THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Friday, November 8, 2019 |A
Chasing
An Epic Fail
Berezina
By Sylvain Tesson
(Europa, 177 pages, $15)BOOKSHELF| By Benjamin Shull
A
bérézinarefers, in colloquial French, to “a
disastrous situation.” The term derives from the
name of a river that the French army crossed in
November 1812, in retreat from Moscow after Napoleon’s
ill-fated invasion of Russia. The French crossed the
Berezina, in Belarus, but suffered heavy casualties, under
siege by a vengeful Russian army. The river entered the
lexicon as a synonym for catastrophe—and inspired a
road trip 200 years later.
In “Berezina: On Three Wheels From Moscow to Paris
Chasing Napoleon’s Epic Fail,” Sylvain Tesson, a French
writer and traveler, recounts a journey he took with four
comrades roughly retracing the French retreat. This is
bloody ground to tread. Tolstoy likened the invasion of
Russia to “an enraged beast mortally wounded as it
charges.” The Berezina crossing was but one grisly node
of a military campaign
that, in addition to all
the death and suffering
it brought, was the
beginning of the end of
the first French empire.
Mr. Tesson’s book,
published in France in
2015 and now translated
by Katherine Gregor,
takes the form of a
travelogue, each chapter
devoted to a single day on
the road. Accompanying the
author are two Frenchmen
(Gras and Goisque) and two
Russians (Vitaly and Vassily).
The five ride on Ural motorcycles
equipped with sidecars, and the lousy
condition of the vehicles becomes a recurring
joke: “These machines are robotics of the Soviet
industry,” Mr. Tesson says of the Urals just before
departing from Moscow. “They promise adventure. You
can never tell if they’ll start and, once launched, no one
knows if they’ll stop.”
Mr. Tesson jumps back and forth in time, describing
both his own journey and the events surrounding the
French retreat, interjecting meditations on travel, books
and the fate of nations, as well as observations on the
local fare: “A Russian dinner consists in slowing down
the ravages of vodka by swallowing an onion, some dill,
and a small herring.” In Ms. Gregor’s translation, the
narration is wry and marked by a cheerful fatalism. Mr.
Tesson is a witty and knowledgeable road companion,
though at times his grandiose pronouncements—“It’s a
madness we get obsessed with, that transports us into
myth; a drift, a frenzy, with History and Geography
running through it”—may cause eyerolls.
The first day of the trip brings the three Frenchmen
(the Russians would link up later) from Moscow to
Borodino, the location of a famous French triumph in
September 1812. In “War and Peace,” Borodino is the site
of Prince Andrei’s mortal wounding. Like Tolstoy, Mr.
Tesson notes the cost of the battle for the French. “If we
rely on simple statistics and consider the Grim Reaper as
an accountant, the Battle of Borodino was a Napoleonic
victory,” he writes. “The Russian losses were greater than
the French. But as far as victory goes it was a perverse
victory. What had the Emperor gained? The right to go a
little deeper into the country.” The French took Moscow
soon after, but the city’s residents had burned the city and
fled. Emperor Alexander I, meanwhile, refused to negotiate
with Napoleon. And the retreat would soon commence.Mr. Tesson’s crew changes spark plugs in the Russian
town of Vyazma, where the French army took a beating
two weeks after vacating Moscow, and continues west
along the “awful” Moscow-Smolensk highway, “where
the procession of thirty-three-ton trucks remind [them]
in heavy bursts that Russia had joined the free-trade
carousel.” While in Belarus, they stand in the presence
of the Berezina itself. Mr. Tesson sees a stone slab that
bears an inscription: “ ‘Here, the soldiers of theGrande
Arméecrossed the Berezina.’ A sentence that made
nightmare sound like nothing at all.” His description of
the Battle of Berezina is certainly gruesome: “People
died crushed and stifled. They slipped, fell, tried to get
back onto the footbridges, but fell into the water and
drowned. The river collected the corpses of men and
horses, carriage debris mixed with ice.”
Things take a lighter tone when, a few days later, the
travelers reach Warsaw, celebrating their arrival by
smoking cigars in the Ural sidecars. But the toll of the
Russian campaign lingers over nearly every page. Many
of the French who didn’t perish in combat froze to death;
others survived by eating their horses, some of which
died from sheer overwork. (Mr. Tesson devotes a section
to the “equine martyrdom” of the retreat.) Napoleon’s
foolhardy decision to march on Russia resulted in an
“epic fail” indeed.
A detour through Berlin—“I wanted to drive my
motorbike and sidecar at the foot of the Brandenburg
Gate, where Napoleon paraded after kicking the Prussian
asses at Jena in 1806”—occasions, in contrast to the
Russian campaign, memories of French battlefield glory.
So, too, does the Invalides, the Paris complex that pays
tribute to France’s military history. It is there that Mr.
Tesson ends his long trip. His final chapter, detailing
his arrival in Paris, features some of his loftiest
ruminations—on the meaning of nationhood and the
legacy of the whole Napoleonic project—but once his
Ural rumbles over the cobblestones of the Invalides
courtyard, more immediate concerns come to mind. “I
suddenly felt like going home, taking a shower, and
washing off all those horrors.”Mr. Shull is an assistant books editor at the Journal.A road trip from Moscow to Paris,
tracing the route of the French retreat
after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.A Centenary for Free Speech
A
mericans may take free
speech for granted, but
they couldn’t do so a
century ago. Courts convicted
newspapermen, pamphleteers
and politicians for nothing
more—and sometimes less—
than trying to sway the public
against U.S. involvement in
World War I. On Nov. 10, 1919,
the Supreme Court affirmed
the conviction of antiwar pro-
testers under a law that made
it a crime to “hinder” the war
effort. But a dissent inAbrams
v. U.S.laid the foundation for
today’s robust protection of
controversial speech.
The idea that speech could
pose a “clear and present dan-
ger” to the government, and
thus lacked First Amendment
protection, came from a quar-
tet of 1919 cases, three of
which were unanimous. In
March, inSchenck v. U.S.,the
court, led by archprogressive
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr., upheld the convictions of
pamphleteers who encouraged
draft-dodging. A week later,
Frohwerk v. U.S.upheld the
conviction of a newspaperman
who criticized U.S. involvement
in foreign wars, whileDebs v.
U.S.affirmed the conviction of
Socialist Party leader Eugene
Debs for denouncing the war in
a speech. (Debs went on to re-
ceive 3.4% of the 1920 presi-
dential vote from prison.)In October the court in
Abramsupheld another anti-
war protest conviction—but
this time not unanimously.
Like Charles Schenck, Jacob
Abrams was a socialist who
had distributed antiwar pam-
phlets. His group criticized
U.S. military support for the
anti-Communist White move-
ment in the Russian Civil War.
As socialists of the time oftendid, the pamphleteers urged a
general strike in New York, on
grounds that workers were
making weapons to use against
their Bolshevik comrades.
But those same weapons
had an alternative—and like-
lier—use in the allied war ef-
fort against the Germans. The
defendants were convicted un-
der the Sedition Act of 1918,
which made it a crime to
“urge, incite, or advocate any
curtailment of production...
with intent by such curtail-
ment to cripple or hinder...
the prosecution of the war.”
The court affirmed the con-
victions over the surprising
dissent ofSchenck’s author,
Holmes, joined by Justice Louis
Brandeis. It’s unclear why
Holmes put aside his majori-
tarian impulses to support a
constitutional restriction on
legislative action. Some schol-
ars have posited that Holmes
acted not out of a commitment
to the Constitution but because
of the disparate impact of
speech restrictions on progres-
sive icons. Even so, the dissent
is steeped in libertarian ideas.It draws implicitly on John
Stuart Mill and asserts that
“the best test of truth is the
power of the thought to get it-
self accepted in the competi-
tion of the market.”
Abramsand the other cases
were effectively overturned in
Brandenburg v. Ohio(1969),
which held that speech can be
prosecuted only if intended to
foment “imminent lawless ac-
tion.” Since then, the court has
vigorously defended speech
that offends or provokes,
ranging from the publication
of the Pentagon Papers, to vio-
lent rap lyrics, from porno-
graphic humor to burning the
American flag.
These strong protections
give Americans confidence in
our right to express and hear
unpopular opinions. The expe-
rience of a century ago should
warn us against being compla-
cent about it.Mr. Shapiro is director of
the Robert A. Levy Center for
Constitutional Studies at the
Cato Institute, where Mr. Col-
lins is a legal associate.By Ilya Shapiro
And Michael T. Collins
Holmes’s dissent in
Abrams v. U.S.set the
stage for broad First
Amendment rights.OPINION
Analysts are
reading Tues-
day’s tea
leaves, pre-
dicting what
the off-year
election re-
sults mean for
the presiden-
tial race. But
one victory is
beyond dis-
pute. Former Attorney General
Eric Holder will be celebrating
this week for a decade.
Democrats on Tuesday won
total control of Virginia’s gov-
ernment, adding both cham-
bers of the General Assembly
to the governor’s mansion.
They will redraw Virginia’s
legislative district lines after
next year’s census. The Old Do-
minion was already moving
left, though the redistricting
power likely cements Demo-
cratic dominance over Virginia
for the next 10 years.
This was Mr. Holder’s plan.
While most prominent Demo-
crats spent the months follow-
ing Donald Trump’s election
plotting future runs, Mr.
Holder was launching the Na-
tional Democratic Redistrict-
ing Committee, committed to
domination of electoral map-
making through the courts and
legislatures. The NDRC spent
its first years aggressively liti-
gating legislative maps it
didn’t like, to great success.
Virginia’s election was the first
test of the electoral piece of
Mr. Holder’s strategy, and it
will now serve as the model by
which Democrats attempt to
gain redistricting power in 11
other key states next year.
The NDRC claims its efforts
are aimed at simple “fairness
Eric Holder Takes Virginia
in the electoral system.” It
says it’s working to overturn
gerrymanders that “disenfran-
chise” voters. Don’t be fooled.
Mr. Holder’s group has never
engaged in blue states where
Democrats routinely draw
maps to disadvantage Republi-
cans, such as Maryland, Mas-
sachusetts or New Jersey.
The NDRC is instead the
Democratic version of the
GOP’s success of a decade ago,
the Redmap Project. Democrats,
flush from Barack Obama’s
2008 victory, tuned out the
state legislatures. Republicans
used their inattention, along
with a sweeping cash advan-
tage and a backlash against the
Obama presidency, to flip 21
state chambers in 2010, allow-
ing them to dominate map-
drawing after that year’s cen-
sus. That power helped
consolidate Republican control
of state chambers and the U.S.
House. Republicans might be
flattered by Mr. Holder’s imita-
tion—if they weren’t so busy
getting crushed.
The Holder “sue to blue” lit-
igation strategy has already
yielded major gains for Demo-
crats, as state judges struck
down maps drawn by Republi-
cans and required changes that
ultimately aided the Demo-
crats. Example: Pennsylvania’s
Supreme Court—which is cho-
sen through partisan elections
and has a Democratic major-
ity—in 2018 overruled the U.S.
House maps drawn by the Re-
publican legislature and pro-
duced its own version. The
new maps helped Democrats
flip three net seats. In Virginia,
federal judges redrew the state
legislative map to aid candi-
dates running this week.Mr. Holder built on those
victories, using Tuesday’s elec-
tion to carry out his group’s
plan for state legislative domi-
nance. The NDRC announced in
August its support, to the tune
of $250,000, for 17 Democrats
running in state legislative
elections. The more important
contribution was to concen-
trate the liberal mind on the
redistricting project. Left-wing
activist groups had their own
motives for wanting Demo-
cratic control in Virginia—guncontrol, abortion, labor and
energy policy. But Mr. Holder
and his backer Barack Obama
have been pitching donors and
activists on their plan for
years, and the prospect of re-
districting power and long-
term Democratic dominance
proved a powerful additional
motivator.
Democratic groups threw at
least $54 million at Virginia—
an unprecedented sum in an
election that didn’t feature a
single federal office—out-
spending Republicans by some
$12 million. Outside groups ac-
counted for at least $22 million
of the Democratic effort, nearly
four times what they spent in- Three billionaires—Mi-
chael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer
and George Soros—and their
organizations spent more than
all outside Republican contrib-
utors combined.
Republican donors and
groups are caught in the same
funk as Democrats in 2009—
too focused on the president
and his fights to engage in the
battle at the state level. The
Republican State Leadership
Committee—charged with
getting and keeping state
chambers—understood the
stakes in Virginia, and it was
one of the largest single
spenders in the race. But it
proved no match for the Dem-
ocratic juggernaut.
Republicans are proving
similarly flat-footed in com-
bating Mr. Holder’s legal strat-
egy. Democrats are ramping up
litigation, increasingly relying
on state judges—many of them
elected and partisan, as in
Pennsylvania—to do their bid-
ding. Their goal in some of
next year’s legislative races is
simply to flip one chamber in
each state, deadlocking Repub-
licans and Democrats, poten-
tially throwing the question to
the courts. That means Repub-
licans will need to put a huge
new effort into electing state
judges who refrain from med-
dling in the redistricting func-
tion, which the U.S. Constitu-
tion assigns to state
legislatures.
Mr. Holder’s plan to take
over nearly a dozen more
states next year is far from a
fait accompli. Virginia was al-
ready trending blue, and he
will face a harder task in other
target states such as Florida,
Georgia and Texas. But the
threat to the GOP is real. And
if the party doesn’t take up
that challenge soon, it’s going
to lose its opportunity for an-
other decade.
Write to [email protected].The Democratic plan
to dominate state
legislatures has its
first electoral success.POTOMAC
WATCH
By Kimberley
A. Strassel
East Ger-
many’s Com-
munist gov-
ernment
opened the
Berlin Wall
and thus the country 30 years
ago Saturday. Geopolitics and
economics drove this out-
come, but East Germany’s reli-
gious communities played a
complicated, significant and
far too often overlooked role.
The Stasi, East Germany’s
secret police agency, under-
stood that the country’s con-
gregations presented a major
threat to the existing order.
Lutherans were East Ger-
many’s largest denomination,
and many actively opposed
the regime. Undermining them
became a thorny task for a
ruling class that disdained the
brutality of the Soviet Union
and its other satellites.
By 1954 the Stasi had built
a Soviet-inspired agency to
monitor churches, later named
Department XX/4. It gradually
perfected the art of subver-
sion. The group’s officers
came from the proletariat, as
most top officials did. The
Stasi recruited farmhands and
factory workers and sent them
to the Potsdam College of Ju-
risprudence, its officer train-
ing school.
To weaken faith communi-
ties, the department culti-
vated believers, including
pastors, as spies. They in-
cluded every rank of East
German clergy, from bishops
to pastors in training. Among
The Stasi Spies in Seminary
the latter was an East Ber-
liner named Frank Stolt. As a
teenager he had watched spy
movies and made plans to es-
cape by chatting with West-
ern tourists in East Berlin.
When his daring plan failed,
the teenager quelled his de-
sire for adventure by working
for Department XX/4. His
first assignment: Attend pas-
tor college.
Aleksander Radler, an East
German theology student with
an Austrian passport, spent
his early Stasi years uncover-
ing the networks in Berlin that
allowed fellow students to es-
cape. His success led to a per-
manent assignment in Swe-
den. Mr. Radler, subsequently
a pastor and theology profes-
sor, kept a close eye on the
powerful Swedish state church
and its East German connec-
tions until the end of the Cold
War.
Gerd Bambowsky, a flam-
boyant preacher, worked for
the Soviet KGB as well as De-
partment XX/4. He infiltrated
Western charities smuggling
Bibles behind the Iron Curtain,
making himself a key courier.
Bambowsky’s work helped the
regime establish how the
book-smuggling networks op-
erated and led to a significant
diversion of books. As for the
intended recipients, the Stasi
passed their personal informa-
tion to the KGB, which dealt
with them in its own manner.
Yet another pastor-spy,
Jürgen Kapiske, was a tal-
ented church journalist whotraveled around Europe ex-
pertly gathering information
as a reporter. He showed how
the Stasi could benefit from
East Germans’ international
contacts: Through his church
sources, he collected valuable
information about Czechoslo-
vakia’s Charter 77 dissident
movement. During East Ger-
many’s dying days, Mr.
Kapiske even wrote an article
for an American magazine.But the central character
was Col. Joachim Wiegand,
who led XX/4 during the final
decade of East Germany’s ex-
istence. In one of my conver-
sations with him, he explained
his approach to East German
Christians: “Let them sing, let
them pray, but they shouldn’t
do politics.” He pursued this
goal with doggedness and ex-
traordinary skill.
The department’s officers
constantly mapped potential
recruits and cultivated them
by appealing to their weak-
nesses—Western consumer
goods, say, or a desire for a
faster-moving career. These
pastors delivered information
on congregation members,
clerics at home and abroad,
and opposition-minded groupsmeeting in churches.
As the country’s only semi-
free space, East Germany’s
churches in the 1980s hosted
countless groups supporting
the environment, peace and
human rights. Although a few
pastors spied out of belief in
East Germany, for most the
undercover work was a Faust-
ian bargain. They reported for
Department XX/4 because
they wanted personal advan-
tages. And in most pastor-
agents’ reports, no piece of in-
formation was too trivial to
include. One supplied theolog-
ical exegeses written by his
students with helpful pointers
as to which bits the officers
should read.
Thanks to his pastor
agents, Col. Wiegand had su-
perb insights to his country’s
mood and could foresee the
coming instability. But he
could only deliver the intelli-
gence for his country’s deci-
sion makers, not influence
policy. By November 1989, the
reforms East Germans were
demanding were too extensive
and the regime too rigid. De-
spite the efforts of Depart-
ment XX/4, the wall still came
down as Christians and other
East Germans took to the
streets. The pastor-spies were
effective, but the people’s will
was stronger.Ms. Braw, author of “God’s
Spies” (Eerdmans, 2019), di-
rects the Modern Deterrence
project at the Royal United
Services Institute.Religion played a
complicated but key
role in the collapse
of East Germany.HOUSES OF
WORSHIP
By Elisabeth
Braw
Coming in BOOKS this weekend
The twilight of Margaret Thatcher • Literary travels in
Russia • Urban idealism in America • Cole Porter’s letters- Walter Ralegh, architect of empire • Canine-friendly
children’sbooks • Sam Sacks on new fiction • & more