Fluff on the Sleeve of History

...Fluff on the Sleeve of History VARIETY OF MEN By C P Snow Scnbner 270 pp $5 95 Reviewed by SIDNEY HOOK A man's personality is reflected in the constellation of values by which he lives, and it is tempting to seek these values in the gallery of men he admires For even within the restriction that association by accident imposes on his possible choices, there is a selective bias that makes some characters more appealing to him than others No one is drawn equally to every blossom in the garden A clue to the personality of the portrait painter can be found in the traits of the subjects he selects as well as in his manner of portraying them In his Variety of Men, C P Snow gives his personal impressions of nine men of power and fame he has met, some of them rather casually Most of what he knows about these men he has learned from reading books by others about them There is no account of anyone who has not achieved power or fame, and the absence of such persons from Snow s gallery is mildly surprising It would be a poor life that had never encountered fascinating or indeed noble individuals who were neither famous nor powerful One would have expected a novelist to do them justice not only to extend the spectrum of human variety we naturally enjoy knowing about, but to bring them alive to share his interest with us More significant than this omission, however, is the fact that the longest chapter of the book is devoted to someone Snow never met, not even in the committee meeting or afternoon visit that marked the extent of his personal acquamtance with Churchill and Einstein The number of famous men we have not met is enormously larger than those we have Why then, of all people, did Snow include Joseph Stalin7 What in Stalin's life appealed to Snow7 I think the answer is suggested partly by Snow's treatment of his other subjects and partly by what he stresses m his account of Stalin In all his portraits Snow is very sensitive to the perquisites of power and success He is always concerned with the class origins of his subjects, the amount of money they earned or their families possessed, whom they knew or got to know among the great of the world It is the typical outlook of an arriviste, of a man inordinately curious about who made good and how, and who in a modest way wants to be one of their court The preoccupation is not so pronounced in his discussion of intellectual figures?Hardy, the mathematician, Rutherford and Einstein, the scientists?but m these chapters there is a surprising absence of detailed reference to any of their ideas, to the scientific significance of their achievements and the real basis foi their greatness Similarly, there is no adequate treatment of Robert Frost's quality as a poet In view of Snow's background, this is rather puzzling until one realizes that, for all his talk about science in his confused and contusing Two Cultures, Snow has no taste or capacity for illuminating scientific exposition One does not have to vulgarize to convey to intelligent laymen the significance of the great landmarks of scientific discovery, witness the writing of Sehg Hecht and of Einstein himself Snow's approach to science is more like that of a laboratory technician or scientific project-administrator than of a historian or philosopher of science He stresses facts but not what they relate to, especially not the broader issues of knowledge No one with any competence in the philosophy of science could have repeatedly asserted, as Snow did in 1959-60, that in 10 years we faced "a certainty of disaster" (the nuclear holocaust) if disarmament were not introduced He has even referred to this as "a mathematical" certainty His writings reveal both ignorance and dogmatism in "the third culture"—the domains of social and political thought—whose encompassing frame determines the practical consequences of scientific discovery, and which are of far greater importance for understanding the shape of the future than either the purely humanistic or scientific cultures When Snow touches on his third culture even his facts are often questionable—¦ not only about the state of literary freedom in the USSR but about U S nuclear disarmament policy Snow's picture of Stalin is in line with the partial rehabilitation Stalin is currently enjoying under the Kosygin-Brezhnev bureaucracy It is the position of Mikhail Sho-lokhov and, if Snow reports him correctly, Leonid Leonov Stalin was a truly great man, another Peter the Great, to whom, despite his cruelty (attributed to a streak of paranoia), the Soviet Union owes its survival Snow goes to extraordinary lengths to build up Stalin as a profound practical thinker, as one who knew Russia better than Lenin, Trotsky and the entire Social-Democratic emigre leadership, whether Menshevik or Bolshevik Better lead than any statesman of his time, Stalin had a profound interest in literature, the theater, and ballet True, he acted as the supreme censoi of Russian literature Yet that, according to Snow, was a sign of his respect for it Literary men in the West who protest Soviet censorship enjoy freedom because htera-tuie doesn't matter much in their own countries But m the Soviet Union it has an exalted place "If you believe that the written word affects men's actions, then you watch it The price for our complete literary liberty in the West is that no one really believes that m terms of action literature really matters " Presumably, if we were to jail, exile and hound writers to death in the West that would show we were taking literature seriously' Under Tsarism, too, literature as a medium of social thought had practical effects and was taken seriously How explain that the Tsarist censorship was much milder than that of the Kremlin7 Actually, from Dickens to the present literature in the West has often had a great impact on events (and is taken seriously even when it has no specific impact), while the persecution of writers in the Soviet Union has extended to poets like Anna Akhmatova and Iosif Brodsky, who are not essentially concerned with a political message The only relevant point, which Snow overlooks, is whether the writer and artist are to be free to select and develop their themes in their own way, free from the coercion of state, church and party?regardless of whether or not they influence men's actions Snow seems to imply that the agony and martyrdom of the Soviet writer is the natural price for dedication to literature that really matters Snow would have us believe that even before the October Revolution Stalin abandoned the doctrines of his party, accepted the policy of "socialism in one country," and was profoundly skeptical of the Bolshevik expectation that a revolution begun m Russia, if successful, would spread to the West "This view," he tells us, "he expounded in guarded terms, well before the revolution He could not make it explicit at any time, but there is no doubt that this formed the inner consistency of his career " This is sheer invention in order to impress the reader with Stalin's prescience, there is no evidence to warrant this letrospective tribute On the other hand, m discussing Lenin's relations to Stalin, Snow speaks very gingerly and ignores pertinent evidence He claims that there are only "indications" that Lenin in the last year of his life was getting "uneasy" about Stalin "It has been stated (sic1) that Lenin finally reached the point of deciding to take drastic action against Stalin the complete truth of the story will have to await future historians" Not so much as a line is devoted to Lenin's "Testament" and letter to Stahn, which made unmistakably clear Lenin's judgment on and break with Stalin Snow links the great purges and their millions of victims to Stalin's program of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization of agriculture, which presumably saved the Soviet Union from Hitler There is as much warrant for giving Stalinism credit for the victory over Hitler as for giving Tsarist feudalism credit for the victory over Napoleon We can only touch lightly on the issue here But the first thing to inquire is to what extent Stalin's policies, especially his theory of social-Fascism—according to which the German Social Democrats, not Hitler, were the chief enemies of the German working class—were responsible for the victory of Nazism in Germany This point aside, it is extremely questionable whether the systematic and prolonged terror instituted by Stalin had any but an obstructive effect upon the programs of industrialization and collectivization he imposed upon Russia The waste, suffering and hunger were colossal How indeed could a policy that automatically equated error or accident with treason or other capital crimes lead to anything but a paralysis of judgment and a slowing down of production7 The purges and terror were bound up with Stalin's increasingly dictatorial rule They were not the necessary price ot Soviet industrialization and collectivization In fact, terror was resumed with full steam after the victory agamst Hitler and culminated in the so-called Doctors' Poison Plot Snow claims that by that time Stalin was m the throes of paranoia But if so, he was in the same condition when the charge was made that Gorki had been poisoned in the '30s And the persecution of Stalin's opponents goes back to the '20s—Joffe's suicide resulted from it as did the execution of Blumkin At any rate, if Stalin's terror is to be attributed primarily to his paranoia, then the terror cannot be intelligibly interpreted as the price for dragging Russia into the 20th century Historical necessity has nothing to do with it What repels one in Snow's portrait of Stalin is not so much his errors—he asserts that Stalin had "first class military judgment," something the record does not support—but the spirit in which it is written a kind of sneaking and lll-lepressed admiration for the extent and ruthlessness of power won by a cobbler's son One senses no compassion for the victims of Stahn, no shi inking from the mass horror, no outrage at the torture of innocent men and women, no indignation at the system of institutional terror that made Stalin's absolute rule possible There is, to be sure, a kind of porcine shrewdness m Snow's discernment of the personal weaknesses of the politically powerful It is more m evidence in his treatment of Lloyd George and Churchill than of Stalin An eye for the small sides of the great is one way of equalizing our relations with them Shining through these pages, however, is the soul of a collaborator with whoever occupies the seat of the mighty Snow is on excellent terms with the persecutors of Andrei Smyavsky and Yuli Daniel He has no stomach for lost causes My guess is that had England fallen to its enemies in the last War, he would have been among the first of "the realists" to plead for an accommodation with the inevitable Snow is not a Communist like his friend, John Bernal Since he lacks idealism, he is free of its diseases But he is an impatient anti-anti-Commumst whose rancor agamst those who oppose Communist terror is much more marked than his criticism of those who practice it...