time to accept that.

Listen. How do we overcome the awkwardness that keeps us from starting a conversation? In the latest episode of How to Talk to People, host Julie Beck dissects small talk.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I mentioned Red Oaks the other day, the sweet coming-of-age series set in the mid-1980s (available for streaming on Prime Video), and it occurred to me that for some readers, the MTV video music era is now lost in the mists of time. Videos (and I am thinking about this because one of the characters in Red Oaks works in a studio that makes them) were a unique art form, and a lot of them were quite good. So, now and then, I’ll use this addendum here in the Daily to recommend some of these lost mini-movies.

I have a special interest in Cold War–themed videos, so today, let me recommend one I alluded to when I recommended Red Oaks. In late 1983, Roger Hodgson left the group Supertramp and embarked on a solo career. He had a modest hit the next year with the song “Had a Dream (Sleeping With the Enemy).” The video is kind of freaky, but the clips of Soviet and American marching bands and huge explosions make clear that it was a cry of anxiety about nuclear war. (“Had a dream / It was war / And they couldn’t tell me what it was for.”)

It’s overly arty but still a cool time capsule —and watch for the split-second, almost-subliminal scare cut at 2:58, where Hodgson’s face becomes a skull. (It’s a gimmick William Friedkin used in The Exorcist too, and a version of it shows up in another classic early-’80s video, “Only the Lonely.” You can spot it here at 2:12.)

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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North Korea may have tens of millions of artillery shells and rockets based on Soviet designs that could give a huge boost to the Russian army in Ukraine, analysts say.