IS THIS A JOKE?

Red Scare: Fifty years after his death, Stalin's crimes are still morally shocking--and politically vexing: a review of Gulag by Anne Applebaum (Bruce Clark, Washington Monthly)

In her new book, Anne Applebaum tells an instructive story about Vice President Henry Wallace's first visit to the Soviet Far East in May 1944. Determined to think the best of America's wartime ally, Wallace took an instant liking to his Russian host, a senior secret policeman called Ivan Nikishov. The visitor was struck by the similarities between America and Russia as pioneering nations with vast natural resources, and he listened sympathetically as Nikishov told him how the town of Magadan, with 40,000 residents, had sprung up over the last 12 years. What Wallace hardly seems to have realized is that he was visiting a giant prison: Magadan was the "capital" of an area several times the size of France, where hundreds of thousands of people were sent to incarceration or exile. Many did not even arrive, because the ships that ferried prisoners to Magadan were notorious death traps. And work in the nearby Kolyma gold fields was so back-breaking that very few survived it for more than a couple of years. The town Wallace so admired had been built by penal labor; the singers and musicians who performed for him were captives (albeit under strict instructions not to reveal the fact); even the local embroidery which he politely praised was the work of prisoners.

What this story reminds us, of course, is that when a nation or coalition has focused all its attention on the defeat of a single enemy, it can easily become blinded to the faults, indeed the downright evil, of other forces in the world--especially if those other forces happen to be helping in the struggle against the main adversary. Winston Churchill, to his credit, was aware of this paradox: He once declared that if Hitler had invaded hell, Her Majesty's government would at least have sent a friendly diplomatic note to the Prince of Darkness. And most people would agree that when a nation is engaged in the heat of a life-and-death struggle with a clearly defined enemy, such as Nazi Germany, it is reasonable to accept help from almost any partner, however unsavory--as long as you do not deceive yourself, as Wallace appears to have done, about that partner's real nature. The wisdom of cultivating dubious allies--on the old "enemy of my enemy" principle--is much less self-evident when the war you are fighting is long, multi-fronted, and has an important moral and psychological dimension as well as a military one. That description applied to the Cold War, and it also applies to the current war against terrorism.

Since 1945, not many observers of the Soviet Union have been as naive as Wallace; but Anne Applebaum believes that Westerners--especially on the political left--have never ceased to underestimate the radically evil nature of the Soviet system, and the degree of suffering it inflicted on its own citizens. [...]

She is right to say that some Westerners underestimate the evil perpetrated under the Soviet flag. But surely, it is going too far to regard Western tactics during the Cold War as beyond reproach. It is true, of course, that any moral assessment of that period must take full account of the horrific nature of the Soviet penal system, and of the fact that whenever it had the chance, the Soviet regime imposed similar horrors on other countries. Western leaders would stand condemned by history if they had not worked tirelessly to avoid the imposition of that system on their own countries--and in the long run, to roll back repression inside the Soviet empire.

But the fact that one party to a con-flict practiced terrible wickedness does not imply that the other behaved with disinterested perfection. With full knowledge of the Soviet Union's crimes against its own subjects, it is still possible to argue that at certain times, America and its allies stoked the fires of superpower competition and put humanity's survival at risk. The expression "military-industrial complex"--meaning an alliance of interests between the Pentagon and the arms industry which had an agenda of its own--was not coined by some soft-minded apologist for communism; it was coined by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican and supreme commander of Allied forces during World War II. As Applebaum herself notes, Stalin's jailers--especially after 1945--shored up their own authority at home by citing the imperative to achieve and maintain parity with the country that had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This does not necessarily imply that the Western side in the Cold War should have slackened its own efforts in the naïve hope that the Soviet regime would have softened as a result. But it is not being treacherous or soft-minded to study the Soviet-American contest as a self-compounding process in which one side's fearful and suspicious behavior fueled the other's.

Nor was the practice of terrible forms of repression, including the widespread use of incarceration, torture, and extrajudicial killing, any monopoly of the communist side in the Cold War. In countries like Chile, Iran, Indonesia, and Greece, precisely those crimes were perpetrated in the name of the "free world"--and they were justified, or actively abetted, by America's keenest Cold Warriors on grounds that "our sons of bitches" should be forgiven almost anything as long they fought the good fight against the Reds.

This does not mean that communism and liberal capitalism are morally equivalent routes to modernity and industrialization. At least in its purer form, the Cold War theory of convergence, which held that American and Soviet societies were becoming almost identical--was utter nonsense. But in any sustained conflict, whether personal or geopolitical, there is an ever-present possibility that the two sides will imitate certain aspects of each other's behavior. It is not only our spouses, or our pets that we grow to resemble, but also, to some extent, our enemies. To put it another way, our adversaries--ideological and geopolitical--do not merely threaten us by preparing to attack and defeat us; in a more subtle way, they also threaten us by making us more like them. It would be absurd to suggest that America itself had any equivalent of the Soviet gulag, but Cold War logic did make the United States more tolerant of its allies' repressive behavior.

The only possible explanation for this is that it was intentionally run in the April issue and is meant to be a joke, right? Mr. Clark has no sooner run through the litany of what made the Gulag radically evil, as Ms Applebaum has argued in her book, than he proves her point about the Left not coming to terms with this fact by comparing it to the Shah's Iran and Pinochet's Chile and by basically accusing either the US of "imitating" the Soviet Union or, possibly even more outrageous, them of imitating us, as if the whole homicidal regime was our idea. One need merely note that Stalin murdered between 17 and 22 million of his own people just in the 1930's, long before America's Cold Warriors made the Soviets more like us. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 28, 2003 9:39 PM