Ignorance Worn Lightly

...It is not pedantic to insist on the proper spelling of Dzierzynski (or at least Dzerzhinskn), or on the correct birth-date of Denikin In the course of the book, the authors present details of espionage activities and claim some of their information comes from archives But it is impossible to trust them, or to treat their judgments and opimons seriously Their cavalier approach to their work shows contempt for the reader The authors wear their ignorance lightly Their self-confidence borders on the comical when they take on George Kennan on the subject of the Sisson "documents " Kennan proved decades ago that these documents showing Lenin and Trotsky as German agents had been forged Although Brown and MacDonald read neither Russian nor German, the languages of the Sisson documents, they do not hesitate to contradict Kennan (The authors generally prefer to err on the side of certitude rather than skepticism They have no doubt about the guilt of Hiss and the Rosenbergs Whenastoryistoofantas-tic even for them, they still cannot resist repeating it Thus we hear once again how Stalin might have murdered Lenin, etc ) As a professional historian, I am baffled about the writing and publication of this book Perhaps Brown and MacDonald took no notes, perhaps they wrote down what they remembered of their reading after a day or two Only this could explain the quantity of their misinformation But it does not explain why their publisher did not hire a graduate student, or an undergraduate, to check a few facts in encyclopedias and atlases That would have prevented such sillv mistakes as putting the Don Cossacks into Siberia It might even have prev ented the sillier mistake ot publishing On a Field of Red...

...Ignorance Worn Lightly On a Field of Red: The Communist International and the Coming of World War II By Anthony Cave Blown and Charles B MacDonald Putnam 718 pp $19 95 Reviewed by Peter Kenez Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Cruz There are many bad books published on contemporary history and politics Some are not well researched, others present no cogent arguments, and a great number simply have nothing interesting or new to say Once in a while, however, a book appears that is so bad it stands out The morbid reader turns the pages with fascination What next9 On a Field of Red, written by a British journalist and an American military historian, is in this category It is not organized around a central argument In the Authors' Note we are told the writers had two goals to show that the Comintern's policy contributed to the coming of World War II, and that the Cold War originated not with the defeat of Hitler, but with the establishment of the Soviet regime Since neither of these points is systematically developed in the text, it is not clear how serious the authors are about them Whatever the case, as for the first point, if the authors merely meant to say the Communist movement was a crucially important part of the post-Versailles world, and that world created the preconditions for the next conflict—well, obviously It is also true that the perceived danger from the Left greatly encouraged the growth of the Right (and vice versa), and in this sense international Communism contributed to the coming of the War But I doubt that the authors would be satisfied with so modest and commonsensical a definition of the situation They appear to prefer conspiracy scenarios Without offering any proof, they attribute to the Communists a much more direct and immediate responsibility for the War The second point hardly merits attention I have never had a freshman student who failed to realize that the antagonism between the West and the Soviets went back to the time of the Revolution Nonetheless, of course, World War II was a great turning point in Western-Soviet relations, and it is perfectly proper to describe the subsequent period with the new phrase, "ColdWar " Brown and MacDonald throw a motley collection of bits of 20th-century history into the pot to cook their undigestible stew They do not even attempt to explain why the disillusionment of Emma Goldman, the story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the adventures of Washington B Vander-hp in the Soviet Union, the courtship and abdication of the Prince of Wales, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, etc belong in the same book—let alone what these characters and events have to do with Comintern subversion Apparently the authors find them interesting and believe that is sufficient justification for their presence But it is a dangerous premise for putting together a book Aside from confusing the reader about what is going on, it might give him the impression that somehow every person and incident mentioned is involved with Soviet espionage For the unstated and unexamined assumption of On a Field of Red is that the Comintern was an important organization that successfully carried out subversion and espionage As far as subversion is concerned, it is more likely that Russian meddling in the affairs of the Communist parties of Europe through the Comintern undermined the force of indigenous radicalism Lenin, who had an uncanny understanding of the Russian political environment, deeply misunderstood the West Yet even if this were not the reality, the task of the interventionist—revolutionary or counterrevolutionary—is never an easy one By the time the usually insolent Comintern agent arrived with his fresh instructions from Moscow, the circumstances had changed so much that the orders were worse than meaningless No wonder the Comintern agents, the heroes of this book, never produced a revolution The matter is somewhat different with espionage Certainly during the interwar years quite a few people were motivated by Communism to spy for the Soviet Union But the authors, as lovers of spy stones are prone to do, vastly overstate the importance of intelligence gathering They themselves demonstrate, however, that the USSR gained nothing from securing a very important item of information the date of the impending German attack Nor do they make a convincing case that intelligence received from the U S greatly contributed to the development of the Soviet atom bomb The Comintern, after all, was a feeble weapon in the arsenal of an isolated state weakened by revolution and civil war Most disconcertingly, the authors are deeply and hopelessly ignorant There is no way to cite here every error in this extremely long, cliche-ridden book Let me just concentrate on a few pages General Denikin is a rather minor figure in the story and our authors have littleto tell us about him, but even that is completely wrong They say he was 37 in 1918, in fact he was 46, they say he was an aristocrat, in fact he was the son of a man born a serf, they say he succeeded Ataman Kaledin, in fact he came to lead an altogether different army which had been headed by General Kormlov, they say he went into exile in the United States, in fact he lived most of his exile in France Elsewhere they write about nonexisting organizations such as the "Military Revolutionary Committee of the Bolshevik Party," and non-existing persons such as "Der-zhinski" and "Kesenskaia " They are surprised to find that Ataman Kaledin's Cossacks did not march on Moscow in J uly 1918 They would be less surprised if they knew that the poor Ataman had committed suicide almost five months before And so on In the very first sentence ot chapter one they write "In 1903 when Lenin first established the notion of the world revolution of the proletanat "One can only wonder What was Lenin doing in 1902'' Or 19019 Indeed, what was Marx doing dunng his long and productive life'' Equally outlandish is the idea that in March 1917 Lemn promised the German Emperor he would not harm the Tsar and his family...