Julie Willett's "The Male Chauvinist Pig"

Julie Willett is professor of history at Texas Tech University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Male Chauvinist Pig: A History, and reported the following:

If you only had a few moments to understand why this research matters, I would encourage you to take a close look at page ninety-nine. In fact, it serves as the introduction to the last chapter entitled “Modern Conservatism’s Missing Link: Rush Limbaugh, Feminazis and the Rise of Donald Trump.” Here you will see how an unorthodox conservative talk show host used “‘bad-boy jokes’” to reshape the political landscape. Indeed, this single page of history reveals humor as a conduit of power, and one often overlooked in the histories of post-Vietnam conservatism.

This page begins with the observations of documentary filmmaker Stephen Talbot, who in 1995 was trying to understand how Limbaugh had become a political tour de force. In part, Limbaugh presented himself as the common man whose manners and mores were anything but elite. Most importantly, Talbot notes, the talk show host effectively challenged “the notion that ‘funny conservative is an oxymoron.’” To be sure, progressives never found Limbaugh funny. After all, isn’t the golden rule of comedy to punch up not down? But for white conservatives, who felt they were the victims of limousine liberals and political correctness, Limbaugh “‘played the angry white guy with a sense of humor.’”

By the end of the page, it becomes clear that Limbaugh had become a master at transforming his political enemies into the butt of the joke. Most famously, “with a single catchphrase [Feminazi], feminism became an indispensable enemy” and too serious to be taken seriously, too moralizing to be likeable. All of which came to haunt the 2016 Clinton-Trump presidential race.

Earlier chapters, however, offer a richer history that trace the rise of the Male Chauvinist Pig (MCP), including the popularity of 1970s icons like Bobby Riggs and Archie Bunker. As the epithet transformed into a source of pride, the MCP sold everything from neckties to conservative politics. The MCP not only rolled around in white privilege; he was far more accessible than the Playboy. Men didn’t need to rely on a swank bachelor pad or a refined sense of taste. Instead, a misogynist joke got them into the club.

Finally, looking beyond this single page also reveals an important nuance: The MCP was easier to spot than to define. Like feminisms, chauvinisms turned on a more fluid and mixed political consciousness, something that might make us rethink our contemporary political divide.

Learn more about The Male Chauvinist Pig at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margarita M. Balmaceda's "Russian Energy Chains"

Margarita M. Balmaceda is a professor of diplomacy and international relations at Seton Hall University. She is also an associate at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Her books include The Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania Between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Pressure (2013) and Living the High Life in Minsk: Russian Energy Rents, Domestic Populism, and Belarus’ Impending Crisis (2014).

Balmaceda applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union, and reported the following:

Page 99 is located in the middle of chapter 4 of the book (“Natural Gas: Managing Pressure from Western Siberia to the Nürnberg Power Plant”), the first of three parallel chapters analyzing, respectively, the journey of a natural gas, an oil and a coal molecule from production in Russia to final consumers in Germany in order to compare how the different materiality characteristics of different types of energy affect the way it may be used as an instrument of (domestic or) externally-oriented power. In page 99, in the middle of chapter 4, our natural gas molecule finds itself in the Ukrainian-Slovak border, in the middle of a complex gas transit system.

Most of page 99 is taken by a map, “Uzhgorod area gas infrastructure map” (more on this below).

Here is an additional excerpt from page 99:

In addition to its use in managing networkness and Gazprom’s exports to Western Europe, underground storage could also be used in more domestic-related ways. Ukraine reportedly used supplies from storage—but shipped in reverse of the usual route—to supply its own population during the January 2009 gas cutoff. Their technical characteristics also made stored volumes hard to secure and account for, facilitating their misappropriation and helping create distinct distributive openings.

The page 99 test works well for my book as it illustrates several central ideas of the book.

Page 99 features a map that encapsulates many of the larger themes of the book. This map is a high-detail map of natural gas transit infrastructure in the Western Ukrainian area near the borders with Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova. This map illustrates two key arguments made in the book: 1) In contrast with the prevalent view presenting gas pipelines as a single-line conduct for energy and power where supplies can be simply turned on and off at will by the supplying country (in this case, Russia) for political pressure purposes, this map illustrates how complex long-distance gas transportation is, and how, for it to happen, a number of elements need to work in synergy – and not only the will of the supplier. In particular, the prominent role of underground gas storage sites in the map (without match in the former USSR in terms of volume and location next to export markets) illustrates Ukraine’s extremely important role making possible Russia’s profitable natural gas exports, and not only because gas transits through it. These sites are key for Russian exports in several ways. As discussed in this chapter, a key element in natural gas supply chains is managing physical pressure in the pipeline, as natural gas, being lighter than air, would not move at all in the pipeline without pressure, but too much pressure can endanger property and human lives. So the enterprise becomes one in managing pressure: from reducing pressure when natural gas comes out of the ground so that it can be handled, to significantly increasing pressure to make it possible for gas to move in the pipeline, to reducing pressure again as it reaches smaller-diameter city pipelines so that it can be safely distributed. Most important in our case, having available large und reliable underground storage facilities (from which natural gas could be pumped in and out as needed) was essential both for the managing of pressure in the system and for the managing of seasonal demand swings –such as storing natural gas until the winter months when demand would be higher and it could fetch a higher price. The technical needs related to natural gas’ materiality transform Ukraine from being simply a passive recipient of Russian energy to a key player.

Learn more about Russian Energy Chains at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Blake Scott Ball's "Charlie Brown’s America"

Blake Scott Ball is Assistant Professor of History at Huntingdon College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Charlie Brown's America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts, and reported the following:

On this page we encounter Snoopy as the World War flying ace in hot pursuit of the Red Baron. We learn that cartoonist Charles Schulz introduced the new fantasy story at the outset of US combat presence in South Vietnam in 1965. We also find that some of Schulz’s colleagues, like Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker, were deeply concerned that Schulz might ruin the appeal of his popular strip by drawing analogies too close to a gruesome real-world conflict. We also get a good sense of just how the American public felt about the emerging Cold War conflict through a range of opinion poll results. Finally, page 99 explores why Schulz might have chosen to put Snoopy to war in World War I rather than the conflict the cartoonist had experienced firsthand, World War II.

For Charlie Brown’s America, the “page 99 test” works fairly well. There are really three threads at the heart of this book: the content of the Peanuts strips, the intent of the cartoonist Charles Schulz, and the interpretation of his diverse national audience. On page 99, we get a glimpse of each one of these elements at play with one another during the Vietnam War era. Over the course of the rest of the book, I explore the interaction between these three threads through a wide variety of issues: evangelical revivalism, civil rights, abortion, feminism, environmentalism, the rise of modern conservatism, and more.

Visit Blake Scott Ball's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Katz Rothman's "The Biomedical Empire"

Barbara Katz Rothman is Professor of Sociology, at the City University of New York. She has served as President of Sociologists for Women in Society; the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Eastern Sociological Society. Her awards include the Jesse Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association, and an award for "Midwifing the Movement" from the Midwives Alliance of North America, and a distinguished Chair in Health Sciences from the Fulbright Association. She is the author of numerous books, including A Bun in the Oven: How the Food and Birth Movements Resist Industrialization (2016).

Katz Rothman applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Biomedical Empire: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic, and reported the following:

Seriously? It had to be page 99? A whole book about Biomedical imperialism, and y’all had to pick the page where I am back to talking about what I’ve been saying for my whole career, from my dissertation onward?

So yeah, on Page 99 I am making the absolutely reasonable and true point that medicine as a profession, as an industry, as an imperial power colonized midwifery, taking knowledge, power and control over birth out of the hands of the women of the world, and claimed it as an exclusive medical arena. You can be – and midwives have been – arrested for ‘practicing medicine without a license’ for doing what they have done for cultural eternities and individual lifetimes. Feeling a baby move gently through a belly, saying ‘yes, you’re pregnant, feel that?’ can get you arrested. You don’t have the right to ‘diagnose’ a pregnancy. Let alone helping a woman push the baby out and bring it up to her arms. It’s a great example, yup, but dammit I did write about other things, I’m not totally stuck on that one issue, no, not me.

Take the medical innovation we are most indebted to right now in this gradually post-covid moment: vaccinations. People (‘milk maids’) knew that exposure to cowpox prevented smallpox and were doing that for each other. Jenner tried it out on a servant’s kid to confirm, gave it a Latin name (Vax for cow) and ta-da! Medicine gets credited with inventing vaccines. And anyone else who might want to try anything like that now – don’t. All the rights, to invent, to try, to implement – solidly in the hands of Biomedicine.

Biomedicine has the hallmarks of an imperial power – enormous economic power, governmentality or legal rule (medical folks need to sign off on birth certificates, yeah, but also death certificates; you’re not legally dead without one) and an almost religious power, something we ‘believe in.’

Colonizing was never only about the land – what to do with that coffee, that cotton, how to grow and harvest and use – that too was colonized. In our global world, it’s no longer about any given nation colonizing another, and it’s no longer about land alone. We need to think about and understand biomedicine as an imperial power, conquering the world. Like all Empires it does some good – those Romans built some great roads – but it most assuredly does what it does in its own interest, in the interest of growing and maintaining imperial power.

It’s not just about birth –but you’ll have to read the other 152 pages yourself.

Visit Barbara Katz Rothman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elie Honig's "Hatchet Man"

Elie Honig worked as a federal and state prosecutor for 14 years. He prosecuted and tried cases involving violent crime, human trafficking, public corruption, and organized crime, including successful prosecutions of over 100 members and associates of the mafia. Honig now is a CNN Legal Analyst, hosts podcasts and writes for Cafe, is a Rutgers University scholar, and is Special Counsel to the law firm Lowenstein Sandler.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department, and reported the following:

Page 99 picks up right in the middle of one of my own real-life trial stories. This one’s a favorite of mine; it’s about a sad-sack contractor who had been the victim of an extortion by the mafia and was having a nervous breakdown just as he was about to take the stand to testify against a mobster. On page 98, I set the scene and describe how I started to get angry with our recalcitrant witness, until my trial partner saved me:

But thankfully, my trial partner, Lisa Zornberg, stopped me with a look. The contractor was her witness, and she brought a better touch to the matter. “Listen,” Zornberg said to him. “I know it’s not easy. But the law is entitled to your evidence. We need it. The court needs it. The jury needs to hear it.” The contractor seemed to catch himself and arrest his downward spiral. He took a breath and looked up. “Would it help if I gave you a hug?” Zornberg asked.

Minutes later, the contractor walked into the courtroom, past Nicosia, and onto the witness stand. He took the oath and got through his testimony, first answering questions from Zornberg on direct exam and then withstanding a pointed cross-examination from the defense attorney. The contractor was halting and visibly shaky in his testimony—in a sense, his palpable fear probably helped us by driving home to the jury just how scared he was—but he got through it. By the time he was done, it was game over. A few days later, the jury found Nicosia guilty of extortion.

We were lucky to get the contractor’s testimony. It often is difficult to convince witnesses, especially victims, to come forward and testify against a criminal defendant, particularly those who are Mobbed up or otherwise powerful. As a prosecutor, it’s easy to get used to the courtroom. But to a victim, the courtroom can be terrifying. The defendant is right there, seated just feet away from the witness box. (There’s no way around this. Our Constitution ensures every defendant the right to “confront” the witnesses against him, meaning the defendant must be physically present during the trial and can challenge the testimony, through a lawyer’s cross-examination.) Trials are open to the public. Sometimes members of the media show up. And at times, defendants will pack the viewing area with sympathizers and supporters; if the defendant has Mob ties, the gallery can look imposing. It’s a small miracle we got the contractor on the stand, albeit just barely.

I tell these insider stories in part because they’re fun and entertaining and accessible. The book offers a unique, insider’s look at how federal prosecutors really do the job. But I also use these firsthad anecdotes to establish and explain those core principles that I collectively refer to as “the prosecutor’s code.” These are the unwritten rules, the things you learn only by doing, by succeeding and failing, and they guide the ethical and effective prosecutor in everything he or she does. The story on page 99 about our terrified contractor, for example, illustrates the systemic danger posed by what people sometimes dismissively call “process crime” -- witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and the like.

Throughout the book, after I establish each of the core tenets of the prosecutor’s code through a story like this one, I then demonstrate how Bill Barr broke that code during his tenure as attorney general. For example, I use the story on page 99 to launch into chapters about Barr’s unprecedented and nakedly political interference in the prosecutions of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, both of whom were convicted of what Trump and his supporters referred to as mere “process crimes.” I argue that Barr’s actions convey his fundamental disregard for, or ignorance of, the prosecutor’s code and that, all told, Barr should be remembered as a uniquely inept and corrupt attorney general .

Follow Elie Honig on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charly Coleman's "The Spirit of French Capitalism"

Charly Coleman is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author of The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (2014), which was awarded the 2016 Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies.

Coleman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment, and reported the following:

Page 99 is at the end of chapter 2, which argues that the French government’s interventions in early modern theological debates over frequent communion—the question of how often and under what conditions it was acceptable to partake of the Eucharist—reflected more general anxieties over how to approach the sacrament as a conduit to boundless spiritual wealth. Here’s an excerpt:

Historians continue to view the fate of the eighteenth-century Gallican church and state through the prism of degenerative processes: dechristianization, desacralization, disenchantment. Yet symptoms should not be confused with causes. As this and the preceding chapter have argued, disputes in the economic-theological field involved no small measure of creative destruction. Without Arnauld’s provocative treatise on frequent communion, it is uncertain whether Jansenism would have assumed its distinctly French aspects or sheer prominence on the spiritual and social scenes. Likewise, but from the opposite end of the doctrinal spectrum, Pichon’s attempt to encourage the practice, which came seemingly as a bolt out of the blue, elevated the already high stakes of the refusal of sacraments controversy. This bitter feud laid bare the constitutive tensions of absolutism under the Old Regime.

My book argues that in early modern France, theology and the economy were deeply imbricated not only in religious matters, but also in financial relationships and affairs of state.

In one sense, the page 99 test offers a mediocre if satisfactory glimpse into this argument. It comes immediately before a major hinge in the exposition between chapters 2 and 3, as I move from an account of the sacramental economy, in which the Eucharist figured mightily, to the influence of this sacramental economy on the workings of the economy as conventionally defined. The point is crucial for my claim that, in Catholic France, theology was always already economistic, and that what I term economic theology operated alongside the material economy in consistent but contingent ways—in ruminations not only on the Eucharist, but also on seemingly profane subjects such as money, usury, and luxury.

There are limits to the test’s reliability. Much of the page is taken up with narrating how debates between the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, who opposed frequent communion, and the Jesuit Jean Pichon, who championed the practice, drew to an inconclusive close. The stalemate ultimately compromised the monarch’s role as the guarantor of religious peace in his kingdom. Yet even this flawed resolution suggests how the sacramental economy remained of pressing importance; otherwise, it would not have drawn the attention of the king himself along with that of much of the French ecclesiastical establishment. What began as a series of controversies over the nature of the Eucharist as a universal equivalent in the production and distribution of grace established a template for understanding how consumption in all its forms could be mediated by sublimely material instruments, including money itself.

But there is another sense in which the test is surprisingly revelatory. Among the aims of the book is to historicize what Marx called the fetish character of the commodity, which he duly likened to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Fetishes work by endowing a part with the ability to conjure the whole in mysterious but intensely gratifying ways. The page 99 test operates according to a similar principle by assuming that the quality of a thing—its intellectual, if not financial value—can be grasped through an arbitrary quantity. The figures in my book speculated on how this was possible to the point of obsession.

Learn more about The Spirit of French Capitalism at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Finis Dunaway's "Defending the Arctic Refuge"

Finis Dunaway is professor of history at Trent University, where he teaches U.S. history, environmental studies, and media studies. His books include Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform and Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. Seeing Green received the John G. Cawelti Award from the American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association and the History Division Book Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Dunaway applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice, and reported the following:

A casual browser opening to page 99 might be surprised by what they find. The page begins with a description of photographs taken by Lenny Kohm, the book’s main protagonist, outside of Old Crow, Yukon. But these images do not depict vast mountains or other conventional scenes of sublime wilderness. Instead, Kohm documented a caribou hunt, including shots of a man toting a rifle and then skinning and butchering a carcass.

Later in the page, the reader will encounter the words of Randall Tetlichi, a citizen of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, whom Kohm interviewed in Old Crow in 1988. “That’s our survival,” Tetlichi said to him. “If there’s no caribou, we’re going to have a hard time up here. And I hope people from the South listen to us and try to get the picture that we talk about.”

Page 99 introduces readers to key themes that run throughout Defending the Arctic Refuge. Kohm’s photographs and Tetlichi’s words reveal how the debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—one of the most contested lands in all of North America—has always been about more than wilderness versus oil. From visiting Gwich’in communities in Alaska and Canada, Kohm learned to see fossil fuel development as a form of colonial violence that jeopardized the food security and cultural survival of Arctic Indigenous peoples. The page also indicates the close relationships Kohm built with Gwich’in communities—and how these bonds shaped the Arctic Refuge struggle.

As on page 99, Defending the Arctic Refuge places Kohm—an unlikely activist—at the center of the narrative. A former jazz drummer and aspiring photographer, Kohm experienced an epiphany in the Arctic in 1987. He soon became an anti-drilling activist, using his photographs as part of a multimedia slide show called The Last Great Wilderness. For the next two decades, Kohm presented the show to grassroots audiences across the United States, often joined by Gwich’in representatives from Canada and Alaska. Together, Kohm’s photographs and Gwich’in voices helped turn a traditional wilderness battle into something else entirely: a transnational struggle for Indigenous rights and environmental justice.

Page 99 plunges the reader into the micro-history of Kohm’s transformative experience in Gwich’in country, but it does not summon the broader scales of analysis found elsewhere in the book. Other chapters consider the Arctic Refuge fight in light of longer histories of Indigenous resistance to colonial mega-projects; of the work of other photographers and filmmakers who mobilized opposition to Arctic drilling; and of the power struggles and changing political dynamics in Washington, DC.

Defending the Arctic Refuge is a story of the grassroots taking on Goliath, of a slide show galvanizing the citizenry, of unlikely, cross-cultural alliances forming across vast distances. The book shows how countless people across the continent—including Indigenous leaders, environmental activists, scientists, students, churchgoers, and many others—made this history. If not for their actions, the Arctic Refuge would have long ago been turned into an industrialized oil field.

Visit the companion website to Defending the Arctic Refuge.

Follow Finis Dunaway on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gordon Fraser's "Star Territory"

Gordon Fraser is Lecturer and Presidential Fellow in American Studies at the University of Manchester.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Star Territory: Printing the Universe in Nineteenth-Century America, and reported the following:

In 1853, a Cherokee observer named Tso-le-oh-woh published a poem about a comet. You can read about it on page 99 of my new book, Star Territory. The poem Tso-le-oh-woh published is the sort of nineteenth-century literary work that doesn’t get much attention. Printed in a newspaper called The Cherokee Advocate, it is difficult to understand without context, and it has only rarely been anthologized.

Yet this comet poem tells precisely the story that I tell in Star Territory. The speaker of Tso-le-oh-woh’s poem, an “Indian” man who “saw a comet,” has the option of looking up at the stars in one of two ways. He could imagine that the universe exists irrespective of human desires, that it is a vast cosmic tapestry of living and non-living things. Or, alternatively, he could try to come up with ways to instrumentalize the universe—to use it to become rich and powerful.

The observer in Tso-le-oh-woh’s poem chooses the second path, and the poet makes clear that he is fool for making this choice. This “Indian” man begins to imagine that he could find a gold mine on the comet. A gold rush in Georgia, Tso-le-oh-woh would not have had to remind his Cherokee readers, had prompted white settlers in the 1830s to drive indigenous people from their homes.

The choice in Tso-le-oh-woh’s poem—is the universe an instrument of human desires or something more?—is one that numerous nineteenth-century people had to make. In Star Territory, I am concerned with how the United States of America has since its founding sought to instrumentalize space, to use it for the extension of national power. Government agents did this with almanacs, star charts, observatories, and astronomy training for military officers. But I am also interested in how others in the nineteenth century regarded the cosmos as independent of human desires. From the poet Walt Whitman to the Black newspaper editor Samuel Cornish to the Hawaiian monarch Lili‘uokalani to Tso-le-oh-woh, numerous nineteenth-century people saw in the cosmos something more than exploitable space.

Today, we are embarking on a new space age—defined by commercial rockets, by the US Space Force, and by ambitious plans to land human beings on the moon and on Mars. We should, then, remember Tso-le-oh-woh’s injunction to regard of the universe as something more than another place to find a gold mine.

Visit Gordon Fraser's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martha Minow's "Saving the News"

Martha Minow is Professor of Law and former Dean of Harvard Law School. She is the author of In Brown's Wake (2010).

Minow applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech, and reported the following:

Page 99 actually serves as the bridge between the “problem statement” and the solutions offered in this book. Early chapters lay out the diminishing scope of the news business in the United States, examine causes and effects, and contrast these developments with historic and longstanding government involvement in and subsidy for news gathering and distribution and media technologies. Page 99 is the penultimate page of a chapter connecting past and present issues with the law and specifically with the United States Constitution. Anticipating concerns that government action to save the news industry would contravene the First Amendment’s prohibition on any governmental action “abridging the freedom of speech…or of the press,” the chapter shows how the First Amendment has coexisted with governmental subsidies for media, regulation of the economics and structure of media, and laws protecting individuals from libel, defamation, and fraud. That chapter also identifies and criticisms some recent judicial interpretations of the First Amendment that show hostility to any governmental regulation and emphasizes that freedom of speech must coexist with other values, such as the democratic system itself; the Constitution is not a suicide pact. The topics on page 99: news deserts, troubling behaviors of digital platform companies, and varieties of governmental actions both consistent with and advancing Constitutional values undergird the book’s entire analysis.

I hope that page 99 whets the reader’s appetite for the remainder of the book. There I lay out more than a dozen reforms that could help “save the news” while remaining consistent with the Constitution and suggest an affirmative constitutional duty for all who care about democracy, accountable government, and safety from exploitation and violence to fight for changes in the current ecosystem of news. There is only one private industry mentioned in the U.S. Constitution—the press—and it is expressly protected. U.S. democratic processes and communities are in jeopardy if the press, news-gathering, and accountability journalism collapse. Hence, the Constitution calls for government action. I could say more here—or better yet, extend hope for discussion once you read the whole book!

Learn more about Saving the News at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ian Ona Johnson's "Faustian Bargain"

Ian Ona Johnson is the P.J. Moran Family Assistant Professor of Military History at the University of Notre Dame. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The National Interest, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, among other publications.

Johnson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Faustian Bargain: The Soviet-German Partnership and the Origins of the Second World War, and reported the following:

Faustian Bargain tells the story of twenty years of on-again, off-again partnership between Germany and the Soviet Union. In its first phase (1922-1933), the Soviet government and the German military built a network of secret bases and factories in Russia, where they developed new weapons of war and trained officers. They renewed their cooperation in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, partitioning Eastern Europe between them.

Page 99 of my book finds the reader in the year 1927. In December 1926, journalists had reported that the German military was illicitly producing arms in the USSR. The resultant scandal brought down the German government. Stalin had been deeply embarrassed by public revelations of the Soviet pact with the arch-reactionary German military. A series of surreptitious meetings followed, where the Soviets demanded better secrecy and closer coordination between the German military and the German state. They were surprised to learn that Germany’s elected leaders had been left in the dark about much of the German military’s operations in Russia.

To remedy the situation, the one great statesman of Weimar Germany - Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann - held a series of meetings behind closed doors with the generals then leading the German Reichswehr (Reich Defense Force, or Army). Streseman made clear that he wanted greater civilian oversight of the military’s activities. He told the Reichswehr that he wanted to personally approve future secret bases on Soviet soil and that all Reichswehr soldiers should “resign” before arriving in Russia as a means of maintaining secrecy - they would, of course, be restored to rank the moment they returned to German soil. If they did so, he believed that their covert work rearming Germany could continue, or perhaps even expand. It eventually would, with the Soviet-German network reaching its peak size in 1931.

Page 99 highlights the secrecy and scandals that marked the Soviet-German relationship, as well as the stakes. Thanks to the work conducted in the USSR, even before Hitler came to power, the German government had already begun expanding the army to 21 divisions - well beyond the limits allowed Germany by international law. The Reichswehr already possessed a new generation of aircraft and armored vehicles. And it had thousands of officers familiar with the new technologies of war. Hitler would accelerate the arms race that had already quietly begun. The end result would be a new European war in 1939.

Visit Ian Ona Johnson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue