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Old 03-25-2009, 16:12   #1
Richard
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The lingering stench: airing Stalin’s archives

Found this interesting and insightful - I'm going to look for the book to read now.

Richard's $.02


The lingering stench: airing Stalin’s archives
Gary Saul Morson

On Inside the Stalin Archives by Jonathan Brent. (Part 1)

As he wanders through the streets of St. Petersburg contemplating murder, the hero of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment notices “that special Petersburg stench” which seems to be everywhere. Somehow, that stench constitutes the atmosphere in which lethal and repulsive ideas arise.

When Jonathan Brent arrived in Moscow, he detected the same stench. It was 1992, just after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Brent seized a unique opportunity that, if not for him, would doubtless have been missed. He came to negotiate a deal to publish sensitive and secret documents from the Central Party Archives. But despite the new openness, the old Russian smell, or spirit—the Russian word dukh means both—persisted. Brent noticed “the smell of Moscow—flat, unwashed, sour—an accumulation of fifty years without sunlight or cleansing breeze, as if inhering in the things themselves.” The odor differed from the stink of garbage or stale apartment-building air in New York because it had no specific source. On the contrary, it seemed to be there all on its own, not like the smell of rotting objects in the refrigerator, but, rather, the smell of the refrigerator itself.

Brent describes how he learned to negotiate the bureaucratic obstacles, slovenly work habits, anti-Semitism, and lawlessness that make Russia enduringly Russian as he pursued what has turned out to be the most significant publishing venture of the past fifty years: Yale University Press’s Annals of Communism series. About two dozen volumes already published reveal documents, never seen before in Russia or the West, of the greatest importance in understanding world Communism. Though invented by Lenin in Russia, totalitarian Communism has, after all, ruled nearly twenty countries and about 40 percent of the world’s people at one time or another, and it has inspired true believers almost everywhere, including the United States. The documents show that, if anything, the ideology was more pervasive and dangerous than we thought.

The first volume in the series, The Secret World of American Communism, caused shock waves by demonstrating that the American Communist Party was not a group of home-grown idealists, as so many apologists claimed, but, from the start, conducted espionage and took orders directly from Moscow. Despite decades of leftist mockery and vilification, the basic picture provided by Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley of Alger Hiss and many others was correct. The Comintern, too, was from day one directed by Moscow as a tool of Russian foreign policy.

And despite the desperate strategy of throwing all blame on Stalin so as to excuse Lenin, The Unknown Lenin, which reproduces a selection from some six thousand Lenin documents never before released, reveals bloodthirstiness that surprised even anti-Communists. During a famine, Lenin ordered his followers not to alleviate but to take advantage of mass starvation:

It is precisely now and only now when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.
“an (and therefore must)”: Leninist and Soviet ideology held not just that the end justifies any means, but also that it was immoral not to use the utmost cruelty if that would help. And it was bound to help in at least one way—intimidating the population. From the beginning, terror was not just an expedient but a defining feature of Soviet Communism. In Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky was simply voicing a Bolshevik truism when he rejected “the bourgeois theory of the sanctity of human life.” In fact, Soviet ethics utterly rejected human rights, universal justice, or even basic human decency, for all concepts that apply to everyone might lead one to show mercy to a class enemy. In Bolshevism, there is no abstract justice, only “proletarian justice,” as defined by the Party.

The series also published the last diary of the Tsaritsa, a volume on the Great Terror, and a documentation of the bloody war on the peasantry. One might imagine that, by now, there would be little of such importance to reveal, or, if there were, that the Putin regime, which has returned to praising Stalin, would call a halt. But the most important volumes are now in preparation: papers from Stalin’s personal archives. Soon to appear is one documenting his rise to power. It will be possible to see how strakh—terror or fear—became the guiding feature of Soviet life. Even Bukharin, the Bolshevik leader whom Stalin executed, wrote from prison that the Purges were a brilliant stroke that would, by creating “everlasting distrust,” allow the regime to achieve “a full guarantee for itself.”

How did Brent manage to get these documents, arrange for their editing and publication, and negotiate with the FSB (formerly the KGB)? After all, signing a contract with the secret police is not exactly like sealing a deal with Wal-Mart. Brent had to learn how things work in Russia, and his book shows us the conditions—moral, personal, and material—that Russians take for granted but which are utterly unlike anything Americans have ever experienced. Describing the author’s growing understanding of Russia, this long essay puts most conventional scholarship to shame.

Brent gradually realized that even though the Soviet Union had disintegrated, the Russian army had become a shadow of itself, and the Russian Orthodox Church had returned to official favor, the very feel of life—that smell of Russia—remained. He had to negotiate contracts in a land where contracts were still not binding. The process taught him how ostensibly obsolete cultural structures or expectations can replicate themselves in radically changed conditions of daily life, how culture persists longer than ideas and regimes.
If only American economists who presume a culture-free agent calculating his best advantage would grasp the point. Culture matters, and culture, above all, consists of habits we do not even notice because they shape the very possibilities of action, or even thought.

(cont'd)
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Old 03-25-2009, 16:13   #2
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The lingering stench: airing Stalin’s archives
Gary Saul Morson

On Inside the Stalin Archives by Jonathan Brent. (Part 2)

While supposedly living in a market economy, today’s Russians understand making money by stealing, but not by producing. Efficiency remains a foreign concept. One scholar remarked that Russian spirituality allows people to deal with abstractions but leaves them unable to repair an elevator or television. Brent stayed in an apartment where “it seemed as if none of the objects … had ever been new but had come into the world already used and broken.”

Going to one meeting, Brent became perplexed by an elevator showing two second floors—the sequence went 2, 2, 3—and at last found himself in a room still equipped with manual typewriters. He instantly recognized that his host, the head of publications of the Comintern archive, was wearing “a Soviet suit”:

What made such a suit “Soviet” I could never precisely identify, but it was a combination of cheap fabric, washed-out colors, old-fashioned, wide lapels, and a cut that was always slightly too big or too small.
Russia has progressed from totalitarian terror to Mafia-like thuggery, but, except for pockets of obscene wealth, it remains, as Herzen and Dostoevsky had feared, the land of eternal shabbiness.

Even the vulgarity is shabby. My favorite moment occurs when, in pursuit of the correspondence between Stalin and the sycophantic Bulgarian leader Dimitrov, Brent checked into a Bulgarian hotel. The most striking feature in his room, he muses, was not the paper-thin walls and the paper-thin blanket and the paper-thin mattress, and the sliver of soap in its silky wrapper on the washbasin, but rather that in place of the mint one might have found on one’s pillow in an American hotel, there was a cellophane packet containing a single condom.

Brent worked with Alexander Yakovlev, the key liberal aide to Gorbachev and Yeltsin. In return for an important favor, Yakovlev got Yeltsin to allow him to have Stalin’s private archives published. Yakovlev emphasized a point made by a handful of pre-revolutionary Russian liberals: that what Russia needs most is the concept of law. Without an understanding of legality as opposed to sheer arbitrary power, one of these liberals explained, democracy is impossible. On the right, the Slavophiles rejected law as contrary to the national spirit, and, on the left, radicals saw it as a surreptitious attempt to limit state power. In his copy of Lenin’s works, Stalin underlined his predecessor’s descriptions of the dictatorship of the proletariat:

The dictatorship is power depending directly on force, not bound by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is power won and supported by the force of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, power not bound by any laws.

The Great Purges have puzzled scholars because they seemed to be directed at no particular group; local officials were given arrest quotas to fill as they saw fit. But precisely because of their senselessness, the Purges served the function of letting everyone know that no law would ever protect them. One usually thinks of a repressive regime as one that deals ruthlessly with dissenters, but in Soviet Russia no one was ever safe.

During his last years, Stalin invented the “doctors’ plot.” Supposedly, a group of Jewish doctors had conspired to murder Kremlin officials. When the doctors did not confess, Stalin threatened the investigators with torture if they did not get the doctors to say what was wanted. Of course, they could have just shot the doctors and made up confessions, but the regime needed constantly to prove to itself that its enemies acknowledged their wrongdoing and that lawlessness was all-powerful. Recalling the Cheka, the first Bolshevik secret police force, Stalin told the investigators: “You work like waiters in white gloves. If you want to be Chekists, take off your gloves. Chekist work—this is for peasants and not for barons.” You must beat the doctors “with death blows.”

Brent agrees with Yakovlev that, today, corruption serves the role that terror played for Stalin. It is not, as Westerners presume, a threat to the state but the very means by which the central government further destroys the rule of law and thereby can gain indisputable power for itself. The rule of law is a much greater enemy than [the oligarchs] Khodorovsky and Berezovsky.
In twenty-first-century Russia, corruption comes not from the breaking of law but from the absence of law.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles...-archives-4028
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“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” - Robert Heinlein
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Old 04-07-2009, 08:26   #3
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Good stuff. Thanks!
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Old 04-07-2009, 09:55   #4
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STENCH

I know the stench of totalitarianism, too. In 1965, I was assigned to escort a prisoner to the confinement facility in Dacau. Even though the war had been over for 40 years, there was a particular stench that permiated the entire country side. If someone told me then that they didn't realize that the concentration camp was there and what was happening there, I would call them a liar.
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Old 04-07-2009, 11:06   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by f50lrrp View Post
I know the stench of totalitarianism, too. In 1965, I was assigned to escort a prisoner to the confinement facility in Dacau. Even though the war had been over for 40 years, there was a particular stench that permiated the entire country side. If someone told me then that they didn't realize that the concentration camp was there and what was happening there, I would call them a liar.
I was there in 1957, at Dacau, and they were still sticking to their story that they where unaware of what was happening. However I did meet a former "fasimlager" who ended up as a guard when their unit was disbursted and he had the guts to tell me the truth that everyone knew what was going on only were afraid to mention it because of the shame they felt....................

GB TFS
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