LETTERS
Editors: It is with utmost difficulty that I overcome the more primitive impulses aroused by the sheer—even if unintended— effrontery of Eugene D. Genovese's article "The Question," (Dissent,...
...It was easier to dismiss everything Soviet as alien to our concept of the socialist future...
...the support given by the communist states to antiracist and anticolonial movements in the Third World—all of these considerations accounted for the anti–anti-Communism of the New Left...
...the infamous Moscow treason trials...
...I hazard to predict that succeeding comments in Dissent on the Genovese article will follow the same pattern...
...To express appreciation to Genovese, however, is rather awkward, since it is very much like thanking a reckless truck driver for crashing through the storefront to make an unexpected delivery...
...For "The Crimes of Communism" consist, principally, of defending the use of means that violate the norms of acceptable conduct in traditionally civilized communities— norms the perpetrators dismissed as "bourgeois" and the 138 • DISSENT Letters violation of which they justified as being in the service of "higher" ends...
...The "we" seems to include the entire left...
...Genovese is certainly on target in criticizing this disposition...
...Northampton, Mass...
...It took the Stalinist ruling class years to smash the revolution not only in the USSR but in China, Spain, and Eastern Europe...
...actions in the Caribbean and Central America running a close second...
...What made Genovese "see the light...
...But not for Genovese—he held on until there was no longer a Soviet Union to support...
...In continuation of this (somewhat tortured) metaphor, his action did serve to awaken the proprietors to an interest in his unordered merchandise sufficient for them to create an impromptu display for the possible interest of customers and passersby, thereby showing promotional enterprise in a line of wares they had previously not stocked...
...Anti-anticommunism and the associated evasions survive and their persistence generally vindicates Genovese...
...And, as Genovese's riposte illustrates, attacks on the person are still part of his political armament...
...The revelations since 1989 of terrible environmental damage and nuclear accidents are the most recent cases in point, surprising and shocking even anti-Communists of long standing...
...Their murderous counterrevolution advanced the cause of their ruling class, not that of the working class...
...Genovese is right that there has been little serious self-examination regarding the mistaken beliefs of the past, that few of the erstwhile fellow travelers, political tourists, apologists, assorted supporters, and glorifiers of communist systems came forward self-critically in recent years to publicly reevaluate their former commitments...
...If the goal of socialism is the free and autonomous individual, then all the devices and institutions used to achieve that goal are simply means to that end...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...It may very well be the case that, as Foner accuses Genovese of believing, "human nature is immutable, hierarchy inevitable, equality impossible," but to acknowledge this does not, as Foner suggests, transform one into a cynical or acquiescent conservative denying any possible improvement in the human lot...
...And in our country, where everything on the left is minuscule, Stalinism and stalinism remain a proportionately significant presence...
...Now he wants to tar us all with the same brush...
...I take it that Genovese's strictures on "radical egalitarianism and participatory democracy" are directed against utopian belief in the ultimate abolition of all authority and elites, the institutionalization of complete equality of condition, and the universal reign of love and altruism in all human relations...
...If all are guilty, then none are...
...There was the end of liberalism with the abandonment of the New Economic Policy...
...Columbia, Maryland Ernest Erber is certainly right to argue that when the editors accepted Genovese's "The Question," we were allowing him to frame the question, and he did so in a peculiarly personal way...
...If one accepts this approach, it matters little what the stated goals may be—what matters are the means used for their achievement...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...Not the Dewey Commission report on the purges...
...Sent to a conservative boarding school in Canada, I rebelled and embraced what I took to be the "values" of my previous school, earning a reputation as the school "Red...
...Dissent's immediate concerns made it counter-productive to inquire whether any—and which— aspects of Soviet society's seven-decade-long existence contained experiences that might be considered to be protosocialist and germane to answering our question of "What is socialism...
...These and related issues are at the root of contemporary politics in our country and in most other industrially advanced nations, marking the battle line between conservatives and liberals at home and between conservatives and social democrats abroad, with the right trumpeting the "fall of communism" as evidence that increased privatization, rather than a larger role for government, is now the order of the day...
...Because comprehending the nature of Stalinism/communism as historical phenomena is essential to defining socialism and capitalism for the twenty-first century...
...the same process of enchantment and apology gets repeated again and again, writ large and small, in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua...
...But these attitudes became especially dominant in the sixties with the rise of the New Left, the spread of "polycentrism" in the Communist world, and communist revolutions in the Third World, of which the Cuban was the most important...
...Wellfleet, Mass...
...New York, N.Y...
...One can recognize this without renouncing images of a Good Society as a guiding ideal: I recall one of our editors, Agnes Heller, observing at an editorial board meeting that "utopia should be a standard, not a goal...
...Hierarchy, inequality, authority, and even the immutability of human nature are all matters of degree...
...Their comments, contesting Genovese's distorted database and flawed logic, unavoidably conform to Genovese's agenda of what is relevant and to his order of priorities...
...There have been few, if any, attempts to confront the possibility that there might have been a connection between susceptibility to the claims of these exceptionally repressive political systems and an entrenched, obligatory alienation and contempt for Western political institutions and ideals many on the left have reflexively displayed...
...not the Hitler-Stalin Pact...
...For me the most important lesson to draw from Genovese's essay is that those who supported the Communist party beyond the 1930s are still not potential allies in my own efforts to work toward socialism by extending human rights...
...At each stage of your new learning about the mass slaughters, what did you think, what did you say to others and they to you about it, what if any steps did you take toward acknowledging or alleviating or fulfilling your moral responsibility in this connection...
...Clearly, Genovese is anxious to generalize the guilt and thus diffuse his own...
...and its concomitant, "How is it to be realized...
...Because the editors have blundered into a discussion of preeminent importance to the future of the democratic left on the basis of Genovese's hopelessly tangled conceptualizations...
...Genovese's statement, and his riposte, do not contain even a hint of contrition...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...I went so far as to offer my services to the Canadian Communist party...
...No, he tells us that he remained a supporter of the Soviet Union "until there was nothing left to support...
...But whatever made them supporters in the first place, and whatever made them adhere to that support in the face of great contrary evidence, is the question that remains unanswered...
...Such a view is in no way inconsistent with Genovese's realism and in no way precludes continued efforts to advance traditional left ideals...
...This is not simply a matter of where Stalinism continues in state power—China, Cuba, North Korea, et al.—but where its ideology, however much diluted, persists within the left, largely because it is the only concept of "socialism" known to contemporary generations of leftists, as shown by Genovese's article and some of the commentary on it...
...But he does not understand that the analogy itself is quite erroneous, that it completely misrepresents what democratic socialism is...
...Had Dissent's editors rejected his article in order to continue ignoring the overall subject matter of which it is a part, its rejection would have been worse than its publication...
...There are any number of ways to fulfill such a need, including at one extreme general cynicism and at the other, obedience to an authoritarian or totalitarian hierarchy...
...And #2: Was Stalinism communist...
...It is that at the close of the twentieth century we are less able to give a clear answer to the question "What is socialism...
...There have been similarly few attempts to examine the connections between the practices of the systems that used Marxism-Leninism to legitimate themselves and the nature of these theories, which evidently lent themselves to misuse...
...They were betrayed by the object of their adoration and most have at last abandoned their support...
...Given no evidence to the contrary, it is fair to assume that any person who had such a need probably still has it—and will seek another system to play the same psychological role...
...But these reflect largely the polemical needs of those times, targeted mainly against the role of Stalinism, both within the Soviet Union and worldwide...
...It is less important now to point the finger (we have been doing that for a long time) than to understand what it is we are pointing at...
...However, in his statement he did not give any reasons why he, personally, did what he did...
...If many on the left have regarded the invocation of the ideals as at least a mitigating consideration in their judgment of the Communist world, it can be argued to the contrary that the commission of monstrous crimes in the name of ideals is morally even more discreditable than sinning out of manifestly evil or basely self-interested motives...
...As someone who was saying "a plague on both your houses" as long ago as the 1930s, I find Genovese's presentation of the views of the left disingenuous and self-serving...
...It is often forgotten that the Nation, the New Republic, and the New Statesman, all of which I shortly began to read, were anti-Stalinist during this period...
...My fellow students there included the sons of the president, the foreign minister, and the ambassador to Britain of the embattled Spanish republic then highly subject to Soviet influence, the future chief adviser on nuclear physics to the French Communist party, the niece of a famous German Communist novelist, the son of a leading journalist for the London Daily Worker, and several Americans from New York and Hollywood whose parents were affluent fellowtravelers...
...In fact, he told us nothing at all about this...
...than at any time since the century's beginning...
...not the Krushchev report...
...And to Dissent's editors a question: "Is this what it takes to get you to target what is most relevant...
...The consequences can already be seen in the fractionated responses of those chosen to rebut him, each selected to speak for one of the various professions, political tendencies, or ideologies subjected to attack in his article...
...We still need to investigate the political psychology at work here...
...the so-called "doctors' plot...
...Better this than nothing...
...The invitation to join this enterprise cannot, however, be extended to those who have not yet rid themselves of the bag and baggage of their communist pasts...
...Nor is this a matter of historical critique only...
...It also repeated with reference to Cuba, Maoist China, North Vietnam, and Nicaragua, though more shallowly and for a much shorter time, the illusions about communist revolutions that had first emerged in connection with the Soviet Union...
...One of the most important being, "Why did it take so long...
...For many of us 140 • DISSENT Letters comfortable academics fortunate enough to have had no direct experience of Communist tyranny and duplicity, what fueled our moral outrage over Communism was the discovery that people who flaunted their "social conscience" and displayed an overweening self-righteousness in judging others were defending a regime that had committed mass murders on an unprecedented scale...
...Why, knowing all that you knew at some point before the Soviet Union collapsed, did you wait until after it had collapsed to declare your moral responsibility...
...Denial of what one knows but finds difficult to admit is a very human trait, but there must come a point at which rational people can no longer sustain such denial...
...But we will address these other questions in our own way, when they arise as real political questions—thus Tom Weisskopf on the prospects of market socialism in this issue...
...the execution of most of the "old Bolsheviks" who had led the 1917 coup...
...Genovese refers to this en passant, and somewhat disparagingly, by noting that the broken eggs were mostly (millions of) people of color...
...The same cerebral judgment and sense of civility do not induce me to thank Dissent's editors for exploiting the unsolicited arrival of Genovese's article to finally publish something in the area of post-Soviet investigations on the nature of Stalinism and/or communism—in my opinion, the salient historical phenomenon of the twentieth century...
...The reference literature for these purposes is much smaller than most would imagine, with Robert V. Daniels's The End of the Communist Revolution covering most of the ground, at least in outline...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Editors: At the heart of Eugene Genovese's continuing darkness lies his statement "I see no theoretical or historical reason to believe that socialism must be democratic...
...The effort to resolve our problem, therefore, should begin with a search to understand the meaning of the Russian revolution, beginning with a reexamination of the history of its intellectual framework (from Herzen to Yeltsin...
...Terror, repression, and violence were openly and deeply embedded in the basic institutions of their so-called "socialist" system...
...An omelet is a blended unit in which all the elements have lost their individual identities...
...Even for Genovese's central purpose of assessing guilt for "The Crimes of Communism," not an insignificant matter, the very title of Genovese's article, "The Question," explicated as "What did you know and when did you know it," heralds its worthlessness by presenting it as a matter of who among the Communist party's adherents was an ignorant dupe and who was a knowing scoundrel and who was some of each, when, in truth, how much or little anyone knew hardly matters...
...Query #1: Was communism, in any way, socialist...
...Conservatives, however, regularly implied that this outlook involved branding Soviet and American societies as equally evil in toto, whereas it usually referred, at least since 1956, only to the alleged "mirror-imaging" strategies of the two superpowers in the Cold War...
...It encompasses such basic issues as the state and civil society, the moral and ethical basis for regulations to assure environmental sustainability, how to increase social equality and expand political empowerment without curtailing freedom, and so on...
...What was "new" about the New Left was its dissociation from either active support for or opposition to the Soviet Union, although it reiterated many of the arguments against the Cold War and American "imperialism" long favored by partisans of the Soviet Union...
...What makes this subject matter preeminent...
...the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968...
...Even if there have been hardly any true apologists for Stalinism since at the latest Khrushchev's de-Stalinization speech, anti–anti-Communists remain open to the charge of moral blindness and lack of imagination...
...What, then, is our problem—which requires our format for discussion, rather than Genovese's...
...Though its publication has got Dissent into this on the wrong foot, it does not preclude regaining balance and moving ahead to carry out the mission that should have become apparent to it several years ago with the fall of Soviet Communism...
...To Genovese, therefore, a grudging "Thank you...
...We are not prepared to sponsor a massive re-analysis and rewriting of Russian history in light of the communist collapse (there are some things, after all, that are better done in academic journals), though we would be happy to carry speculative pieces about how such a rewriting might turn out...
...Who else on the American scene has a comparable history of dissecting and combatting communism/Stalinism...
...They printed a number of challenges to remaining believers and apologists by former Communists not unlike Genovese's...
...Such support in no way entailed endorsement of anything and everything done by American govemments in opposition to Communism...
...It seems to me that the persistence of support for such a horrifying structure, one that destroys the very values that the believer professes, can be explained only by a psychological need to believe in a system that provides all the answers and removes the obligation to think for oneself...
...As Leszek Kolakowski once noted, there has not been a single evil denounced by the left in the capitalist West that did not exist in vastly greater proportions in the Communist world...
...To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...What does matter is how much or how little they were willing to use Leninist and/or Stalinist ideology (they are not the same) to rationalize words or deeds as being morally and ethically acceptable...
...This despite our century's vast, earth-shaking experiences, in which the Russian revolution and its demise played the central, historyshaping role: no less so than the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century and the French revolution and its extended impact in the nineteenth century...
...not the crushing of the East German and Polish revolts and of the Hungarian and Czech revolutions...
...Opposition to the Cold War as distinct from identification with Communism...
...He is also right in suggesting that little was learned from the experiences of the Soviet Union under Stalin, as "each new revolution" was applauded and morally misperceived: China under Mao, Cuba under Castro, communist Vietnam, Grenada, Nicaragua, and so on...
...the incredible Soviet-Nazi pact, followed by the Soviet invasion of Poland and its partition with Germany...
...recoil from anti-Communism because the crudest and most visible anti-Communists were invariably on the right...
...Editors: Eugene Genovese's questions are a good start ("The Question," Dissent, Summer 1994), but his own answers are not only far from adequate but open up a whole series of new questions...
...Undeniably, rejections of Communism by many on the left have had a "tepid" pro forma flavor when contrasted with their impassioned denunciations of apartheid in South Africa or right-wing dictatorships in Latin America...
...Editors: It is with utmost difficulty that I overcome the more primitive impulses aroused by the sheer—even if unintended— effrontery of Eugene D. Genovese's article "The Question," (Dissent, Summer 1994) and concede to a more coldly cerebral judgment that tells me that a sense of civility, even if at its most minimal level, requires me to express my appreciation for his having submitted it for publication in Dissent...
...So this is an old story, and Genovese's critics are right to insist that for a long time there have been many voices on the left condemning Soviet totalitarianism...
...The very preference for the label "Stalinism" rather than "Communism" exemplifies such an attitude...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...I became aware of The Question just after my sixteenth birthday, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland in late 1939...
...As a disbeliever in collective responsibility I do not think that we should hold people responsible for what they did not do...
...His article might have better use at colloquies of communists of recent date, whose political morals and ethics were shaped by the Stalinist value system and who, like Genovese, are now undergoing an agonizing readjustment that will prove to be far more complex than casting off old garments and donning new ones...
...though Irving Howe, with his characteristic intellectual honesty, admitted publicly that the Gorbachev phenomenon showed that Isaac Deutscher had been closer to the truth in this matter than had Dissent in its fierce polemics against him...
...Despite Genovese's mea culpa, I find nothing in his statement to explain that...
...This approach states that the means used will determine the ends actually realized, regardless of the goals intended...
...I share Genovese's belief that "socialism is finished" but that the economy we are accustomed to call "capitalism" remains eminently reformable...
...Irving Howe's last, alas, publication in Dissent, "Two Cheers for Utopia" in the Spring 1993 issue, was in this same spirit...
...The crimes of imperialists, capitalist exploiters, and traditional authoritarian regimes over the centuries hardly excuse such selective indignation, for the raison d'etre of the left was to oppose injustice and oppression everywhere...
...the invasion of Finland and of the Baltic states...
...Those who believed that it would all come out well in the end cited the (in)famous cliché about breaking eggs to make an omelet...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...Our rethinking "how to achieve socialism" must also, of necessity, concern itself with the record of the international communist movement—its ideology, its mores, its strategical and tactical concepts, in other words, the theories and practices that underlie the "Crimes of Communism...
...On the other hand, many influential Western leftists provided moral support to these systems, declaring them vastly superior to Western capitalist democracies, denying that they were capable of committing moral outrages, and crediting them with ending social injustices, alienation, inequality, and discrimination of every kind...
...This is above all true of Russia and most of the rest of the former Soviet bloc, as seen in the resurgence of former Communist parties and cadres, though de-Stalinized to various degrees, in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, et al...
...He is referring here to a position that conservatives have attacked as "moral equivalence," and that Arthur Koestler long ago named "the fallacy of the false equation...
...I had become interested in politics and defined myself as a socialist sympathetic to the Soviet Union a few months earlier, although the StalinHitler pact had already given me pause...
...His darkness will remain...
...The depression years were a time when support of the U.S...
...Princeton, N.J...
...the establishment of the gulags...
...Dissent's editorial board should, therefore, terminate the Genovese-bounded discussion in its pages by presenting its own format for a discussion of new insights into the historical nature and significance of Stalinism/communism and its present and future implications for the restructuring of society...
...Communist party and indeed the USSR was understandable, even acceptable, yet many "leftists" were not taken in...
...Genovese charges socialists, social democrats, and liberals with hypocrisy...
...And above all, not to those who come on the basis of their recently revised and poorly rethought ideological formats, as per Genovese...
...Presumably, if the USSR had not collapsed, he would continue to support it...
...I hope we may receive from him all his reasons — emotional, intellectual, altruistic, selfish, professional, personal, and historical—so that we may then have from him a model of personal honesty and candor on this and related questions...
...It is written as an expression of his problem, which is not our problem...
...To say the least, there was some connection between theory and practice, ideology and reality—how much remains to be established pending the result of serious inquiry and analysis, which few leftists seem anxious to undertake...
...The supporters of the Soviet Union were presumably idealists seeking a socialist society...
...There is a philosophy that states that the ends do not justify the means, a position quite the opposite of that taken by Genovese and indeed all Soviet supporters...
...West Roxbury, Mass...
...Anyway, Genovese's question opens readily into a larger one that Dissent has addressed in the past and will almost certainly have to address in the future: why have so many left intellectuals, and leftists generally, often fallen for one or another version of authoritarianism...
...Ever since the coup d'etat by which the Communist party seized power in 1917 (overthrowing a potentially democratic regime) many well-publicized events revealed the true nature of Soviet communism...
...and many other events of the same portent but of lesser magnitude...
...He claims that, while denouncing Stalinism, "we of the left" supported colonialism, capitalism, and social democratic governments that in turn WINTER • 1995 • 141 Letters supported Stalinist practices...
...To accept that they cannot be totally overcome still leaves a lot of room for their reduction...
...Elimination of the vestiges of communist/Stalinist ideology from the American left, essential to its renewal and growth, is an enormous challenge to Dissent: more than it can carry off on its own...
...Yet, although expelled from the Communist party in 1950, he "remained a supporter of the international movement and of the Soviet Union until there was nothing left to support...
...the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the execution of Imre Nagy despite safe-conduct assurances...
...commitment to the "noble ideals" of socialism still affirmed by the Communist states if violated in practice...
...My own impression is that few intellectuals have in recent decades been all-out supporters of the Soviet Union—I had not indeed thought of Genovese himself as one up to the "bitter end," as he now says he was...
...Such a stance seemed more morally culpable than the complacent or fatalistic acceptance of the status quo, warts and all, characteristic of the conservative majority in all times and places...
...As a "Cold War liberal," I have always rejected the sufficiency of such a view of Communism, believing that it was necessary to support a foreign policy that resisted Soviet (and Chinese) expansionism...
...Indeed socialism is itself only a means to the goal of the autonomous person...
...But now that the editors have launched the discussion— which they title "The Crimes of Communism" and Genovese titles "The Question" —why complain...
...Those of us who have never compromised in our struggle against capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism now find ourselves relegated by Genovese to our "preferred portion of the left...
...He admits that the Soviet Union was the perpetrator of mass slaughter on a scale previously unmatched in all human history...
...socialist movement, under Norman Thomas, as well as that part of the black labor movement led by A. Philip Randolph, opposed the evils of capitalism, fascism, colonialism, and the USSR's version of communism...
...Western leftists (except the few who became communist agents or spies or resident propagandists, such as Kim Philby or Anna Louise Strong) did not make a discernible contribution to the policies of communist systems that culminated in their massive violations of human rights...
...not the looting of Eastern Europe...
...And I have watched many leftish Americans these past months aching to believe in Subcommandante Marcos, knowing that they shouldn't, WINTER • 1995 • 139 Letters tantalized by that democratic sounding "sub...
...An extraordinary statement in view of the vast array of known Soviet transgressions (to which Genovese does not plead previous ignorance—on the contrary, he says "we knew everything essential and we knew it from the beginning...
...The cooperation on which the society depends is offered freely, without any coercion...
...Dissent's forty years of publication, together with other writings of its editors and contributors, constitute an important repository for such an examination...
...The twenty-two months of the Nazi-Soviet alliance were, however, an unpromising time to become a Communist sympathizer...
...Thus he believes that the Stalinist bureaucratic collectivist state was socialist and that its fall signified the fall and failure of socialism...
...Christine Stansell has it exactly right in referring to the "tepid tolerance of the communist dictatorships . . . and distrust of anticommunism . . . as inherently right wing" that prevailed in "the strongholds of the American left...
...The U.S...
...And although I do appreciate wit and humor, and Genovese demonstrates that he is talented in that direction, his use of it in this particular essay tends to make light of the most horrendous chapter in this history of human mistreatment of humans...
...The Soviet Union was founded in violence, and Lenin and Stalin made it clear that they would use violence and terror to crush all opposition...
...He didn't open up a discussion of why so much of the left took the historical wrong turn represented by Soviet communism or whether or how it is possible to get back on track (or if the tracks are still there...
...It is not only a matter of the Stalinist regime and the gulags...
...Impervious to facts and reality, they never engaged in honest and open discussion...
...Undoubtedly, I had previously absorbed much from the ambience of the "progressive" school I had attended in Europe...
...Instead, they reek of that arrogance and certainty that have always characterized the more articulate supporters of communism...
...A worse discussion format for defining and resolving these issues can hardly be conceived than that of Genovese's article...
...The democratic socialist society is not an omelet, and the analogy is completely spurious...
...142 • DISSENT Letters Editors: Putting aside for a moment controversies already engendered by "The Question," since Eugene Genovese was an important figure in the pro-Soviet American left right up to the end, I regard his declaration of personal moral responsibility for the Soviets and other communists in power having broken all records for "mass slaughter" as a momentous starting point for a momentous discussion...
...In a true socialist society, each individual is economically secure and accorded full personal dignity—indeed is independent and autonomous...
...America made mistakes and engaged in morally questionable actions in the course of the Cold War, especially in relation to the Third World, the war in Vietnam being, of course, the most notable instance...
...Indeed, faith is required and, much like religious faith, it demands faith in omniscient beings—in this case leaders whose wisdom remains beyond challenge...
...Dissent can build on this tradition, welcoming all who agree to become part of it...
...Professor Genovese, What did you know, and when did you know it...
...Editors: Eugene Genovese and his critics ("The Question," Dissent, Summer 1994) leave me feeling altogether ancient...
...The conviction that such an ideal social order can actually be achieved through political revolution is rightly seen as the source of the evils perpetrated or justified by the left since 1917, or 1789 for that matter...
...Yet, Thomas and Randolph were called "social fascists" and "running dogs of capitalism" by Genovese's colleagues...
...Much of this question relates to a deeper understanding of the social history of the Soviet Union, as found, for instance, in the work of Moshe Lewin...
...the liquidation of the kulaks and the subsequent deliberate starvation in the Ukraine...
...Genovese says he became a Communist at the age of fifteen in 1945, and Eric Foner says he first confronted Genovese's "Question" at the time of Khrushchev's famous speech in 1956...
...Many Western leftists not only supported these deceitful, murderous police states, but also approved of their grotesque "cults of personalities," and mistook great butchers and megalomaniacs for wise and benign fathers of their people...
...During the Vietnam War, for example, many of us opposed American involvement as strongly as he did, but, unlike him, we did so without supporting the other side...
...He wrote: "When someone gets around to asking me The Question I shall answer frankly, explaining as best I can my reasons for having gone along...
...Genovese's essay reveals the real question—why did he and countless others maintain their faith in the face of such known brutalities, and why did they continue to believe in the ultimate validity of "socialism" in the Soviet Union...
...Genovese speaks of "leftwingers who endlessly denounced Stalinism but who could be counted on to support— 'critically,' of course—the essentials of our political line on the world and national affairs...
...I am generally reluctant to assign psychological reasons for people's actions, feeling that I do not know enough to do so, and my judgments are likely to be in error...
...as internationalized by Soviet power to influence anticapitalist programs and movements throughout the world...
...To be able to work with them, I would have to be convinced that their personal psychological needs have changed and that they are not still seeking that external authority to which they could surrender their autonomy...
...remain very much alive, and will continue to play an important role in the twenty-first century...
...Stalinism, and certainly "stalinism" (1.c...
...Editors: Unlike Genovese I believe that the American supporters of Stalin bear far less moral responsibility for the misdeeds of his system than Stalin and his henchmen...
...Many simply denied that what had occurred had occurred, others claimed that it all was necessary to defend the Soviet Union in the face of the world's hostility—and would be justified in the end...
...But it should strive to be the intellectual spearhead in this undertaking...
...I was doubtless lucky to have had to face The Question so early both in my own life and in the era during which it became a major issue, if not the major issue, for the Western left...
...This is especially important at a time when the murky notion of "complicity" has become conventional wisdom among the "politically correct," when, for instance, all white Americans are routinely pronounced "racists" and held responsible for slavery (and its aftereffects), all males for the rapes of women, and so on...
...This makes them unreliable partners...
...WINTER • 1995 • 143...
...Nevertheless, I feel that in this case such an analysis is required...
...I have taken note of the several relevant articles by two board members since the downfall of Soviet power, whose work only serves to highlight, one by cursoriness and the other by singularity, Dissent's failure to comprehend the prime importance of this subject matter...
...I see no indication in Genovese's essay that that psychological need has been eliminated...
Vol. 42 • January 1995 • No. 1
