Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Z?rror-Famine. Robert Conquest. Oxford University Press, $19.95 When future histories are written, the...
...Clients respond to a hard sell and increasingly demand the kind of one-stop shopping that only the largest firms with the most specialties can provide...
...But the new brassiness raises the question of whether the title "officer of the court" fits the people Stevens writes about...
...Traditionalists fight a futile rear-guard battle, mourning a loss of quality and dignity...
...Conquest writes with a dry passion, piling fact upon fact, statistic upon statistic, account upon account until whatever resistance the reader may have to an acceptance of the truth is chafed away, leaving only stark belief...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Z?rror-Famine...
...One peasant, Conquest writes, "was shot for possession of 25 pounds of wheat gleaned in the fields by his 10-year-old daughter" People robbed graves, searching for jewelry with which to purchase food in the cities...
...Almost everyone has his price," says managing partner Steve Kumble...
...Stevens might have investigated more thoroughly whether the quality of corporate legal work is actually improving or deteriorating as the business changes in style and structure...
...It's an old marketing trick, but one now pursued with a zest characteristic of Michael Deaver and other heroes of the Reagan era...
...Some of its members no doubt live up to their reputation...
...For corporate lawyers, current and aspiring, Stevens' book serves as a warning that disdain for the sordid affairs of commerce will soon be a thing of the past...
...In his powerful, welldocumented new work, The Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest makes a persuasive case that the famine was no accidental catastrophe, but a deliberate policy of class and national extermination directed by Stalin against the peasantry...
...Another 6.5 million died from "dekulakization," the brutal campaign against the kulaks, who were seen by Stalin and the party as an exploitative class of landowners, but whom Conquest portrays as simply the most industrious peasants—pettybourgeois, but far from rich...
...Taking cues from Madison Avenue rather the Old Boy Network, the new breed uses marketing flash to lure customers, and scatters field offices like a fried-chicken chain...
...The whole apparatus is fine-tuned to bring in clients with hardly a thought to serving them once they're lured into the web," a partner of a more traditional firm says...
...What the book lacks in depth, it makes up for in bluntness...
...A major target of these attacks, and Stevens' prime example of the marauding new mega-firm, is Finley, Kumble, which began with eight lawyers in 1968 and is heading toward 700 today...
...But Mark Stevens reports in Power of Attorney that the tweedy old bird was onto something...
...In-house counsels were weaklings whose job was to nod yes, yes, while the meters kept running up, up...
...The New Yorkbased firm unapologetically snatches competitor's long-time clients, promising cheaper, more comprehensive service from offices spread out across the country and the world...
...The famine, he argues, was largely a result of Stalin's fear of the Ukraine's power and nationalism...
...The "revolving door of government service," for example, remains a "route to legal stardom," he writes...
...Stevens, who has written widely about business, provides a useful, if sketchy, outline of this transformation...
...After all, non-lawyers would think we were doing something important, and our Ivy League degrees would guarantee good pay...
...McGraw-Hill, $17.95 The practice of blue-chip law, my first-year civil procedure professor told us, is mostly boredom...
...Mark Stevens...
...An estimated seven million died of starvation, Conquest calculates: five million in the Ukraine, one million in the North Caucasus, and one million elsewhere...
...Those peasants who were left were the target of Stalin's mad conviction that grain was being withheld from the state...
...David K. Shipler Power of Attorney...
...Although he offers little critical commentary, Stevens does contribute to the demystification of lawyerdom...
...Oxford University Press, $19.95 When future histories are written, the twentieth century may come to be known as the era of genocides...
...Today, huge firms gobble up smaller ones and shamelessly raid competitors for top lawyers and clients...
...They began comparison shopping when they did go outside, and the Finley, Kumbles were there to pitch the business...
...Having already heard about Wall Street salaries, most of us were keeping an open mind on greed...
...A legal vice president for a bank tells Stevens that his main goal when he left his old firm was "to make certain my former colleagues didn't charge this client what I used to charge it ." In-house legal staffs grew in size and sophistication, taking over routine work once farmed out to expensive firms...
...Harvest of Sorrow must now stand beside it as a companion volume in documenting one of history's most terrible manifestations of state madness...
...The pin-striped bitching provides a certain perverse entertainment...
...Corporate legal staffs fought their way through the storm of retainer invoices and hourly bills to discover that they were getting royally ripped off...
...A respected teacher and judge in the last semester of a 50-year career, he assured us we'd get used to it...
...We still accord this profession, and especially its corporate law elite, high social status, defering to it on many matters of public concern...
...The author persuaded a wide circle of heavyweight lawyers to accuse each other of complacency, avarice and worse...
...In December, the firm announced it had signed departing Senators Russell Long, premier tax loophole artist, and Paul Laxalt, close friend of the Reagans...
...Stevens describes how Finley, Kumble grabbed former governor of New York Hugh Carey the year after he left office to help grease the opening of a new market in municipal bond financing...
...Power of Attorney unfortunately doesn't explain much of the significance of these trends...
...Disappearing from the culture of corporate law are loyalty to the firm and aspirations to academic accomplishment or public service...
...Over in Russia," he writes "things were diffe.ent...
...When that doesn't work, Finley, Kumble borrows a tactic common in advertising and public relations, but previously taboo among respectable law firms: It buys its competitors' more profitable partners, clients in tow...
...Stevens traces the origins of the Finley, Kumble strategy to the wising-up of clients that began about 1970...
...Crass capitalism, Stevens writes, has invaded the once serene realm of corporate law...
...Conquest, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is best known for his work on Stalinism, The Great Terror...
...Keeping the best specialists on hand requires not professional comeraderie, but greenbacks—in some cases, millions of them...
...The "liquidation of the kulaks as a class," in the words of Stalin's order of 1927, involved executing some, imprisoning others, and deporting still others to remote areas of Siberia...
...He ordered impossibly high quotas of grain from the Ukraine and sent teams of military and party activists to search ruthlessly for caches of grain...
...Although the terrible famine in the Soviet Union in 1932-33 has been well known, it has usually been regarded as an inadvertent result of Stalin's forced collectivization...
...These captive relationships enabled established legal practices to "all but ignore such boorish concerns as efficiency, productivity, marketing, and competition," Stevens writes...
...Firms that for generations had relied on gentlemanly relations with a handful of compliant clients saw profits dry up...
...The new breed cares nothing about ivory tower trappings, and Stevens mentions public service only as it's used to line people's private pockets...
...In the good old boring days, prominent firms enjoyed virtual monopoly status in representing flocks of sheep-like companies and banks...
...Some of its competitors argue that the new national franchises are mostly mirrors and facades...
...Some mothers even killed and ate their children...
...Finley, Kumble says it offers more efficient service at a lower price...
...Paul Barrett...
...An editor of an Odessa newspaper "described two villages on either side of the RussoUkrainian border, where all the grain was taken from the Ukrainian, but only a reasonable delivery quota from the Russian villages:' The famine also was coupled with a campaign against the artifacts of Ukrainian national culture, including the Church...
...But few pretend any more that those revolving back to the "private sector" do anything other than twist the rules they once helped enforce...
...The only thing to fear, he warned, is lawyers who want to turn the profession into a mere business...
...There is perfidy and greed...
...Finley, Kumble partners argue that customers don't care about tradition, pipe smoke, or how many law review articles a firm produces...
...Finley, Kumble has been particularly successful at deploying expolitician "rainmakers," who peddle their names and connections to prospective clients...
...We have seen the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by the 'lurks, the extermination of six million Jews in Europe by the Nazis, and the auto-genocide of perhaps two million Cambodians by their own rulers...
...There are worse things than boredom," he declared, bony forefinger held high...
Vol. 19 • February 1987 • No. 1
