Changes in Russia and the American Right

...Puddington's nasty attack drew a spirited reply from Robert Conquest (November 1990), who could hardly be accused of apologetic tendencies...

...Indeed, they endowed the system with far more resilience than did their "evolutionist" opponents...

...either full privatization or a perpetuation of the centralized economy (in Revel's words, "capitalism—everything else is froth")— the "hard-liners" dismissed any nuances and foreclosed all other options...

...Puddington was left without a rebuttal, but not without allies in and outside Commentary...

...by Alexander Dallin and Gail Lapidus (Westview Press: 1991...

...And hasn't its spectacular demise proved that it had never been "reformable" or improvable...

...That would come, conservatively, to about ten million people...

...Among the latter were politicians, journalists, and scholars for whom the external fixity of communism was something of an article of faith...

...In fact, "Lenin loved it" so much that he used it "46 times...

...He attributed some fallacious Sovietological interpretations less to "ideological basis" than to "the traditional Western inability to understand political and social systems different from our own...

...July 18, 1991), Malia's analysis is rooted in conceptions of communist rule that predate perestroika, and he uses—with deliberate contempt—a language no longer at all appropriate to the reality of the Soviet Union ("Leninist regime," the "marxist burden," and so on...

...Had the reforms been implemented more thoughtfully, or had their priorities been reversed (for instance, had economic changes preceded or at least accompanied political changes), they might well have succeeded...

...One tactic was to reaffirm the validity of the "totalitarian" model as an explanation of the Soviet system past and present...

...In April 1988, for instance, Commentary published Alain Besancon's "Gorbachev Without Illusions," where the leading French proponent of the demonological view of the Soviet Union denounced any attempts to give Gorbachev any credit for anything...

...5 "To the Stalin Mausoleum," originally published in Daedalus (January 1990), reprinted in The Soviet System in Crisis, ed...

...I am pro witch hunt," he declared in a recent piece (September 2, 1991...

...Commentary had for a long time been leading the fight against the "present danger" (to borrow the title of its editor's 1980 volume...

...Glasnost was in high gear, and while political and economic institutions had barely begun "restructuring," the atmosphere in the Soviet Union had undergone an oceanic change...

...One can only wonder whether Malia assumes that all his readers are so ignorant as not to question this wild characterization...

...The argument against uncritically accepting the "totalitarian model" has been made elsewhere...

...The Kornilovs and Kolchaks are not likely to find their modern successors, but the old communist apparatchiks have already proved capable of defending the status quo ante, most successfully thus far in Central Asia and the Caucasus by donning the mantle of nationalism and xenophobia...

...and that the USSR had succeeded in creating "a new man," homo sovieticus, who accepts "slavery" and wallows in corruption and hypocrisy, all out of fear of the state...

...In that essay Aron criticized the notion that the Soviet regime was "invulnerable to outside forces" as "an almost metaphysical interpretation of totalitarianism" —precisely the kind of interpretation offered by Besancon in 1976...

...That both Nekrich and Heller were Soviet emigres was not insignificant...

...This took the form of demonstrating that Gorbachev's reforms could not—in theory and in fact—alter the essential nature of the Soviet system...

...The press was publishing searing criticisms of past and present Soviet policies...

...4 American anti-Americanism is a real phenomenon...

...Will...

...In the New York Review of Books ("A New Russian Revolution...

...Though by 1990 it seemed more and more likely that the end was approaching, nothing in history is ever certain or preordained...

...How Will calculated this remarkable statistic he did not say (a concordance to Lenin's complete works...

...A few months later came the victory of Solidarity, the routing of communist rule in Czechoslovakia, and the fall of the Berlin Wall—developments Gorbachev not only did not try to prevent but actively supported...

...By 1989-90, to be sure, some of the conservative critics abandoned positions they once held tenaciously, but others remained committed, and a few brave acrobats tried to do both...

...The champions of the theory of "totalitarianism" to the contrary, the Soviet Union had changed, dramatically and significantly, after the death of Stalin, under Khrushchev, even under Brezhnev, and most saliently under Gorbachev...

...Today's op-ed pages are given over largely to George Will, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer, Abe Rosenthal, and other spokesmen of the right...

...729-730...

...She still holds firmly to the applicability of her theory in other parts of the "totalitarian" world, including Nicaragua...

...In a Commentary symposium published in the September 1990 issue, Kirkpatrick offered a version of her "they always blame America" theory...

...The trouble with this proposition is, for one, that it stands truth on its head: for it isn't the evolutionists who, in Malia's words, were guilty of "our grim overestimation of the Soviet Union's prowess" but the writers and politicians besotten by fear of the "red menace" and "communist conspiracies...

...The shallowest familiarity with Kennan's writings demonstrates that Krauthammer's depiction is a shoddy caricature...

...He accuses Cohen of denying that the Soviet Union was a closed society—as if Cohen makes no distinctions between the USSR circa 1937 and the USSR circa 1987...

...In the process Commentary had also honed its skills in the art of imputation and insinuation—skills more in demand than ever, now that the West was on the verge of being (once again) hoodwinked by a wily and unscrupulous foe...

...His efforts were therefore either a deliberate deception or, if meant seriously (which was exceedingly unlikely), doomed to failure...

...Kennan is not a mealymouthed man, and this was patently—assuming Krauthammer quotes him correctly —a slip...

...Given previous disillusionments, some skepticism was a rational response...

...Bukovsky was repeating standard arguments of the right...

...Their increasing impact on public opinion was part of a growing conservatism, primarily in the United States but also in other countries...

...Moreover, he deliberately provoked divisive ethnic clashes "in order to present Moscow as the only force capable of preserving peace...

...Even in the late 1980s, when tens of thousands of Soviet citizens were proving by word and deed that they were not willing to yield "their freedom" for a pot of kasha, Heller was warning anyone lending credence to Gorbachev's reforms that they were teetering on the edge of the same trap as early admirers of Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin...

...The editors of that ferociously radical magazine, added Will, "must be very sad to see a Europe infected so thoroughly by the virus that the New Yorker thinks has made American public life so disagreeable...

...One "insider" was Jeane Kirkpatrick, author of the famous "theoretical" distinction between "totalitarian" and "authoritarian" systems...

...By 1987, however, the Gorbachev "thaw" could hardly be dismissed as merely another chimera...

...Suddenly," said the author, apparently struck with the force of revelation, "it seems possible to think about the reversibility of communism" —which is to say that all previous attempts to reform the system, particularly Khrushchev's "thaw," were not even potentially serious...

...that Sovietologists have (again) "displayed inexhaustible ingenuity in their effort to explain the endlessly prolonged decrepitude of communist economies by any factor other than communism itself "; that 18 • DISSENT Atter the Fall glasnost, like the "thaw" twenty years earlier, "is a gift from on high" and, furthermore, "an instrument through which the general secretary can consolidate his own power by using the press to indict and, little by little, eliminate his predecessors' men...

...June 4, 1991...

...Despite all evidence to the contrary, Malia insists on seeing Gorbachev in static terms, holding fast to principles that are locked into "the socialist choice made in 1917...

...In "Drunk on Detente" Will cited approvingly the notion, propounded by Angelo Codevilla in Commentary in 1987, that the Soviet Union "is as much of a threat as ever, WINTER • 1992 • 17 After the Fall maybe more...

...A number of emigres (many of them unhampered by virtual ignorance of English, convinced that American Sovietology was a nest of fools and apologists) published articles denouncing the changes in the Soviet Union as nothing but fraud...

...The party was being openly mocked for its pretensions to "infallibility...

...A suspect lot, they have "to a degree reflected Soviet thinking in the Moscow social science institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences" and many have championed the idea of "democratic Stalinism," which should come as a surprise to those in the Sovietological community who are familiar neither with the work of Soviet social institutes nor with fried snow balls...

...The Gorbachev challenge was most acute for the adherents of the "Evil Empire" theory...

...However, whether American "leftists" (whoever they may be) really detest WINTER • 1992 • 19 After the Fall capitalism not because of its flaws but because they associate it with John Wayne, and whether dislike of capitalism automatically translates into "pro-Sovietism," are, to put it mildly, open questions...

...It might appear to some that the Gulag's dismantlement actually preceded the collapse of communism...

...The New York Times has its own demonology specialists: William Safire, its resident linguist, and Abe Rosenthal, who excels in stridency...

...16 • DISSENT After the Fall All the evidence suggested that something serious was afoot in the Soviet Union, that Gorbachev was more than just another halfhearted or duplicitous apparatchik tinkering with a dilapidated machine, and that his policies had, at least potentially, revolutionary implications...

...I quote Aron with considerable dismay, for not only have I never considered him a spokesman of the conventional "right," but also because nearly twenty years earlier I published his essay "Soviet Society in Transition" (Problems of Communism, November–December 1957 and subsequently in A. Brumberg, ed., Russia Under Khrushchev, Praeger, 1962...

...Gorbachev's reforms, if genuine and long-lasting, would call into question their entire worldview —and that of course can be rather upsetting...

...But, having been based upon pseudo-reality, the regime as a result escapes history...

...As for "all the sophisticated books and learned articles of the Sovietological mafia," they "have been exposed for what they are—a pile of trash" (November 1988...

...but he bolstered his scholarly image by citing two of Lenin's pronouncements, which he characterized as being "of almost delphic inscrutability": " 'Glasnost is a sword which itself can heal the very wound it may inflict' "; and (Lenin loved martial metaphors) it is good to use " 'the artillery fire of party glasnost to combat vice and error.' " Anyway, "glasnost" can't be trusted: the Soviet press of 1987, in Will's view, "is full of Goebbels-like lies...

...If anything, it suggests that the "evolutionists" had a much surer grasp of reality...

...As usual, Arch P. goes overboard...

...In Commentary's standard arsenal against "left intellectuals," innuendo sometimes slides into character assassination...

...The czarist empire, too, folded in a matter of a few days, in March 1917, and although it is true that unlike the Soviet system its collapse had been conditioned by military defeats, the principal reason for the disintegration of both empires was internal rot, the fact that their power and resilience were spent, and their legitimacy in the eyes of most of their subjects gone...

...4 Kirkpatrick subsequently shifted to asking "what can we do to help Gorbachev," and answering that we should support whatever policies he initiates that move society toward pluralism, democracy and economic progress...

...Partly liberal publications, such as the New Republic, often embraced the "Evil Empire" theory, especially with regard to Central American left-wing movements, while for unabashedly conservative journals—Commentary, the New Criterion, the Public Interest, the National Interest—and the conservative think tanks and foundations (Center for Strategic and International Studies, Heritage, Olin) that often underwrite them, the term "totalitarian" embraced not only the Soviet Union and China but also Sandinista Nicaragua, Hungary, and even the bulk of the African National Congress...

...Second, the stress on the unique character of the collapse of the Soviet empire (which, mirabile dictu, now illustrates how weak it was), also leaves something to be desired...

...In January 1989 came the strongest reaffirmation of the "totalitarian" theory, "Is Communism Reversible...

...More: in time-honored fashion, they derided those who were willing to take it seriously as naive, ignorant—and worse...

...In his latest blast ("The Hunt for the True October," Commentary, October 1991), Malia notes that "revisionists" (that is to say, Sovietologists) come in various forms...

...One can imagine what an agreeable chuckle these ruminations would have elicited from Leonid Brezhnev, that Soviet corruptor par excellence...

...In "What to Do about the Soviet Collapse" (September 1991) Bukovsky declared that any accomplishments of the past few years—if indeed there were any—could not be credited to Gorbachev, who had consistently "stalled the process he himself had unwittingly triggered...

...Revel assumed an open-minded posture: we must avoid, he asserted, the tendency to cling to the "old" belief that all changes are meaningless, though we must not assume that everything that was happening was "qualifiedly new...

...In light of the current note of triumphalism about the collapse of communism—the blithe assumption that it was all a Western "victory," and more specifically a vindication of the hard-nosed view of the Soviet Union and of the tough Reaganite policies it begot (Star Wars, Pershing missiles, and so on)—it is striking how little confidence the proponents of such policies had that their approach could result in the "reversal" of communism, or even a serious reduction of Soviet power...

...Inexhaustibly acid in pursuit of "leftists" is the columnist Charles Krauthammer...

...that "regardless of historical traditions, geography, or national character, each country where a Soviet-style socialist system was installed produced identical results...

...Such tolerance was—well, intolerable...

...Fire every elected [Soviet] official who was a member of the party at the time of the coup...

...In 1986, two ex-Soviet scholars, historian Alexsandr Nekrich and literary critic Mikhail Heller, published a book, Utopia in Power, whose nearly nine hundred pages are dedicated to several related propositions: that the Soviet Union is the perfect model of a modern totalitarian state, which "finds life-giving energy only in expansionism...

...It was they, after all, who had honed conventional wisdom about the Soviet Union and— especially since Ronald Reagan's election— had set the parameters of public debate about the nature of revolutionary, "left-wing" or "Marxist-Leninist" movements and regimes...

...I want here to examine some of the recent views of American adherents of the "totalitarian model" of communism...

...The West is thinking of giving aid to the Soviets...

...Puddington rounds up the usual suspects: Senators Fulbright and McGovern, Richard Barnet (of the Institute for Policy Studies), David Riesman, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and that arch-villain George Kennan...

...In 1988 Walter Laqueur published a piece ("Glasnost & Its Limits," July 1988) that didn't quite fit the rigid Manichaeism favored by the editors...

...It has "a glittering pedigree," wrote the learned Mr...

...The nature of the Soviet regime has not changed . . . since November 7, 1917...

...He charges Cohen with maligning the proponents of the totalitarian theory, when what Cohen actually did was to present a picture—however overdrawn—of how the "cold war" atmosphere in the 1950s and 1960s affected the views of many scholars of Soviet affairs...

...a civic society began to emerge...

...2 Such "testimony" by former Soviet citizens (including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his earlier writings) dovetailed with the arguments of Western conservative militants...

...Liberal Discontents," Washington Post, July 18, 1989...

...George Will, for instance, excoriated the New Yorker's "antianticommunism" as a form of "disdain for American public life...

...In short, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...

...Bukovsky's letter must have pleased the editors: a few years later, after the failed coup, they invited his comments...

...Three months after that, in "Drunk on Detente" (Washington Post, December 13, 1987), he repeated his warning, reminding his readers that the Soviet Union has always been guided by a quest for "world domination...

...22 • DISSENT...

...Apparently Kennan, on April 4, 1989, referred to the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia as "increased troop movements...

...Others, for reasons ideological or professional, responded to the evidence by dismissing it either as illusory or deliberately deceptive...

...True, the collapse of communism as such is indisputable...

...Neither Puddington's unfamiliarity with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union nor what appears to be his total ignorance of any of the pertinent languages has deterred him from declaring himself frequently on this subject...

...Revel was confident that "the balance sheet for the Kremlin for the entire period 1975-1990 will in the end be a positive one," especially in view of Gorbachev's firm determination to hang on to Eastern Europe...

...Six months later, Will warned the West to beware of Soviet arms-control proposals, which were nothing but a ruse (Washington Post, September 24, 1987...

...5 Malia qua Malia, however begrudges even that much credit...

...To those who had always assumed that the Soviet system was capable of evolving, these were logical conclusions...

...For all the nonsense of some of the "revisionists" and the naive hopes of those who believed that change would inevitably lead to democracy (or socialism), the "mainstream" Sovietologists can be proud of having studied, traced and interpreted the most horrific chapter in the history of the twentieth century...

...As a result, Malia acknowledged, the "initially demagogic slogan 'All power to the people' began to acquire some real content...

...Perestroika," a word "Gorbachev adores," is equally meretricious and unoriginal: shockingly, Lenin used it first...

...October 16, 1990...

...Diverse as these conservatives were, they were united by a belief that the Soviet regime, "a state unlike any other," was characterized by "its apparent immutability," and that the single most important objective of the "free world" was to combat it.' Thus the extraordinary events in the Soviet Union and East Europe, with their shock wave effect, were bound to bring them all to their feet...

...So susceptible were the authors to the thrall of Soviet mystifications that they pronounced the Soviet regime eminently "stable," a stability explained by a new kind of "social contract": "the citizens surrender their freedom to the state, and in exchange the state gives them the right (under its supervision) to abuse their positions and violate the law...

...According to Malia, the "revisionist" historians— that is, the group of scholars who were bent on minimizing, not dismissing, the horrors of Stalinism—are not a minority fringe but constitute the "the main line of American Sovietology...

...At the same time the state guarantees minimal conditions for survival" (pp...

...Had any political cum ideological system ever proved so hollow and so brittle...

...What has changed is the USSR, which as a reality remains within history and keeps pace with it...

...Nevertheless, they all concur on "the absolute separation of Lenin and October from Stalin" and on the maxim "that with Gorbachev and perestroika the Soviet experiment would at last return to the True October, all aberrations overcome and all wrong things set aright...

...by the French nouveau philosophe Jean-Francois Revel...

...Consequently it cannot be corrupted, for corruption is down-to-earth...

...With their hypertrophy of the power of the Soviet state and their either-or solutions—either the system is fully dismantled or the changes amount to nothing...

...Take his "Kennan: Cold War Realist" (Washington Post, April 14, 1989...

...3 See, for instance, my introduction to Chronicle of a Revolution, Michael Walzer, "On Failed Totalitarianism" (Dissent, Summer 1983), and Irving Howe, "Totalitarianism Reconsidered" (Dissent, Winter 1991...

...This charge, incidentally, for which there is not a shred of evidence, has been voiced by some of Gorbachev's hostile critics inside the USSR, too...

...The (apologetic) attitude of American intellectuals toward communism, she argued, arose primarily from "their alienation from the United States," rather than from any real convictions or scholarly analysis...

...The collapse of communism, therefore, hardly validates the "totalitarian" school...

...Work on a new criminal code was underway, with special attention to laws dealing with political dissent...

...To Commentary, such views have been anathema...

...But the columnist will not leave well enough alone, and so he hammers in his lessons: this was a "grotesque euphemism . . . a window onto Kennan's political philosophy," which scorns any moral considerations whatsoever...

...Oddly enough, Malia launched his new career with an essay — "To the Stalin Mausoleum" —that appeared not under his own name, but under the pseudonym "Z...

...Puddington singles out for attack Stephen Cohen, the Princeton historian known for his book on Bukharin...

...3 However valid the model had been for Stalinist Russia, it became less and less cogent after Stalin's death, both in the East European "satellites" (which in fact had never been perfect satellites) and in the Soviet Union...

...Writing as "Z," Malia was still willing to 20 • DISSENT After the Fall give some credit to Gorbachev for launching "revolutionary policies," including a measure of democratization, and for attempting to "give real political life to both halves of the system of dual administration, in which all power, since Lenin, had belonged to the Party...

...Only Soviet emigres, said Bukovsky, truly understand the nature of the Soviet beast—the "most powerful machine of subjection and terror ever known, a machine which has so far been completely unaffected by perestroika...

...Why Malia was bent on disguising his identity, to the point of angrily rebutting the first stories disclosing his authorship, he has never explained...

...Notes 1 The words come from Raymond Aron's introduction to The Soviet Syndrome and paraphrase the views of the book's author, Alain Besancon (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976...

...The first two years of Gorbachev's reign, for all their innovations, met with considerable "wait and see" skepticism...

...But Kirkpatrick is not alone in reaching such conclusions...

...But then, czarism, too, left no visible institutions behind, which didn't prevent the new order from appropriating some of them in disguise...

...My angry rebuttal of Shlapentokh's remarks was seconded by many of those Soviets who attended the session...

...Indeed, in their lexicon any expression of doubt about the invincible might of the Soviet Union was close to treason...

...As soon as we are strong enough to defeat capitalism as a whole," said Lenin according to Will, "we shall take it by the scruff of the neck" —a colorful phrase, but one which, as it happens, Lenin never used...

...American leftists "disdain capitalism for much the same reason they disdain John Wayne and Ronald Reagan—because it seems so American...

...Commentary published a slashing letter by its resident emigre intellectual, Vladimir Bukovsky, who was happy to "straighten out" Laqueur...

...Vladimir Shlapentokh, a sociologist who emigrated to the United States in the 1970s, used this occasion to denounce nearly all Western Sovietologists (excepting Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes) as hopeless apologists...

...One article deserves special mention: "The Anti-Cold-War Brigade," by Arch Puddington (August 1990...

...He was therefore against giving any help to Gorbachev, even if the latter's goal were the "transition from a party-state and a command economy to democracy and the market," first, because he did not believe that to be Gorbachev's goal and second, because it would destroy the leading role of the party and result in the selfliquidation of communism, something Gorbachev clearly does not intend to do...

...To the disciples of the "totalitarian model" and the spokesmen of the right, the events in the Soviet Union over the past few years, and especially since last summer, have conclusively demonstrated the wisdom of their theories and the bankruptcy of those of their critics...

...2 In June 1991 I attended a meeting of liberal intellectuals in what was still called Leningrad...

...The "evolutionary school," which believed that the Soviet Union and the countries within its orbit were bound to alter and become (at least at first) more traditionally "authoritarian," has stood the test of time, up to the final collapse of communist rule...

...And had Gorbachev (as some had urged him to do) been more sensitive to the volatile nature of national aspirations, the USSR might not have collapsed, and the stage would not have been set (as it now has been) for dangerous conflicts and bloodshed...

...Indeed, if not for the changes initiated by Gorbachev, the August coup might WINTER • 1992 • 21 After the Fall well have succeeded, at least for a period of time...

...A year ago, when Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Rosenthal grew livid: how can a prize be given to someone who "deserves credit for speeding the end of the Gulag—after communism began to collapse, not before...

...For all the differences, the similarities between the period 1917-19 and the current one are extraordinary, chiefly in the explosion of ethnic conflicts and competing independence movements...

...Malia's piece is predicated on Kirkpatrick's totalitarian model: the Soviet Union as a basically and necessarily inert system not subject to the same processes of social and economic change that affect democratic (and authoritarian) societies...

...Although Nekrich and Heller wrote their book years before Gorbachev came to power, they were loath to abandon their Orwellian nightmare...

...Be that as it may, the essay was a sweeping indictment of western Sovietology, as well as a passionate defense of "totalitarianism" as the only key to the understanding of "Sovietism" (a term first used by Leszek Kolakowski) past and present...

...On the face of it, their argument seems to make sense: the Soviet system, once its foundations were shaken, began to erode and finally collapsed, with remarkable rapidity, with virtually no bloodshed, and, most important (as Malia points out in his last Commentary piece), in utter ignominy, "[leaving] behind no viable institutions for whatever government will inherit the rubble...

...While acknowledging political disagreements, Conquest praised Cohen's scholarship as "impeccable...

...The "left," and those particularly dangerous villains, professional Sovietologists, have become the favorite targets of Martin Malia, professor of history at Berkeley and author of a fine study of the nineteenth-century Russian liberal thinker Alexander Herzen...

...Rosenthal turns apoplectic: this is more than terrible, "it is mad...

...Why should we give money to "criminals in charge of the Soviet Union [so that they may] remain in power...

...Apparently convinced that the proof of the pudding is not merely in the eating but in the overeating, Puddington even harks back to Henry Wallace, "the original dissenter from America's coldwar course, [whose] influence over succeeding generations of scholars and politicians was not insignificant...

...Gorbachev had initiated a series of groundbreaking steps in the areas of arms control and international relations...

...In " 'Glasnost' —Lenin Loved It" (Washington Post, March 27, 1987), George Will, a man with a weakness for bogus scholarship, warned his readers not to be misled by Gorbachev's use of the word "glasnost...

...After this wise beginning came the standard litany of grievances: that internal reforms do not necessarily accompany a diminution of expansionism...