REVIEWS
Kohák, Erazim & Hall, Robert F. & Giarelli, Andrew L.
THE CHALLENGE OF THE SPIRIT, by Boris Shragin. Translated by P. S. Falla. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 262 pp. $10.00. THE PUNISHED PEOPLES, by Aleksandr M. Nekrich. Translated by George Saunders....
...If this explains the failure of the liberals, how explain the failure of the Communists...
...THESE BOOKS work because they are deeply aware that whenever we tell history, we are really just telling stories...
...I could have qualified as a Southern liberal under Sosna's implied definition...
...Roosevelt to endorse and address a conference of Southern liberals...
...The second section, "Survivors," is a much more select group...
...The cynicism of leading Soviet Marxists about Marxism—if vodka or blood ties loosen their tongues—is shocking even to a non-Marxist...
...The "separate but equal" concept, however, still underlay the entire program...
...As a cub reporter 490 on the Mobile Register at the age of 18, I covered a meeting of Negroes addressed by Oscar De Priest, then the only black congressman, and wrote of it sympathetically...
...Supreme Court decision in Brown vs...
...These people form Namias's most diverse group: refugees from Communist bloc nations, illegal aliens, arrivals from United States territories, and young immigrants from many of the same places that sent millions in the first three decades of this century...
...The Renaissance alone would lead to anarchism or despotism...
...For too long have we tended to see the Soviet Union in terms of the ideological facade that its rulers chose to project...
...Like Rousseau before him, Solzhenitsyn sees modernization solely as social disintegration...
...That, ironically, is progress...
...Bloch and Reddaway's book makes ominous reading, both as an examination of the kind of threat that anyone who choses to live in truth in the Soviet Union must face and as a reflection on Western therapeutic practice...
...Three authors, Sergei Elagin, German Andreev, and Lev Z. Kopelev, each focusing on his specialty, address themselves to Solzhenitsyn's thesis that the only authentically Russian heritage is Russian Orthodox...
...Nekrich, writing, at the time, within the Soviet Union, deserves great credit both for his courage in speaking out and for his deep, humanistic sympathy for the nations he describes...
...The Jewish Frontier, monthly organ of Labor Zionism, had seemed rather somnolent for some time, but it now has a new young editor, Mitchell Cohen, who is putting some energy into it...
...12.95...
...Anywhere else in1he world that would hardly be progress...
...Yet, the Eurocommunists are commited to dismantling that shield...
...Afro-Americans stockpile their well-earned rage while watching "Roots" and then ignite it—in the high schools and outside the kung-fu movie houses...
...Shragin knows that...
...But he never released that information for fear of being charged with aiding the Communists...
...Soon, I imagine, every real ethnic group and a few invented ones will depend on TV sitcom as the fit vehicle for disseminating its story...
...These incidents suggest that to focus exclusively on white liberals during the early struggles for civil rights in the South is so limiting as to be misleading...
...How alien to our usual notions about history is such logic...
...Here is none of the muted fear with which Lucy Skipwith approaches the demise of plantation life, none of the inarticulate rambling of the teenaged immigrants in First Generation...
...We cannot decide who will rule over us, but we can decide over whom they will rule, whether over a nation of serfs or over free humans in transient bondage...
...He is not unwilling to remind Cocke of the latter's promise to send other Skipwiths to Liberia...
...They attacked the Jim Crow laws as the major obstacle...
...They already knew who they were...
...Is the reintegration represented by the internalization of the moral law really possible—or will we move only as far as the disintegration represented by its autonomization...
...That year also saw Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Miller's narrators are not deceptive the way scholars like to think that slaves were deceptive...
...The Russian in-the-street may have no great love for the authorities, but he has no understanding for people who deviate from the mores or disrupt the prevailing pattern of paternalism...
...At times we accepted it at its word, at other times we questioned it but, 484 throughout, the Soviet state and its MarxistLeninist ideology remained our basic reference point...
...Sometimes he shifts from the former to the latter within the same story: as soon as Masauwu the Fire Spirit allots lands to various Hopi clans, for example, Yava begins speculation on the historic claims of those clans...
...489 IN SEARCH OF THE SILENT SOUTH: SOUTHERN LIBERALS AND THE RACE ISSUE, by Morton Sosna...
...But it was the only way out: no removal, no freedom...
...C. Vann Woodward, a Southern historian whom I have long admired, once wrote me a very angry letter in which he charged that my very existence in the South played into the hands of anti-Negro firebrands...
...But the Emperor may well be wearing fewer clothes than we realize and, in the samizdat, there has arisen a boy either naive or honest enough to say so...
...Medvedev, interestingly, agrees with Solzhenitsyn on one crucial point: he, too, regards Marxism as essentially or at least potentially a modernizing movement, albeit deeply corrupted by Stalin and his successors...
...He reveals himself as an accomplished jostler for a share of the power...
...Transplanted to the West as Eurocommunism, Czechoslovak "socialism with a human face" is now enjoying its Indian summer behind the NATO shield...
...It hardly seems to be...
...Their approach may in fact be the only feasible strategy of transition from the present harsh rule to eventual independence for all the conquered nations, including my own...
...His call is to reintegrate what the Westernizing Marxist regimes disintegrated, by a return to the traditional values and structures of Russia...
...In part, as Bloch and Reddaway, two British scholars with insiders' knowledge of Soviet therapeutic practice, recognize in Psychiatric Terror (an abominable and most inappropriate title), the problem may be a lack of confidence in the state of the psychiatric art...
...As for the Communists, we were highly critical of most of Sosna's white liberals for their failure to attack segregation...
...So much "ethnic history," especially the kind that promises to be told by participants themselves, scrupulously avoids provoking thought...
...History-tellers normally want to impart more than a sense of continuity...
...Two years later, in 1836, he can calmly note that "that day of awful gloom is gone and I feel satisfied with my present home and desire no other...
...Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press...
...I AM NOT at all disposed to apologize for such militant activity as the Communist party practiced in the South up to the end of World War II (although I blush to recall the party's 1930 manifesto demanding the establishment of a Negro Republic in the Black Belt...
...It was the year of the Freedom Marchers, the assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, and of a white civil rights crusader from Baltimore on a roadside near Attala, Alabama...
...But if the courage of the white liberals, though ineffective, is worth a book, the courage of Southern Communists during those three decades justifies some footnotes...
...Not only the story is cherished but also the elements in it that make it one with other "different" stories...
...A gradual transformation of Soviet Marxism into a socialist democracy is highly unlikely...
...Russia not only suffers from its "peculiar institutions," it also needs them...
...Board of Education mandated school desegregation, rejecting the "separate but equal" concept to which these liberals had so long appealed...
...TOO MANY oral history projects are spoiled by interviewers already decided on what they want to hear and by timid subjects only too glad to let themselves be rehearsed...
...The decision posed the issue of civil rights not merely for the South but for the whole nation, where it properly belonged...
...More in love with story than we ever like to admit when we confront our history, we Americans nevertheless hunt for essences and stereotypes to make sense out of those stories...
...The SCHW was to function for several years under the leadership of Clark Foreman, Dr...
...The Soviet Union has two types of mental institutions: one operated by the public health service, the second by the ideological police, two psychiatric staffs with a similar double allegiance, and two sets of patients, one recognized as "really" ill, the other acknowledged as imprisoned...
...Though himself a Russian, he writes with a genuine compassion of the "punished peoples" love for their land, their pride in their language, and of the utter brutality of the deportation...
...But mostly these letters, all written by various members of the 493 Skipwith family in Alabama and Liberia to Virginia aristocrat John Hartwell Cocke, form a surprisingly mundane tale of marling and manuring, of the progress of crops and livestock...
...The book stops almost ten years short of the cataclysmic demonstrations of 1963, which saw Governor Wallace "stand in the schoolhouse door" at the University of Alabama to protest the enrollment of a black student...
...He was busy getting me out of Bull Connor's jail when he was kidnapped and beaten by goons of the Tennessee Coal & Iron Co., a subsidiary of U.S...
...Neither do I wish to exaggerate the effects of our activity...
...He is small and alone, but his voice might well prove to have the strength of truth...
...They do not seem to cover anger and rebelliousness with their displays of loyalty...
...Their storytellers harvest commonplace details indiscriminately and lovingly, just as we do when we tell what we have accomplished at the end of the day...
...Thereby an error in perspective was corrected, which from the beginning had hampered the Southern liberals...
...As Sosna relates, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare was conceived by Joseph S. Gelders, who left his post as physics professor at the University of Alabama to head the National Committee for Defense of Political Prisoners...
...Seen through Western eyes or through the eyes of Russian modernizers, Solzhenitsyn may appear hopelessly reactionary...
...Those two terms indicate less discrete historical events than fundamental movements of the European spirit...
...10.95...
...Russia has never passed through a renaissance and a reformation...
...As Peter the Great found out earlier, it is not possible to foster modernity, the autonomization and internalization of the moral law, while preserving autocracy...
...Still, this is a horrifying phenomenon, and it is more than disquieting that it has not aroused a storm of indignation in the West...
...Its program, as laid down at Birmingham, was by far the most progressive of any Southern liberal organization...
...We fail when we confuse history with reality—whether we try to make too much sense out of it with grand theories, or whether we try to relive it, like Yava's culture-hungry neighbors...
...Solzhenitsyn, most familiar and probably least comprehensible to the West, can be used as a symbol of the traditionalist end of the spectrum...
...Of course not...
...The universal significance of the Renaissance is not its classical scholarship but rather its separation of morality from mores...
...But that is less than fair...
...The charge of communism was an ever recurring nightmare to the liberals...
...But she possesses the gift of provoking an extended and committed narrative...
...Lucy seems to become more attuned to mundane rituals with each passing year of the conflict...
...they called for complete social equality and never fell into the "separate but equal" trap...
...But Khrushchev's attempt was stifled by the Soviet system...
...491 But the red scare was used by conservatives to oppose the relatively progressive policies of the organization, and in 1954 Mrs...
...but, in the Russian heartland of the empire, it is a faithful expression of the spirit of a nation that, overtly, may even reject it...
...As reality increasingly deviated from ideology, it could not give up its ideology without giving up its legitimacy...
...In Russia the representatives of human rights face a harder task: they 487 have to be modernizers of their nation as well as protesters against their state...
...But therein lies the rub...
...Bethune...
...Translated from Erazim Kohak, Narod v nas, circulating as samizdat in Czechoslovakia...
...Today, the possibility for an internal reformation of Marxism seems highly problematic...
...Certainly, they correctly recognized black and white unity as the essential element in success...
...He is not being disrespectful but is in fact showing the ultimate respect toward the myth...
...In the whole sad story, only the tenacious loyalty of even the second and third generations of the deportees to their land and language offers a ray of hope for all the peoples trapped in the Soviet prison house of nations...
...The Czechoslovak experiment, moving along Krushchev's lines, accepted the consequence of surrendering autocracy—and was promptly crushed by Soviet tanks...
...Together they make a convincing case that even Russia's Christian heritage provides a legitimate basis for modernization, not only for a reaffirmation of the premodern Russia...
...314 pp...
...The conference was held in the municipal auditorium in Birmingham in November 1938 with an impressive list of Southern leaders in industry, education, government, labor, religion, and journalism in attendance...
...To Western observers, that passionate earnestness often seems naive...
...One looks in vain through "Dear Master" and its 31 years of correspondence for any reference to the debate over slavery...
...It has retained a byzantine mentality, which would transform any ideology and any system into yet another version of caesaropapism...
...Is it a realistic hope...
...Peyton's ultimate praise of Liberia as the only proper home for American blacks, as well as his pleas for more help in civilizing that country's heathens, must also be regarded as bits of smart politicking...
...A commitment to a mental hospital can be accomplished with a minimum of fuss and publicity...
...It is a literary urge...
...In Sakharov's writing, the problem of modernization emerges most clearly...
...one does not need to know of his taste for alcohol and other men's wives to see how pragmatically he regarded his role in Cocke's "school for freedom...
...An exercise in courage or militance for a worthy cause is, I believe, never wasted, even though its tangible result is impossible to measure...
...In Russia, should some Chinese miracle bring on an abrupt demise of the Soviet regime, Solzhenitsyn's conception of a moral orthodoxy and autocracy may prove the only viable alternative to the present Marxist one and, while perhaps better, it would not be good...
...Boston: Beacon Press...
...281 pp...
...As baggage on their way to Liberia they were supposed to pick up notions of scientific agriculture, a hatred of liquor, and an austere Presbyterianism—besides exemplary obedience to Cocke...
...Such deportations, to be sure, are nothing new in imperial history...
...It is the misfortune of the modernized lands under its rule—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary—that such 485 peculiar institutions cannot be applied selectively...
...Two retired Italian-American stonecutters—one eloquent but preachy, the other a follower—hash out a mutually acceptable history of labor troubles in Barre, Vermont...
...Shragin's insight is also central to understanding the spectrum of Russia's spontaneous thought and literature...
...Very few of the liberals embraced the objective of desegregation, fearing the charge that they desired "social equality...
...After threescore years of elaborate ideological construction, the Soviet empire presents a vision of an almost total alienation of theory from practice...
...I I f there is nothing sublime in the commonplace," argues historian Randall Miller in his introduction to one segment of Dear Master, "there is continuity...
...This is the significance of the "sam" in samizdat: it is spontaneous literature, ordered by no one, directed by no one, produced at no one's behest by the readers themselves...
...ALBERT YAVA'S VOICE in Big Falling Snow is the most ironic of all among these histories...
...Spontaneity, not any ideological sophistication or the number of its supporters, is what makes this unauthorized literature of the Soviet empire significant...
...These books will earn mistrust because of their subject matter as well as their style...
...Frank Graham, and Virginia Foster Durr...
...Though unspoken, their aim was to achieve a status for blacks in the South comparable to that in the North that, in the 1930s, was hardly one of equality...
...While, in the name of sophistication, we, like our Soviet counterparts, seek to explain individual freedom in terms of systematic necessity, Russia's proscribed authors look for a key to the complexity of the system in the spontaneity of human freedom...
...The Caucasian deportations are important, less because they are unique than because they are typical...
...Yet, there is a difference, and Bloch and 488 Reddaway document it scrupulously, citing not only their own experiences and the testimony of the dissidents but also official Soviet sources...
...Its second weakness is its lack of popular support...
...Shragin is Russian to the marrow of his bones, as Russian as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, or Solzhenitsyn...
...Maybe they discovered too early the irony of how expendable they were despite their big dreams...
...The beating permanently injured his heart and he died in California in 1950...
...Shragin's basic recognition is that the Soviet Union's "peculiar institutions" owe far less to Karl Marx than to the spirit of Russia itself...
...She speaks haltingly of Cocke's proposal that she go to Liberia, and she explains her wish to visit Virginia...
...The inertia of the system is such that Amalrik's scenario could overtake in a rush such progress as Russia's modernizers might achieve...
...He counters the stock argument that the deportations were a punishment for collaboration with convincing evidence of the deported nations' loyalty to the Soviets at the time of the German onslaught...
...Eurocommunism can survive only behind the NATO shield, as the occupation of Czechoslovakia proved beyond the shadow of a doubt...
...To medieval Europe—witness John of Salisbury— that distinction would have been incomprehensible...
...in the period from the early 1930s to the early 1950s when the U.S...
...BIG FALLING SNOW, by Albert Yava...
...The mixed seating of black and white in the auditorium violated the city's segregation ordinance and Bull Connor's police showed up to enforce the law...
...Among the Soviet empire's other subject nations with a tradition of modernity this emphasis has clearly come into the focus of spontaneous thought and action, as in the Czech Charter 77 or the Polish Committee for the Defense of the Society...
...One gets the feeling that Philip and Theresa Bonacorsi of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Nicholas Gerros (a "Greek Horatio Alger," says Namias) and their contemporaries in these pages do not see their stories as dramas of self-definition...
...The Soviet state is powerful: it leaves no room for opposition or dissent...
...The spontaneous literature that is now emerging in English translations presents a very different picture...
...His positive demand is for legality, but that is again less than neo-Marxism, especially in view of Zimin's recognition that the total state monopoly of initiative is incapable of regeneration...
...I lived and worked in Mobile until 1929 when I came north to Columbia College...
...the deal will never become reciprocal...
...8.95...
...In their own eyes, they are simply people weary of pretense, people who have chosen to live in truth: to say what they are and be what they say...
...He and the people loosely associated with him regard themselves as loyal subjects of the Soviet state, operating strictly within the limits of its laws and even in harmony with its stated aims of freedom and justice, even though not with its feudal spirit...
...178 pp...
...That spectrum is not defined by its views of Marxism, today largely irrelevant, but rather based on its attitude toward the modernization of Russian society...
...We agreed it would be helpful for Mrs...
...But where morality is communal rather than individually internalized, the individual, as individual, remains lawless and social coexistence possible only under the constraint of despotism...
...I attended that convention and submitted the resolutions to Walter Jones, the Negro assistant to District President Bill Mitch of the United Mine Workers...
...Jewish Frontier, 575 Sixth Ave., New York City...
...Bethune called "the tallest tree in our forest," sang and spoke briefly, calling for a resolution for clemency for the Scottsboro Boys and the end of Jim Crow...
...Even the term "sam-izdat" is indicative...
...The Gosizdat's omnipresent productions are official, centrally directed—and so suspect: for truth must bear the mark of spontaneity...
...Lacking a clear vision of moral humanity—or, more antiseptically, of "mental health"— psychiatry the world over tends to fall back on a vague notion of "adjustment"—basically, conformity to prevailing mores...
...New York: Crown...
...One of those still indentured was Peyton's brother George, entrusted with the position of slave-driver at Cocke's absentee-owned Alabama plantation...
...Gelders made contact with President and Mrs...
...Roosevelt not through Lucy Randolph Mason, as Sosna reports, but through two ILGWU organizers from Tupelo, Mississippi, whose youth and dedication had attracted Mrs...
...And Randall Miller is so charmed by the dutifully mundane "Dear Master" letters of one slave family that he occasionally judges them according to the standards of their "enlightened" owner, as if Miller had been tricked into thinking that the letters were addressed to him...
...12.95...
...What Sakharov is trying to do is not to change the system but to change the mentality that rules it, insisting on the autonomy and internal validity of the moral law...
...There is the very shocking case of Will Alexander who early in the Scottsboro case learned from the Huntsville police that Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, whom the young men were charged with raping, were prostitutes...
...With the U.S.S.R...
...Actually, none of us exerted any influence in SCHW except for our small part in its launching...
...261 pp...
...Boris Shragin gives a penetrating description of the consequences...
...The difference is not only the primitive state of Soviet psychiatry—committed, by official edict, to the teachings of Pavlov and to dealing with all mental disorders as either overstimulation or understimulation, to be countered by massive doses of sedatives or stimulants...
...DEAR MASTER": LETTERS OF A SLAVE FAMILY, edited by Randall M. Miller...
...Strangely, these final stories are the least interesting...
...My mother came from a slaveowning family in Monroe county, Alabama...
...The tragedy of the Southern liberals and the Southern Communists is that a potential for great achievement was squandered...
...It would be misleading to describe Sakharov as pro- or anti-Marxist or, for that matter, as pro- or anti-Soviet...
...VII IN FACE of the total monopoly of initiative at the disposal of the Soviet state, how significant can the phenomenon of spontaneous thought in Russia be...
...That, after all, was Khrushchev's policy: revitalizing Marxism by reforming its Stalinist deformations...
...He is not ashamed to remind us that a particular myth is important because it presents the usual Hopi "theme of dissension and evil, and search for a place of harmony...
...I am Mrs...
...In countries where the Renaissance was not followed by an internalization of the moral law but was cut short by some form of external imposition of social order—as in France, Austria, or Italy—democracy remained problematic, a slogan of anarchic autonomy in a perennial dialectic with a countervailing tyranny...
...The pressing issue is not Marxism, its preservation, reformation, or destruction, but the spiritual modernization of Russia...
...The conquered people owe the Soviets nothing...
...The conception of a "Silent South" was first posited in 1885 by George Washington Cable, who was convinced that the majority of Southern whites were sympathetic to or would accept justice for Negroes—held back only by their fear of the loudmouth bigots who established post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws...
...What emerges from The Samizdat Register is that neo-Marxism is not a viable alternative, even though it might be the most viable strategy of transformation—if the Soviet state were seeking such strategies, which it emphatically is not...
...If the courts were unnecessary or completely docile, this would make little difference...
...B ehind the facade of Soviet ideology, there is a tremendous longing for the clear, pure word of truth...
...Nor is it simply the use of such concepts as "sluggish schizophrenia," a disease characterized by a total absence of visible symptoms and serving as convenient grounds for the involuntary commitment of anyone whom the authorities do not want to put on trial but prefer not to have around...
...The audience accepted the separation under protest and adopted a strong resolution attacking this segregation...
...In Europe, such a free society in fact developed fully only in the lands that passed both through a renaissance and a reformation, the autonomization and the internalization of morality...
...Namias cultivates her most absorbing narratives 494 in the earlier sections of First Generation...
...If the moral law is not binding as mores that is, in terms of communal coercion—it is not binding at all unless each individual recognizes it as intimately his own, as Kant's "moral law within...
...PSYCHIATRIC TERROR, by Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway...
...they distance themselves from their subjects in order to make events look as if they could have been meaningful even without the help of historians...
...Any critique of mores appears intrinsically immoral—while the authority of mores/morality remains wholly external, binding only where it can be made so by the vigilance of the community or the authorities...
...This was a fatal flaw...
...Confession is the prerequisite to absolution...
...But the punitive use of therapy, already "pioneered" by the Czar against Chadaayev in 1854, has played a special role in Russian history...
...Roosevelt's attention...
...495...
...A tough, fearless black from Harlem, an unsung hero named Al Murphy, met us and arranged the meeting with about 20 sharecroppers, which resulted in a delegation coming to Washington for what we called a Farmers National Committee for Action...
...V THE COLLECTION of Sakharov's occasional writings, Alarm and Hope, is a "slice-of-life" book, a day— really, a year—in the life of a Russian humanist...
...Only her last letter, dated December 7, 1865, reveals a crack in the facade...
...Paul Robeson, whom Mrs...
...Rather, they lie about the influence of what we call history upon their lives...
...Zimin's critique of Stalin's monopolization of power would apply to Lenin as well...
...But Russia never passed through either a renaissance or a reformation, through either the autonomization or the internalization of the moral law...
...Their speakers seem to have paid for small benefits like an easy adaptation of idiomatic English with the surrender of any purposeful sense of their distinction from other Americans...
...Mitchell and Howard Kester, the Socialists who headed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas (both mentioned by Sosna as liberals), but no merger ever took place...
...And that knowledge fills their voices with—and I am unashamed to say it—a noble irony...
...The civil rights movement in Czechoslovakia, though minute, can count on the tacit sympathy of the overwhelming majority of its fellow citizens...
...Is it wrong, then, to hunger for a heritage...
...Its Russian counterparts cannot...
...The most viable alternative might well come not from the people who reject Marxism or from those seeking to reform it but from those who simply ignore it, focusing their effort on fostering a rule of law and a recognition of human rights as the basis for social coexistence...
...13.00...
...But the Russians who choose the truth are not an opposition or a dissident movement...
...Of 1,200 attending, there were all of six of us...
...We, too, are accustomed to think ideologically...
...Clyde Johnson, a brave young white from Minnesota, was later to live and work underground, risking his life daily, to build that union...
...Neither is A. Zimin's historiographical contribution...
...That is why these books are so sad...
...Emigre edition...
...Equally vain is the attempt to locate these slaves' feelings about the outcome of the Civil War, though house servant Lucy Skipwith throws the pejorative "Yankee" into one snarling sentence and shows pity for plantation whites who have suffered for the Confederacy...
...Communist influence was repeatedly charged, and although Chairman Graham insisted that Communists had never determined its policies, Barry Bingham, Mark Ethridge, and Louise Charlton used this charge as their reason for resigning in 1941...
...Toronto: '68 Publishers, 1978, p. 190...
...224 pp...
...I recall the white president of a local of the United Textile Workers Union who, at a state CIO convention in Gadsden, had to defend himself with his fists for supporting resolutions on civil rights...
...To translate it, literally, as "self-publishing" misses the point...
...Not all parts of it are equally so—not even the most prominent "dissident" can be interesting 24 hours a day...
...New York: Columbia University Press...
...Still, even among the Russians, this emphasis, represented by Andrei Sakharov, is coming increasingly to the forefront, both as the common platform of all free thought and as its cutting edge...
...He has earned the right to say whatever he wishes...
...But, in the meantime, the stability of Russia's despotic paternalism does not rest simply on the undeniable efficiency of the Soviet police, army, and bureaucracy as it does in other Soviet-ruled lands...
...But when I finished at Columbia and returned to the South as Southern secretary of the Communist party at Birmingham in 1933, I and my comrades were apparently a nameless embarrassment to the liberals and therefore do not qualify for mention in this book...
...The June-July issue, for instance, has some strong political commentary about the Begin regime by Marie Syrkin and a revealing interview with Yitzchak Ben Aharon, former secretary-general of the Histadrut, who has the courage to speak frankly about the failures and lapses of the Israeli labor movement even as he urges its revival...
...Whether we speak of macrosociology or of "critical theory," we seek a more sophisticated and less demanding substitute for both truth and reality in a theoretical model that purports to describe the hidden driving forces of History...
...Introduction by Robert Coles...
...Some of every bodys black people in this Neighbourhood have left their homes but us," she concludes...
...To Solzhenitsyn, the disruption of the social fabric required by the autonomization of morality seems inherently destructive...
...510 pp...
...What we today call modernization became possible only when the Renaissance, in the name of reason and classical culture, posited morality as radically autonomous of mores and so made a moral critique of "our way of life" possible and acceptable...
...The book's third major group of letters, from Alabama house servant Lucy Skipwith, are mostly intriguing for what they conceal about slave emotions during the war years...
...If you have read Mari Sandoz's Cheyenne Autumn, you know the scenario, here rendered more horrifying by the anonymous brutality of the Soviet system and the gratuitous cruelty of its agents...
...Robert Coles, who introduces the immigrant oral histories in First Generation, expends some worried prose discounting hypothetical worries that the book's narratives are "skirting fibs, exaggerations, distortions, deceptions...
...They are not even dissidents in the usual sense of proposing an alternative ideology...
...I was born in 1906 in Mississippi...
...IV THE SAME essentially transitional character marks Roy Medvedev's collection of essays, The Samizdat Register...
...Although Sosna seems unaware of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, it was the subject of an important work by Theodore Rosengarten, entitled All God's Dangers: the Life of Nate Shaw, published in 1974...
...Folklorist Harold Courlander claims that Albert Yava, the Tewa-Hopi narrator of Big Falling Snow, assumes the voice of an "external observer" of his own culture...
...The Bolshevik regime, lacking either evident massive popular support or the dynastic legitimacy of the Czars, could base its legitimacy only on its orthodoxy as the sole representative of the "scientific world view," Marxism-Leninism...
...Foreword by Vladimir Bukovsky...
...Nekrich's book is even more interesting as an illustration of the promise and the limitations of the "reformist" approach...
...So there were four places on this journey that are remembered...
...Italian-Americans herd together at street festivals, buying carnival rides and overpriced calzone with desperate abandon...
...The neo-Marxists' great contribution- is their recognition of the legitimacy of the basic socialist impulse of the Soviet revolution, but what they propose is a vaguely socialist alternative to, rather than a modification of, the state that revolution has produced...
...The Czars followed a policy of deportation and resettlement to secure marginal regions, Cromwell did it in Ulster, the Americans used a similar policy 486 in dealing with the Indian population, Hitler planned a similar treatment for the Czech lands...
...But he is also a Jew and, in a society as deeply anti-Semitic as the Russian, this inevitably makes him an outsider, no matter how totally he identifies with the country...
...New York: W. W. Norton...
...We the Czechs and the Slovaks, are the powerless ones who yet decide the fate of our land...
...But the modernity of which they speak is in no recognizable sense Marxist...
...We are all here so far but I cannot tell how it will be another year...
...But the fatal contradiction remains...
...He denounced the resolutions and me, but a textile worker, a member of the Socialist party, took the floor in their defense...
...There were protests in private to Eleanor Roosevelt who responded, "Paul is a special person...
...Perhaps that is why it is so fascinating...
...He is convinced that they should have every bit as full a right to be loyal Soviet citizens as if they were Russian...
...The "counterculture" in America had only marginal impact because American society was far sounder than the counterculture gave it credit for being...
...Sakharov unwittingly confirms Shragin's analysis...
...Who can say, then, that the narrators of any of these three unusual histories are any less "truthful" just because they do not try to assume the normal, distanced and objective stance of "real" historians...
...These political and ethnic refugees from the Europe of the '30s and '40s are from the upper- and upper-middle-class...
...Why should loyalty to the Soviet state be a -condition of selfdetermination...
...Like the letter-writers in Dear Master, Yava confounds our normal expectations about historic time...
...Nekrich opens one of the many skeleton-filled closets of the Soviet empire, that of the mass deportations of entire nations from the Caucasus during the Second World War...
...Cocke was truly the psychologically cruellest of masters, despite Professor Miller's talk about his "humane values, good order, and sense of noblesse oblige...
...It also served as a chapter in Seeds of Revolt, by Mauritz Hallgren, published in 1933...
...Its very existence depends on detente—the sense of the Soviet authorities that the West is watching them and that it is crucial not to make too flagrantly a bad impression...
...They robbed the subject peoples of the most precious heritage humans have on this earth, their language and their land...
...In the process, Sakharov answers most of the practical questions Western observers raise— about the importance of the West for the protesters in the Soviet Union, about the possibilities and limitation of Soviet legality, about the impact of the Czech and the Yugoslav experiments, about the significance of the human rights movements in the West but, most significantly, about the future of the Soviet Union...
...10.95...
...Here, morality and mores remain fused...
...The word is a variation on Gosizdat, short for gosudarstvenoye izdatelstvo, the government publishing monopoly...
...lead thousands of Birmingham blacks in a militant confrontation with Bull Connor's police dogs...
...Supreme Court to reverse its 1937 decision upholding the Georgia poll tax...
...The Southern Regional Council reported that 75 Southern cities experienced demonstrations with more than 13,000, mostly blacks, arrested...
...Yava himself, on the other hand, is one of the strangest graftings of folklore subject with folklorist that I have ever encountered...
...VI BUT THERE IS EVIDENCE that these efforts are not without effect—and one bit of evidence is the growing use of psychiatric hospitals as a means of coercion...
...We of the democratic left are committed to the proposition that a society that is both free and moral is possible, but this, after all, is an act of faith that, in the last decade, has become increasingly hard to sustain...
...It is Medvedev and his intellectual kin who come closest to what Western ideological loyalists hope for in a "reformed" Marxism...
...Basically, the difference is that what in the West occurs as an unintended byproduct of the state of the art recognized as a deformation, is, in the Soviet Union, a conscious and systematic policy...
...Johnson and I met later with H.L...
...In the case of a gradual rather than an abrupt demise of the Soviet state, a legitimist strategy might well be in order, but it would be vain to pretend that it represents a revitalization of Marxism...
...George's letters, full of innuendo against his white overseer and defensive of his ability to command the fieldworkers, provide rich insights into the nerve-wracking politics of the plantation hierarchy...
...Unscrupulous authors and film directors have been quick to exploit this and to claim that psychiatry is simply a tool for making sane persons conform to an insane society...
...Many had died...
...This is an exercise in empathy with that highly articulate group of white Southerners, mostly writers, who were strongly committed to justice for Negroes and who appealed for support—it was not forthcoming—from what they believed was a reservoir of racial liberalism among their fellow Southerners...
...Their relative wealth gave them the greater (though often mistaken) sense of freedom implied in the words of Anna Foa Yona, an Italian Jew: "Where could we go...
...For this he was physically attacked by some white unionists...
...New Beginnings contains the stories of people who arrived here before immigrant-quota laws blocked America's "Golden Door" in the '20s...
...Sosna loved and admired his Southern white liberals, and I join him in admiration and affection for some of them whom I knew and with whom I worked...
...Moreover, Yava hates empty ceremonialism and anything smacking of the "revival" of Indian tribalism more than he hates the pernicious effects of white culture...
...They are, if anything, a "counterculture"—and the strength of any countercultural movement, presenting no doctrine, serving no interest but refusing to go along with pretense, is not in numbers but in the weakness of the "establishment" it opposes...
...the claim falls flat, however, when Yava begins to spice his account with his own views in the ongoing debate between resistance and accommodation to white culture...
...The Skipwiths were coddled slaves...
...It'll probably be some time before the Frontier can gain a readership and influence like that of the increasingly conservative magazines that dominate American Jewish life, but meanwhile it's good to see it picking up...
...Their success would be their demise...
...Eleanor Roosevelt dramatized her position by placing her chair in the middle aisle between the two sections...
...Some, like Virginia Dabney, could not relinquish Old South prejudices, and some justified themselves through a mistaken notion of strategy...
...Only integration and social equality could assure a normal interplay between white and black, an intermingling in schools, churches, work, and politics...
...They cannot count on the automatic sympathy of their compatriots...
...The Soviet system, that strange combination of paternalism and despotism tinged with xenophobia and cruelty, may be an alien imposition on the Western nations under Soviet rule...
...It is also a sad record of futility, because the improvement in the status of blacks in the South came as the result of militant movements by blacks and Northern whites, the assertion of political power by blacks nationwide, and by action in Washington—all resented or objected to by most of the Southern liberals...
...Unfortunately, Jones put them in the hands of Noel Beddow, a Birmingham lawyer John L. Lewis had hired to head the state CIO...
...June Namias is consistently too polished and courteous an interviewer for that kind of sloppiness...
...Yava accuses some of his predecessors who wrote books about Hopi culture of just the kind of disrespect he abhors, and he does so with scholarly precision...
...Once the Russians recognize the traits of their society that make orthodoxy and autocracy necessary they will have taken the first step toward making them obsolete...
...The communalism of the Russian society made it uniquely susceptible to Communism—while making sure that such Communism would inevitably turn into a stifling communalism...
...at one point he muses that "it is something strange to think that those people of Africa are called our ancestors...
...234 pp...
...This conception was invoked repeatedly by the liberals about whom Sosna writes...
...The Russians settled as masters among them, reduced their language to a kitchen vernacular, and transformed them into "ethnic minorities" in their own lands...
...New Generations"—those who arrived after the end of World War II—tell their stories in the book's final pages...
...Edited and annotated by Harold Courlander...
...The Reformation, now less as a historical event than a metaphor, represents a culmination of the Renaissance in the internalization of the autonomous moral law as individually binding...
...Two factors probably contribute to that irony...
...The men and women who risk life, liberty, and fortune—such as they are—to produce and reproduce those slender volumes are not an opposition seeking to replace the rulers of the Soviet state...
...All of the Skipwiths, even those who went to Liberia, show in their letters how ambiguously they regarded the "reward" of exile from the only home they knew...
...The author and the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest have rendered the Soviets yeoman service: Westerners feel too unsure of their own psychiatry to be indignant about that of the Soviets...
...Insistence on human rights and on an equitable application of the law is the concrete means of such transformation...
...paperback, New York: Vintage, $2.95...
...This internal contradiction marks the writings of authors who, very loosely, might be grouped with Medvedev's legitimist approach, among them Aleksandr Nekrich's The Punished Peoples...
...It underplays the role of the blacks in the South, struggling for their liberation, as well as actions, minor though they may be, in the trade unions and churches that demonstrated instances of Negro-white activity...
...Certainly, as an opposition or even as a dissident movement in any traditional sense, those who speak the truth in the Soviet Union would be wholly insignificant...
...Samizdat is not a primitive version of the vanity press...
...ALARM AND HOPE, by Andrei D. Sakharov...
...Mary McLeod Bethune, president of Bethune-Cookman College, as "Mary...
...The realities of the concrete, individual struggle for moral integrity appear to us as little more than an uninteresting biographical footnote to history...
...It had, instead, to silence the reality...
...But it is a strategy of transition, not a long-range alternative...
...For a man who has spent so much of his life in ritual, his judgment against a neighboring village's attempt to revive one clan ceremony is rational and awful: "If they succeed it will only be on a superficial level...
...One such footnote would be the battle of Camp Hill in December 1932, where black members of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union fought a pitched battle with the sheriff's forces and vigilantes to prevent the seizure for debt of a member's livestock...
...We spread the map...
...Mrs...
...Suddenly the seasonal continuity that rules her life is revealed as something created by whites who, like herself, do not know how it will be another year...
...If there had been a Silent South in the 1880s, shortly after Reconstruction, it had long been obliterated by the separation of the races through the rigidly enforced Jim Crow laws that made it difficult if not impossible for white and black to know each other except in a masterservant relationship...
...Edited and translated by Efrem Yankelevich and Alfred Friendly, Jr...
...Yet, as Sosna points out, when the Supreme Court outlawed the white primary in 1944, Southern liberals failed to exploit that decision...
...There is no room for individuality because there is no room for an individual moral identity: criticism is not a legitimate form of social participation...
...In 1940, the SCHW financed an unsuccessful appeal to the U.S...
...All they can ask is humane rather than arbitrary injustice...
...His first panicked letter pleads with Cocke "to write to me by the first opportunity and let me no on what terms I can come back for I intend coming back as soon as I can...
...The answer lies, I think, in that Southern mystique that makes Southern whites regard themselves as members of an exclusive club with its own traditions and nostalgia...
...I SUSPECT that here I must establish my credentials to speak about Sosna's liberals...
...The book covers a wide spectrum of topics...
...238 pp...
...They let their scholarly appendages do the awkward—and I suppose necessary—dance around the issue of truth...
...Frances Pickens Miller resigned from SCHW because of the presence of Communist party members at the Birmingham conference...
...If the Soviet authorities increasingly resort to involuntary confinement in mental institutions as a means of silencing nonconforming thinkers, it suggests that they no longer feel free to ignore or manipulate the legal system as Stalin once did with utter impunity...
...The Soviet legitimists cannot, in principle, carry their recognition that far...
...The record for the three decades covered by Sosna finds his liberals consistently pitted against black militancy and "outside interference...
...More than 200,000 white and Negro citizens converged on Washington and heard King's famous "I have a dream" oration...
...Here mores seemed totally synonymous with morality...
...With Sosna we can respect the Southern white liberals for their courage and commitment, but we can identify the reason for their failure—which was their inability to see the picture as a whole...
...In Russia, any morality— including, ironically, the Marxist—necessarily tends to become totalitarian because it can only be understood as mores...
...There is, however, strangely little anguish in these older voices...
...Such hope as there may be is for a modernization of the Russian spirit...
...They want to make history seem meaningful...
...That, more than anything else, is the driving force behind the upsurge of literature, in typescript and carbon copies, emerging in all parts of the Soviet empire...
...I was one of those whom Gelders consulted as to the nature of the help he would request from the Roosevelts...
...A few years after that he is narrating details of settlement and battles against native tribes like a proper white colonist...
...It is, however, also a testimony to the courage of the few Russians who, in spite of the threat, do refuse to participate in the comfortable lie...
...But, as war clouds gathered, the party's easy acceptance of the Hitler-Stalin pact and, following the victory over the Axis at the end of the war, the party's continued slavish following 492 of Moscow's line rendered it impotent and without influence...
...A violent destruction of Soviet Marxism could at best create a vacuum that only an analogous orthodoxy could fill...
...The problem is not only that Soviet rule in the conquered territories has been harsh and at times genocidal but that even the most benign Soviet rule is in principle unjust...
...What kind of a nation will grow up in our land is up to us, the powerless ones...
...FIRST GENERATION, by June Namias...
...Solzhenitsyn rejects the entire notion of modernization together with the Russian Marxism that he sees not as all-too-Russian but as too Western...
...The Russians came to these lands as conquerors...
...Louise O. Charlton, presiding, introduced Mrs...
...II THE GREAT VALUE of Boris Josifovich Shragin's soul-searching study, The Challenge of the Spirit, both for the Russian reader for whom it was written and for the Western observer privileged to read it in translation, is that it penetrates behind the ideological facade to the living reality of the Russian nation...
...III SHOULD THE DEMISE of the Soviet regime take the form of a gradual devolution, the model most appropriate might prove to be that symbolized by Solzhenitsyn's most persistent intellectual critic, Roy Medvedev...
...The deformations proved too deeply ingrained to be removed without radical surgery...
...But we had friendly relations, sometimes working relations, with most of them...
...The skeptical attitude of some of the Negroes present was dramatized a few minutes after it opened, when Mrs...
...The panorama of sold-out subcultures is long and depressing...
...Senator John Bankhead resigned from the organization because of the resolution...
...Given the circumscribed subject of the book, Communist activity may seem extraneous...
...Toward the end Yava comments on the death of Hopi ceremonialism...
...Steel...
...Cocke's experiment worked best on Peyton Skipwith, whose letters from Liberia open "Dear Master...
...How much self-respect could a person or a nation retain if they accepted such treatment and repaid it with loyalty to their masters...
...They bought, or pretended to buy, stakes in Cocke's program of conservative reform...
...The perfunctory bow to Lenin does not dull the edge of criticism...
...But the book suffers by this circumscription...
...He writes with the intimate understanding of an unreservedly committed insider—but with a critical perspective of one never fully accepted...
...It called for outlawing the poll tax, for federal antilynching legislation, opposition to wage differentials, equal educational opportunities, and "full rights and privileges of American citizenship for all people under the law...
...It was FDR himself who emphasized that the conference program should include resolutions demanding abolition of both the poll tax and restrictions on the franchise...
...yet to emerge as a world power, I suspect that many who invoked the red scare against Southern Communists did so more out of fear of these Communists' militant fight against Jim Crow than because of Moscow's dominance...
...Here the focus is on the struggle of humans and nations to regain a sense of moral integrity, self-respect, and personal reality long obscured by repeated cliches...
...Bethune corrected the chairman: "I don't know you well enough for you to call me by my first name...
...Namias divides her interviews into three groups...
...He dissects Hopi myth and ritual with the combined familiarity and arrogance of one whose Tewa legends claim that Tewas will forever share the Hopi language and ceremonies but that Greetings...
...The history of the '30s and the '50s—as well as the fate of free thinkers too obscure to be visible in the West—shows what the Soviet system can do...
...Of course, everything goes by fours, because it is a sacred number," he observes...
...One may then wonder about the writing and publication of a whole book on what at most is a footnote to an important development in American democracy...
...A couple of years later I publicly called on the district attorney, Nicholas Stallworth, and the Junior Chamber of Commerce that he was addressing, to endorse the right to vote for Mobile's black citizens...
...He begins to tell the legend of one tribal journey and suddenly interrupts himself...
...At a time when the leading American Jewish magazines, Commentary and Midstream, increasingly inch toward the politics of William Buckley's National Review-though in styles less amusing—it's a pleasure to report that another American Jewish magazine is coming to life on the left...
...Twenty years ago, such an approach seemed most promising and even received some passing official sanction...
...Modernization—the possibility of a free society—is totally contingent, first, on the autonomization of the moral law from mores, breaking the omnipresent tyranny of custom and, second, on the internalization of the moral law, which makes order without coercion possible...
...Solzhenitsyn is posing a serious question that the West has so far confronted only hesitantly: is modernization really "progress...
...In light of the reality of which Shragin and Sakharov write, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, if the Soviet Union has a future, Sakharov's approach is a key to it...
...He simply does not observe the great distinction white culture makes between mythic and actual moments...
...Yava's tales lead into wry little side-paths...
...Most of Sosna's liberals were by then old and tired...
...The goals of the liberals were cramped and limited...
...Boris Shragin's book is brilliant, bitter, and full of an unspoken hope...
...A blue string was stretched down the center aisle to separate the sections occupied by white and black...
...Nekrich shows a genuine love for the victims, the Kalmyks, the Balkars, the Chechens, the Kazaks...
...THE SAMIZDAT REGISTER, edited by Roy A. Medvedev...
...Beddow was a reactionary to whose lips the phrase "syphlitic communists" came as easily as "damnyankee...
...These three narrative compilations will help to provide a bulwark against the flood of medicated ethnic history...
...Both my grandfathers served in the Confederate Army...
...But it is that much more revealing, for it shows the daybyday reality of a Russian who has chosen to eschew easy conformity and live in truth...
...With directions from Nat Ross, then the party's organizer in Birmingham, two of us drove into that Black Belt community one night that summer to lay the basis for what was to become the first organization of tenants and sharecroppers in the Deep South...
...Durr and Aubrey Williams were summoned to testify about it by the witchhunting committee of Senator James O. Eastland...
...New York: Basic Books...
...He sides with the "friendly" camp only out of the most rigid and prideful conservatism...
...Russia, together with the Ukraine and Krivia ("White" or "Lesser" Russia), is unique among the lands of the Western heritage in never having passed through either a renaissance or a reformation...
...New York: W. W. Norton...
...The condition of the Soviet system is far more problematic...
...Her repertoire of questions is not broad: rarely does she demand anything more speculative than "Do you miss the old country...
...Soviet society does not suffer only from inadequate laws or an archaic ideology—though both are in evidence—but even more fundamentally from backwardness of spirit...
...It rests on the inherent weakness of Russia's social structure...
...The 90-year-old Yava belongs to the assertively autonomous Tewa minority within the Hopi community...
...Even before the outbreak of World War II, the Communist party's subordination to the Communist International and to the Diktats of Moscow compromised its image as a radical American party...
...Shragin's selfanalysis is a crucial step toward such modernization...
...Yet, by the 1960s when the crucial battles for civil rights began, Communists played no role...
...A Spanish leftist describes our gover'nment's threats and harassments against him, speaking with the wryness suitable to one who knows that his alternative was possible death in Franco's Spain...
...Her lists of white men killed and captured and of black men worked to death building fortifications in Mobile are as cold as the sing-song poem she makes out of the ten commandments in one letter...
...It has some obvious weaknesses...
...In the Soviet Union, however, years of enforced orthodoxy have rendered all ideology suspect, not just because it is often false, but because it is always untrue, far removed from the living reality of human lives...
Vol. 26 • September 1979 • No. 4
