By Brian Carnell

Tuesday, November 30, 1999

About once a week I receive an e-mail that goes something like this: "How can you possibly groan and moan about the Soviet Union? Sure it committed some human rights violations, but the Soviet Union was trying to bring about a better society, unlike capitalist countries which have killed for no better reason than the profit motive."

What genuinely surprises me is when I find such sentiments in liberal/left magazines such as |The Nation|. The December 13th issue of The Nation features a review by Daniel Singer of three recent books on Communism, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, and The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Unfortunately the review tells us more about Singer and the Left's continuing, if more tempered, romanticization of the Soviet Union than the merits and faults of the respective books.

Singer is a diehard collectivist apparently angered primarily by one of the themes that unites all three of these books -- the belief that the Soviet Union demonstrates the inherent dangers in certain forms of collective action. Singer is so ideologically committed to collectivism that he contradicts his own advice in condemning anti-collectivists.

In the opening of his book review, he relates his father's Russian peasant background and then explains:

I mention this fact merely to avoid misunderstandings and superfluous accusations. If you oppose the new orthodoxy, in which the red is painted in black or brown, you are branded as shamefully oblivious to Stalinist -- or, to be really in tune, "Bolshevik" -- crimes.

Fair enough. Merely disagreeing with current interpretations of Soviet history shouldn't warrant being called a Bolshevik. Singer, however, is unwilling to extend the same courtesy to his opponents:

On the other hand, the ambition of many is to take advantage of the circumstances, of the terrible heritage, to destroy the Promethean spirit of humankind. You feel it while reading their prose. In his foreword to the Black Book, Martin Malia actually proclaims that "any realistic accounting of Communist crime would effectively shut the door on Utopia.

Singer doesn't want to be labeled a Bolshevik but he has no problem attacking the motives of people chronicling the Left's flirtation with the Soviet Union (why is that people like Singer always decry authors who write about the Left's cooperation with the USSR, rather than condemn that very cooperation?) This is just the latest variation in a long series of hypocritical smears by the Left. Liberal opponents of the Soviet Union were often labeled as Fascists or of aiding Fascists, while even a hint of criticism of pro-Soviet Leftists immediately led to charges of Red Baiting. To be fair, the Right is also guilty of this sort of hypocrisy, but I thought the Left was supposed to be above such crass use of the ad hominem.

It is the abiding belief in the Soviet Union as a flawed utopia that drives both Singer and significant portions of the Left. Singer, for example, flails away at comparisons between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union:

In the revised version Lenin equals Stalin, Communism equals Nazism and Marx is responsible for the concentration camps.

...It is not even that Courtois tries to equate the elimination of the kulaks as a class with the racial extermination of the Jews or, ignoring time and population factors, insists that the Communists killed more people than the Nazis and, therefore, must be equated with them.

It is certainly an act of ideological desperation when a reviewer has to resort to "time and population factors" to explain away the fact that the Soviet Union killed far more people than Nazi Germany. Singer implies, bizarrely, that the fact that the USSR lasted far longer than Nazi Germany obviates any comparison between the murderous nature of the respective regimes, conveniently avoiding the question of what role Left wing support for the USSR in Europe and the United States contributed to that longevity (not to mention that the Left actively acted to diminish or outright deny the crimes of the Soviet state.) Few mainstream Right wing activists, politicians and intellectuals could be found in the 1950s offering apologias for the Holocaust. Plenty of Leftists, however, could be found providing apologias for Stalin's Show Trials, the gulag and other crimes.

And why should the Soviet Union not be judged in the same way as Nazi Germany? Because, as my e-mail correspondents argue, the Soviets were earnestly trying to bring about utopia (ignoring the fact that Hitler too was trying to bring about what he thought would be a utopia). Singer writes:

If you look at Communism as merely the story of crimes, terror and repression, to borrow the subtitle of the Black Book, you are missing the point. The Soviet Union did not rest on the gulag alone. There was also enthusiasm, construction, the spread of education and social advancement for millions; when this momentum was lost in the Brezhnev years the system was close to the end of its tether. Similarly, it is impossible to grasp the fascination of outsiders for the Soviet myth and their reluctance to see the reality if you don't view them in their own environment. If you ignore the Great Depression, the strikes and other struggles against exploitation, the colonial oppression and deadly poverty, the wars in Algeria or Indochina -- in short, if, like these authors, you idealize the Western world -- you cannot comprehend why millions of the best and brightest rallied behind the red flag or why a good section of the Western left turned a blind eye to the crimes committed in its name. History is understanding, not just propaganda.

As Furet notes in The Passing of an Illusion, however, all of the above also applies to far right movements, including Fascism. Those who followed Mussolini, Hitler and others despised capitalism and longed for an anti-capitalist utopia as much as any Left wing ideologue. Where The Left deified the lower class, the Right deified the nation and both ideologies had little problem dispensing with those who threatened the attainment of this utopia (the Jews in the case of German nationalism, kulaks and other counterrevolutionary groups in the case of Communism).

Singer accuses the authors of these books of idealizing the West, but what is the West but an ideal compared to the Communist monstrosities to which the Left turned a blind eye? Singer complains, for example, that anti-Communists ignore the poverty of the Great Depression. The Great Depression was certainly a low point for Western democracies, but compare how many people starved to death in the United States and Great Britain compared to the tens of millions who starved to death during the two great Soviet famines prior to World War II. Similarly, the history of state-sanctioned violence against union organizers in the United States this century is horrendous, but I would wager more unionist agitators were murdered at Kronstaadt alone than in United States throughout the 20th century. More importantly, opponents of such violence lobbied and argued for strong laws to prevent it, whereas in the Soviet Union such vocal opponents were regularly dispatched to the gulag. Yet, when it comes time for a reckoning it is, according to Singer, the Soviet Union which is being unfairly vilified in order to whitewash the crimes of liberal democratic countries like the United States.

Not that Singer isn't willing to concede that when it comes to Communism, mistakes were made, but (there's always a "but" with these folks) Singer informs us those mistakes must always be put into the proper context:

There should be no taboos whatsoever, and it would be most un-Marxist if Marx himself were not questioned in this reexamination. The whole exercise, however, is worthwhile only on two conditions: First, the judgment, however stern and ruthless, must be made not in the void, in the abstract, but in historical context, taking into account real conditions and the available alternatives. Second, it must serve a practical purpose, so that when the people next take power, it will be to exercise it themselves. In other words, democracy must be not the crowning of the revolutionary process but its central element from the very beginning of the transformation.

The reader can imagine the reaction if a prominent conservative suggested that it was okay to consider the crimes of Fascism only if such crimes were placed into their proper historical context, taking into account real conditions at the time, and then only if such an evaluation were forward looking that didn't simply serve to demean the goal of hypernationalism. It is ironic that this is is the case that some of the more extreme conservatives make for rehabilitating McCarthy -- certainly McCarthy was wrong, they say, but in order to discuss how wrong he was first you have to consider the historical context of when he lived and the legitimate fear of the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Or how many times has some apologist for extreme warime measures pointed out that although the internment of Americans of Japanese descent was clearly wrong, that action has to be understood in the context of a legitimate American fear of Japanese-sponsored espionage. Given enough time and effort, scholars and others can minimize the actions of any wrongful act simply by spending enough time dwelling on the context and conditions under which it was taken. In reality this is simply an exercise in ideological whitewashing -- the things done by those on the Left or the Right are placed into the "proper" context by their proponents while the evil things done by their opponents are left to stand by themselves.

Singer's review might be helpful if he was half as concerned with the way that Communist regimes in this century "destroy[ed] the Promethean spirit of humankind" as he is with how the revelations of the crimes committed by those regimes might undermine his precious goal of collective action.

Source:

Exploiting a Tragedy, or Le Rouge en Noir. Daniel Singer, The Nation, December 13, 1999.

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