THE COMFORTING BELIEF THAT WE CONTROL EVENTS:

Where Sovietologists Went Wrong (Richard Pipes, History News Network)

To understand the attitudes-and failures-of the Sovietological community in the United States one must bear in mind the conditions under which the study of the Soviet Union had gotten underway in this country. It first emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s and took off, as it were, in 1957, after the Russians had launched the Sputnik, a potential weapon system which (for the first time in U.S. history) directly threatened its security and even survival. It is commonly believed that the circumstance of its origin infused Sovietology with irreconcilable hostility toward communism and the USSR, breeding a Cold War mentality. In fact, it had the very opposite effect. In Europe, where communist ideology had a history going back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century and communist parties had come into being in the early 1920s, scholars and publicists had analyzed communism on its own merits for a century before it attracted the attention of the United States. Some of them -- notably the Poles -- had predicted with astonishing accuracy the nature of a communist regime, anticipating its political despotism and economic failures.

In the United States, such analysis was impeded by the fact that the phenomenon of communism came to be inextricably linked with the dread of nuclear war. Largely ignorant of Marxist theory and the history of both Russia and the Soviet Union, Americans tended to see the problem exclusively in foreign policy terms: that is, how to avoid the conflict between the two camps leading to a nuclear holocaust. It made them conciliatory and this meant that they stressed positive developments in the Communist bloc and interpreted them in the best possible light. Quite unconsciously they minimized differences and emphasized similarities. However well intentioned the sentiments behind this attitude, they misconstrued reality, as inevitably happens when truth is subordinated to politics. The Sovietological community was first and foremost committed to bringing the the adversaries together and in so doing ignored or downplayed whatever ran counter to this objective. As a result, it grossly misunderstood the nature of communist regimes and the forces that animated them.

This approach enjoyed popularity because it carried a comforting message. It appealed to those who had no sympathy for communism but were frightened of nuclear war and liked to think that patience and understanding would persuade the Russians to adopt a more friendly stance. Evidence to the contrary was rationalized. [...]

The misunderstanding of Russian motives and intentions had also deeper cultural causes. For most Americans the axiom that all people are equal leads more or less inadvertently to the belief that they are the same by which they mean that they are at heart like themselves so that given a chance, they would behave like themselves. If a nation behaves aggressively toward the United States, it is because it is justly aggrieved: by extrapolation, the blame for aggression falls not on the aggressor but on his victim. The logic is quite flawed but psychologically understandable. Throughout the years of the Cold War, a high proportion of educated, affluent Americans felt guilty of provoking the Russians and pressed for concessions to them to make them feel more "secure."

The Russians exploited such American perceptions with admirable skill.

This phenomenon is obvious today too, among those who wish to believe that if we' were only nicer to Islamicists they'd leave us alone.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 5, 2003 4:17 PM