ANTI-REALIST ICON:

Martin Malia, 80, Soviet-Era Skeptic, Dies (MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN, November 24, 2004, NY Times)

Martin Malia, a historian of Soviet Communism who persistently challenged the prevailing notion of that system's durability, died last Friday in a convalescent home in Oakland, Calif. He was 80 years old.

The cause was pneumonia, said a statement from the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught for more than 30 years.

During the final three decades of the Soviet empire, Mr. Malia, who retired in 1991, provided an often provocative voice from the conservative flank of Soviet studies, which scorned the idea that Communist rule would ever be capable of reforming itself and assailed those of his fellow academics who foresaw such possibilities.

In his books and numerous magazine articles, Mr. Malia advocated the position that the Soviet Union was constituted ideologically - and became as he put it an "idiocracy" that was alien to the currents of Russian and European history and thus could not endure. [...]

The most dramatic expression of Mr. Malia's views on Communism's dismal prospects and impending doom took the form of a January 1990 article in the quarterly Daedalus titled "To the Stalin Mausoleum." The author was identified only by the single initial "Z."

At the time, Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of perestroika were generating optimism and enthusiasm in much of the West, including academic circles. But the article lambasted the Soviet leader, insisting that his rule would bring neither democracy nor free markets to the Soviet Union, though they might extend the life of the Communist Party, whose existence, the article contended, lay at the heart of the Soviet Union's problems.

Partly because of speculation over the identity of the author, the article gained international attention and a crucial portion was excerpted on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. One line of conjecture held that the "Z" in the signature was meant to recall the famous 1947 article in Foreign Affairs in which George F. Kennan's proposed policies for the containment of the Soviet Union were presented under the pseudonym "X." In the fall of 1990, after the Berlin Wall had come down and Mr. Gorbachev was being eclipsed by Boris Yeltsin, Mr. Malia acknowledged in another Op-Ed piece in The Times that he was "Z," and not a diplomat, as Mr. Kennan had been, but a university professor who eight months earlier had hidden his identity to avoid compromising his sources in Russia and Eastern Europe.

A devout Roman Catholic, Mr. Malia was quick to recognize how Poland's Solidarity movement was gaining cultural and popular support in its challenge to Communism and wrote about the struggle for The New York Review of Books. He saw no prospect of similar upheavals in Russia, and in contrast to many colleagues he refused to believe that significant changes could emerge from party structures. Yuri Slezkine, a history professor at Berkeley, observed that Mr. Malia's views were regarded as controversial by many in the field, but added, " things kind of came together in the end, and he was very grateful."

Fortunately, the bare handful of men who understood the inherent impossibility of Communism enduring included Ronald Reagan.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 24, 2004 10:46 PM