Claire Berlinski on Soviet Espionage: A Misleading Article Appears in City Journal
It turns out as well that Bukovsky did not realize — and Kramer personally told him more than a decade ago — that “almost everything in his collection has been available in Fond 89 at RGANI since 1993.” (My emphasis. Kramer is referring to material in the Russian archives in Moscow, using their identification system of “fond” and the name of the archive.) Moreover, these 3000 documents were microfilmed and are available at the Library of Congress as well as many other libraries in the United States! For those scholars who wish to see them, there are item level finding aids with cross-indexing that can easily be used. Bukovsky, he acknowledges, has a rather small number of documents on dissidents and on his own case that are not in Fond 89, but Kramer photocopied these long ago, and posted them eight years ago on the Internet. As he concludes: “The notion that the Stroilov and Bukovsky collections are being willfully disregarded for some nefarious reasons is absurd.”
Later, Kramer added the following in another e-mail to me:
I’m not sure precisely what Bukovsky approached Jonathan [Brent] about, but I think it was about putting out an English edition of Bukovsky’s “Jugement à Moscou,” which came out in 1995 from Robert Laffont (the same publisher that later put out “Le livre noir du communisme”). The “Jugement à Moscou” edition was a translation of the Russian edition, but the Russian edition (“Moskovskii protsess”) didn’t come out until 1996. Subsequently, a Polish edition was also put out. The reason that no English edition has been published is partly…[that] the commercial prospects are minimal at best — but it’s also because a lot of the stuff Bukovsky cites has already been published in full in English translation, and the value added by the book is not at all evident. … All of the documents have in fact been available for more than a decade as scanned images on Bukovsky’s website. But, as I mentioned earlier, almost the entire Bukovsky collection is just a duplicate of items in Fond 89, and the images on his website (which were pieced together from a handheld scanner he was using in early 1992) are inferior to those available in Fond 89, including the Fond 89 microfilms that we have here and that are also available at numerous other university libraries and large public libraries. Moreover, Fond 89 includes a lot of things that are not in his collection. … The[Wilson Center] Cold War International History Project has put out translations of many of the documents.
Next, I asked Anne Applebaum, who knows as much about these records as any working scholar, what her response is. She e-mailed me the following:
Ten years ago, I would have agreed with Berlinski. Unfortunately, she seems totally unaware of what has been published and what has been made available over the past decade. Since 1990, hundreds of thousands of Soviet documents have been microfilmed by the Hoover Institution, published online, and reprinted in enormous collections sponsored by Yale University press and others. One of the collections she seems most incensed about – Bukovsky’s document collection – is easily available to researchers. I made extensive use of it at Hoover where it can be read on microfilm. These many documents have revolutionized Soviet scholarship, and have provided the basis for hundreds of academic books, popular books and scholarly articles in the past decade.
She is also quite wrong in thinking that US publishers are uninterested in publishing books based on”unofficial” KGB document collections either. The Mitrokhin Archive and the Vassiliev collection, for example, have both been used to produce excellent books. (The latter produced Spies, by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the definitive account of the history of Soviet espionage in the United States).
I share Berlinski’s desire to have more of this history published, but her anger is completely misplaced. She should be denouncing the Russian government, which has slowed down the declassification of secret documents, and which continues to hold back material vital to understanding Stalin and Stalinism.
Finally, I asked Jonathan Brent, who is now executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, to comment on Berlinski’s attack on his reputation. I reached Brent, whom I got to know when he was editor of the volume I wrote with Mary Habeck on the Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War that was part of the Annals of Communism Series. (It occurs to me that Berlinski might not have realized that Brent left Yale University Press, and that might account for her inability to reach him there.)
Here are Brent’s comments:
What I’ve seen of these materials does not amount to a book YUP could have published because Bukovsky and his young associate won’t show the originals but only their redactions of the copies they have. There’s no way of knowing what is left out—or what may be put in. They use extracts from documents not whole documents and therefore there is inherent uncertainty as to context and content. Without proper historical contextualization there can be no systematic approach to understanding the materials, as there was with the Vassiliev documents that Harvey [Klehr] & John [Haynes] used. In the end, frankly, I couldn’t piece their materials together to make any kind of narrative that Yale Press could stand behind. KGB materials are notoriously difficult to study. THERE ARE NO SMOKING GUNS and documents that look like smoking guns are often fakes of one sort or another or taken out of context. If Bukovsky would make the originals available for study by qualified historians, then there would be a chance of real results. I’m afraid that this present publicity is an attempt to make money. Why hasn’t he produced a study or a book out of these materials and submitted it in a regular fashion? The reason is that it’s extremely difficult to make a responsible argument out of them. As for Berlinski’s claim that she tried to contact me, I have no record of this or I would have told her what I’m telling you.
As for why American publishers are wary of such a book as Bukovsky and Stroilov have produced, the reason is hardly that they wish to suppress knowledge, but that they don’t think they can make money. That is, the commercial publishers were burned badly by the KGB sponsored books produced in the early 90s; and the scholarly publishers are wary because of the lack of scholarly credibility of the authors and the status of the materials. The Cold War will become a hot topic again at some point but it’s not there yet. Even SPIES, one of the very best books ever written about the espionage in America, has only sold about 10,000 copies in cloth—far less than a commercial publisher could tolerate.
Brent also said he checked his e-mail on his computer in all possible places, and could find no record of Berlinski trying to get in touch with him or leaving him any messages.
When John Haynes and Harvey Klehr worked with Alexander Vassiliev, they cross checked all his material with reports in the Venona decrypted Soviet KGB messages, as well as convened a panel of scholars who carefully vetted Vassiliev’s meticulous copying of actual KGB documents, and only after this panel approved the material, did Yale University Press go ahead with plans for publication. An academic publisher has standards to uphold, and when a work of this sort is planned, they must be certain that the veracity of the documents are taken into account. This is especially the case when ideological opponents will go on the attack. As I previously noted in my review of their book in The Weekly Standard, Amy Knight in the prestigious TLS accused them of “McCarthyite” methods.
In conclusion, I think it is clear that Claire Berlinski has not only overstated her case; she has also unfairly impugned the reputation of Jonathan Brent, underestimated what is actually available for anyone to see, and uncritically accepted some of the claims made to her by both Bukovsky and Striliov. She did not check with experts who regularly use this archival material to find out whether or not their claims are accurate.
The failure to publish their documents is not an example of the world failing to acknowledge “the monstrous history of Communism,” but of a decision by conscientious editors that these particular documents need more work before anyone can publish them. And in the meantime, those who do want to consult them, have every opportunity to do so. Sometimes there is an easy answer to what on first glance looks like a serious academic and political scandal. If large numbers on the Left ignore the lessons of Communism — that is a situation which many of us have long tried to address — it is not the result of failure to publish either Bukovsky’s or Stroilov’s material in the United States.
The only scandal is why City Journal, one of the most important and distinguished journals in the United States, printed such a weak and misleading article that is far below its usual quality.
“The Cold War will become a hot topic again at some point but it’s not there yet. Even SPIES, one of the very best books ever written about the espionage in America, has only sold about 10,000 copies in cloth—far less than a commercial publisher could tolerate.”
Why are these works ignored by the majority of academics? Why is the study of the evils of Communism something of little interest? Is there any possibility that the Cold War can ever be a “hot topic” in a university culture that implicitly believes that the Communists merely got a little bit too carried away—but future utopians might get it right? This is the unavoidable question that cannot be ignored. One gets the impression that the works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault earn far more money.
I think you’re failing to distinguish here between the worlds of academic and commercial publishing. The Cold War is very much a hot topic within academia, as the ever-flowing outpour of scholarship on all aspects of the conflict will attest. Commercial publishing, by its very nature, is concerned with profits. I think it’s unfair to characterize the entire world of academia as insensitive to the horrors and brutality of life under communist rule. It just simply is not true that the academic establishment thinks that the communists “merely got a little bit too carried away.” If you need evidence, check out some of the hundreds of books and articles published by academic presses and journals that excoriate the crimes of the communists, whether in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or in other various Third World locales that briefly experimented with this brutal form of power. As for the world of commercial publishing and profits, you might as well bemoan Hollywood’s complete inattention to the horrors of life in the Soviet Union. Why have there been so many movies made about the Holocaust and none about Stalinist Russia?
Fair enough Ron, but her larger point that many are uninterested in the topic of learning more indepth about Soviet doings via the Soviet documents is true. That is why these books are unsuccessful in the marketplace. People still defend the Rosenbergs and they still dont want to know about Castroism or Chavezism, certainly not about Soviet doings.
Since when was Yale University Press obsessed with turning a profit? Many areas of study are not exactly moneymakers. This is why we have non-profits to help along the way. The lefty-dominated institutions seem to find any convenient excuse to pull the rug from under any serious scholarship concerning the Soviets and their bloodthirsty comrades in the East. Also, we know that high school and college students learn next to nothing about these evil periods of history. It is therefore inevitable that they will not eventually purchase these works—but whose fault is that?
Here is one answer to your question, David. “The Jews” are responsible for the silence regarding Soviet atrocities, in the opinion of one Facebook member, an experienced publisher. For my blog on this point and the dispute in general, see http://clarespark.com/2010/05/23/some-dirty-little-secrets/.
Since when was Yale University Press obsessed with turning a profit? — David Thomson
Since it was convenient to do so, with regards to the lack of published work on Soviet history based on new access archives.
I respect the people whom Mr. Radosh consulted, but so the point is that they did go through Stroilov’s, and Bukovsky’s, and the Gorbachev Foundation’s documents, and found that they overlap completely? I think Berlinski reports that Stroilov’s archive is hundreds of thousands of documents. Even if it was hundreds of thousands of pages rather than documents, It strikes me as odd that they would put that much effort into such a project and then not bother to simply write Stroilov that “there is nothing new in your collection.” Right?
Because in the estimation of Mr. Radosh, Berlinski may have overstated her case – actually, he seems to be claiming that she lied – but it is also true that, for example, if her examples about UK MPs and architects of the Eurozone are true or as suggestive as they sound, then isn’t it indeed odd that no one – including these venerable institutions like Yale – have pointed them up much?
I’m afraid the best retort to Kleher and Weinstein is that they seem to believe that all KGB activity ended following Stalin’s death – I forget exactly how they put it, but they seem to sort of subscribe to the anti-anti-Communist notion that the KGB was not the Comintern or the NKVD of Stalin’s period, or in any case they weren’t effective at anything. And yet we learn, for example, that the German policeman who shot the demonstrator on June 2 in 1968 and thereafter justified a decade of Communist terrorism and a big swing to the Left in German politics (“The conservatives are all former Nazis!!” etc.) was actually an illegal member of the Communist Party and a Stasi agent! And of course this is just one example.
So it’s sort of depressing that Mr. Radosh, who is so good on so many questions, should seem so consistently to directly and indirectly support the notion that Communist conspiracy died with Stalin. I don’t get why all these former Communists and Socialists seem to genuinely believe that, or believe that other people will believe that, but nevertheless what they write supports, rather than erodes, the state of affairs in which the Nazis are the only popular caricature of evil, not their teachers the Bolsheviks. Of course, one must not indulge in falsehood to get to truth, but if the contents are as Brent and Berlinski say they are, why would anyone need to? The point about proof of allegations or conclusions concerning the KGB’s activities being beyond scholars is well-taken, but unfortunately that only supports the notion that “well the KGB is just like the CIA, didn’t amount to much” and, implicitly (under the circumstances) the two superpowers really weren’t that much different. None of those inferences could be further from the truth, as the Black Book makes clear enough.
But see, that’s the problem: somehow the Black Book just makes these huge tallies, and yet – because the scholarship cannot be up to snuff – the question is why? The Nazis had their Hitler and their Gestapo and Einzatzgruppen. Will we have to wait until the conquest of the Kremlin for scholars to write their books about what the Politburo and Defense Council and KGB and GRU really were for and did and how? Come on.
If it’s a matter of profits, I for one would definitely buy a 2 or 3 volume set of this stuff. How much money has the Mitrokhin/Andrews stuff sold?
With all due respect, as a professional historian I have to say that both Berlinski and the people rising to her defense on this forum seem both uninformed and gullible. Berlinski admits that her knowledge of the subject is casual at best–she doesn’t know Russian, and clearly has conducted no thorough review of recent scholarship. She got fed a line by Stroilov and Bukovsky, and knew that she could find enough right wing sympathizers to publish it, even if it wasn’t true. But a more conscientious writer would be ashamed, as Radosh’s thoughtful and if anything overly respectful demolition of her nonsense demonstrates. As for the readers here, most show a shocking willingness to hold forth about things they know on a vague, Wikipedia like level–showing, at the same time no knowledge of–nor any attempt to know–the MOUNTAIN of scholarship and original documents that have been published on every aspect of Soviet history in both English and Russian in the past 20 years. I’ll call it as I see it: most of the posters here are just lurking around, waiting for a chance to bash liberals and get up on a soapbox about the deaths of millions of people–all the while not giving an actual damn to know much about those same people, or about the complex task of verifying and preserving what we know about them. What this is about is the Right’s desire to use history as a political tool, at the cost of history itself. If you want to actually know something, do yourself a favor and crack a book. If what you’re really about — and take a look in the mirror, you owe it to yourself — is getting angry over subjects you know nothing about, could you have the common decency to avoid actual tragedies? Maybe you could, you know, criticize tie-dye t-shirts or something: you know, something so trivial that it doesn’t really matter if public discussion about it gets drowned in a pool of nonsense.
With all due respect as a professional historian, while I do believe that many are far more interested in gettin potshots in at the Left than in the actual facts, I do not believe that Berlinski and her contacts were necessarily wrong.
For starters, we sure as hell do NOT know as much about the history of the Soviet Empire as you imply. Sure, we know the general outline and proceedings more or less like the backs of our hands, but attempts to examine that closely just fade into the morass. I have examined the Gorbachev records, and I must say that there HAS to be fairly large gaps in their records if for no other reason than because they do not cover several events we KNOW happened (have you even TRIED looking for the Elbe River Crisis there) and the total lists of names do not come even close to adding up. In short, as the Soviet Union fell, those who had the most to loose doubtless went through and tried to scrub out as much as they could. That was both unbelievably predictable and tragically inevitable. We will NEVER get all that was lost back, for the same reason we probably will never know for certain the identity of three quarters of the informants the Nazis had (for instance: who ACTUALLY betrayed Anne Frank?). But that does not excuse us from trying to piece together as much as humanly possible.
Is it possible that this is a fraud? Certainly. But its claims must be first assessed before it can be judged as such. Possessionm of versions of documents from prior to the “great scrub” would be invaluable, and just as the police are obligated to follow up each and EVERY tip, we too must be as historians and as huamns.
Which is why I believe your attacks are off base. Berlinski is a rookie, there is no dispute about that. But sometimes it is the rookies who make the unbelievable discoveries. And we have an obligation to check regardless.
Maybe someone should call John Lewis Gaddis for his 2¢?
Ron:
You can say more than “One could argue that in fact, Communism and its leaders killed more people numerically than Hitler’s fascist order.”
It is more than just an argument, it is fact. The Soviet State murdered more of its citizen prior to Hitler’s appointment to the Chancellorship then he would murder in his career. Furthermore, without the 1939-41 alliance with the Soviet Union it is unlikely that Hitler could have wreaked as much havoc on Europe as he did. Arguably he could not have mustered sufficient forces against France before the Fall of 1940, if that soon, if Germany was forced to watch its Eastern frontier. Let us not also forget the role that the Communist Party played in undermining French morale and sabotaging war production in the run up to the May attack. Just remember no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, no Holocaust.
We are told we cannot compare the two regimes by the still pro-Soviet Western intellectual elite because it would not be a flattering comparison to the Nazis. The fact remains that in terms of healthcare, housing, food, clothing and life expectancy the Soviet Union in 1989 had a lower standard of living then Nazi Germany in 1939.
I find that argument about projected sales volume less than persuasive in an age when books can be electronically published in quantities of one. There may not be enough sales to interest an author, but books are routinely published these days either totally electronically, or on demand, and publishing volume is not a consideration.
Publishing the real history of Communism would be deeply embarrassing for the American Jewish Community, or at least that part of it which is ethnically, rather than religiously Jewish, and Russian-Polish in origin. Jews who rejected Judiasm, apostates, were incredibly prominent in the Soviet State. Trotsky, Kaminev, Zinoviev, Larine, Sverdlov– who killed the Czar’s family, Yagoda, Kaganovich and Schlichter — who drove the Holodomor Ukranian Terror Famine, the “Managers” of the Gulag, the wives of Molotov, Stalin, Khruschev, etc. etc. And then there were Schiff and Hammer’s financing of Lenin… If you read French, German, or Russian, read Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together, which is NOT anti-semitic, BTW, as it mostly cites Jewish sources. (He also recognized the deep split between religious Jews and those who rejected Judiasm in favor of the “new religion,” Communism. If you don’t, read Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, esp. Chapter 3, and Engineering Communism. Kerensky, the leader of the democratic Duma formed in April, 1917, and overthrown by Lenin (1/4 Jewish) in October was also Jewish. So their were good, decent Jews who did NOT succumb to the Bolshevik temptation. And, yes, the Jews had suffered under the Pogroms (‘tho the violence wreaked by the Bolsheviks was 100s of magnitude worse. But the whole story is entirely too nuanced for our publishing and academic community to deal with.
It wouldn’t just be embarrassing for the Jewish community, it would also be embarrassing for the “enlightened Protestant” community. The Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Alger Hiss type of WASP’s who were fellow travelers would also be embarrassed. The fact is that a significant portion of the Anglo-West’s ruling classing were sycophants of the regime and the promised world that it would bring.
Both this article and the article it references make a glaring and puzzling error. While it is fact that implementations of communism led to millions being killed, there is nothing in the ideology itself that made that a necessity. Those deaths were in no way inexorable. It has been the nature of most major political revolutions that the parties carrying then out, do so violently. That is so irrespective of the ideology they profess to follow. What is mots troubling is the parade of writers -such as the two who authored these articles – who have a very narrow, almost propagandistic, lens through which they see worlds and events.
pov no doubt stands for poverty of judgement, therein.
I find it amusing that in his article lambasting Ms. Berlinski for ‘sloppy’ journalism, Mr. Radosh spells Stroilov’s name three different ways! That’s rich. And,if Mr. Brent was no longer at YUP, with the implication by Mr. Radosh that Ms. Berlinski attempted to email him there, how could Mr. Brent have checked his email for an email at an OLD email address that would have ‘bounced back’ to Ms. Berlinski as ‘undeliverable’? I’m just sayin’… Anyway, as an ex-USAF crypto-linguist who has read Gorby’s “Perestroika” in the original, it is my humble opinion that some things never change in U.S. academic circles. The reason no interest is shown in Gorby’s dark side in these same circles is the VERY SAME reason NO ONE remarks very often that Al Gore’s son-in-law’s grandfather, Jacob Schiff, was instrumental in getting $20 million to one V.I. Lenin in time to launch the 1917 festivities in St. Petersburg. You see, hidden complicity is a terrible burden to carry when you have to fool “all of the people all of the time”. I, for one, would LOVE to eyeball S T R O I L O V’s documents, and I’d even help him translate them! If Brent and Radosh want us to believe that the ‘dirt’ on Gorby is already in those files online, then I got a bridge you can rent from me real cheap. You know, I’ll bet those files explain a LOT about why Gromyko, when introducing Gorby to the Politburo, said, “Comrades, Comrade Gorbachev has a NICE smile, but he has TEETH of IRON!” Poka…
Also funny how Mr Radosh uses the word “essay”, which is what he would be likely to get from a student or colleague, instead of “article”, which is what (lowly, what?) journalists normally produce.
Very interesting, both Claire Berlinski’s article and this one. Updated my blog post:
http://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/claire-berlinski-on-soviet-archive-documents/
The 20th Century saw numerous genocides and democides. Two political ideologies — nominally opposite expressions of totalitarian collectivism — account for the vast majority of the body count. While both ideologies have deluded idiots still adhering to them, one of them (depressingly) is still considered salonfaehig in academia and the chattering class.
And in this century, we are seeing a third variant, based on worshiping a hideous parody of G-d while the two others were based on worship of the state.
“Furthermore, without the 1939-41 alliance with the Soviet Union it is unlikely that Hitler could have wreaked as much havoc on Europe as he did.”
I seem to recall that the Russians and Germans were in bed much earlier than the formal signing in 1939. The Germans were training in Russia and may well have been manufacturing weapons there (I cannot remember if they did).
The Nazis did indeed have a fairly close relationship with the Soviet union before WWII. Why should this surprise anyone? They had so much in common. Both were socialist entities–that minimally tended to be anti-Semitic. The only real major difference is that the Soviets officially advocated socialism for everyone while the Nazis restricted their utopian vision to those of so-called Aryan descent.
Not just that: the Luftwaffe came into fabulous being so swiftly also due to the training facilities provided by the Soviets very early on.
World War II is why Communism endured as long as it did. The USSR was on the winning side. The Soviets gained an enormous amount of legitimacy for helping defeat the biggest threat to humanity in all of history. The Communist regime rode that legitimacy for 50 years, and even now the VE day parade in Moscow is shown to millions. The Nazis were a bigger threat than the Communists because they had Germany and a conquered Europe at their disposal.
If the Nazis had won, we’d very likely be appalled at the atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks in their few years in power before they were defeated. The Nazi’s crimes would seem less important and would be less commented upon. Fascism would be somewhat respectable in academic circles, while Communism would be reviled.
Who wins wars matters a lot. As postmodern as we claim to be, primitive things like power and victory still influence us. Winners are better than losers.
Good grief. Berlinski makes the telling point that materials are not printed because of a lack of enthusiasm for peddling the truth, and you impugn her reputation while saying or quoting:
“The reason that no English edition has been published is partly…[that] the commercial prospects are minimal at best…”
and
“As for why American publishers are wary of such a book as Bukovsky and Stroilov have produced, the reason is hardly that they wish to suppress knowledge, but that they don’t think they can make money”
“Don’t think they can make money” sounds an awful lot like a lack of enthusiasm for peddling documents that tell the graphic truth about the Commies. It may seem benign to you and not to Berlinski. If that’s the case, then your entire argument boils down to what you consider the current state of evil versus what Berlinski considers the current state of evil.
Frankly, if publishers are justifying not printing documents about the Commies that they would have printed about the Nazis and if those publishers are using the excuse that the publishers can’t sell those books, I know where I would come down. And it would not be on your side of the argument.
Thank you, Claire Berlinski. No thanks, Mr Radosh.
I went to the article in City Journal, and noticed the following:
‘According to Zagladin’s reports, for example, Kenneth Coates, who from 1989 to 1998 was a British member of the European Parliament, approached Zagladin on January 9, 1990, to discuss what amounted to a gradual merger of the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet. Coates, says Zagladin, explained that “creating an infrastructure of cooperation between the two parliament[s] would help… to isolate the rightists in the European Parliament (and in Europe), those who are interested in the USSR’s collapse.” Coates served as chair of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights from 1992 to 1994. How did it come to pass that Europe was taking advice about human rights from a man who had apparently wished to “isolate” those interested in the USSR’s collapse and sought to extend Soviet influence in Europe?’
Ken Coates is a long-standing left-wing critic of Stalinism, and I have been reliably informed that the inference in this article that he wanted ‘a gradual merger of the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet’ and that he ‘sought to extend Soviet influence in Europe’ is a gross misrepresentation of his actual views about East-West relations.
As for the Stroilov Archive, one must firstly question the integrity of the original documents, whether they are genuine or concoctions. The article states that they have been vouched for as genuine. This then raises the question of whether they are accurate as descriptions of events and statements. Noting the imaginative interpretation of Coates’ views about East-West relations, I would be very wary about accepting as accurate the information contained in them unless confirmed via other sources.
Dr Paul Flewers
London, UK
It appears that we, the “audience” who are not members of the secret clubs of those in power, are de facto ignoramuses about the events that affect our lives, and thus merely the machinery to maintain those in power, whatever their public statements of directions, means and aims. As only few of the commentators, pundits, teachers, scholars, and of course journalists, have an unadulterated respect for and obeisance to the truth of their pronouncements and review of information, we are in the position of trusting none of them, as we cannot know which of them is truthful. Apathy is the most logical behaviour except as spectators in a game that is fraudulent, whoever the star players. Or I don’t know much about politics, but I know what I like.
While I am no fan of Mr. Coates, you bring up a very valid point and one that must be answered honestly. While I do not believe it is ENTIRELY unbelievable for Mr. Coates to have put forth such a proposition (likely hoping thjat the best of both worlds would unite the European mainland to end the terror of the Cold War and focus on cultivating a paternalistic Socialism as he saw it), it is a fairly glaring issue until it is resolved one way or the other. Which in my opinion only strengthens the case for translation: untile we get the documents translated and evaluated, we will have no way of confirming or debunking its claims because we won’t know what sources to go for in the first place.
´… a long-standing left-wing critic of Stalinism …´ Hear, hear! This is a rather artful description of a die-hard Trotskyite. Makes one wonder which Marxist faction you belong to, Doctor.
Though I think Ron Radosh pulls out some interesting points, I didn’t read Berlinksi’s article as a personal indictment of individuals for being complicit in a cover-up. I read it more as what Brent himself said about the “hotness” of the topic for prospective sales. That general incuriosity results from a general lack of knowledge and candor. Berlinski’s frustration seemed to be, much like mine I admit, with the ongoing cultural deafness toward these horrors.
I’m glad Radosh subjected the City Journal article to a point-by-point review, and perhaps CJ might have done a better job in advance as well, but her overarching conclusion feels valid to me and not especially or personally mean-spirited. If only through the responses to this article, the topic gets fresh notice. I’m glad of that, even if, unfortunately, the presentaion style gave Radosh temporary heartburn.
Claire swings back
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/eon0518cb.html
You two should kiss and make up
Claire is into kick boxing. I was going to suggest that she and Ron fight it out to the death in the gym. Why don’t people listen to me? I thought it was an excellent idea.
A little OT, but needs to be said:
Communism – Soviet Communism in particular – was and is despicable; but the figure of ’150 million’ is completely spurious.
Yes, the Soviets murdered millions of people, they had committed a crime as great or greater than the Holocaust, before the Holocaust and almost certainly were the cause of Hitler becoming leader at all.
But the 150 Million figure requires the inclusion of hugely inflated figures from China, which are less easy to justify. In the first case, Chinese Communism was a harsh and autocratic system, but it was never one that perpetrated outright mass-murder like the Soviets.
The largest number of dead blamed on Chinese Communism were during the Great Leap Forward, but these were deaths as a result of mismanagement, not intentional killing. It has been said that deaths during that period were so high, they reached the same level as during the Japanese occupation and the rule of the Kuomintang; so clearly, the Communists were an vast improvement on the Kuomintang overall.
Therefore, if you include the people who died during the famine of the Great Leap Forward, you must include all the people who died during Chiang Kai Shek’s mismanaged rule in the Fascist total – many more Chinese starved to death under Chiang, and he was an avowed Hitlerite, so Fascism would then exceed Communism in its deadly effect once again.
Even then, I doubt you would reach 100 million, let alone 150 million – that figure seems like an obvious statistical extrapolation, like the nonsensical figures of the ‘Iraq Body Count’.
To be fair, and include such mortality by mismanagement, you would need to include those who died prematurely for similar reasons during the colonial period – why not, indeed? Which, being longer, would probably rival or exceed those of either Communism or Fascism. It would probably reach into the billions – and include America, too!
So the ultimate effect of playing with figures in this way is to endorse moral equivalence and obscure the true horrors of Fascism and Communism.
The Soviets and the Nazis were equivalently and historically murderous and wicked; state-sanctioned murder is far more terrible than deaths caused by errors or incompetence; the Chinese Communists made severe mistakes, but were much better than any government that preceded them: there are your facts, sorry if they don’t match your over-inflated thesis.
You had me until your assertion that Chiang Kai-shek was “an avowed Hitlerite”. Where on earth did you get that from?
In regards to your analysis, I must raise several quibbles.
For one, the lumping of Chiang Kai-Shek as a Fascist. The man certainly wasn’t nice and did indeed cultivate several ties with the Fascist or quasi-Fascist states of Europe (in particular with Hitler’s Germany and he even considered raising Spanish and Portuguese legions to fight Mao), his personal writings and ideology are far harder to pin down and generally reflect a mish-mash of Sun Yat-Sen’s Chinese republicanism, feudalism, neo-Confucianism, old-fashioned tinpot dictatorship, and above all a ludicrous sense of expediency, which makes lumping him in with to-the-death Fascists like Hitler and Mussolini a dicey proposition at best.
Secondly, even if we agree to do that, there was a crucial difference between the KMT and the CCP. Namely that the KMT could barely hold onto its power base in the Central China plain and the coastal cities, PARTICULARLY when the Japanese came by. Their control was so unbelievably weak that a puntivie expedition to Tibet was routed wholesale by the nearly-nonexistant and hopelessly obsolete Tibetian army coupled with the quarreling and unreliable monastary warriors and the cannon fodder peasant militas. This was a regime that barely could control its nominal capital, much less the countryside. In contrast, Mao had spent the Civil War building up his rural cadres and training them into an effective force, and by the time of the 1948 battles that effectively broke the back of the NRA and its allies in China, Mao had far better control of the countryside than pretty much any Chinese leader since the Taiping Revolt due to his fairly numerous and loyal power base in the countryside, which means that what went wrong in the country largely was the result of the central government in Beijing effing up more than the autonomous peasant village effing things up as would have happened more or less until 1949 with the widespead Communist “reforms.”
And no, the use of such examples from the colonial period would almost certainly not exceed those of Fascism or Communism. Even if we include such wildly varring issues as the results of the Opium trade and assuming that every single slave ever suffered from a shorter and more troubled life and thus is counted, it would STILL not get anywhere close. Hell, I would even consider that is still likely true even if we counted the god-knows-how-many that were killed as a result of disease or other accidental deaths relating to the colonization. Which should tell you something about how poisonous these ideologies were.
Sure, Mister Radosh
After all, who could care less that almost every last one of the scum as comprise America’s generally loathsome and fearsome permanent parasitical classless, (AKA the congress and feral gummint bureaucracy) — and especially those counted among self-anointed and self-perpetuating basta*d-offspring of the Communist Party of America/Soviet-Agent Alger Hiss-descended State department Brahmanas — have long enjoyed a cynical, shameful back-room and off-the-record relationship with America’s every enemy?
Brian Richard Allen
Lost Angels – Califlugarcated 90028
And the Very Far Abroad
Chris W,
How, exactly, does criminal mismanagement via Central Planning mistakes excuse the Chinese Communists from their killing of 100 million people or so? Gee, maybe they “didn’t really intend to kill all of those folks.” They just “sort of screwed up” (and starved/killed vast numbers of human beings…) So that means the perpetrators are innocent, and the system that generated those perpetrators is innocent? Phuleeze….. Have you no decency, sir?
Now, why would the academic left run screaming from a treasure trove of documents that might implicate them–and the heroes they still emulate–in mass murder and high crimes?
I’m all for a look at these archives. Sunlight is very cleansing.
Mr Globalizer,
Your argument is weak so you cover it up with false moralising. But I’m a decent guy, so I’ll explain again.
Playing games with figures undermines your own case. All the Western powers were responsible for mismanagement of nations under their power, and all could be accused of causing deaths by incompetence – far worse than the Great Leap Forward – over the decades of the late colonial period. In fact, because America supported Chiang, who was an exponentially more murderously incompetent leader than Mao, responsible for a great deal more starvation, by your own logic it could be argued that America is worse than Communism or Nazism!
Of course such an argument is nonsensical, but that’s where you own irresponsible attitude to facts and figures leads.
The truth is that, for all their faults (and they have many faults, and committed a number of serious crimes), the Chinese Communist Party lifted China from a dark age of misery back into the ranks of civilised nations. By all means criticise them for the Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, Tienanmen Square; but recognise also that they are also a legitimite government with a record of achievement no country can match.
In fact, based on the improvement in people’s lives (which was rapid after the Communists took over) they probably saved at least a billion lives. So by your reasoning, having supported Chiang, impeded this improvement and been party to his mismanagement and its attendant human death and misery, America is the moral equivalent of the Nazis, and China is by far your moral superior! Do you really want to argue on that basis?
The truth is, states that murder people really are worse than states that cause suffering by managing their affairs badly. That doesn’t mean I or anyone else considers deaths by mismanagement to be acceptable (certainly not the Communist Party of China, who fought an intra-party civil war in an attempt to remove Mao, the architect of the Great Leap Forward, from his position of power).
Nazism, Bolshevism/Stalinism and Militarist Japan were regimes of exceptional evil, uniquely bad in all of history – they are each the perfect equivalent of each other. Playing with figures to try and include Communist China amongst those other three is fraudulent, and undermines any attempt to expose the real crimes of totalitarian nations and others.
Yeah…30 million people “accidentally” starve to death. But hey, I guess you have to “accidentally” break a few eggs to make a utopian omelet, right?
And at least nowadays, you don’t have to worry about starving to death in China…at least, that is, according to the totalitarian Communist regime in place (and why would anyone question the word of a totalitarian Communist regime?) Nah…as long as you keep your mouth shut and abjectly submit to the centralized authority, you’ll be just fine. Nothing to worry about.
What an achievement!
This is pointless.
You’re immune to facts and you don’t comprehend written English.
“…government with a record of achievement no country can match.”
Do you support Apartheid? Ever been to China? Are you aware of the internal zones where passports required to move from zone to zone? And the penalties for violations? Are you aware of the near total concentration of wealth in several coastal enclaves?
Try being a peasant in the Communist paradise.
Do you have or desire more than one child? Will you find a wife? Maybe? Do you wish to have free use of communication systems such as the internet?
You’re so much like the students in the ’60s waving their red books and proclaiming that all reports of Chinese communist atrocities were just CIA misinformation.
Take the boot as you kneel to it and lick it. Love is a wonerful thing. Savor the “…government with a record of achievement no country can match.”
“…government with a record of achievement no country can match.”
Yeah, Mr. W, You do prove PT Barnum was “exponentially” right.
Suck well sucker.
“…government with a record of achievement no country can match.”
Yes, I have been to China. I know its history too.
You’re ignorant, you resort to emotion and insult because you know that reason and facts are against you.
You want the world to see China in effigy. I don’t see why, China has been good to the USA, she is a good world citizen and is trying hard to do the best for her people.
Are you just blinded by the fact that her government is Communist? You feel it your duty to hate them?
Bah! I just re-read your comment. You misrepresented or ignored everything I said. You’re not worth the effort. People like you are a disgrace to Conservatism (I say that with deep chagrin, as a conservative myself). No wonder so many people turn to the Left. You don’t oppose Socialism, you inspire it!
“You’re ignorant…”
“… you resort to emotion and insult because you know that reason and facts are against you.”
Nice encapsulation in a single sentence of contradiction. Ignorance co-existing with knowledge and reason no less, said as if only to hear the sounds of the words pronounced.
Remember “…government with a record of achievement no country can match? You really didn’t mean that? Or something else was meant… Your words mean something only to you, and with your secret knowledge you can decipher – your own pronouncements! Clever! Oh yes, and that omelet is soooo good now! Now. Find a human thigh bone in it?
It’s plain why the notion that the Chinese elite that gained power by the most brutal means and continues to do so is a “…government with a record of achievement no country can match”. So they murder 50 million so save their own selves. Yes indeed, that’s the best way, the only way such a paradise can achieved. The only way.
Save your logic for those who will agree with you – the Chinese communist overlords.
“…China has been good to the USA, she is a good world citizen and is trying hard to do the best for her people.”
So what boot polish flavor do you prefer? Kiwi or maybe Lemon Pledge furniture type? What part of kicked out teeth on a whim don’t you understand? Sure, doing the best to insure by any means that 0.01% of the population can continue subject the remainder, and not for the betterment of that remainder, but for there own “noble” goals. Right. Of course. Very good!
“…government with a record of achievement no country can match.” 50 million?
Such evil exists because of suckers such as yourself exist.
Lick well Mr. W. sucker. Kiwi or Pledge?
A word to the wise, Chris: it is best that one should not use arguments that blow up in your face within the space of the very same comment.
And why do you feel like carrying water for the CCP? Even if we can agree that they hauled China out of the anarchy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, why do you feel obliged to apologize for every single one of their sins and declare that it was not their fault when in fact they were more responsible for most of the deaths in their reign than Chiang was?
And as for the ludicrous presumption of the CCP being “good” to the US and the West, as trading partners and a source of cheap manufacturing capacity they have been. But as countless ecconomists have failed to understand, trade is not all. And China’s massive military buildup- including its naval building program to challenge our dominance of the Pacific-, its support of tinpot thugs from Caracas to Khartoum against us, and its various armed adventures including Korea and Indochina shows that the CCP has not in fact been good to us and remains the enemy. Which is what you and your fellows forget.
And if you keep on whining that he is wrong, why don’t you specifically POINT OUT exactly WHERE he is wrong?
It’s not that hard to do!
“Chiang, who was an exponentially more murderously incompetent leader than Mao”. What is your evidence for this claim?
“they are also a legitimite government with a record of achievement no country can match”. Please explain what makes them a legitimate government.
Again, you are using extremely skewed logic to say the least.
For one, if you talk so gladly about how the CCP has lifted China back into the realm of civilized nations, perhaps you should first sneak across the border with India, particularly near Tibet, or perhaps from Central Asia into Singkiang to realize the truth. In order to fuel the “civilization” of the Seaboard and Yellow River cities, the CCP has literally SUCKD the inland regions dry. And I’m not merely talking about to the extent that the US used and sometimes abused Middle America and her farmers, oh no. I am talking about very common famine, even commoner police and military abuse, and general chaos. If that is your civilization, than count me out.
And secondly, Chiang was more incompetent period, but the fact remains that even CONSIDERING the Japanese invasion- throughout his 30-40 some odd years of governance (including his defacto exile on Taiwan), the fact death rate was actually LOWER than under Mao should tell you something very clearly. The fact that we can even DEBATE- albiet only slightly- whether the Great Leap Forward or the centuries of Western colonialism was directly responsible for more deaths should TELL you something about the nature of the CCP’s rule.
Both the KMT and CCP suffered poor infrastructure, that is true.
Both also suffered from widespread corruption and inefficiency, that is also true.
Both, needless to say, also suffered from foreign pressure.
But yet the CCP did not have to worry about a massive invasion of their NorthEast tearing the countryside and the urban coast apart. Nor did they have to deal with the colonial powers and miscellaneous holdings.
Nort did they have to worry about warlordism and the fact that the Central government ceased to exist outside of the Central China Plain.
But yet the CCP saw the higher death toll.
What does that tell you?
I think I’ll go ponder and discuss this dispute over drinks at NYC’s well-known KGB Bar…
http://kgbbar.com/
… a favorite social spot of Manhattan’s literary set.
I’d go for a beer at the Gestapo Bar too, but for some reason there isn’t one.
As opposed to KGB, Gestapo would not go down well, for the strange reason of skewed equivalence where a rotten apple is not as bad as a rotten orange. But what about Abwehr – that might do the trick? Just a business idea.
It looks like Mr. Radosh saw in Ms. Belinski’s article personal attacks that weren’t really there. I guess we should expect that from our academics, whose world nowadays is full of petty in-fighting, and who says what about whom is such a big deal. Ms. Belinski, on the other hand, sounds like she’s from the same planet as most of us – and I think that science and scholarship belong to them increasingly more, compared to full-time academics. Sorta like media and publishing, once monopolized by the MSM, now belongs to lots of people outside the establishment. Power to the people, comrades!
As far as the Soviet history, it is such a sad subject to me as an ex-Soviet. Russian and Soviet history has been so perverted by both Soviet and Western establishments. We still don’t know what happened to Russia in 1917. We know very little about what happened in 1941 or 1991. The explanations that have been offered and accepted as common knowledge tend to be simplistic and insulting to Russians (your country was destroyed in 1917/1941/1991 because it was ruled by tyrants and idiots). Of course, Russians should take responsibility for what happens in Russia, but at least in the 20th century, that was easier said than done. With educated people gone after 1917, the country didn’t have people capable of running it. So who did run Soviet Russia? I surely don’t know, but somehow the answer “tyrants and idiots” seems less and less plausible. We will never know the whole truth, but we must try. Specifically, the West must try for its own sake, because tragically and comically, Western countries seem to get tyrants and idiots to run them, just like Russia they’ve always looked down upon. If we don’t learn what destroyed Russia and her people, we in the West may soon be gone in a similar manner.
wow. needs to be repeated. Fundamental point – Every time Media, ANYONE, espouses the evil of the Nazi regime or fascism, communism should be in that same statement, no, the same breath. Isn’t that what this is about? Marxism, Maoism, Fascism, all the same points of the compass.
And that’s not happening. Why? Because some ideologues have devoted their lives to continuing the drive to control..YOU.
Pretty basic I think. This administration will not rest until they control the car you drive, the food you eat, the exercise you accomplish, and the way you teach your family.
1984 only 2 1/2 decades late.
No, not Maoism.
In one breath: Nazism, Bolshevism/Stalinism, and Japanese Militarism.
In the next breath: Western Colonialism.
China suffered horribly from the aggression of 2 of the above 4. Don’t add insult to injury by naming the victim as aggressor.
Well, if you put it that way, the answer statistically for the two is obvious: Bolshevism and Japanese militarism.
Indeed, stastically, China’s suffering respectively (from highest to lowest is) Bolshevism, Japanese militarism, Nazism/Fascism/Warlordism, and Western Colonalism.
Because it is telling that for all the West’s MANY misdeeds in China, Mao killed more Chinese in ONE year (1949) than the West had for the past century (1849-1949) should tell you something.
The West’s colonial past was never nice or pretty, but it is time for China to own up and admit that the main reason for China’s troubles has been its own internal issues. Nothing more, nothing less.
Critique of Berlinski is accurate to some extent. BUT, my analogy is Stalin’s murders, eg, Katyn massacre, were less racist than Hitler’s, THEREFORE infinitely more dangerous! Sadly, both Hitler & Stalin extended the borders of a rational governing. I may believe Capitalism superior to Socialism, but that is a matter for a free electorate to resolve.
Scandinavia is the model of Socialism, USA is/(was?) the model for Capitalism. We shall see which wins, but it seems, (at least until the Bushies arrived), that American Captialism generally resisted overt war, and surely democracies tended to avoid war!
Mao Tse-dong is of the same atrocious cannibalistic dictator material and with the same contempt to the lives of human beings as any Stalin, Hitler or Genghis Khan.
The fact that China is doing more or less OK now is contrary to the ideas of Mao and ultimately is largely due to us, my fellow Americans.
Let’s outsource some more jobs to help the People’s Republic prosper further.
You commie ass wipes are at it again. The same old vicious attacks on any person who dares question the hate-German fervor maintained by the left for nearly a century. In the meantime, the greater evil, the USSR, gets off scot-free.
The literary low life who wrote the above pro-communist diatribe went to a little, very little, trouble to pretend to be objective. That was a total failure as well as the attempt to indict the writer so criticized by the commie author.
I blame you media scum for the sorry shape the world is in. If I ever get a chance to show you how so many of us hate you and blame you, you will think the Nazis were the good guys. If you only knew how many of us lurk in dark shadows, noting your names and bigotry.
There will be revenge, TOVARISH!
Go to http://www.quikmaneuvers.com and read the truth, you who are not convinced by these Soviet media puppets!
As a periodic customer and constant fan, I see clones of Quikmaneuvers blossoming everywhere. It means that you are doomed to several levels of revenge which will last a thousand years!