Utopia in Power
Menashe, Louis
BOOKS Through the eyes of emigres Not a day goes by without hearing about Mr. Gorbachev's glasnost ("openness"). Have you also heard some of the inevitable puns? Through the glasnost,...
...They are products of an enforced isolation from Western realities...
...True...
...The authors are familiar with a great range of sources, especially literary ones, and often draw on them for an anecdote or illustration...
...It was enough for Gorbachev, then the number two man in the Kremlin, to bring with him a wife who differed little in outward appearance from Western women for the conclusion to be drawn that, since Gorbachev did not have a fat wife, all the talk about Soviet totalitarianism must be false...
...But it runs a bit deeper than that...
...Not Cromwell, Robespierre, or Torquemada...
...Louis Menashe This point of view is.common among the Soviet emigres, whether they are professional scholars, like Nekrich and Heller, or from other walks of their previous Soviet life...
...Moreover, they have uncritically assimilated Soviet propaganda about nonexisting successes as well as Soviet claims of presumed support and sympathy of Western intellectuals...
...Was Lenin "the first to discover the secret of" — the authors take the phrase from Hitler — blending '"spirit and brute force...
...however defined, it is a "structure unique in human history" and "the most inhuman system that ever existed.'' There is no room for genuine improvement in such a society and no capacity for accepting change in such an absolutist view of that society...
...This is an embarrassing chapter in Western intellectual/political history...
...What accounts for this odd, wrongheaded kind of perception...
...It is that they think that no one in the West knows about these things, that somehow everyone is a Soviet sympathizer or underestimates Soviet malevolence...
...This wrap-up is consistent with much of the authors' tone, themes, and outlook throughout the text...
...The one novel interpretation I could find in the book is a piece of revisionist history about McCarthy ism in the U.S...
...over the last forty years, they would have discovered information, views, and analysis not substantially different from their own...
...Here, the authors differ little from traditional anti-Communism and antiSovietism of the Reaganite sort...
...the menace of the USSR must never be minimized if the project is to "Wake Up, America...
...I Suspect the authors are caught off guard by the Gorbachev phenomenon, just as virtually all Sovietologists were baffled by Khrushchev and deStalinization...
...The Soviet Union has come a long way in the past half century: the new leaders have computers...
...This is precisely the thing Gorbachev is struggling against...
...Something else animates the authors of such a text: the freedom to write critically of the USSR to their heart's content, a pleasure they could not enjoy back home...
...Not much...
...What they fail to appreciate is that this kind of writing is common coin in the West, more prevalent in the U.S...
...Thus, at a time when the image of the USSR was never darker in the U.S., when the antiCommunist crusade washed the academies, the professions, and the media clean of anyone to the left of Adlai Stevenson, when Paul Nitze's NSC-68 (and George Kennan's earlier Mr...
...He understands the evil empire...
...X article on containment of the USSR) helped define the framework and legitimacy for the military-industrial-university complex and the national security state that have become permanent features of our domestic life — at this historical moment Nekrich and Heller see only that the Soviet Union "benefited" and that many were driven into the "Soviet camp...
...Now they can vent longsuppressed opinions or merely set down simple, hard facts that were impermissible in print (or otherwise) in the closely watched domain of Soviet historiography...
...Do Heller and Nekrich offer any theoretical framework for understanding the USSR in the era of Gorbachev...
...One can always point to a Sartre, a Walter Duranty, an Ambassador Davies, and even a George Bernard Shaw in the catalogue of Westerners who at one time or another whitewashed Soviet crimes or badly misunderstood what was going on...
...I prefer to think the glasnost is half full...
...This peculiar attitude imparts a certain energy and zeal to a Soviet history text by Soviet emigre's — the missionaries' confidence of bringing enlightenment to the pagans...
...Was George Orwell "perhaps the only Western writer who profoundly understood the essence of the Soviet world...
...Through the glasnost, darkly...
...everywhere they see the triumphs, for example, of Soviet foreign policy, and the failures of the wimpy West, which always acts as if it were serving Soviet interests...
...If they had it their way, they would elect Ronald Reagan president for life...
...After the Revolution were the Bolsheviks smothered "with generosity" by the West and was such a policy "to become standard" between the USSR and the West...
...I am not alluding to a simple disregard for the facts, a characteristic not unknown in official Soviet pronouncements as in Soviet historiography...
...What I mean is the triumphalist mode of discourse, the quality of converting every episode into a net achievement, failures into successes, losses into their dialectical opposites...
...The "essence" of the Soviet system they alternately define as terror, or ideology, or one-man rule, or "absence of principle," or a structure of elite privileges, or the oxymoronic, eponymous "utopia in power...
...Rather than tearing the scales from our eyes, therefore, the book clouds them over...
...It is not that they are wrong about the Soviet past, with its terrors, personality cults, cultural philistinism, social inequalities, convulsive economic policies, bullying of small neighbors, and increasing global influence...
...that takes your breath away: The Soviet Union also benefited from the anti-Communist hysteria sweeping the United States . . . 8 May 1987: 297 which drove prominent American liberals into the Soviet camp and put many intellectuals who had been critical of the Soviet Union on the spot...
...They feared being taken as supporters of the "cold war" and the McCarthyites...
...Sheer antiSoviet wrath helps explain it...
...298: Commonweal...
...Instead, they seem to think that if it weren't for Solzhenitsyn or the dissidents or Nekrich and Heller, the West would still be ignorant of the dark heart and dirty hands of the USSR...
...than anywhere else...
...but for the American edition the authors squeezed in some arch commmentary on the new leader: His visit to Britain in December 1984 eloquently demonstrated how easy it is to charm Westerners...
...Ironically, the anti-Soviet emigres, Heller and Nekrich, share in this very Soviet tendency to inflate Soviet accomplishments...
...The authors' zeal becomes tedious, some of their formulations hyperbolic...
...There is something, how shall I put it, so soviet about the above and many other passages, especially in relation to foreign affairs...
...In the late 1920s Bukharin called Stalin Genghis Khan with a telephone...
...reform programs are designed to streamline the system, not alter it fundamentally, nor make it more benevolent...
...The book was completed before Gorbachev...
...For Heller and Nekrich, two Soviet emigre historians now at the Sorbonne and Harvard respectively, the USSR was, is, and will always be totalitarian...
...Nor do they offer much hope...
...If the authors had taken the trouble to survey the mainstream histories of the USSR written and published in the U.S...
...After a few years of having Soviet emigre students in my Russian history courses, I have come to accept this attitude as an unshakable part of their worldview...
...UTOPIA IN POWER THE HISTORY OF THE SOVIET UNION FROM 1917 TO THE PRESENT Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich Summit, $24.95, 877 pp...
...But they provide not a single insight nor a body of information that has not already been aired in the West...
...The authors are unwitting victims of the very Soviet environment they justly decry...
...Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich are not above such drollery in their massive and muchacclaimed history...
...Is the glasnost half- filled or half-empty...
...and Westerners, particularly the Western intelligentsia, especially Soviet experts, the media, and even government leaders, are naive, and easily taken in by Soviet window dressing (or Raissa Gorbachev's dressing...
...Already Nekrich has been quoted in a recent newspaper article regarding the Gorbachev reforms that "Between words and deeds there is still a big, big difference...
...But it is also true that, to use the authors' categories, between the terror, ideology, and one-man rule of previous epochs of Soviet history and the present one, there is also a big, big difference...
...But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that ultimately, with the coming of the "cold war," views that were soft on the USSR had little clout and were reduced to the margins of political life, especially in the U.S...
...analysis is overwhelmed by invective and name-calling, not to mention misstatements and misunderstandings...
...Ideally, the most appropriate audience for their text is the Soviet public, but it will take a heap of glasnost before that can happen...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 9
