The Berlinski Article: Some Detailed Answers
Tsypkin’s response has been edited only to embed the hyperlinks that he provided:
From Mikhail Tsypkin, Naval Postgraduate School:
“The article by Claire Berlinski, A Hidden History of Evil. Why Doesn’t Anyone Care About the Unread Soviet Archives? contains so many factual errors that it is totally misleading.
She expresses concern about unread Soviet archives and uses the example of Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, [who] “has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, he can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.”
The reality is quite different…
Ms. Berlinski refers to transcripts of nearly every conversation between Gorbachev and his foreign counterparts, hundreds of them, a near-complete diplomatic record of the era, available nowhere else. There are notes from the Politburo taken by Georgy Shakhnazarov, an aide of Gorbachev’s, and by Politburo member Vadim Medvedev. There is the diary of Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s principal aide and deputy chief of the body formerly known as the Comintern, which dates from 1972 to the collapse of the regime. Leaving aside the fact that the Comintern was disbanded in 1943, when Chernyaev was a junior infantry officer at the Soviet-German front, the most important parts of the Chernyaev diary have been translated and displayed on the Web by the National Security Archives here.
- Here.
- Here.
The notes of the Politburo meetings, taken by Shakhnazarov, Chernyaev and Medvedev, which Ms. Berlinski believes to be hidden in the Kremlin archives, have been published in Russia as a book in 2006. The diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev (from 1972 until 1991) were published in Russia last year. The reason these books are not available in English is commercial: Translating and publishing them would be very expensive, while the reading audience would be very limited, since the experts can read them in Russian, while the number of non-experts likely to buy such scholarly books would be miniscule.
Ms. Berlinski also writes in anguish about the archives of the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovski. “These documents are available online at bukovsky-archives.net, but most are not translated. They are unorganized; there are no summaries; there is no search or index function.”
“I offer them free of charge to the most influential newspapers and journals in the world, but nobody wants to print them,” Bukovsky writes. What is the real situation? According to Mark Kramer, “almost everything in his [Bukovsky's] collection has been available in Fond [collection] 89 at RGANI [Russian State Archive of the Modern History] since late 1992. The 3,000 or so documents in Fond 89 were all microfilmed and are available at numerous libraries in the USA and elsewhere. Item-level finding aids with cross-indexing are available for the full Fond 89 collection.” [Personal communication, 05.16.2010.]
Documentation of some of the most despicable activities by the KGB during the last years of the Soviet system have been made available in English in such books as Michael Scammell, ed., The Solzhenitsyn Files: Secret Soviet Documents Reveal One Man’s Fight Against the Monolith (Chicago : Edition q, 1995) and The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, ed. by Joshua Rubenstein and Alexander Gribanov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); moreover, the documents contained in the book on Dr. Sakharov are published in Russian and English on the web:
A massive collection of Soviet formerly secret documents, both in the original Russian and translated into English can be found at the web site of the Cold War International History Project; one can point to the outstanding collection of the documents on the war in Afghanistan online here.
The Cold War History Project at Harvard has displayed online many important documents from Soviet archives, including the top secret official History of the KGB, online at this URL. True, it has not been translated into English, but for those linguistically challenged (as Ms. Berlinski is when it comes to the Russian language) one can recommend two exhaustive volumes compiled on the basis of exhaustive notes taken by the late KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and ChristopherAndrew, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, Basic Books (2005), and Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. (Basic Books, 1999).
Or just take the archive of the late Vitaly Kataev, a top ranking defense industry official in Gorbachev’s Central Committee; its unique documents have been effectively used by David Hoffman in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (Doubleday, 2009). The National Security Archive has posted online English translations of important documents from the Kataev archive online here and here.
This list could be continued. Ms. Berlinski appears to see some nefarious plot in the lack of interest in Soviet archives. I am afraid that her own lack of curiosity and seriousness in approaching this subject is a perfect illustration of this lack of interest.”
Mikhail Tsypkin
Associate Professor
Naval Postgraduate School
The above two communications should do much to shed light on the issues raised by Claire Berlinski re the availability of the documents held by Bukovsky and Stroilov.
“The reason these books are not available in English is commercial:
translating and publishing them would be very expensive, while the reading audience would be very limited, since the experts can read them in Russian, while the number of non-experts likely to buy such scholarly books would be miniscule.”
It’s the “commercial” stuff that is bugging the hell out of me. The odds are that nobody is going to get rich exposing the evils of Communism. Graduates of our so-called elite universities have also often been conditioned to believe that criticism of Communism is similar to McCarthyism. A truly decent person doesn’t do such things. More funding is required from the non-profits.
Those are very satisfying rebuttals to Ms. Berlinski’s article. Thank you Dr. Radosh.
One thing that was mentioned somewhere in all of this, but has gotten lost–how can interested people contribute to the publication of this information? For example if a non-profit made this a cause, how could we help.
I find it extraordinary that Jonathan Brent found the time to write such a polite, elegant and detailed response to Claire Berlinski’s article and yet thought it was alright to let Pavel Stroilov’s book chapters, which he himself commissioned, ‘drop’ without so much as informing him of the fact, despite numerous reminders.
Such an unattractive lack of grace is also evident in the angry reaction from a number of the so-called historians of the Cold War based in the West. Far from being grateful, they refuse to accept the role that Vladimir Bukovsky played in forcing the Russians to set up Fond 89. They regard the brave Pavel Stroilov with similar disgust, the man whose occasional publications based on about 100,000 documents which he stole from the Gorbachev Foundation have forced it to start their own publications.
But what have these historians done to be so proud of themselves? They have been feeding off the crumbs from their Moscow masters’ table for years – writing books, making their own careers. Now they are terrified that most on which they have built their names will have to be re-examined. Comparisons between the originals taken by Stroilov and the documents released by the Gorbachev Foundation have given rise to the suggestions that not only Moscow might still keep a part of its archives under wraps but that the ‘documents’ released by Gorbachev over the past 15 years or so might have been filleted!
In their lofty, academic, and let’s be honest, patronising manner, these career historians try to tell us that it is them who are the real experts about Russia and its history, not the foreign ‘amateurs’ of the likes of the Bukovskys and Stroilovs of this world, who must not be trusted. Well, if these historians knew Russia that well, didn’t they realise who they were dealing with in Moscow?
So why don’t you people start writing about the post-Stalin era then if everything is so available? I don’t get it. Everyone knows this Stalin crap; you have written about it endlessly. I’d say Simon Montefiore’s books are the last word on the subject. It’s been beginning to look like the Holocaust industry: endlessly and endlessly repeated. What – has nothing happened since 1953, or 1956? Or is everything as it was portrayed in the media? Eh?
The absence of THIS history, not the Stalin stuff, is what makes the most difference in the entire public discourse. And yet everyone seems afraid to write anything that doesn’t sound like that idiot Michael Beschloss.
“So why don’t you people start writing about the post-Stalin era then if everything is so available?”
Who pays for all this research? Is it supposed to be entirely an altruistic endeavor? Where is the buying public public? We have a generation of graduates of “elite” universities who are afraid of being charged with McCarthyism. They are usually historical illiterates.
i’d think a not inconsiderable percentage of the millions of people who are open-minded to the idea that obama is a socialist and – outer-most possibility – perhaps a manchurian candidate would want to read about it.
besides that’s really the point, ultimately: this is a phenomenon within living memory and a massive factor in the shape of 20th history and perception. there is probably a “bad market” for it only because no one publishes this stuff so who can say what it would be? why don’t they try something? i suspect the answer is more because they’re a bunch of prostitutes, unfortunately, and terrified of being labelled “paranoid.”
This post should have stopped with the following line from Jonathan Brent, “… the intellectual inertness of the West in the face of the recurrence of precisely those evils that gave rise to those crimes in the first place is incomprehensible to me.”
Isn’t that exactly the argument Berlinski is making? So why continue with this ridiculous “my academicians are better than your journalism” exercise? Instead of trying to one-up Berlinksi, why don’t you reach out to her in order to overcome the “intellectual inertness of the West … [to] the evils that gave rise to [Communist] crimes in the first place”?
If Radosh and Berlinski worked together then perhaps the fact that Communism is an evil on par with Nazism would actually make it into the culture at large and people would give the Hammer and Sickle the same response they give the Nazi Swastika. Maybe then that wretched Communist symbol would stop being a fashion accessory.
And this has a direct implication to “the main challenge to the West [which] is the rise of radical Islam.” The same indifference people give Communism’s past crimes and imperialist nature they are giving the Islamic Supremacists’ current crimes and their imperialist nature. Given how Mr. Radosh has turned Berlinski’s larger point into a pointless academic bull session, we shouldn’t be surprised that this stuff fails to penetrate the culture at large.