Gulag and Ajter

SOVIET TERROR,AMERICAN AMNESIAThere has been a striking asymmetrybetween the American responses tothe two great mass murders ofour century, the Nazi and the Soviet. Why?

PAUL HOLLANDER

IT HAS been customary in our times to make refer-ence to the Holocaust whenever we wish to alludeto some unrivaled evil. The Holocaust became the

undisputed reference point for self-evident evil, and forgood reason. By the same token, words like "Nazi,""Auschwitz," "Storm Troopers," and "Gestapo" are re-flexively appended to political or social phenomena wewish to discredit conclusively.

It rarely happens that self-evident evil is denoted byreference to the mass murders committed in the SovietUnion under Stalin. Words hke "Soviet," "Soviet Com-munist," "Koljina," or "KGB" are rarely used to dis-credit political movements and practices. It is doubtfulthat one in a thousand Americans knows what Kolymawas, or would recognize the name of a single Soviet con-centration camp. It is just as unlikely that one in athousand Americans has heard the names of Beria,Serov, Yagoda, or Yezhov, who used to be in charge ofthe Soviet mass murders.

Indeed, as Soviet mass graves have been discovered,one after another, in the last few years, the Americanmedia have greeted the discoveries with remarkableequanimity. One alone, in Kuropati, near Minsk, wasestimated by Soviet sources to contain over a quarter-milhon remains; Bykovnia, near Kiev, a similar num-ber, killed during the 1930s. No Russian reporters or of-ficials appeared on our television screens to commenton these discoveries, and no American television corre-spondents reported breathlessly from the scene. Wewere also spared the reflections of academic specialists

Mr. Hollander teaches sociology at the University of Massachu-setts at Amherst. His books include Political Pilgrims, Anti-Americanism, and Decline and Discontent. He is currentlyworking on a book on the loss of ideological conviction amongCommunist elites and the fall of Communist systems.

regarding the significance of these findings for a reas-sessment of the Soviet mass murders.

It is not my purpose to dispute the uniqueness of theHolocaust. The question here raised is why, in compar-ison to the intensity of the moral outrage evoked by theHolocaust, the Soviet mass murders have stimulated solittle moral energy.

Genocide or Mass Murder?

IT IS tempting to suggest that the differences be-tween the character and procedures of the Nazi andSoviet mass murders account for the difTerent

moral responses to these slaughters.In Nazi Germany the state set up highly efficient ex-

termination plants (gas chambers, crematoria) with noless a goal than the total elimination of the Jewish pop-ulation of Europe, perhaps some day of the whole world.It was a carefully planned, highly organized operationthat had spectacular results: the killing of six millionJews and smaller numbers of other "undesirables."

These mass murders gave rise to the term "Holo-caust" and popularized the concept of "genocide"—somuch so that since the 1960s it has been applied withdiminishing discrimination to far lesser outrages, suchas the "cultural genocide" of some minority underrepre-sented in institutions of higher education, or policies ofproposing birth control to unwed mothers. Radical fem-inists called pornography "genocide"; for some "experts"of the "recovery movement," childhood is a "holocaust";the homosexual organization Act-Up asserted that"Dinkins's policy is genocidal."

The Soviet mass murders were in significant waysdifferent from the Nazi ones. There was no plan corre-sponding to the "final solution" (the killing of a groupof people in order to purify the world of evil); no partic-

28 NATIONAL REVIEW/MAY 2, 1994

ular ethnic group was singled out for total elimination;indeed, the victims came from every social stratum andethnic group of Soviet society. There were no extermi-nation camps using modern technology and machinery.The victims were killed in relatively old-fashioned andinefficient ways: either shot or allowed to die of starva-tion, cold, and disease in what the Soviet authoritiescalled "corrective labor camps." (According to MikhailHeller and Aleksandr Nekrich, two Russian emigre his-torians, "it was Lenin and Trotsky who were the firstEuropeans to use the term 'concentration camp'" asearly as 1918.)

On tbe other hand the total number of the Soviets'victims was far greater than the Nazis', if we add inthose who were victims of pohtically induced famineand deportations. According to General Volkogonov,head of the parliamentary commission on rehabilita-tion, "from 1929 to 1953 . . . 21.5 million people wererepressed. Of these a third were shot, the rest sen-tenced to imprisonment where many also died." Thesefigures did not include famine victims and deportedethnic groups.

A large portion of the Soviet victims, some mightargue, were not actually killed, they just could not sur-vive the harsh living conditions in the camps, includingthe bad weather, not subject to human control. Theseliving conditions, some might further contend, resultedless from ill will or deliberate policy than from overallbackwardness, sloppiness, and even the needs of theeconomy. After all, slave labor was badly needed tocarry out the great projects of theearly five-year plans, and if mortal-ity rates were high, these regretta-ble sacrifices were exacted to accom-plish worthy objectives. There wasone striking expression of a match-less cynicism the two camp systemshad in common. At the entrance tothe Nazi camps were signs reading"Arbeit macht frei" (Labor liber-ates), while over the gates of Kolymathere was the inscription "Labor isa matter of honor, courage, andheroism."

Doubting the Soviet Record

A NOTHER possibility is thatit was the relative paucity ofinformation about the Soviet

mass murders that explains the dif-ferent moral reactions. While in thepost-Stalin era the quantitative di-mensions of Soviet mass murdersbegan to emerge, they remained anabstraction for the public at large,even for the well educated. AsArthur Koestler noted half a centuryago: "Statistics don't bleed; it is thedetail that counts." And when grad-

ually the details were furnished by the survivors' ac-counts, they were often denigrated (especially by the re-visionist historians) for being too personal and emo-tional to be treated as reliable.

At the end of World War II the Nazi system was de-stroyed; cameramen freely entered the former camps;archives were opened; many perpetrators of thesecrimes were interrogated, studied, and brought to jus-tice. A substantial portion of American and Europeanpopulations were exposed to pictures of gas chambers,crematoria, heaps of corpses, emaciated survivors.

So long as the Soviet system was a going concern, lit-tle corresponding information about tbe Soviet campswas available. Western reporters and social scientistscould not explore former or existing camps to recon-struct the past. Until Gorbachev came into power theSoviet system was highly secretive.

Still, lack of information as such was not decisive.There was some information already in the 1930s, moreafter World War II (including the work of Dallin andNicolaevsky published in 1948), and much more follow-ing Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign starting in1956. Robert Conquest's massive pioneering work. TheGreat Terror, has been available since 1968. In 1978 hepublished Kolyma: Arctic Death Camps, a stunningstudy of the most murderous Soviet camps. There wereeven some comparative accounts (based on personal ex-perience) of Nazi and Soviet concentration camps, suchas Under Two Dictators by Margarete Buber and Gus-tav Herling's World Apart.

Accused of Being to the Right

ATTILATHE HUN?Leave No Poubt.

Oo you lean to the right ofthe current TAX & &FENP administration?

RUSH eKe In hisAttila the Hun chair.Now YOU can iwaryourAttlla the Hun™ tie!

Attractive navy-burgundystripes with qoid silkAttila the Hun profiles.

Makes a bold, yet conservative statement.Makes a great birthday, Father's Pay, andAnniversary gift, tool -ONLY $24.90-

(including postage & handling!)

1-8OO-687-2559MCA'ISA Accepted

Kingdom Productions, Inc.P.O. Box 35296-NR

NM 87176-529e

M A Y 2, 1 9 9 4 / N A T I O N A L R E V I E W 2 9

But these works attracted little public attention andsparked little moral outrage; it is this tepid reactionthat invites further inquiry.

The controversy that surrounded Viktor Kravchenkois a case in point. The flower of the French intelligent-sia vilified Kravchenko (a Soviet defector and author oftwo important books) in the late 1940s and ridiculed hisallegations about Soviet camps. The attitude of the Leftin the United States was no more charitable. A reporterfor The Nation sneered in 1949: "The man [Kravchenko]is very cheap . . . Wbat he lacks is distinction and cul-ture . . . he is also a very poor propaganda agent. Hecommits mistakes by exposing his hand at points wheretbe game demands that be hide it."

At the time of his defection (in 1944) Time magazinebad written: "Editorial comment [on him] was mini-mum and cautious. Most U.S. editors, mindful of thedelicacy of U.S.-Soviet relations . . . and of the 26-year-old difficulty in getting at truth in any item dealingwith Russia, did not want to stick out their necks."

More recently Noam Chomsky expressed (also in TheNation) grave doubts about tbe credibility of Cambo-dian refugees and their accounts of tbe massacres per-petrated by the Pol Pot regime.

It must also he recalled that after World War II overtwo million Soviet refugees in Western Europe (prison-ers of war and slave laborers taken by tbe Germans)were forcibly repatriated with the assistance of Britishand American troops—an event tbat failed to generatewidespread moral outrage at the time.

The collapse of the Soviet Union created a new situa-tion. It bas now become possible to construct a visual(as well as historical-statistical) record of its darkdeeds, to visit former camps and newly discovered massgraves, to intei"view survivors and relatives of victims.While there have been a few reports, American jour-nalists bave not been flocking to the sites of Sovietmass murders; camera crews have not been recordingthe remains of tbe Gulag Arcbipelago. (Rare exceptionsinclude a 1989 60 Minutes segment about the "last po-litical prisoners" in tbe Perm 35 camp; a segment onKuropati mass graves in the PBS program "Inside Gor-bacbev's Russia," produced by Hedrick Smith; a March1990 National Geographic article entitled "Last Days oftbe Gulag?" and a March 1993 New York Times Maga-zine article on tbe discovery of skeletons in Kolpashevo,Siberia.)

Tbere bave been no television documentaries of tbeGulag, not on public television, CNN, or the networks.Russian television programs about tbese mass murdersbave not been shown on American television. No Holly-wood movie bas attempted to sbow any aspect of Sovietrepression and terror, with the partial exception of Dr.Zhivago. (Tbere was one English film based on Solz-benitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisouich, andan American cable TV film in 1985 entitled Gulag tbatwas more of a spy thriller.) There bave been no confer-ences or sjTnposia comparing the Nazi exterminationcamps to the Gulag Archipelago; no inquiry into the ap-plicability of the "obedience to autbority" theory of

mass murders (devised by Stanley Milgram to explainNazi murderousness).

It is not unreasonable to believe that the same politi-cal predispositions which in recent times expressedthemselves in ridiculing the idea that the Soviet Unionwas an evil empire played a part in the neglect of thetopic of the Soviet mass murders.

No Moral Equivalence

T HOSE left-of-center on the political spectrumand most deeply estranged from American soci-ety seemed to have had the greatest difficulty

expressing moral indignation about the Soviet atroci-ties—even when their existence was no longer indoubt.

If there ever was a book one would have expected todelve into the moral dimensions of the Soviet massmurders, it was Sanctions for Euil: Sources of SocialDestructiveness, a collection of 18 essays by Americansocial scientists published in 1971. Tbe dust-jacketmade clear, however, that the moral concerns of the ed-itors and contributors would not extend to the outragesperpetrated by tbe Soviet Union and other Communistsystems: "My Lai. Biafra. Detroit riots. Hiroshima.Dachau. Lynchings. Indian massacres. Salem witchhunts. Spanish Inquisition. Dynastic wars. The cru-sades. The inventory is endless."

The endless inventory had no room for the victims ofthe Soviet Purges and labor camps. The only referencein the entire book to Communism or Communists wasas victims of persecution in the United States; fear ofCommunism was a pathology of American society.There was also a vigorous defense of the exclusion ofthose on the Left from the famous study of the authori-tarian personality.

In 1969 Michael Parenti, a political scientist and re-lentless critic of American society, had this to say aboutSoviet camps:

For many years anti-Communist writers claimed that atany one time, anywhere from 15 to 25 million Soviet cit-izens were suffering the horrors of slave labor camps. . . By such statistics, the sum total of people incarcer-ated . . . over a 25-year period would have consisted ofan astonishing proportion of the Soviet population; thesupport and supervison of lahor camps would have beenRussia's single largest enterprise. That the USSR couldhave maintained this kind of prison population is, to saythe least, highly questionable.

Another illustration of these attitudes has been thefate of a remarkable document published in English in1980, The First Guidebook to Prisons and ConcentrationCamps of the Soviet Union. It was put together by Avra-ham Shifrin, a former inmate of these camps. This mas-sive and meticulous work provided information abouttwo thousand penal institutions, complete with maps,charts, and even some photographs; it also included alist of 41 "deatb camps," "where prisoners, forced towork under dangerous, unhealthy conditions for the So-

30 NATIONAL R E V I E W / M A Y 2, 1994

viet war machine, face virtually certain death." Thebook was barely noticed; its author did not appear ontalk shows, and it received a total of two short reviewsin the United States in publications few people read.

A memorable example of the mindset here examinedwas reflected in a 1987 public-television program enti-tled "The Faces of the Enemy," produced by Sam Keen,better known as the author of Fire in the Belly, a popu-lar male consciousness-raising book. The program wasdesigned to explore the links between dehumanization,political propaganda, and extremism, yet made virtu-ally no reference to such phenomena when manifestedby Communist movements or systems. (I wrote to Mr.Keen pointing out the one-sidedness of the program butgot no reply.) While the atrocities associated withNazis, right-wingers, and U.S. policy in Vietnam werewell covered, there was no reference to Stalin, Mao, theCultural Revolution, or Pol Pot.

This historic amnesia and asymmetry is also appar-ent in high-school textbooks in social studies and con-temporary history, which rarely make reference to the

1/2 Memory

Soviet (or other Communist) mass murders alongsidethe Nazi ones. Teaching at a large public university fora quarter-century I have yet to encounter a student whowas aware of the Soviet mass murders before enteringthe university; the majority graduate without learningof such matters.

It should be noted that while social scientists in gen-eral paid little attention to the Soviet mass murders,there were important exceptions, notably Irving LouisHorowitz, author of Taking Lives: Genocide and StatePower (1982), and Terence Des Pres, author of The Sur-vivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (1976).Both examined comparatively the Nazi and Soviet massmurders and concentration camps.

But as the so-called revisionists (their common de-nominator was a rejection of the totalitarian model anda less critical view of the Soviet system) became moreprominent in Soviet studies during the 1970s and '80snew attempts were made to minimize the Soviet massmurders. Best known for these efforts has been Profes-sor J. Arch Getty, who sought to bring new perspectives

A T LONG LAST there will besome official American recog-nition of the victims of Com-

munism. Tbe U. S. Congress haspassed, and President Clinton hassigned, a public law authorizing aninternational memorial—for which aprivate organization, the Victims ofCommunism Memorial Fund, is rais-ing money—to be constructed at "anappropriate location within theboundaries of the District of Colum-bia," i.e., on the Mall, where millionsof tourists and every American Presi-dent can see it.

In their deliberate mass murder ofcivilians, the Communists are theblood-stained world champions. Ac-cording to conservative estimates,more than 100 million people havebeen murdered by the Communistrulers of the Soviet Union, China,Cambodia, Vietnam, and EasternEurope since the Bolshevik Revolu-tion of 1917. The killing continues incountries like China today.

A few dedicated scholars, startingwith Robert Conquest, have writtenabout the Communist holocaust.Conquest's The Great Terror, pub-lished in 1968, was the first work to

Mr. Edwards is fLnishing a political biog-raphy of Barry Goldwater.

suggest the magnitude of Stalin'smurders. Later, Aleksandr Solzheni-tsyn carefully detailed the operationof the Soviet Union's slave-laborcamps in The Gulag Archipelago.Now R. J. Rummel, in his epic work-in-progress on what he calls de-rnocide (the killing of peoples), sug-gests that even these works mayhave underestimated the magnitudeof this holocaust.

Drawing upon sources rangingfrom Conquest to Solzhenitsyn andusing a conservative mathematicalformula, Rummel calculates that ap-proximately 61.9 million people weremurdered by the Communist govern-ment of the Soviet Union in theseven decades between 1917 and1987.

This mass killing included thewholesale murder of several hundredthousand Don Cossacks in 1919, tbestarving to death of about 5 millionUkrainian peasants in 1932-33, theextermination of perhaps 6.5 millionkulaks (well-off peasants) from 1930to 1937, the execution of 1 millionParty members in the Great Terrorof 1937-38, and the massacre of allTrotskyists in the Gulag.

Attempting to explain how Leninand Stalin could knowingly com-mand the death of millions, Solzheni-tsyn wrote: "Ideology—that is what

gives evildoing its long-sought justi-fication and gives the evildoer thenecessary steadfastness and determi-nation. That is the social theorywhich helps to make his acts seemgood instead of bad in his own andothers' eyes, so that he won't hear re-proaches and curses but will receivepraise and honors."

An image that came to Conquest'smind when thinking of Stalin wasGoya's Saturn Devouring his Chil-dren. But Stalin was Saturn magni-fied one million times, for the Sovietdictator devoured men, women andchildren, the equivalent of entire na-tions. Milovan Djilas said bluntly:"All in all, Stalin was a monster."

But his crimes against humanitywere almost equaled by those of an-other monster, the Great Helmsmanof China, Mao Tse-tung. Rummel es-timates that from 1949 through1987, the Chinese Communists killed38.7 million Chinese, Tibetans, andotber minorities. Communist de-mocide has been four times moredeadly for tbe Chinese people thanall the wars and rebellions of thiscentury in which China has been in-volved, including the Boxer Rebellionand the Sino-Japanese, Korean, andCivil Wars.

For Chinese Communists, theenemy was the landlord, the wealthy

32 NATIONAL REVIEW/MAY 2, 1994

to the Purges, treating them largely as an administra-tive procedure whereby certain Party members are pe-riodically expelled. He also sought to discredit the ac-counts of the surviving Soviet camp inmates. More re-cently Professor Getty in a journal article arrived athigher estimates of the number of victims but in an-other recent publication, edited by Professors Getty andRoberta Manning (Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives,1993), there is a renewed effort to keep the numbersdown. More interesting, however, from the standpointof the moral response to such matters, is the interpreta-tion of the outrages acknowledged. The pursuit of de-tachment brings back a remark Czeslaw Milosz madein his Captive Mind forty years ago:

From the moment we acknowledge historical necessityto be something in the nature of a plague, we shall stopshedding tears over the fate of the victims. A plague oran earthquake does not usually provoke indignation.One admits they are catastrophes, folds the morningpaper, and continues eating breakfast.

What one finds in the new analysis, if not exactly anevocation of "historical necessity," is certainly akin to aplague or earthquake. Getty and his colleagues are anx-ious to diminish both Stalin's personal responsibilityand that of the political system he created; they con-sider it a mistake to seek "the origins of Stalinist terrorin the person of the deranged dictator, the 'administra-tive system' of the time, or the very nature of Lenin-ism." What then are we left with?

We are left with an explanation of these events whichdenudes them of a moral focus or definition. Getty andWilliam Chase wrote:

When the terror erupted in 1936-37, it quickly went outof control, chaotically reflecting personal hatreds (thatis, at the local level—P.H.] and propelling itself withfear. Explanations of the terror . . . should be supple-mented by approaches that account for lack of coordina-tion, local confusion, and personal conflicts.

"Uncoordinated" terror reduces the responsibility ofthe political system—as do "local confusion" and

peasant, the middle class, all to beexterminated or "won over." They setout to transform the most populousnation in the world into a Commu-nist society, regardless of the cost.

Mao reveled in the blood-letting,once boasting: "What's so unusualabout Emperor Shih Huang of theChin Dynasty? He had buried alive460 scholars only, but we have bur-ied alive 46,000 scholars."

IT IS understandable that Com-munists would be still as a graveabout their blood-stained his-

tory, but what excuse do liberalsoffer for their silence?

Lincoln Steffens laid down the lib-eral dictum decades ago when he de-clared: "Treason to the Tsar wasn't asin; treason to Communism is."

Whether or not most American in-tellectuals would express that credoso openly, they clearly live by it.There was, for example. ProfessorPaul Samuelson's confident assertionin 1976 that it was "a vulgar mistaketo think that most people in EasternEurope are miserable." There wasProfessor Jerry Hough's argumentthat Brezhnev's regime was a mod-em pluralist state much like ourown. Hough is most (in)famous forinsisting in print and on televisionthat the number of victims of Stalin's

purges was really rather low: "A fig-ure in the low hundreds of thousandsseems much more probable than onein the high hundreds of thousands,and even tens of thousands is quiteconceivable, maybe even probable."

There was John Kenneth Gal-braith, the man of a thousand opin-ions, who wrote in 1984, just a fewmonths before Mikhail Gorbachevproclaimed an economic crisis: "Thatthe Soviet system has made greatmaterial progress . . . is evident bothfrom the statistics and from the gen-eral urban scene. . . . One sees it inthe appearance of solid well-being ofthe people on the streets. . . . Partlythe Russian system succeeds be-cause, in contrast with the Westernindustrial economies, it makes fulluse of its manpower."

For the Princeton SovietologistStephen F. Cohen, the critical issueof the 1980s was not tbe invasion ofAfghanistan, or the aiming of SS-18sand SS-20s at Europe, or the right ofSoviet Jews to emigrate, but the ne-cessity of accepting Moscow's properplace in the world community. He de-nied the Soviet Union was a "closed"society (Andrei Sakharov was appar-ently a figment of the CIA's imagina-tion). In fact, Cohen claimed that thepost-Stalin leadership enjoyed a highlevel of popular support because it

had made good on basic promiseslike comprehensive welfare protec-tion and improved living standardsfor each succeeding generation.

Such staggering statements con-tinue to be made. In 1992, Sovietolo-gist Robert W. Thurston roundly crit-icized a brochure that the Library ofCongress published about a Sovietexhibit because it "highlighted onlythe repressive nature of the Sovietregime, ignoring its positive [though]flawed accomplishments." "Nothingappeared," he complained, "on thegrowth of education, upward socialmobility, increased availability ofmedical care, urbanization or any-thing that might be considered posi-tive." There was indeed considerable"upward social mobility" in the So-viet Union, as Arnold Beichman hasnoted, after Stalin executed severalthousand marshals, generals, andother officers in the 1930s. In allow-ing lieutenants to become colonelsand captains to become generals,Stalin gave new meaning to the termmeritocracy.

But being liberal means never hav-ing to say you're sorry, and one won-ders whether, for these people, theVictims of Communism monumentwill be any more visible than the vic-tims it memorializes.

—LEB EDWARDS

MAY 2, 1994 / NATIONAL REVIEW 33

"personal conflicts." Earlier in the same volume Gettyand Manning also suggest (as they refer to the writ-ing of Gabor Ritterspom, another of the revisionists)that

Stalin . . . Ezhov [chief of the NKVD] and highly placedNKVD operatives sincerely believed [my emphasis] thatthe nation was riddled with plots and conspiracies . . .He [Ritterspom] intimates that this response was rootedin traditional rural heliefs that the machinations of evilspirits accounted for commonplace misfortunes . . . Rit-terspom's work suggests that the elements of pre-revo-lutionary rural culture helped fuel Stalinist persecu-tions, under the impact of . . . scarcity . . . and leaderswho shared, politicized and used such traditional beliefs.

What Getty and his colleagues here suggest is that con-spiratorial fantasies sincerely entertained help to ex-plain the terror and possibly also its spontaneous, unco-ordinated aspects. (The Nazis too sincerely believed inconspiracies, and especially the Jewish world conspir-acy, which in no way undermined their ability to deviseefficient ways to get rid of the Jews, nor was the outsideworld inclined to diminish their responsibility on ac-count of these delusions.) In turn, the non- or pre-Sovietfactors—the "pre-revolutionary rural culture" and "tra-ditional rural beliefs"—are enlisted to further dilute theresponsibility of the Soviet system.

Elsewhere in the volume Roberta Manning wrote:

In the late 1930s, reformist efforts gave way to terrorunder the impact of the desperate conditions of thetimes. Political, social and economic tensions, aggra-vated by the onset of German expansionism, the suddenescalation of ongoing border conflicts with the Japanesein Manchuria, the 1936 crop failure, and national deci-sions to prosecute former members of defunct oppositionmovements created a tense political climate.

When all is said and done "the new perspectives onStalinist terror" proffer an exceedingly wide range offactors and explanations, all of which appear independ-ent of human political will. It is an approach that re-lieves the commentator from facing questions of moralresponsibility or experiencing a sense of outrage.

The moral sensibility here discussed has not beenlimited to Americans. A small empirical study of myown {reported in my hook Anti-Americanism, 1992) re-vealed a similar pattern among a group of Canadian ac-ademics. When asked (in a mail questionnaire) to listthe most shocking historical events in this century, inthe first instance 52 per cent chose the Holocaust whilevirtually nobody mentioned any Soviet outrage. In thesecond instance 15 per cent made reference to Stalin'sPurges. Further light was shed on these attitudeswhen, in response to the question whom they consid-ered the least admirable political leaders in this cen-tury, Reagan was nominated in the first instance by 29per cent, Stalin by 8.5 per cent.

Another telling illustration is the widespread ridiculePresident Reagan was subjected to for referring to theSoviet Union as "the evil empire." So self-evidently

wrongheaded was this attribution that no one botheredto explain why exact]y it was so laughable.

Tbe unpopularity of Solzhenitsyn among Americanliberals and left-of-center intelligentsia is yet anotherreflection of this mindset. His unhesitating associationof the Soviet system witb evil, his fiery anti-Commu-nism and determination to give it a moral dimension,did not go down well. It was admissible to express re-gret or sorrow over the Soviet mass murders, but moraloutrage was overdoing it. He also committed the unfor-givable offense, Tom Wolfe noted, of suggesting that notonly Stalinism and Leninism, but Marxism and thepursuit of Marxist socialism led to the camps. JosephBrodsky thought that Solzhenitsyn's unpopularity badto do with the "disturbing evidence" he presented whichthreatened the "mental fence that was constructed es-pecially by the Western Left" around the topic of Sovietatrocities.

There is one notable similarity between responses tothe Holocaust and tbe Soviet mass murders; in both in-stances there have been efforts to dispute the magni-tude of the killings. However, Holocaust revisionistshave been regarded as cranks and frauds. By contrastProfessor Getty and his colleagues, although criticizedby some, were bardly read out of the scholarly commu-nity. Purge revisionism bas been more acceptable tbanHolocaust revisionism.

At a time when at last the Soviet Union joined NaziGermany among the great defunct tyrannies of modemhistory and perpetrators of mass murder unrivalled inscale, there is new relevance to the question why the re-vulsion occasioned by the outrages of the Soviet systemhas been more muted than the corresponding senti-ments stimulated by the Nazi misdeeds, especially at atime when new evidence of every kind (from massgraves to archives) has become available.

The Sources of Moral Obtuseness

S INCE public awareness of world events is largelythe creation of the mass media, it is important toreiterate that media coverage of Soviet mass

murders was largely non-existent while they were com-mitted and sparse in the subsequent decades.

It should also be pointed out that not all Soviet massmurders were committed in the distant past. Spectacu-lar mass murders of civilians were carried out by Sovietforces in Afghanistan under Brezhnev in the 1980s.They too received perfunctory coverage in the media, al-though it was occasionally noted that the civilianskilled numbered in the millions.

If by now it has been established that atrocities of theSoviet system neither deeply penetrated popular andscholarly awareness (except that of a handful of special-ists) nor stimulated moral responses comparable tothose evoked by the Nazi ones, it remains to attempt toexplain this phenomenon.

One explanation may be found in the longstanding,indeed chronic. Western ignorance and misperception ofthe Soviet system produced hy attitudes ranging from

34 NATIONAL R E V I E W / M A Y 2, 1994

outright affection to benefit of the douht. It is no longerin dispute that many Americans, and many highly dis-tinguished ones among them, completely misread thenature of the Soviet system through much of its exis-tence and especially during its most murderous dec-ades. What is less widely recognized is how long thesewrongheaded assessments persisted and how theymight have influenced the moral responses, past andcurrent, to the Soviet mass murders.

The roots of present-day attitudes reach back to the1930s. In those years, when influential opinion-makerswere impressed by the Soviet Union, either they foundit inconceivable that such an admirable system couldcommit mass murder, or they wrote the atrocities off asthe reasonable costs of the noble experiment.

Upton Sinclair wrote in 1938 about the collectiviza-tion and resultant famines:

They drove rich peasants off the land and sent them towork in lumber camps and on railroads. Maybe it costa million lives—maybe . . . five million—but you cannotthink intelligently about it unless you ask yourself howmany millions it might have cost if the cbanges bad notbeen made. . . . Tbere has never been in buman historygreat socifd change without killing.

In the mid 1940s it appeared to Jerome Davis, who was

a professor at Yale Divinity School, that during thePurges

only a tiny percentage of the population was involvedand the same years which saw the treason trials sawsome of the greatest triumphs of Soviet planning. Whilethe screws tightened on a tiny minority, the majority ofSoviet people were enjoying greater prosperity.

In 1953, seeking to justify violence associated with thePurges, Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, two Americanacademic Marxists, asked:

Is violence used to perpetuate a state of affairs in whichviolence is inevitable, or . . . [is] it used in the interests

of creating a truly human society from which it will bepossible at long last to banish violence altogether?

This was a rationalization the Nazis could also havegladly endorsed; after all, once they purified the worldof Jews there was not going to be any further need forviolence.

Thus to the extent that the Soviet mass murders andpolitical violence were confronted by those on the Left,and especially the far Left, they were morally neutral-ized by the time-honored device of viewing them as re-grettable means to glorious ends. Legitimizers of Sovietviolence were interested only in the ends and knew lit-tle of the means, nor were they anxious to learn aboutthem. Sartre provided the most ambitious {and morallyrepellent) rationalization for this position:

Like it or not, the construction of socialism is privilegedin that to understand it one must espouse its movementand adopt its goals; in a word, we judge what it does inthe name of what it seeks and its means in the light ofits ends . . .

Even more remarkable, in the 1930s the Sovietprison camps were often viewed as humane institutionsof character reform rather than places of slow extermi-nation. According to Anna Louise Strong, they were "re-

making criminals." Professor GiUin, a lead-ing authority on penology and former presi-dent of the American Sociological Society,averred that "the system is devised to cor-rect the offender and return him to society."Ella Winter was delighted to learn thatcriminals were not treated as outcasts. Ha-rold Laski (the hundredth anniversary ofhis birth recently celebrated) had no doubtahout the superiority of the Soviet penalsystem over its Western counterparts. Hewas also struck "by the excellent relationshetwen the prisoners and the warders . . ."(Reference to any such foolishness wasmissing from the article in the December1993 New Republic entitled "Our Harold,"

_ written by his biographer.) The Webbsfound the prisons "as free from physicalcruelty as any prison in any country is everhkely to be." Maurice Hindus, the veteran

reporter on Soviet affairs, concluded that "Vindictive-ness, punishment, torture, severity, humiliation haveno place in this system." Mr. and Mrs. Corliss Lamontspoke to prisoners who informed them that they did notfeel as if they were in prison, and the Lamonts had nodifficulty beHeving this. This was in the 1930s. A dec-ade later Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore stillfound much to praise in the notorious prison camps ofthe Soviet Far East.

During World War II, the wartime camaraderie pre-cluded inquiry into the Soviet outrages. During theclassic Cold War years there was a greater readiness tocriticize the the Soviet system, but the immediacy ofthe massive, well-documented evil of the Holocaust

36 NATIONAL R E V I E W / M A Y 2, 1994

helped to blot out concern with possible Soviet equiva-lents.

At the end of the 1940s McCarthyism arose andstrongly reinforced the attitudes here examined. Ironi-cally, Senator McCarthy achieved exactly the oppositeof what he had intended: he succeeded in discrediting,for decades to come, opposition to Communist move-ments and systems.

In his book-length critique of anti-Commimism Par-enti linked it to

patriotic hooliganism, collective self-delusion, the propa-gation of political orthodoxy, the imprisonment of dis-senters, and the emergence of a gargantuan military es-tablishment . . . Abroad anti-Communism has broughtus armament races, nuclear terror, the strengthening ofoppressive autocracies . . . the death and maiming ofAmerican boys and the slaughter of far-off unoffendingpeoples. . . . [it] brought us grief and shame.

After McCarthy a vocal anti-Communist stand becamean embarrassmient ("witch hunt," or "Red baiting"), anattitude disdained by self-respecting liberal intellectu-als, journalists, and even pohticians.

From the 1960s until the rise of Gorbachev in 1985 itwas the dread of nuclear war that exerted the major in-fluence on Western perceptions of the Soviet Union. Thepeace movement successfully promoted the belief thatquestioning the moral record of the Soviet systemwould undermine peace. Instead we were urged to focuson matters which our two countries have in common, asfor example the love of children and the goodness of or-dinary people. Since trust was so ardently sought, itwas worse than impolite to seek to unearth Soviet poli-cies of the past (and some of the present) which wouldhave given pause to those in pursuit of good relations.

An 1983 account by a member of an American peacedelegation to the Soviet Union was typical: ". . . whatwe lacked in knowledge we made up in enthusiasm andwe shared a . . . faith that women of our two countrieswere probably more alike than different." It was furtherargued that "people who cultivate wheat can't possiblywant war." Norman Mailer ably summed up these feel-ings: "We live with the scenario that Russia is an evilforce. Now, the world is on the edge of destroying itself.Can we afford abhorrence any longer?" Two prominentpeace activists, Drs. Chivian and Mack, even found thatSoviet concealment of the Chernobyl disaster wasowing to the laudable "tendency on the part of the So-viet leadership to downplay catastrophes and insteadoffer reassurance to the Soviet people so as to preventemotional distress." They averred that such practiceswere beneficial for mental health.

Such attitudes were not limited to peace activists andintellectuals. A Yankelovich survey in 1984 found thatyounger and better educated Americans were more will-ing to give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt andhad more trusting attitudes; their majority believedthat "we would be better off if we stopped treating theSoviets as enemies and tried to hammer out our differ-ences in a live-and-let-Iive spirit."

Whatever the merit of these attitudes for preventingnuclear war, they were not apt to create an atmospherein which Soviet mass murders could be critically exam-ined and evaluated, comparatively or otherwise.

The peace activists were motivated not only by thefear of nuclear war. There was cross-fertilization be-tween the peace movement and what came to be calledthe adversary culture. Highly critical of U.S. foreignpolicy and of traditional American social/cultural val-ues, these movements were disinclined to be critical ofany political system which was also critical of theirown. Suffused with an acute awareness of the ills oftheir own country, they were doubtful that any othersystem could exceed its evils.

It was under these conditions that the concept ofmoral equivalence between the United States and theSoviet Union emerged. Sam Keen wrote:

In tbe current USSR-U.S. conflict, we require eachother as group transference targets. . . . We see the Sovi-ets as making the individual a mere means to the goalsof the state. They see us as sanctifying the greed of pow-erful individuals at the cost of community, and allowingthe profit of the few at the expense of the many. And solong as we trade insults, we are both saved from tbe em-barrassing task of looking at the serious faults and cru-elties of our own systems.

Characteristic of this mindset were the contentions ofRichard Barnet in what I once called the definitivehandbook on moral equivalence. The Giants, pubhshedin 1977. He suggested, among many other parallels,that "both societies were suffering a crisis of legiti-macy," that "the madness of one bureaucracy sus-tains the other," and that "each [country! is a prisonerof a sixty-year-old obsession." Marshall Shulman, thewell-known Sovietologist and former high-rankingState Department advisor, began a major article inForeign Affairs in 1987 with what became a standardincantation:

Both the Soviet Union and the United States [my empha-sisj have been so constrained by parochial domestic in-terests and weighted down by outworn ideologies thattbey have been unable to summon up a competent andenlightened management of their affairs . . . proportion-ate to their respective and common problems.

The images of moral equivalence also deeply penetratedpopular culture. Le Carre portrayed the espionage es-tablishments of both the United States and the SovietUnion as corrupt, the Americans often markedly moreso, "idiots and/or fascistic puritans . . . objects of author-ial loathing" as Walter Laqueur recently observed.James Bond movies made sure that the bad guys wererarely actual KGB agents but rather renegades of somekind, or merchants of death (power-hungry capitalists),or deranged fanatics of no discernible political affiha-tion giving trouble to both superpowers.

There is no doubt that the deeply felt belief in themoral (or immoral) equivalence of the United Statesand USSR was in large measure responsible for a cU-

38 NATIONAL R E V I E W / M A Y 2, 1994

mate in which it was not easy to publicly discuss orevaluate the historic moral outrages of the Sovietsystem.

It should also be noted that until its actual collapsethere was hope (in the West) that the Soviet systemcould be reformed. The USSR survived much longerthan Nazi Germany, and that in itself seemed to provesomething. The reforms that followed the death ofStalin, and later Gorbachev's rise to power, providedsomething of an implicit retroactive justification for thehorrors of the earlier era. Could the great sacrificeshave been for nothing?

Gorbachev created high expectations of both reformand institutional continuity, so much so that the histo-rian Moshe Levin envisioned (in 1988) a rejuvenatedParty and union of states:

For the party is the main stabilizer of tbe political sys-tem and few groups would back measures likely to erodethe integrity of the entire union or the centralized state.The party . . . is the only institution that can presideover the overhaul of the system without endangering thepolity itself in the process.

There was new hope, among some American intellectu-als, that at long last under Gorbachev socialism with ahuman face might arise at the birthplace of the de-formed system.

Anti-Anti-Communism

A T THE HEART of theseasymmetries two principalstrands converge. There are

on the one hand the remnants of anold pro-socialist idealism that can-not bring itself to believe the worstabout a system which at one timewas reputed to be the builder of so-cialism; it is galling for critics of cap-italism to rank its arch-enemy as amoral rival of Nazi Germany.

What makes this residual affinityespecially compelling as an incen-tive to ignore or minimize the crimesof the Soviet system is its distin-guished lineage, which includes somany eminent American intellectu-als and public figures fi-om the1930s until the Gorbachev era. Nolist of similar length and distinctioncould be compiled of American con-servatives expressing admiration forNazism, sympathy for which waslargely confined to fringe elementsin American politics and public life.And if a recent PBS documentary(America and the Holocaust) soughtto establish American moral failureregarding assistance to the victimsof the Holocaust, there is room for a

similar searching look at American attitudes and poli-cies regarding some of the victims of Stalin (in particu-lar the Soviet refugees repatriated to the Soviet Unionafter World War II) and at the moral restraints whichgrew out of the wartime cooperation, as well as from il-lusions regarding the nature of the Soviet system.

The second strand is the hardy heritage of McCarthy-ism: its unintended discrediting of anti-Communismwhich gave rise to anti-anti-Communism, a mindsetstrengthened by the rejection of Western values thatemerged in the 1960s.

In the anti-anti-Communist position two contradic-tory attitudes came together: on the one hand, it wasperfunctorily acknowledged that Communist systems{or some of them) were bad, but asserted that this didnot justify dwelling on their shortcomings; on the otherhand, anti-Communist attitudes were denounced as anobsession, a fantasy, a phobia, a pathology, and a meta-phor for everything that was wrong with American soci-ety. Once the criticism of and concern with Communismwas deemed an aberration, little room was left forfreely expressing moral indignation over its misdeeds,including the mass murders of Stalin.

As long as the attitudes here described persist—andespecially the sentiment that the evils of American soci-ety outweigh all others and disqualify its members frompassing judgment on the moral outrages committed byCommunist governments—there will be little incentiveto confront and reassess the moral implications of theSoviet mass murders. D

linpressivework of scholarship

that will undoubtedly become a standard referencework. It is authoritative and comprehensive in itscoverage of governmental measures that have affect-ed the monetary policy of the United States overnearly two centuries."

—Milton Fnedman

"Sets a new standard for a historyand evaluation of U.S. monetaiypolicy."

—David I. Meiselman

Monetary Polity in theUnited Statesby Richard H. Tiinberlake502 pp7$28.00 paper

A Cato Institute book published by theUniversity of Chicago Press INSTiTUTE

M A Y 2, 1 9 9 4 / N A T I O N A L R E V I E W 3 9