Rhetorical Overkill
BARAS, VICTOR
Rhetorical Overkill The Education of Lev Navrozov By Lev Navrozov Harper's Magazine Press. 628 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Victor Baras Assistant Professor of Political Science, the New School;...
...Navrozov delights in repeating the rumors that Lenin was descended from Germans or Kalmyks, presumably in order to spite the Soviet authorities, who are notoriously sensitive about their Founder's Russian pedigree...
...Every unmarried girl who has reached the age of 18 is obliged, under pain of a severe penalty, to register with the Free Love Office of the Welfare Commissariat...
...Navrozov's answer is perhaps contained in his belief that the West is the home of innocence and ignorance...
...For many years, the democracies pointed and shouted and occasionally fought, yet Communism is more widespread and stable than ever...
...it is working actively to bring about that end...
...He sees the prototypical Westerner in Joseph Davies, America's slow-witted ambassador to Moscow in the 1930s, who considered Stalin's show trials models of enlightened judicial procedure...
...On the contrary, in the 1940s he supported only Communists, and he gave full backing only to those Communist parties loyal to him...
...it is not part of the CIA at all...
...There is certainly innocence...
...The post-Revolutionary "ideal norm of consumption" would have been considered a starvation diet by most Russians before 1917...
...The alleged achievements of Communism, moreover, are scarcely impressive...
...When Lenin was imprisoned for his revolutionary activity, he complained only of delays in the delivery of his favorite brand of mineral water...
...None of this is controversial, and most of it is confirmed openly by the Soviet leadership...
...And why revive the tired speculation about Lenin's ethnic origins...
...Why is Lenin's successor repeatedly identified as "Djugashvili-Stalin...
...Real health care is free only for the Soviet elite...
...it looks forward to the triumph of Communism everywhere...
...They are sincere, Navrozov says, in their greed...
...Why must every mention of Lenin be accompanied by a reminder that his real name was Ulyanov, as if the man's greatest fault were his use of a pseudonym...
...Unfortunately, when he writes in his own voice, Navrozov's prose is contaminated by bitterness...
...Are things going to get worse than that...
...It is implacably hostile to the capitalist countries...
...Rights of residence, education and occupation are all prescribed by a rigid code...
...Yet at least, it is claimed, the Communists-some Communists?are sincere...
...The ordinary citizen gets a bed in a barracks that the authorities call a "hospital," and he is treated by nurses who have been transformed by governmental edict into "doctors...
...Navrozov's love of hyperbole may give them that excuse...
...But the treatment of foreign affairs is otherwise careless...
...In many areas, particularly that of political liberties, conditions are indeed incomparably worse now than before the Bolshevik Revolution...
...He was ambivalent about the revolution in China, and openly hostile to the non-Communist "national liberation" leaders of the Third World...
...What he means, apparently, is that in the near future it may be impossible for even one person to lead the strictly private life led by Navrozov (and no one else) during the tyrant's last years and after...
...The people at the top are hot so much rulers of the country as owners...
...Communist revolutions are made by society's failures, those who can only get more by brute force...
...As for prosperity, the Soviet standard of living remains far below Europe's...
...Possibly the strangest is this 1918 proclamation of the soviet (governing council) of the city of Vladimir: "Every girl above the age of 18 is hereby declared to be state property...
...Even in Britain the symbol karlmarx verbalizes for a good half of the population the possibility of getting more wealth and higher status by fleecing the other half...
...It is distracting...
...Such imprecisions and outright errors are the inevitable consequence of Navrozov's taste for dramatic overstatement...
...The social structure resembles the medieval pyramid, with the mem-bers of each caste owing fealty to those above and commanding those below...
...Navrozov is at his best when he lets the Russians speak for themselves...
...In addition, though, there is exhaustion...
...Navrozov's preferred metaphor for the Soviet Union is that of a complete feudal society...
...It is too bad that Navrozov's fury at the Soviet regime and his exasperation with Westerners who refuse to see Communism for what it is drives him to rhetorical overkill...
...He says the USSR "may soon have a more repressive society than great Stalin's" (his italics...
...Curiously, the other old Bolsheviks, most of whom used pseudonyms, are spared this small indignity...
...His general premises are sound enough: The USSR is on the offensive diplomatically and militarily throughout the world...
...There are territorial fiefdoms, peasants bound by law to the land, privileges and duties of station...
...Even if Tsarism had survived and continued to stumble along the road of semiconstitutional monarchy, Navrozov believes, Russia would probably have been better off than it is today...
...The USSR boasts the lowest rents in the world, but as Navrozov observes, cheap (and overorowded) housing is merely part of the pittance doled out by the government to a populace from whom everything has been confiscated...
...The offspring of such cohabitation become the property of the Republic...
...Interested persons may choose a husband or wife once a month...
...Under the Tsar, the Communist party journal Pravda was sold openly on the streets...
...The repressiveness of the Stalin years, however, had something to do with the fact that millions of people starved to death, that tens or hundreds of thousands were shot, that whole populations were "resettled" and decimated...
...He has sifted through old newspaper stories and official pronouncements, unearthing some surprising and amusing tidbits...
...Navrozov is only partly right about the reason tough talk on Communism is unfashionable in the West...
...The National Security Council is not "the most secret department of the CIA...
...How he managed this feat is not quite clear—except that he did not attack the authorities in public, and they seem to have reciprocated by somehow failing to take notice of him...
...A well-paid worker in 1964, to use Navrozov's favorite example, labored for two weeks to buy an Italian plastic raincoat that sold in the West for $1.40...
...So they steal—not a loaf of bread but a whole country...
...Among the others duped by Stalin, in Navrozov's opinion, were Winston Churchill and Golda Meir (who was outraged by the allegation and sued for libel...
...All the same, the author of The Education of Lev Navrozov sees Soviet Communism as an unrelieved disaster for mankind, an evil regime with no triumphs to balance against its failures...
...Stalin did not try to mobilize the peoples of Asia and Latin America against the U.S...
...Or he may pay for treatment that is only slightly inferior to what the higher-ups receive for nothing...
...Our moral-political lives would clearly be more comfortable if we could convince ourselves that the powers with whom we are forced to share the globe are not really as awful as we thought...
...As a result, many Westerners have found it expedient, or necessary for their selfrespect, to delude themselves about the character of Communist regimes...
...Westerners can barely imagine the pervasive totality of state power in the USSR...
...Thus, the Kremlin continues to give top priority to military development, devoting twice as large a proportion of the GNP to defense as does the United States...
...It oozes malice...
...Associate, Russian Research Center, Harvard University Prior to his relatively recent emigration from the USSR, Lev Navrozov was, to use his phrase, "the only strictly private person in the country...
...the suit is pending...
...For many readers are still willing to listen to the truth, even if they are looking for an excuse not to...
...Besides, to dismiss the truth about the USSR as anti-Communist hysteria or nostalgia for the Cold War is terribly tempting...
...Nor is he particularly compelling in discussing foreign policy...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 23
