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