The Use and Abuse of Sovietology

...In the 1930s, this defeatist attitude found its political expression in the policy known as "appeasement...

...In the 1970s, according to Labedz, similar attitudes formed the intellectual underpinnings of detente...

...Realism" meant that in evaluating history's handiwork one must set aside one's moral scruples and repeat, with Hegel, that "whatever is real, is rational...

...All this, of course, is entirely speculative...

...As a young American diplomat writing from Prague in the aftermath of Munich, Kennan expressed the hope that the Czechs would set aside "political romanticism" and reconcile themselves to the verdict of history, which would lead to "greater economic security and greater racial tolerance for the Czechoslovak people sadly in need of both...

...In a brilliantly perceptive essay published in 1979, Labedz described "the two minds of George Kennan," and demonstrated how his psychological contradictions account for Kennan's evolution "from his original position of advising resistance to Soviet expansionism to the present one of advocating its accommodation...

...D eutscher, Carr, and Kennan: One could hardly imagine a more vivid study in contrasts than those between the Marxist-Rabbi, the Cambridge Hegelian, and the American Preacher...

...His friend Zbigniew Brzezinski has rightly called him "an activist-scholar .. . with an ability to work in many languages and with a wide knowledge of history, political science, sociology, and other social sciences...

...Unlike Carr, Kennan's views sprang less from "realism" than from a kind of historical fatalism, a feeling that there is not much human beings can do about history, apart from accepting, and adjusting to, the inevitable...

...Deutscher's unwavering commitment to historical determinism, and his view of Stalin as history's agent, led Labedz to launch a furious attack on him in the pages of Survey—an attack which must have drawn blood, since Deutscher threatened to sue Labedz for libel...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 45...

...Leo understood the two myths, and the mortal dangers of both Gulag and Kazett...

...Last March, Survey brought out a special issue, "The Use and Abuse of Sovietology" (now published in hardcover by Transaction Books) containing sixteen essays written by Labedz over the past twenty-five years...

...For many years now, often under precarious financial circumstances, Labedz has edited Survey, one of the finest journals on East-West relations in the world today...

...A product of Cambridge and the Foreign Office, and a former Deputy Editor of the Times, Carr's background was very different from Deutscher's, yet both men were gifted writers who became subtle apologists for Stalin...

...Leo Labedz is an intellectual in the older, honorable sense of the term...

...According to Labedz, a growing disenchantment with American politics and culture has led Kennan, in his old age, to return to the fatalism of his Munich days and repudiate the activism of his middle years...

...Like Encounter, with which it shares a similar political outlook, Survey is published in London but probably enjoys a wider readership on this side of the Atlantic, an anomaly best explained, perhaps, by the fact that British intellectuals are even more estranged from reality than their American counterparts...

...Nor are they any more willing than Americans to listen to the truth about Soviet domestic and foreign policy, especially when it comes from someone who speaks with a funny Polish accent, thinks they're a bunch of bloody fools, and is not afraid to say so...

...For as this collection of essays makes plain, Leo Labedz has, for a quarter of a century, been more than a perceptive analyst of Soviet affairs...

...It is tempting to relate Labedz's unswerving belief in "historical alternatives" to the events of his own dramatic life...

...It also left him, I should think, with an abiding sense that alternatives always exist, that there is no such thing as historical inevitability, and that even when one is confronted witha choice of evils, choosing the lesser evil can mean the difference between life and death, survival and annihilation...

...Another supporter of the Munich Agreement, destined like Carr to become a distinguished historian of Soviet affairs, was George Kennan...

...A supplementary argument for the Soviet form of detente is that whatever the current conduct of the Soviet leadership, international detente will in the long run, more or less automatically, lead to an improvement in the Soviet treatment of its own citizens . ." It is almost as though Western policymakers, having learned their Soviet history from Deutscher and Carr, set out to fashion a policy which incorporated the "realist" and determinist assumptions of their mentors...

...But when I reflect on what intellectuals used to be—free-spirited polymaths, fluent in several languages and disciplines, able to integrate their wide-ranging knowledge and bring it to bear on current affairs—I am reluctantly forced to conclude that such intellectuals may well be an endangered species, soon to be superseded by academic specialists who know everything about nothing, and pop-journalists who know nothing about everything...

...One of his aunts, recalling memories of the First World War and the Kaiser, chose to move westward toward "civilized Germany...

...Only a few of them, in identifying themselves with it so irrevocably, went as far as to commit actual treason, but many engaged in la trahison des clercs...

...Carr's proSovietism, however, did not derive from a quasi-religious faith in history...

...In an appreciation of Aron published in 1977, Labedz identified himself completely with Aron's position...

...Though he is not much read today, at one time Deutscher was regarded as a veritable Walter Lippmann among Sovietologists...

...Of course, not all students of Soviet affairs have subscribed to these views...

...But this streak of fatalism in Kennan's character has been constantly at odds with another, more activist strain, which led him to advocate the "containment" of Soviet aggression in the 1940s...

...As it turned out, between Siberia and Holocaust, he saw his entire family suffer great casualties, leaving him with an acute sense of how both German National-Socialism and Soviet Communism were manifestations of the same tragic phenomenon of totalitarianism...

...He believed that going West would mean certain death and that going East, while perilous, would at least offer a chance to survive...

...And in an article advocating Britain's entry into the Common Market, published back in 1971, Labedz was quite explicit about his own philosophy of history...

...Others chose to run eastward toward the "progressive anti-fascist homeland of socialism...

...With the wartime partition of Poland between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, many families had to face the stark choice of deciding whether to flee East or West, into THE USE AND ABUSE OF SOVIETOLOGY Leopold Labedz/Transaction Books (a reprint of Survey, March 1988)/$39.95 Joseph Shattan 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 Nazi- or Soviet-occupied territory...

...The result, according to Labedz, has been "an almost schizoid political dualism" which Kennan has been unable to overcome...

...As a tireless champion of Soviet dissidents, and a relentless critic of the trendy leftism that dominates intellectual life in Great Britain and America today, Labedz has been a moral presence...

...Shortly before his death, for example, the great French political commentator, Raymond Aron, affirmed his belief that there are times "when lucidity and a bit of courage can suffice to alter the future...

...Whatever it is, though, we could all use a good, stiff dose of it...

...Rather, it stemmed from a political stance characterized by Carr as "realism...

...As he put it in a 1974 essay, "Those who defend the policy of detente in the way in which it is understood in the Soviet Union argue that international negotiations between powers are simply a matter of realistic policies to which ethical issues are irrelevant...

...Born in 1907 to an Orthodox Polish-Jewish family, Deutscher chose to place his trust in History, rather than in the Lord of History who had inspired his forebears, and joined the Polish Communist Party at the age of nineteen...

...Take, for example, the writings of Isaac Deutscher...

...But what these three Sovietologists have in common is a conviction that in the grand historical scheme of things, human choice and volition count for very little...

...Sometimes it seems to me that far from being endangered, intellectuals—particularly those associated with the media—are among the dominant groups of our society, and exploit their dominance to threaten the rest of us...

...Like Lippmann, Deutscher was usually wrong, but his flawed prophecies, far from diminishing his intellectual stature, seemed only to enhance it...

...If intellectuals such as he are truly an endangered species, Labedz's life and achievement remind us why it is vital for our civilization that they endure...

...But there is nothing automatic about it, just as there is nothing inevitable about 'post-imperial decline.' Historical alternatives do exist...

...Subsequently, this same "realistic" stance caused Carr, in his multi-volume history of the Soviet Union, to identify with the nomenklatura rather than with its victims...

...As Zbigniew Brzezinski notes in his introduction to this anthology: Leo Labedz was 19 years old in 1939, having returned from studies in Paris and living again in his native Poland...

...The simple truth is that nobody knows what makes Leo Labedz tick...

...Labedz's indictment of this attitude is right on target: "Carr," he explained, "was only one of a number of intellectuals fascinated with power who at the time of its decline in Britain were looking with nostalgic sympathy at the rising new empire...

...These erudite, argumentative, passionately Joseph Shattan, a frequent contributor, is a writer living in Washington, D.0 outspoken essays encompass an extremely broad range of political, literary, and philosophical themes, but what binds them together is Labedz's activist approach to history—an approach that stresses the ability of human beings to overcome historical adversity and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat...

...Such a view might seem to be little more than sturdy common sense, yet it is remarkable how much of contemporary political and scholarly discourse has been informed by a very different set of assumptions...

...In 1939, Carr's "realistic" acceptance of German hegemony led him to endorse the Munich Agreement of 1938, calling it "the nearest approach in recent years to the settlement of a major issue by a procedure of peaceful change...

...Since the First World War," he wrote, "we have known that civilizations are mortal...

...ore than twenty years after his assault on Deutscher, Labedz launched an equally devastating attack against Deutscher's friend and fellow Sovietologist, Edward Hallett Carr...

...Although he was expelled from the party in 1932, and eventually became a regular contributor to the Observer and the Economist, as well as a world-famous biographer of Stalin and Trotsky, Deutscher always retained what Labedz called, in a famous polemic published in 1962, "his own private unpuzzled vision of a Communist wave of the future...

...This belief, Aron declared, "is part of my philosophy of history...