EVERYBODY WANTS TO KILL SOMEBODY:

Soviet terror, American amnesia : there has been a striking asymmetry between the American responses to the two great mass murders of our century, the Nazi and the Soviet. Why? (Paul Hollander, May 2, 1994, National Review)

IT HAS been customary in our times to make reference to the Holocaust whenever we wish to allude to some unrivaled evil. The Holocaust became the undisputed reference point for self-evident evil, and for good reason. By the same token, words like "Nazi," "Auschwitz," "Storm Troopers," and "Gestapo" are reflexively appended to political or social phenomena we wish to discredit conclusively.

It rarely happens that self-evident evil is denoted by reference to the mass murders committed in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Words like "Soviet," "Soviet Communist," "Kolyma," or "KGB" are rarely used to discredit political movements and practices. It is doubtful that one in a thousand Americans knows what Kolyma was, or would recognize the name of a single Soviet concentration camp. It is just as unlikely that one in a thousand Americans has heard the names of Beria, Serov, Yagoda, or Yezhov, who used to be in charge of the Soviet mass murders.

Indeed, as Soviet mass graves have been discovered, one after another, in the last few years, the American media have greeted the discoveries with remarkable equanimity. One alone, in Kuropati, near Minsk, was estimated by Soviet sources to contain over a quarter-million remains; Bykovnia, near Kiev, a similar number, killed during the 1930s. No Russian reporters or officials appeared on our television screens to comment on these discoveries, and no American television correspondents reported breathlessly from the scene. We were also spared the reflections of academic specialists regarding the significance of these findings for a reassessment of the Soviet mass murders.

It is not my purpose to dispute the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The question here raised is why, in comparison to the intensity of the moral outrage evoked by the Holocaust, the Soviet mass murders have stimulated so little moral energy. [...]

SINCE public awareness of world events is largely the creation of the mass medial it is important to reiterate that media coverage of Soviet mass murders was largely non-existent while they were committed and sparse in the subsequent decades.

It should also be pointed out that not all Soviet mass murders were committed in the distant past. Spectacular mass murders of civilians were carried out by Soviet forces in Afghanistan under Brezhnev in the 1980s. They too received perfunctory coverage in the media, although it was occasionally noted that the civilians killed numbered in the millions.

If by now it has been established that atrocities of the Soviet system neither deeply penetrated popular and scholarly awareness (except that of a handfill of specialists) nor stimulated moral responses comparable to those evoked by the Nazi ones, it remains to attempt to explain this phenomenon.

One explanation may be found in the longstanding, indeed chronic, Western ignorance and misperception of the Soviet system produced by attitudes ranging from outright affection to benefit of the doubt. It is no longer in dispute that many Americans, and many highly distinguished ones among them, completely misread the nature of the Soviet system through much of its existence and especially during its most murderous decades. What is less widely recognized is how long these wrongheaded assessments persisted and how they might have influenced the moral responses, past and current, to the Soviet mass murders.

The roots of present-day attitudes reach back to the 1930s. In those years, when influential opinion-makers were impressed by the Soviet Union, either they found it inconceivable that such an admirable system could commit mass murder, or they wrote the atrocities off as the reasonable costs of the noble experiment.

Upton Sinclair wrote in 1938 about the collectivization and resultant famines:

They drove rich peasants off the land and sent them to work in lumber camps and on railroads. Maybe it cost a million lives--maybe . . . five million--but you cannot think intelligently about it unless you ask yourself how many millions it might have cost if the changes had not been made. . . . There has never been in human history great social change without killing.

In the mid 1940s it appeared to Jerome Davis, who was a professor at Yale Divinity School, that during the Purges

only a tiny percentage of the population was involved and the same years which saw the treason trials saw some of the greatest triumphs of Soviet planning. While the screws tightened on a tiny minority, the majority of Soviet people were enjoying greater prosperity.

In 1953, seeking to justify violence associated with the Purges, Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, two American academic Marxists, asked:

Is violence used to perpetuate a state of affairs in which violence is inevitable, or . . . [is] it used in the interests of creating a truly human society from which it will be possible at long last to banish violence altogether?

This was a rationalization the Nazis could also have gladly endorsed; after all, once they purified the world of Jews there was not going to be any further need for violence.

Thus to the extent that the Soviet mass murders and political violence were confronted by those on the Left, and especially the far Left, they were morally neutralized by the time-honored device of viewing them as regrettable means to glorious ends. Legitimizers of Soviet violence were interested only in the ends and knew little of the means, nor were they anxious to learn about them. Sartre provided the most ambitious (and morally repellent) rationalization for this position:

Like it or not, the construction of socialism is privileged in that to understand it one must espouse its movement and adopt its goals; in a word, we judge what it does in the name of what it seeks and its means in the light of its ends. . .

Even more remarkable, in the 1930s the Soviet prison camps were often viewed as humane institutions of character reform rather than places of slow extermination. According to Anna Louise Strong, they were "remaking criminals." Professor Gillin, a leading authority on penology and former president of the American Sociological Society, averred that "the system is devised to correct the offender and return him to society." Ella Winter was delighted to learn that criminals were not treated as outcasts. Harold Laski (the hundredth anniversary of his birth recently celebrated) had no doubt about the superiority of the Soviet penal system over its Western counterparts. He was also struck "by the excellent relations between the prisoners and the warders . . ." (Reference to any such foolishness was missing from the article in the December 1993 New Republic entitled "Our Harold," written by his biographer.) The Webbs found the prisons "as free from physical cruelty as any prison in any country is ever likely to be." Maurice Hindus, the veteran reporter on Soviet affairs, concluded that "Vindictiveness, punishment, torture, severity, humilation have no place in this system." Mr. and Mrs. Corliss Lamont spoke to prisoners who informed them that they did not feel as if they were in prison, and the Lamonts had no difficulty believing this. This was in the 1930s. A decade later Henry Wallace and Owen Lattimore still found much to praise in the notorious prison camps of the Soviet Far East.

During World War II, the wartime camaraderie precluded inquiry into the Soviet outrages. During the classic Cold War years there was a greater readiness to criticize the the Soviet system, but the immediacy of the massive, well-documented evil of the Holocaust helped to blot out concern with possible Soviet equivalents.

At the end of the 1940s McCarthyism arose and strongly reinforced the attitudes here examined. Ironically, Senator McCarthy achieved exactly the opposite of what he had intended: he succeeded in discrediting, for decades to come, opposition to Communist movements and systems.

In his book-length critique of anti-communism Parenti linked it to

patriotic hooliganism, collective self-delusion, the propagation of political orthodoxy, the imprisonment of dissenters, and the emergence of a gargantuan military establishment . . . Abroad anti-communism has brought us armament races, nuclear terror, the strengthening of oppressive autocracies . . . the death and maiming of American boys and the slaughter of far-off unoffending peoples. . . . [it] brought us grief and shame.

After McCarthy a vocal anti-communist stand became an embarrassment ("witch hunt," or "Red baiting"), an attitude disdained by self-respecting liberal intellectuals, journalists, and even politicians.

From the 1960s until the rise of Gorbachev in 1985 it was the dread of nuclear war that exerted the major influence on Western perceptions of the Soviet Union. The peace movement successfully promoted the belief that questioning the moral record of the Soviet system would undermine peace. Instead we were urged to focus on matters which our two countries have in common, as for example the love of children and the goodness of ordinary people. Since trust was so ardently sought, it was worse than impolite to seek to unearth Soviet policies of the past (and some of the present) which would have given pause to those in pursuit of good relations.

An 1983 account by a member of an American peace delegation to the Soviet Union was typical: ". . . what we lacked in knowledge we made up in enthusiasm and we shared a . . . faith that women of our two countries were probably more alike than different." It was further argued that "people who cultivate wheat can't possibly want war." Norman Mailer ably summed up these feelings: "We live with the scenario that Russia is an evil force. Now, the world is on the edge of destroying itself. Can we afford abhorrence any longer?" Two prominent peace activists, Drs. Chivian and Mack, even found that Soviet concealment of the Chernobyl disaster was owing to the laudable "tendency on the part of the Soviet leadership to downplay catastrophes and instead offer reassurance to the Soviet people so as to prevent emotional distress." They averred that such practices were beneficial for mental health.

Such attitudes were not limited to peace activists and intellectuals. A Yankelovich survey in 1984 found that younger and better educated Americans were more willing to give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt and had more trusting attitudes; their majority believed that "we would be better off if we stopped treating the Soviets as enemies and tried to hammer out our differences in a live-and-let-live spirit."

Whatever the merit of these attitudes for preventing nuclear war, they were not apt to create an atmosphere in which Soviet mass murders could be critically examined and evaluated, comparatively or otherwise.

The peace activists were motivated not only by the fear of nuclear war. There was cross-fertilization between the peace movement and what came to be called the adversary culture. Highly critical of U.S. foreign policy and of traditional American social/cultural values, these movements were disinclined to be critical of any political system which was also critical of their own. Suffused with an acute awareness of the ills of their own country, they were doubtful that any other system could exceed its evils.

It was under these conditions that the concept of moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union emerged. Sam Keen wrote:

In the current USSR-U.S. conflict, we require each other as group transference targets. . . . We see the Soviets as making the individual a mere means to the goals of the state. They see us as sanctifying the greed of powerful individuals at the cost of community, and allowing the profit of the few at the expense of the many. And so long as we trade insults, we are both saved from the embarrassing task of looking at the serious faults and cruelties of our own systems.

Characteristic of this mindset were the contentions of Richard Barnet in what I once called the definitive handbook on moral equivalence, The Giants, published in 1977. He suggested, among many other parallels, that "both societies were suffering a crisis of legitimacy," that "the madness of one bureaucracy sustains the other," and that "each [country] is a prisoner of a sixty-year-old obsession." Marshall Shulman, the well-known Sovietologist and former high-ranking State Department advisor, began a major article in Foreign Affairs in 1987 with what became a standard incantation:

Both the Soviet Union and the United States have been so constrained by parochial domestic interests and weighted down by outworn ideologies that they have been unable to summon up a competent and enlightened management of their affairs . . . proportionate to their respective and common problems.

The images of moral equivalence also deeply penetrated popular culture. Le Carre portrayed the espionage establishments of both the United States and the Soviet Union as corrupt, the Americans often markedly more so, "idiots and/or fascistic puritans . . . objects of authorial loathing" as Walter Laqueur recently observed. James Bond movies made sure that the bad guys were rarely actual KGB agents but rather renegades of some kind, or merchants of death (power-hungry capitalists), or deranged fanatics of no discernible political affiliation giving trouble to both superpowers.

There is no doubt that the deeply felt belief in the moral (or immoral) equivalence of the United States and USSR was in large measure responsible for a climate in which it was not easy to publicly discuss or evaluate the historic moral outrages of the Soviet system.

It should also be noted that until its actual collapse there was hope (in the West) that the Soviet system could be reformed. The USSR survived much longer than Nazi Germany, and that in itself seemed to prove something. The reforms that followed the death of Stalin, and later Gorbachev's rise to power, provided something of an implicit retroactive justification for the horrors of the earlier era. Could the great sacrifices have been for nothing?

Gorbachev created high expectations of both reform and institutional continuity, so much so that the historian Moshe Levin envisioned (in 1988) a rejuvenated Party and union of states:

For the party is the main stabilizer of the political system and few groups would back measures likely to erode the integrity of the entire union or the centralized state. The party . . . is the only institution that can preside over the overhaul of the system without endangering the polity itself in the process.

There was new hope, among some American intellectuals, that at long last under Gorbachev socialism with a human face might arise at the birthplace of the deformed system.

Anti-Anti-Communism

AT THE HEART of these asymmetries two principal strands converge. There are on the one hand the remnants of an old pro-socialist idealism that cannot bring itself to believe the worst about a system which at one time was reputed to be the builder of socialism; it is galling for critics of capitalism to rank its arch-enemy as a moral rival of Nazi Germany.

What makes this residual affinity especially compelling as an incentive to ignore or minimize the crimes of the Soviet system is its distinguished lineage, which includes so many eminent American intellectuals and public figures from the 1930s until the Gorbachev era. No list of similar length and distinction could be compiled of American conservatives expressing admiration for Nazism, sympathy for which was largely confined to fringe elements in American politics and public life. And if a recent PBS documentary (America and the Holocaust) sought to establish American moral failure regarding assistance to the victims of the Holocaust, there is room for a similar searching look at American attitudes and policies regarding some of the victims of Stalin (in particular the Soviet refugees repatriated to the Soviet Union after World War II) and at the moral restraints which grew out of the wartime cooperation, as well as from illusions regarding the nature of the Soviet system.

The second strand is the hardy heritage of McCarthyism: its unintended discrediting of anti-communism which gave rise to anti-anti-communism, a mindset strengthened by the rejection of Western values that emerged in the 1960s.

In the anti-anti-communist position two contradictory attitudes came together: on the one hand, it was perfunctorily acknowledged that Communist systems (or some of them) were bad, but asserted that this did not justify dwelling on their shortcomings; on the other hand, anti-communist attitudes were denounced as an obsession, a fantasy, a phobia, a pathology, and a metaphor for everything that was wrong with American society. Once the criticism of and concern with Communism was deemed an aberration, little room was left for freely expressing moral indignation over its misdeeds, including the mass murders of Stalin.

The real problem lies not in arguing that the end justifies the means--it always can--but in the end they thought were worth these means.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 3, 2005 5:16 PM