The Nightmarish Child

02 Monday Jun 2014

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Adam Ulam, Alexander Lenin, Communism, Dmitri Volkogonov, Intellectuals, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Krupskaya Lenin, Lenin: A New Biography, Leninism, Purges, Robert Conquest, Russia, Russian History, Russian Revolution, Soviet Union, The Harvest of Sorrow, Tsar Alexander III, Vladimir Lenin

“Lenin suffered his first stroke in May 1922. In September he wrote the ferocious letter to Gorky.* In the intervening July he was drawing up his many lists of intellectuals for arrest and deportation or internal exile. A month earlier Lenin’s doctors had asked him to multiply 12 by 7. Three hours later he solved the problem by addition: 12 + 12 = 24, 24 + 12 = 36. . . . The ex-believer Dmitri Volkogonov comments in his Lenin: A New Biography:

He had covered a twenty-one-page notepad with childish scrawls… The future of an entire generation of the flower of the Russian intelligentsia was being decided by a man who could barely cope with an arithmetical problem for a seven-year-old.

There were further strokes. Later, Lenin’s wife Krupskaya taught him to repeat (and it only worked under direct prompting) the words ‘peasant,’ ‘worker,’ ‘people,’ and ‘revolution’ . . . Adam Ulam has described the nihilism of the Russian revolutionary tradition as ‘at once childish and nightmarish.’ The dying Lenin — and, frequently, the living Lenin, too — was childish and nightmarish. In his last ten months he was reduced to monosyllables. But at least they were political monosyllables: vot-vot (here-here) and sezd-sezd (congress-congress)…

In March 1887 Lenin’s older brother Alexander was arrested for conspiring to murder his namesake, Tsar Alexander III; a plea for clemency would have reduced his sentence to hard labor, but Alexander was possessed of the courage of youth and, two months later, was duly hanged. He was twenty-one. Vladimir Ilyich was seventeen. And their father died the previous year. Clearly the consequences of these events are entitled to be boundless. My sense of it is that Lenin’s moral faculties stopped developing thereafter. Hence his foulmouthed tantrums, his studied amorality, his flirtatious nihilism, his positively giggly response to violence: his nightmarish childishness.”

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Excerpted from Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis.

I highly recommend you pick up your own copy of this dark but illuminating book. On a sunnier (or at least funnier) note, there’s some light verse that’s unavoidable here, penned as it was by Robert Conquest, the renowned historian of the Soviet Union and family friend of Amis:

There once was a bastard called Lenin
Who did one or two million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

To take you back into the shade: in introducing his compendious study of the 1929 Soviet terror-famine, The Harvest of Sorrow, Conquest offers the reader the following proem:

“We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.”

That single sentence stands for 3,040 lives. His book runs 417 pages.

*“The intellectual strength of workers and peasants grows in the struggle to overturn the bourgeoisie and their acolytes, those second-rate intellectuals and lackeys of capitalism, who think they are the brains of the nation. They are not the brains of the nation. They’re its shit.”

A Chekist on the Global Chessboard

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Interview, Politics

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Anne Applebaum, Cheka, Chekist, China, Clement Attlee, Communism, current events, Danielle Crittenden, David Frum, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Gulag, Gulag: A History, Harry Truman, International Politics, Iraq, KGB, Leninism, Leon Trotsky, Leonid Brezhnev, Lev Kamenev, Neville Chamberlain, Nikita Khrushchev, North Korea, Police State, Russia, Russian History, Saddam Hussein, Secret Police, Soviet Union, Stalinism, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Torture, Totalitarianism, Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir Putin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Winston Churchill

Brian Lamb: Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you say [Putin] was a ‘Cheka’?

Anne Applebaum: Putin was a member of the secret police, which was later called the KGB. And the old name — the Leninist era name — for the KGB is the Cheka. And Putin has described himself as a ‘Chekist,’ which is an old fashioned word for secret policeman.

Brian Lamb: What does that mean to you?

Anne Applebaum: The first time I heard him say it, it filled me with horror. It’s like somebody saying, “I was a Brownshirt.” It has very, very unpleasant connotations.

Brian Lamb: Why do you think he says it?

Anne Applebaum: He says it because it gives him an aura of invincibility. ‘We were the people behind the scenes who were running the old Soviet Union.’ The term still commands a certain amount of respect in Russia. A poll was done recently which showed that some 60 or 70 percent of Russians still think Lenin was a great man who contributed to their country. So he’s echoing a respect for the Russian Revolution.

Brian Lamb: I read a story in The New York Times about Saddam Hussein which read just like [accounts of the Soviet Gulag] — the enemies lists that they had, the kind of people they put away, the torturing that went on. How much of this is still going on around the world?

Anne Applebaum: I would say a great deal. The Stalinist regime — and later the Krushchevite and Brezhnevite regimes in the Soviet Union — actually spread their techniques, and they taught people around the world how to run police states. I have no doubt that, through the East Germans, Saddam Hussein’s police state was probably set up with Russian or Soviet advice.

It is not an accident that so many of these systems share so much in common; there was a set of techniques, they were deliberately spread. The Soviet camp was exported to China; the Chinese exported it to North Korea. The North Korean Gulag that exists today sounds, from what little we know about it, very much like Stalin’s Gulag.

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From Anne Applebaum’s 2003 interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, discussing her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag: A History.

I sometimes think it all boils down to names. We had Roosevelt (Dutch for “rose garden”) then Truman (Old English: “honest man”); Chamberlain (“servant of a bed chamber”) then Churchill (“church’s hill”) and Attlee (“from the meadow”).

They had Stalin (“man of steel”) and his henchmen: Kamenev (“man of stone”), Molotov (“hammer”), Lenin (“from the River Lena”) — and Trotsky (The name on one of young Lev Bronstein’s fake passports, which wound up catching on).

Putin, though he mysteriously lacks a single antecedent family member who shares his surname, lays claim to a strangely appropriate etymology: “on his way”, “on his path”.

In the next few weeks, I’ll post more on this topic as well as excerpts from Applebaum’s book, which as far as I can tell is now considered the preeminent history of the Soviet prison and slave labor system (a Google search for “gulag book” displays it first, above Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago). Gulag concludes with a clear-eyed rumination on the post-Soviet psyche, especially as it is expressed by today’s Russians and enacted in the 20th century atavisms of their largely popular Chekist-in-Chief. Writing in her epilogue a decade ago, Applebaum observed,

[T]en years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, the country that has inherited the Soviet Union’s diplomatic and foreign policies, its embassies, its debts, and its seat at the United Nations, continues to act as if it has not inherited the Soviet Union’s history. Russia does not have a national museum dedicated to the history of repression. Nor does Russia have a national place of mourning, a monument which officially recognizes the suffering of victims and their families…

Many Russians experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a profound blow to their personal pride. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel—but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad. It is too painful, like speaking ill of the dead.

Unlike most attempts at mass psychoanalysis, these considerations are hardly trivial, especially as we attempt to internalize what is happening in Ukraine and perhaps anticipate the Chekist’s next move.

On a brighter note: I recommend not only Applebaum’s substantial book, but also her columns, which are printed in The Washington Post. Along with Danielle Crittenden (wife of conservative political commentator David Frum), she has also published a cook book on Polish comfort food — and though I can’t speak to its merits, I can say that when juxtaposed with her work on the famines of Stalinism makes her probably the most versatile author I’ve cited on this blog. (Below: Applebaum and Crittenden; below that, Applebaum with her sons and husband, Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.)