Dear Editor
Dear Editor Brzezinski l am not entirely convinced of the merits of all the details in Zbigniew Brzezinski's "A Plan for Peace in the Middle East" (NL, January 7), but his critics????especially P....
...The storms his cadres create around the country by vehemently denouncing their infallible leader's real or imagined enemies????or, for that matter, Beethoven, whose Appassionato was Lenin's favorite piece of music????Generate an atmosphere that scares off all potential conspirators...
...NL, June 10) did not have very much to say about the volume under review...
...Boston Terry Kalendar China-Watching Donald Kirk's "Chinese Puzzles" (NL, June 10) should be approached in the light of Stalin's behavior during the last years of his life...
...This weakens his regime's chances of reaching the (nuclear) status of safety and the point fcr new monolithic-ideological departures...
...Let me give just two examples...
...This is proper and welcome...
...290...
...The planting of a sovereign Jewish State in the middle of the Arab world involved tremendous risks...
...The problem is Kenez' peculiar method of developing his disagreements...
...At the same time I think the hook is overrated...
...Perhaps I should also be pleased that other of my points are so persuasive that he has appropriated them...
...It was...
...Taking up the economic debates between the Bolshevik Left and Bukharinists in the 1920s????And presumably to illustrate that I treat other Bolsheviks "unfairly"????kenez complains that I do not acknowledge Preobrazhensky's insights or that Bukharin "came to accept the soundness of many of the Leftist criticisms...
...and that for too long Bukharin remained "stubbornly indifferent to the Left's analysis" (pp...
...at the same time, he has written an absorbing and balanced study of Bukharin's era...
...in a recent essay, to describe the book as "one of the two or three really outsanding studies in the historv of the Soviet Union of the past 25 years-" The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...If the search for absolute security is futile even in the case of the greal powers, in Israel's case it is obviously a chimera...
...In this two-fold sense, Cohen's contribution is of major historiographical importance to our understanding of the Revolution and early Soviet years...
...Whenever Mao is being stricken by an acute spell of suspicion, he unleashes a "cultural revolution...
...In doing so, however, he often misrepresents what Cohen is saying...
...i then go on (in Chapter VII) to s*>ow that Bukharin subsequently "modified his economic program . . . seemingly narrowing his distance from the Left" (p...
...But now, as Lekachman rightly indicates, the magazine seems to have lost a certain drive, not to mention its broad perspective: It has become cliquish, stodgy and academic...
...In that period the Soviet dictator constantly feared and terrorized everyone around him...
...Cohen's great achievement, it seems to me, is that he has produced a surprisingly detached, remarkably rich intellectual portrait of one of the most important, yet little understood, Bolshevik figures...
...I am well aware that he knows Bukharin was more like Kamenev than like Stalin...
...Cohen also chose to misinterpret my last paragraph...
...where I treat Bukharin's belated recognition of the truth...
...Certainly Kenez is welcome to take issue with Cohen...
...1 argue explicitly that Preobrazhensky's analysis ''pinpointed the essential weak spot in his [Bukharin's] industrial program," that the "Left's critiaue was clearly valid in important respects...
...Princeton, NJ...
...Despite its Anglophilia and one or two other minor faults, it provided its readers with as fine an overview of the era's intellectual currents as one could wish...
...Indeed, striving for the unattainable may cause us to miss the opportunity to secure the benefits that do lie within the realm of possibility...
...however, an excellent assessment of the current state of a magazine which, over much of the last decade, had been probably the major intellectual force in the United States...
...He chose to write a defense of Bukharin's economic views in the late 1920s...
...for protection against the threat of Soviet preemptive strikes) apparently fade from Mao's mind...
...We must now search for a plan that offers the best chances for Israel's preservation, though nothing we can do will entirely eliminate the risks that were inherent in the enterprise from the beginning...
...To cite just one prominent example, Kenez implies that Cohen ignores the fact that Bukharin ultimately recognized that disagreements between the Right and Left oppositions paled in comparison with differences between all of the other major Bolshevik leaders and Stalin, when precisely this point is one of the major themes of the last part of the book...
...In fact...
...I believe that Preobrazhensky was a superior economist...
...of course, Kenez' quotation of Bukharin's words to K.amenev is taken straight from the book (p...
...April 29) conveys the overall impression that the book is narrowly focused, a paean to Bukharin that says relatively little about "the man" or the period in which he lived...
...They enhance his domestic nimbus and personal safety...
...Since official reports indicate that Mao was suspicious even of Lin Piao, whom he had formally designated to succeed him, his mistrust of the rest of his Party's hierarchy can be safely assumed...
...I therefore cannot understand why Alexander Rabinowitch got the impression that I regard it as narrow...
...In this regard, it is heroic nonsense to assume that the nation can in the long run be preserved by its military power alone...
...Based on this evidence, he presents a stimulating, insightful reinterpretation of Bukharin's views and historical importance that I find quite persuasive...
...NYR Robert Lekachman's piece on Philip No-bile's Intellectual Skywriting...
...I wish I could reconcile these compliments with the sustained assault that follows...
...Secondly, there is Kenez' remarkable claim that "Cohen overlooks the truth Bukharin finally realized in defeat and confided to Lev Kamenev: 'Disagreements between us continufd on next pnire .llf##?f>?K| 1 tinis ami thv Hvuttlt ttoform My ilieiuutl .Mtnifttlis Dear Editor ¦I^^^^^^B^^^^H^^^nHHLMUL^HLBMI^L^B continued and Stalin are many times more serious lhan were our disagreements with you.' " In fact, this "truth" is a recurrent theme of the book...
...It is clear that Cohen has thoroughly researched a large body of previously unwork-ed source material, a significant portion of it apparently only recently available...
...As I put it in one of several places, "Part of the tragedy of the Old Bolsheviks lay here: For seven years they fought among themselves over principles, while an intriguer gradually acquired the power to destroy them all" (p...
...On the other hand, during these crises of confidence the fundamental aspects of his dialectical foreign policy (such as diplomatic reliance on the U.S...
...today, of course, it is a moot question whether another solution would have been feasible...
...Literary Politics and the "New York Review of Books" ("Victor by Default...
...The New York Review achieved its exalted position by placing itself firmly in the center of America's cultural life (the same, of course, cannot be said about its position in American politics...
...because compared to Stalin all the major figures of Bolshevism in the 1920s were liberals, and ihus in one way or another precursors...
...Since the two men held diametrically opposing views, Cohen cannot agree with both of them...
...My book, which is meant to be not only a biography of Bukharin but also a more general history of the period, departs in important ways from conventional scholarly thinking about the formative decades in Soviet history, and indeed i am hoping that it will help reopen serious discussion of the Bolshevik Revolution and its outcome...
...Berkeley Carl Landauer Bukharin Peter Kenez' review of Stephen F. Cohen's Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution ("Stalin's Most Formidable Opponent," NL...
...157...
...Since 1948, great sacrifices have been inflicted on the people of Israel as well as on the Arabs, but the Jewish State still exists, which is more than any sober observer could have believed probable when it was founded...
...Granted that neither Arab commitments, nor UN controlled buffer zones, nor even U.S...
...guarantees are absolutely reliable, yet in combination they offer a greater measure of protection than could otherwise be obtained...
...I certainly do not agree with the author's modest self-evaluation that his work "departs in important ways from conventional scholarly thinking about the formative decades in Soviet history," and I think his hope "that it will reopen serious discussion of the Bolshevik Revolution and its outcome" is unfounded...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...Surely, this is part of what prompted Leonard Schapiro...
...At the time I considered the odds against this experiment too great and would have preferred another solution to the pressing problem of where to place the remnants of European Jewry...
...Alexander Rabinowitch Member, 1973-74, Institute for Advanced Study Peter Kenez begins his review by calling my Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution "an important book" and me "a first-rate biographer...
...Dear Editor Brzezinski l am not entirely convinced of the merits of all the details in Zbigniew Brzezinski's "A Plan for Peace in the Middle East" (NL, January 7), but his critics????especially P. J. Berlin (NL, April 29)????overlook one decisive point...
...As I wrote in my review, this is a well-researched study that places Bukharin in the proper historical context...
...208-12...
...My criticism is that it is wrong to pick Bukharin from the oppositions as the precursor of "socialism with a human face...
...New York City Laszlo A. Kiss...
...I did not appropriate Cohen"-, point: We really do disagree...
...Thus, these outbursts of Mao's absolu-tistic ego and anxiety are not without profit...
...New York City Stephen F. Cohen Peter Kcttez replies: I fully realize that Stephen F. Cohen's Bukharin and the Russian Revolution was well received by the critics, and to a point I agree with them...
...I am pleased that Kenez seems to accept my main thesis that Bukharin's ideas, and not Trotsky's, represented the real and formidable Bolshevik alternative to Stalin and Stalinism...
...One can only hope that the vacuum created by the New York Review's decline will quickly be filled...
...242...
...Kenez says he "disagree [s] with much of Cohen's treatment...
...Repeatedly, on important questions, he ascribes to me positions that simply are not mine, and then adopts what I actually say in the book as the basis of his own objections...
Vol. 57 • June 1974 • No. 13
