Tag Archives: Soviet Union

Appraising Reagan

29 Monday Feb 2016

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Ronald Reagan

“The daily expressions of Reagan’s long-term strategies – inveighing against deficits while creating them, aspiring to eliminate nuclear missiles while increasing them – were often inconsistent. Failure to choose between opposing alternatives sometimes produced a zigzag pattern in his presidency. But a tolerance for cognitive dissonance, like other forms of irrationality, can be an effective negotiating tactic. The Soviets, like Tip O’Neill, were never quite sure which Reagan they were bargaining with. His ability to live with contradiction was, on balance, more blessing than curse.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many people remembered having had views similar to Reagan’s about the vulnerability of the Soviet Union. But Reagan, as Robert Gates wrote in his 1996 memoir From the Shadows, ‘nearly alone truly believed in 1981 that the Soviet system was vulnerable not in some vague, long-range historical sense, but right then.’ Reagan’s commonsense view of historical inevitability was that an unworkable government was sure to break down sooner or later. ‘Communism is neither an economic or a political system – it is a form of insanity – a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature,’ he wrote in his unpublished 1962 statement, ‘Are Liberals Really Liberal?’ […]

Reagan himself never used phrases such as ‘American exceptionalism’ or ‘moral clarity,’ any more than he talked about being visionary or consequential. He had a low level of self-consciousness, and expressed these concepts simply by being himself. If none of his successors formed the kind of bond he did with the country, it may be because few politicians have ever embodied the idealized national character the way Reagan did. Simplicity, innocence, and personal modesty are rare qualities in public life, and difficult ones to fake. People excused Reagan’s lapses and contradictions because they believed he was genuine and recognized themselves in his aspirations.

Reagan’s claim to the nation’s affection rests on his American personality: his homespun wit, his good nature, and his native optimism. His claim to greatness rests on his role in the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism. To put the case in the simplest possible terms, the Soviet Union didn’t fall; it was pushed. The push that Gorbachev gave it was the proximate cause, but it reflected pressure that Reagan began to apply four years before Gorbachev came to power. Gorbachev’s goal was to render it harmless. Through the shove he gave it came from farther away, it was intended to produce the outcome that followed, one that he was nearly alone in thinking possible.”

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Pulled from chapters 10 (“The Ash Heap of History”) and 15 (“Tear Down This Wall”) of Jacob Weinberg’s short biography Ronald Reagan, which was published last month.

Yes, I posted this so I could chalk one up in the February ’16 column. Shameless, especially on a leap day, but the 41-month post streak is alive.

You can see Weinberg, who’s a self-identified liberal, discuss the book and some revelations about the Gipper in his recent conversation with Christopher Buckley at the 92nd St. Y.

Our Next Series of Demands

03 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in History

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World Leaders at the Yalta Conference, 1945

“In November 1945 Maxim Litvinov, at that time Deputy Foreign Minister of the USSR (who, as his wife told me, had become not merely tactically but even ideologically disenchanted), was asked by the American envoy Averell Harriman what the West could do to satisfy Stalin. He answered: ‘Nothing.’ In June 1946, still in that post, he warned a Western journalist that the ‘root cause’ of the confrontation was ‘the ideological conception prevailing here that conflict between the Communist and capitalist worlds is inevitable’ — that is, no more than the doctrine long since announced by Lenin that ‘a series of frightful clashes’ were bound to occur between the two systems, leading finally to the world victory of communism. When the correspondent asked Litvinov, ‘Suppose the West would suddenly give in and grant all Moscow’s demands?… would that lead to goodwill and the easing of the present tension?’ Litvinov answered, ‘It would lead to you being faced, after a more or less short time, with our next series of demands.'”

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Excerpted from Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century. In the book, Conquest, who Paul Johnson calls “our greatest living historian,” offers a blistering critique of not just Marx and his acolytes, but of the more general tendency for human beings to believe too strongly in the redemptive power of radical ideas and institutions.

On another level, in reading Litvinov’s ominous response, I was struck not by its application to today’s Russia (though some may argue that), but by how it reflects the unspoken approaches of so many groups and movements, both internal and external.

The photograph was taken at the 1945 Yalta Conference. Harriman is in the background, second from the right.

There’s more:

Why Stalin Hated Trotsky

01 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in History, Political Philosophy

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Three Famous Russians

“One wonders whether Stalin’s hatred of Trotsky, one of the most passionate in history (with three floors of the Lubyanka [KGB headquarters] devoted to his destruction), was to some extent ‘racial.’ It is, anyway, all of a piece. Anti-Semitism is an announcement of inferiority and a protest against a level playing field – a protest against talent. And this is true, too, of the most hysterical, demonizing, millenarian versions of the cult, according to which a tiny minority, the Jews, planned to achieve world domination. Now how would they manage that, without inordinate gifts? It is said that anti-Semitism differs from other prejudices because it is also a ‘philosophy.’ It is also a religion – the religion of the inadequate. When tracing the fateful synergy between Russia and Germany, we may recall that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the ‘warrant for genocide’ as it is called in Norman Cohn’s book of that name, was a fiction composed by the Tsarist secret police. […]

The proximate cause of [Stalin’s] final delirium was evidently the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 and the arrival, later that year, of the new ambassador, Golda Meir, who attracted a crowd of 50,000 Jews outside the Moscow synagogue. This was a shocking display of ‘spontaneity’; it also confronted Stalin with an active minority who owed an allegiance other than to ‘the Soviet power’. He is supposed to have said: ‘I can’t swallow them, I can’t spit them out.’ In the end, it seems, he decided to do both. The Jews who survived the gauntlet were meant to end up in Birobidzhan on the Chinese border and in other parts of Siberia where, according to Solzhenitsyn, ‘barracks had already been prepared for them’… Solzhenitsyn believes that the pogrom was to be launched at the beginning of March by the hanging of the ‘doctor-murderers’ in Red Square. But then, too, at the beginning of March something else happened: Stalin died.

It is perhaps controversial to suggest that Iosif Stalin in his last years was capable of further spiritual decline. But one is struck by the loss, the utter evaporation, of his historical self-consciousness, suggesting some sort of erasure in a reasonably important part of Stalin’s brain. ‘Anti-Semitism is counterrevolution,’ Lenin once claimed. Anti-Semitism was the creed of the Whites, of the Tsarists… against whom the young Stalin might have stood in line on the streets of Russia’s cities. Anti-Semitism was for the rabble and the Right. In turning to it, the world’s premier statesman, as he then was, also squandered the vast moral capital that the USSR had accumulated during the war: Hitler’s conqueror, incredibly, became Hitler’s protégé.”

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Pulled from Martin Amis’s engrossing short history of Stalin and the origins of the Soviet Union Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.

Among the most renowned Anglo-American historians of the Soviet Union is 98-year-old Hoover Institute fellow Robert Conquest, a familial friend of Amis and the first Western scholar to describe Stalin’s terror-famine as a purposeful, premeditated genocide. The book in which he makes that claim, The Harvest of Sorrow, opens with the following:

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 is 3,040 lives. His book runs over 400 pages.

Pictured: Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky at the Eighth Bolshevik Conference in March, 1919.

Go on:

Russia’s Hero-less History

09 Monday Mar 2015

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Russian flag world war two

“[H]alf a century after the end of World War II, the Germans still conduct regular public disputes about victims’ compensation, about memorials, about new interpretations of Nazi history, even about whether a younger generation of Germans ought to go on shouldering the burden of guilt about the crimes of the Nazis. Half a century after Stalin’s death, there were no equivalent arguments taking place in Russia because the memory of the past was not a living part of the public discourse.

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.

But there are reasons for the profound silence. 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…

Tragically, Russia’s lack of interest in its past has deprived the Russians of heroes, as well as victims. The names of those who secretly opposed Stalin, however ineffectively — the students like Susanna Pechora, Viktor Bulgakov, and Anatoly Zhigulin; the leaders of the Gulag rebellions and uprisings; the dissidents, from Sakharov to Bukovsky to Orlov — ought to be as widely known in Russia as are, in Germany, the names of the participants in the plot to kill Hitler. The incredibly rich body of Russian survivors’ literature — tales of people whose humanity triumphed over the horrifying conditions of the Soviet concentration camps — should be better read, better known, more frequently quoted. If schoolchildren knew these heroes and their stories better, they would find something to be proud of even in Russia’s Soviet past, aside from imperial and military triumphs.

Fall of the Berlin Wall

But in the end, the foreign policy consequences are not the most important. For if we forget the Gulag, sooner or later we will find it hard to understand our own history too. Why did we fight the Cold War, after all? Was it because crazed right-wing politicians, in cahoots with the military-industrial complex and the CIA, invented the whole thing and forced two generations of Americans and West Europeans to go along with it? Or was there something more important happening? Confusion is already rife. In 2002, an article in the conservative British Spectator magazine opined that the Cold War was “one of the most unnecessary conflicts of all time.” The American writer Gore Vidal has also described the battles of the Cold War as “forty years of mindless wars which created a debt of $5 trillion.”

Thus we are forgetting what it was that mobilized us, what inspired us, what held the civilization of “the West” together for so long; we are forgetting what it was that we were fighting against. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is…

Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the ‘objective enemy,’ as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why — and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.”

Anne Applebaum

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Excerpted from Anne Applebaum’s powerful, seminal work Gulag: A History.

These reflections, pulled from the book’s final chapter, clearly have broad political implications right now, 12 years after Gulag was first published. During last year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, I was struck by how little reference was made to the Soviet Union in general and its cultural history in particular, as well as by how much of that scant attention was mere metaphor — an animated hammer and sickle or War and Peace reference whizzing by on the jumbotron.

There was during the closing ceremony a tribute to Russia’s writers, a lineup, perhaps the strongest of any modern country, which was paraded out as if each had been lionized by the state all along. Thirteen total were honored, including Dostoevsky (censored; forced into hard labor in Siberia), Pushkin (exiled), Gogol (exiled), Turgenev (exiled), Vladimir Mayakovsky (repression; suicide), Anna Akhmatova (censored), Marina Tsvetaeva (exiled; suicide), Joseph Brodsky (exiled), Mikhail Bulgakov (censored), and Solzhenitsyn (Gulag). Only two of them — Tolstoy and Chekhov — were able to live in their home country and use a pen without state retribution.

Go deeper into Russia:

Stalin’s Son

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

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Stalin and daughter

“Stalin really hated him. It took me several days of subliminal work to accept this. The standard interpretation may seem ridiculous, but it is probably the right interpretation. We have seen something of Stalin’s violent insecurity about his provenance. This insecurity was now turned on Yakov. Stalin hated Yakov because Yakov was Georgian. Yakov was Georgian because his mother was Georgian; Yakov was Georgian because Stalin was Georgian; yet Stalin hated Yakov because Yakov was Georgian. The racial and regional tensions within the USSR constitute an enormous subject, but Stalin’s case was, as usual, outlandish. We have to imagine a primitive provincial who (by 1939 or so) had started to think of himself as a self-made Peter the Great: an Ivan the Terrible who had got where he was on merit. Thus Stalin was Russia personified; and Yakov was Georgian. Yakov is said also to have been of a mild and gentle disposition, to his father’s additional disgust.

Raised by his maternal grandparents, Yakov joined the Stalin household in the mid-1920s. He spoke little Russian, and did so with a thick accent (like Stalin). Nadezhda seems to have liked him and fully accepted him. But Stalin’s persecution was so systematic that toward the end of the decade Yakov attempted suicide. He succeeded only in wounding himself; and when Stalin heard about the attempt he said, ‘Ha! He couldn’t even shoot straight” (Volkogonov has him actually confronting his son with the greeting, ‘Ha! You missed!’) Soon afterward Yakov moved to Leningrad to live with Nadezhda’s family, the Alliluyevs.

Like Vasily, Yakov joined the armed forces, as a lieutenant (rather than a field marshal), reflecting his more peripheral status. He was the better soldier, and fought energetically until his unit was captured by the Reichswehr. This placed Stalin in a doubly embarrassing position. A law of August 1941 had declared that all captured officers were ‘malicious traitors’ whose families were ‘subject to arrest.’ Thus Yakov came under the first category – and Stalin came under the second. As a kind of compromise, Stalin arrested Yakov’s wife. When the Nazis tried to negotiate an exchange, Stalin refused (‘I have no son called Yakov’). He feared all the same that the supposedly feeble Yakov might be pressured into some propagandist exhibition of disloyalty. He need not have so feared. Yakov passed through three concentration camps – Hammelburg, Lubeck, Sachsenhausen – and resisted all intimidation. It was precisely to avoid succumbing (Volkogonov believes) that Yakov made his decisive move. In a German camp, as in a Russian, the surest route to suicide was a run at the barbed wire. Yakov ran. The guard did not miss.”

Stalin's son 2

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

Read on:

Stalin's children

The Nightmarish Child

02 Monday Jun 2014

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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.”

More on Russia:

  • Anne Applebaum describes Putin’s eerie connection to the ancien régime
  • A. N. Wilson lays out just how much the Soviets sacrificed to beat the Nazis
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s incisive Nobel speech about the nature of man

Vladimir Lenin

Bernard Baruch: We Need an International Law with Teeth

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in Speeches, War

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Bernard Baruch

“The basis of a sound foreign policy, in this new age, for all the nations here gathered, is that anything that happens, no matter where or how, which menaces the peace of the world, or the economic stability, concerns each and all of us…

Now, if ever, is the time to act for the common good. Public opinion supports a world movement toward security. If I read the signs aright, the peoples want a program not composed merely of pious thoughts but of enforceable sanctions — an international law with teeth in it…

Let this be anchored in our minds: Peace is never long preserved by weight of metal or by an armament race. Peace can be made tranquil and secure only by understanding and agreement fortified by sanctions. We must embrace international cooperation or international disintegration…

The solution will require apparent sacrifice in pride and in position, but better pain as the price of peace than death as the price of war.”

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From Bernard Baruch’s 1946 speech “A Choice between the Quick and the Dead”.

Though he would in the following year coin the term “Cold War”, Baruch concluded this speech with the ungrudging proposal that all nuclear weapons be placed — through a thirteen-step procedure — under some intergovernmental authority. You think that sounds idealistic? Yeah, me too. Or at least anachronistic, especially in a time when the international community flounders purposelessly, not only in its attempt to curb the annexation of Eastern Ukraine, but also in keeping track of a massive commercial airliner with 200 cell-phones on board. What would it possibly do with a couple thousand nuclear bombs?

Though the number of active nukes has shriveled to around 4,100 from a peak of 68,000 in 1985, Baruch’s point is a serious one, especially when our attention is drawn to the Korean Peninsula or the once-unified Pashtun region split between Pakistan and India. Neither of those two neighbors, nor the hermit kingdom of the Kim dynasty, is yet to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, even though they are armed with an estimated 200-plus total (though not all active) warheads.

As someone born in 1989, I’ve never felt the disquiet of a duck-and-cover drill. Nor did I spend geography week in Kindergarten as my mom did: ogling anxiously at the massive Soviet Union — a red Rorschach blot that provoked only ugly words. Fear. Danger. Enemy. Still, if we can form a post-9/11 position toward nuclear weapons, it must rest on the tension between the unfortunate fact and terrifying contingency which follow: The human animal’s technological progress is outpacing its moral progress; what happens when an apocalyptic ideology lays its hands on apocalypse-inducing weaponry? In other words: can there be any doubt that if Muhammad Atta had a nuclear bomb, he would have used it?

There are two additional paragraphs, supplied by Martin Amis in his suggestively titled Einstein’s Monsters (1987), which illuminate a critical generational difference in our attitudes towards the inevitability of living with nukes.

My father regards nuclear weapons as an unbudgeable given. They will always be necessary because the Soviets will always have them and the Soviets will always want to enslave the West. Arms agreements are no good because the Soviets will always cheat. Unilateral disarmament equals surrender. And anyway, it isn’t a case of “red or dead.” The communist world is itself nuclear-armed and deeply divided: so it’s a case of “red and dead.”

Well, dead, at any rate, is what this prescription seems to me to promise. Nuclear weapons, my father reminds me, have deterred war for forty years. I remind him that no global abattoir presided over the century-long peace that followed Napoleon’s discomfiture in 1815. And the trouble with deterrence is that it can’t last out the necessary time-span, which is roughly between now and the death of the sun.

Read on:

  • I describe how Baruch became the original “Wolf of Wall Street”
  • Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck riff on the evils of militarism
  • Andrew Bacevich connects the concept of ‘original sin’ to the prospect of future war

Bernard Baruch

A Chekist on the Global Chessboard

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Current Events, Interview, Politics

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Vladimir Putin

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.)

Anne Applebaum and Danielle Crittenden Anne Applebaum and Family

The Tragic Paradox at the Center of Twentieth Century History

05 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in History, War

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Adolf Hitler

“Barbarossa, as the invasion of the Soviet Union was codenamed, unleashed the greatest, bloodiest and most difficult land campaign ever fought in the history of warfare. The failure of the German army to conquer Russia did indeed guarantee that Germany as a nation would be destroyed and that the eastern half of Europe would remain in bondage to the Communists until 1989. The tragic paradox at the center of mid- to late-twentieth century history is that Europe, and the world, owed its deliverance from the tyranny of Hitler to the heroism of the Red Army. Of course, Britain’s resistance to Hitler in 1940 played its part at the beginning of the conflict, as did the enormous contribution of men and arms by the United States when they eventually entered the conflict. But the Russian contribution was crucial: it was the resistance of the Russian people to invasion, siege, and starvation, and the preparedness of Stalin to sacrifice millions of lives, both military and civilian in what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War, which secured Hitler’s defeat. To be delivered from the tyranny of Hitler, it was necessary to be delivered into the tyranny of Josef Stalin. If you were a Pole, a Czech, an East German, a Hungarian, a Serb or a Croat you did not have to be A. J. P. Taylor to see that this was a questionable form of liberation. […]

The immense strength and skill of the Red army and the titanic heroism of the Russian people in resisting invasion must have taken Hitler by surprise. To the reader sixty and more years later, the sheer scale of the campaign is not possible to absorb. Within one day, German attacks had demolished a quarter of the entire Soviet air force. Within four months, the Germans had occupied 600,000 square miles of Russian soil, captured 3 million Russian troops, butchered countless Jews and other civilians as they went, and come within sixty-five miles of Moscow. But within a further four months, more than 200,000 German soldiers had been killed, a staggering 726,000 wounded, and a further 113,000 incapacitated by frostbite.”

__________

Excerpted from A. N. Wilson’s Hitler — one of the more absorbing biographies I’ve read in a long while. At just shy of 200 pages, the book pays significant dividends of insight for the time and attention it demands.

Joseph Stalin

A World Split Apart: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Speech

22 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by in Freedom, History, Politics, Speeches

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“The current Western view of the world was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression in the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists…

This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones…

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding.

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.”

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From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s speech “The World Spent Apart” delivered at Harvard University on June 8th, 1978.

“A World Split Apart” was given as the commencement address at Harvard’s graduation exercises, and despite it’s several glaring oversimplifications, is a sinewy and deep meditation on the moral fault line of the Cold War. Solzhenitsyn’s less than nuanced characterization of the West (as a society whose freedom has led to moral decay) is excusable, in my opinion, given his personal history and the honest attention he brings to the corrosive effects of Western decadence. It’s a worthwhile — if slightly simplistic — point to make. Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn’s reading of history here — described in the transition from Dark Ages to Renaissance — is shoddy (and surprisingly Marxist), but still necessary to lend brevity and clarity to his moral appraisal of our civilizational course.

We must also spare a little slack for the speech’s specific political context. At this late date in the 1970’s, observing the Carter administration’s impotence on the international stage, one could hardly count the Cold War as a fait accompli.

Still, in a 2007 interview with Victoria Lautman about his Gulag novel House of Meetings, Martin Amis reflected on the uniqueness of Solzhenitsyn’s spiritual resilience:

“It’s often said that memoirs of the Gulag are unrepresentative because they’re all written by intellectuals, and not by criminals or guards.

But they are deeply unrepresentative in another way, too, I feel, in that these people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Yevgenia Ginzburg and Janusz Bardach — what enormous souls they had, what incredible spirits they were, what amazing force of life they possessed.

The most popular tattoo in the Gulag, sported mostly by the hereditary criminals, the Urkas, read, “YOU MAY LIVE BUT YOU WON’T LOVE.”

But these Solzhenitsyn’s, they lived and they loved, and their integrity was never challenged. The person they could have been apart from the Gulag was never defiled; Solzhenitsyn said, ‘Prison has wings. You can soar in prison.’

So tales of the Gulag are unrepresentative in that sense. And I think most of the millions who passed through the system – tens of millions who passed through the system – suffered a darker fate: their integrity did not survive. Their character was ruined. They couldn’t love; they lived but they couldn’t love.”

Although I agree with Amis’s general assessment, there’s a minor correction or at least point of clarification to be made about his ‘prison has wings’ anecdote. That phrase appears in Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and is uttered by the title character — but not as an affirmation of his vividly imaginative or elevated state within the Gulag. Rather the point being made is the exact opposite.

“Prison” in this context is pedestrian jail; it has wings compared to the spiritually subterranean, emotionally asphyxiating life of a cog in the Siberian forced labor camps administered by the Gulag. Ivan says prison has wings not because he is so spiritually resilient as to transcend captivity; he says it because unlike one of the 14 million Russians who filtered through the Gulag, a regular jailbird, even when confined to a cage, might avoid having his soul defaced, his spiritual wings clipped.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Can Civilization Survive Without God?

30 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by in Current Events, History, Politics, Religion, War

≈ 1 Comment

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Peter Hitchens

The following is a transcription of Peter Hitchens’s brilliant response to the question: Can civilization survive without God?

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Thank you. The question, first of all, is what civilization might be. I doubt whether we can agree on that very quickly, since we probably can’t even agree on how to spell it on either side of the Atlantic. I would really like to start by explaining what it isn’t and to recount some experiences of mine in places where it had ceased to be.

The first one, picture me, if you will, in a blue suit and polished leather shoes sitting on top of a pile of cargo in a retired Soviet aircraft — rather, Soviet aircraft which ought to have been retired — landing at Mogadishu Airport one winter’s afternoon shortly before sunset. I won’t explain quite how stupid I had been to get myself into this position, but I was working at that time for a daily newspaper which had accepted a suggestion of mine, unexpectedly, that I should go to Mogadishu just before the U.S. Marines arrived, as they thought, to rescue the Somalis from famine and chaos.

Arriving at Mogadishu Airport is an experience some of you may have had and some of you may not. What I can tell you is this: There is no passport control. There is no baggage reclaim. In fact, as you land, sitting on top of the baggage, it slides the length of the aircraft as the brakes go on, which has made me take aircraft safety precautions with a total lack of seriousness ever since. It’s rather enjoyable, actually, when the baggage slides down the whole length of the plane.

You’re met at the end of the runway by a man from The Associated Press who is collecting all the water and supplies for his bureau, and by about 15 young men with AK-47s, who approach you and say, do you want a bodyguard? And you turn to the man from The Associated Press and you say, do I want a bodyguard? And he says, yes you do. If you don’t have a bodyguard, you’ll be dead and stripped by morning.

So we hire, myself and my colleague, John Downing, we hire one of these — in fact, two of these bodyguards — and a car with no upholstery, and we drive into Mogadishu just in time to see the departing ranks of the gangs and tribal formations which are supposed to be driven away by the arrival of the U.S. Marines. They are, in fact, going. They’re going into the sunset with their machine guns and their bandannas — they look like heavily armed rock stars — because they know that there is no point in being there when the Marines arrive, and they intend to come back later and do whatever it is they do.

We circle around, looking for some time for somewhere to spend the night. And only by great good fortune, because departing around a corner, my colleague sees somebody he knows from Sarajevo, do we find anywhere to spend the night. We are allowed into a compound which has been rented by some German television people, who share with us their camel stew and allow us to sleep on their concrete floor. I go to sleep listening that evening to the cries of dying people and the chatter of gunfire outside and hearing, in effect, what would have happened to me if I hadn’t found my way into the German compound.

The following day I find people to take me round; we’re nearly murdered on one occasion because my interpreter is from the wrong tribe. I see a scene of complete desolation. Every building has bullet holes, or indeed, shell holes in it. The main street is completely stripped bare of every feature of modern civilization. It’s just a stretch of mud with potholes in it with loping persons on it carrying weapons and no guarantee that they won’t use them on you. All the physical features of civilization and all the, as it were, intangible features of civilization — civility, safety, the ability to rely on your neighbor, the passing person, for any kind of kindness or consideration — have gone.

Eventually, with great relief, I got out of Mogadishu and I got home and was shown a few weeks afterwards a photograph of the same street which I had seen on that evening and on the following morning. Mogadishu having been an Italian colony, the street scene was actually rather Roman: pleasantly dressed people strolling along well-kept sidewalks, expensive cars gliding up and down a smooth road, telephone kiosks, pavement cafes.

The distance between that and what I saw was approximately 20 years, and it came to me and it has stayed with me ever since, whenever I walk down a pleasant street in Oxford, where I live, or indeed roam around Dupont Circle here in Washington, D.C. or any major civilized city, this is not permanent. This is not here automatically. It is not in the air we breathe or the water we drink. It is as a result of certain unusual conditions which do not always exist and which have come about only for a very short period of time in a very limited number of places, and which even having been established, can come to an end.

This experience came on top of two years living in what, when I arrived, was the capital city of the Soviet Union and what, when I left, was the capital city of the Russian Federation. And there I also saw a very curious civilization which was not a civilization. That is to say, there was very little civility on the street between people. I was always struck by this. I would go down into what we’re always told in the tourist manuals is the magnificent Moscow Metro.

Because of the horrendously ruthless climate, the stations are guarded by very heavy wooden swing doors, or were in those days, and I would hold them open for people as they came into the stations behind me, and they would step back with a look of mistrust on their faces, as if I was playing a sort of joke on them. They were completely unused to the idea that anyone might do this. There wasn’t even that level of consideration. Nobody in any kind of public dealing would trust you. Almost everything had to be obtained through whispered threats and bribes…

How has this decline in civilization come about? Well, I think it has come about at least partly — and I’m not a single-cause person — but at least partly because there is no longer in the hearts of the English people the restraint of the Christian religion, which used to prevent this sort of behavior.

I think it would be completely idle to imagine that the two things were unconnected. I haven’t come here to say that civilization’s impossible without religion or indeed without Christianity. There are non-Christian civilizations. There are civilized countries which aren’t really based upon religion at all, such as Japan, which I think any visitor there will agree is an intensely civilized place.

But the extraordinary combination, which you in this country and I in mine used to enjoy and may for some time continue to, of liberty and order seems to me only to occur where people take into their hearts the very, very powerful messages of self-restraint without mutual advantage, which is central to the Christian religion…

Peter Hitchens in Giza

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Read the rest of Peter’s answer as well as the entire discussion at the Pew Forum on the motion Can Civilization Survive Without God?.