Westerman's Engineers of the Soul

“Our tanks are worthless if the souls who must steer them are made of glass. This is why I say:  the production of souls is more important than that of tanks.”  J. Stalin.

There is an Andrei Tarkovsky film about a few forlorn humans who make their living by trying to navigate mysterious, unintelligible, alien-crafted zones. In these zones, the normal laws of physics do not apply. Nothing is predictable.  

These zones, utterly bereft of our ordinary understanding of cause and effect, reminded me of something a former colleague once told me about an old employer of mine.  He said:  "Derek, take everything you've learned over the years;  take your three graduate degrees, years of college teaching experience, and decade of administrative experience--take all that you have learned from mentors of the years, and...set all of this aside. These experiences are of no value to you here."  He meant that trying to be good in a truly bad place didn't work, and in fact might make both my life and the place itself worse than it had been.  Ia bad place, even good intentions can be mistaken for cynical ploys and interpreted as aggressive overtures.  

I think sometimes of what Afghanistan must be like, 1960s Vietnam, or Iraq.  Without, I hope, descending into xenophobic, cultural short-sightedness, I think it's safe to say that from time to time a place lapses into prehistoric, moral anarchy.  In such situations, it's impossible, or almost impossible, to tell right from wrong.  Does one side with a criminally corrupt central government, a reprehensible rebel group, a vicious warlord, a distorted religious creed, a foreign colonizer of incalculable power, or one's own backward and bloodthirsty clan?  

In such a moral vacuum, isn't any decision to side with one group against another bound to be a bad one?  And what if the landscape of alliances changes from one year to the next?  What then?  What is right this year might very well prove to be wrong next year. And even if, like Demosthenes, I've managed to encounter  a good man with whom to ally, if that good man in turn is allied to criminals, is my alliance a worthy one or not?  The answer isn't easy to discover, even if one is, against all self-interest, inclined to honesty.

I've worked in such conditions here in America, even though American civilization isn't, as a rule, bereft of morality, or at least moral checks and balances.  We have, after all, an active press, free elections, an independent judiciary, separation of church and state, a written Constitution and Bill of Rights, and a reasonably healthy tradition of civil rights.  So, having worked in places where moral decisions are seldom made, I wonder how much worse things were in places like the U.S.S.R., where no leader was bound by anything other than the fear of Party hierarchy or state authority.  

Reading Frank Westerman's book, Engineers of the Soul:  In the Footsteps of Stalin's Writers, I wonder how sensitive souls navigated even the most pleasant years of the Soviet regime, the period of the so-called Thaw.  Westerman's book reminds us that most Soviet writers were obligated to celebrate Soviet civilization, which more often than not meant praising its most conspicuous hydraulic engineering projects, namely its many canals.  Even Maxim Gorky--who almost always tried to wed his tremendous writing talent to moral causes--wound up writing a paean to a canal, and one that had been built by slave labor.  Paustovsky also wrote about a massive engineering project.  And if Plotonov failed to get much work related to these Stalinist engineering feats, it wasn’t for lack of trying.  Of course, the best Soviet authors found a variety of ways to remain more or less connected to their own understanding of objective (as opposed to Socialist Realist) truth, their own dignity, and the dignity of literature in general.  Some, like Pasternak, avoided poetry and focused on the ideologically safer work of translation, although he famously also took the approach of writing clandestinely.  Some, like Paustovsky, wrote different types of books, some directly pleasing to the apprachniks, others more personal.  But all Soviet writers, with the possible exceptions of Solzhenitsyn a few others, made significant moral and of course aesthetic compromises.  The Ghetto Boys famously rapped that “the world is a ghetto.”  For Soviet authors, the world they knew was “a gulag.”  And it’s a prison or prison camp that most clearly conjures up the perfect collapse of a morally intelligible universe. 

Volkogonov on Yuri Andropov

Yuri Andropov was sixty-eight years old when Brezhnev died and he ascended to the role of Party Leader. He lived only fifteen months after that, but his short reign as the Soviet boss reveals a great deal about the Soviet political experiment. Andropov’s rise to the top Party job reveals the close ties between the political hierarchy and the security apparatus. The Soviet Union was awash in security officials and paid informers, people who existed at every level of Russian society and regularly received small stipends for their services, so it was only natural for Brezhnev’s Politburo to place its faith in the head of the KGB.

Under Andropov, the KGB had become less brutal but no less efficient or even powerful. Andropov referred to his men as “Chekists” (a term that connoted a certain level of cold-bloodiness to those who had experienced the early years of the Bolshevik regime ) and was sometimes called a “Liberal Chekist,” insofar as he believed that the security organs could often fight heterodoxy at the level of ideas more often than it relied on the naked threat of physical coercion. Volkogonov points out that Andropov spent half his life as a Party apparatchik, and the other half as a KGB leader.

Andropov –calm, secretive, desk-bound, humble, and hard-working-- shared Brezhnev’s basic political outlook. The two men were conservatives who believed wholeheartedly in the basic tenants of the Soviet political system and command economy. Unlike Brezhnev, Andropov was well-read and extremely intelligent, if fairly orthodox in his approach to the growing problems that confronted the Soviet Union, including its troubles in Afghanistan, ailing economy, strained relations with China, and expensive arms race with the United States. According to Volkogonov, Andropov had a powerful intellect but failed to creatively address the basic flaws in the Soviet system. The answer to all pressing problems was greater Party discipline, more police surveillance, and more perfect control over the economy.

While Andropov made cosmetic proposals to alter the formal composition of the Supreme Soviet, took on a few regional bosses on issues related to corruption, and talked about new “brigade contracts” to incentivize work at least one some level, he entertained no thoughts that would have affected the Party’s monopoly of power. Indeed, under Andropov, the Politburo continued to make all decisions, no matter how big or small. In a single day, a few old men (and usually, only one old man, namely Andropov) would decide the future of Soviet foreign policy as well as which pig breeders deserved to be awarded prizes for their accomplishments.

Andropov’s rule was marked by debilitating illness. Volkogonov is impressed with Andropov’s capacity for work in the face of advancing physical infirmity, but notes with sadness that no Soviet leader even considered giving up power, no matter how incapacitated. The darkest moment of Andropov’s reign came in 1985, when the Soviets shot down a commercial Korean airliner, killing 269, and showed no remorse (and some deceit) over the incident.

Volkogonov on Brezhnev

Dimitry Volkogonov comes into his own in the era of Brezhnev, in part because he was already a reasonably important Party apparatchik at the time. In fact, Volkogonov had access to Brezhnev's personel file at the time, and even participated in the early phases of the disastrous and immoral intervention in Afghanistan. Who was Brezhnev? Before the creeping senility and physical infirmity overtook him and turned him into a running punchline of untold political jokes, Brezhnev was an affable man, not well-read or worldly, but good-looking, charming, personally generous, apparently loyal, and well-liked by colleagues and supervisors.

Gradually Brezhnev worked his way up through the ranks of Stalin’s regional and then national political regime. Khrushchev (with Stalin's personal knowledge) tapped Brezhnev for multiple advancements, but was eventually undone by his own protegee. Volkogonov says that Brezhnev never evinced any particular courage other than leading the coup to overthrow Khrushchev, and even mentions that fact that one eyewitness reports that Brezhnev collapsed in fear when he believed that Khrushchev was about to act against him. But Brezhnev was the right man for the job of overthrowing Khrushchev, in that his own personal moderation and penchant for stability helped to galvanize party officials who were disgusted by Khrushchev’s theatrical antics, unending reforms, and enthusiasm for change of any sort.



Where Khrushchev never sat still even in his retirement, and never met an idea he didn’t like; Volkogonov says that Brezhnev craved consensus and the maintenance of the status quo, and never really came up with an original or profound idea. (And obviously, in his later years, Brezhnev could barely speak coherently, and was often physically guided, script in hand, from one appointment to the next, as--to paraphrase Volgonov--a sort of experiment to see how long a dying man could be made to maintain even the pretence of working in an official post.)



The author combed Brezhnev’s voluminous personal records and diaries, and rarely if ever found evidence of creativity, abstract thought, or theoretical sophistication. Brezhnev's diaries reveal nothing so much as the record of his hunting accomplishment, though in his advanced age he was sometimes hurt by the recoil of the rifles he could no longer control. (Near the end, Brezhnev merely supervised the hunting, doing no actual shooting.)



The Brezhnev era, as a whole, was a conservative and stable one, although certain intellectual and cultural trends that had emerged under Khrushchev showed continued vitality beneath the surface of official Soviet life. And Brezhnev's 18 year reign witnessed the "beginning of the end" or at least the "end of the beginning" of Russian communism. Under Brezhnev, who refused or could not reconstitute terror to move the economy forward, the Soviet economy stagnated, awash in corruption, cronyism, regulation, extreme centralization, and bureaucracy. The basic Soviet model of political economy was obviously flawed: the Soviets could not compete with America and the West, and maintaining military parity was helping to bankrupt the system. Indeed, probably only massive amounts of petroleum kept the state adrift. But the Brezhnev regime knew enough to understand that Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe depended on military coercion, so the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the whole Brezhnev doctrine made sense in the context of certain inherent Russian weakneses. Without the invasion, the Soviet system might well have collapsed much sooner than it did.

Raisa was a Capricorn

It’s a good thing the Soviet Union collapsed when it did because we’ve all somehow forgotten that it appeared—almost right up until the moment of the collapse—that the Soviet Union was holding its own, even winning, even in the first half of the 1980s. As I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, the Communist Superpower seemed to have a lot going for it. It remained the largest country in the world; its population was larger than ours; its army was said to be superior to that of the U.S., in quantity if not in quality; and we were routinely told that the Soviets enjoyed strategic superiority in many key aspects of the nuclear arms race.

The Soviet Union had its problems, but it possessed immense natural resources, including astronomical quantities of oil, which dwarfed our own. It had reliable allies in comparison with our NATO client states, who often went their own way even on matters directly related to the safety of the Western World. The Soviet Union also continued to do well in the war for the hearts and minds of the so-called Third World (now renamed the developing world). The Russians had, for instance, apparently chosen the right side in the Arab-Israeli conflict, insofar as Israel had little to offer America in comparison with the wealth, population, markets, and oil of the Arab League and OPEC. Moreover, despite the quagmire of Afghanistan, the Russians had clearly won in Vietnam, and were doing well in Africa, where, once again, the U.S. seemed to have backed the wrong side: the minority Apartheid regime of White South Africans.

The Soviets were even gaining ground in Latin America. Cuba had survived a trade decade for decades, and Ronald Reagan insisted that Nicaragua and Grenada were lethal threats to the security of the continental United States. Remember the map Reagan showed Americans of a huge red surge washing up to the U.S. southern border by way of Nicaragua and Mexico?

Soviet superiority also seemed to manifest itself in chess, with the Soviets maintaining both the first and second positions in the global sport. There were no more Bobby Fishers in the 1980s: We knew we couldn’t be either Kasparov or his opponent. The Russians continued to well in international sports as well. The Russian state had another important advantage: its leaders didn’t need to contend with alternative parties, or organized public opposition, or true freedom of the press.

Even when Communism entered into the period of Glasnost and Perestroika, the Soviet Union evinced certain signs of competitiveness. The viability of the system was epitomized in the strange pairing of Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. Gorbachev, confident, supremely intelligent, and urbane, the Soviet leader emerged as a master of public diplomacy. Where David Stockman’s book The Triumph of Politics revealed that Ronald Reagan frequently slept during key meetings and required blow up dolls or other gimmicks to engage his attention for White House presentations, Gorbachev boldly challenged stereotypes about what a Communist leader could do or be. He, more than Reagan, seemed to be the man of the future. He was—or so it seemed to many, especially in Western Europe--for peace, reform, and change.

If Gorbachev seemed like a sophisticated leader who was prepared for the future, Ronald Reagan’s confidence seemed rooted in his Hollywood past. It was a matter of playacting. Reagan could deliver speeches, but was he the real thing or was he a B grade actor? A large minority of the United States didn’t think he was smart enough to be president. (It turns out alzheimer's might have been part of the problem). However, for me the real key to understanding Soviet potential for the future was not Mikhail Gorbachev but his wife, Raisa. While Raise was a sophisticated, substantive woman who had earned a doctorate and taught philosophy at the college level for two decades, Nancy Reagan was spending huge quantities of money on designer dresses and consulting astrologers. In the past ten years, I’ve come to reassess my superficial appraisal of the two women, and I’ve come to respect the magic of astrology.

Soviet/American Defeat in Afghanistan

Once upon a time Afghanistan was a metaphor for remoteness. Even with our American capacity for forgetting the past, how is it that we find ourselves trying to outdo the Soviets in terms of conquering Afghanistan? Two decades ago, the possibility of winning a war in Afghanistan was a punch-line in a movie (The Prince’s Bride). Yet now, two American presidents have apparently decided that there is no war America cannot win, and no war American should not try to win.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, American foreign policy and military analysts insisted that Russia would now threaten nations in the Persian Gulf as well as the Indian subcontinent. Russia maintained the largest and strongest army in the world, and everyone knew that Communism had never before been known to surrender territory to the free world or even non-aligned world. Jimmy Carter launched a feeble protest, cancelled grain sales to Russia, and withdrew America from the Olympics.

Of course, with the assistance of U.S. funds, Russia was eventually defeated. The Soviet Union’s border with Afghanistan didn’t help ensure Russian victory. Neither did the Kremlin’s total immunity from an inquisitive press, popular protests, or the possibility of electoral defeat. Now America thinks it can do better. (And better than the British Raj by the way).

It’s remarkable that Americans believe they can dominate mountainous terrain so far from home. It’s even more remarkable that Americans think it’s worthwhile to try. If Gorbachev thought Afghanistan wasn’t worth a prolonged war despite the shared border and possible impact on the Soviet Union’s enormous Muslim population, why is Afghanistan worth so much American treasure and so many American lives?

Both Bush and Obama would no doubt point to 9-11. But responding to stateless actors or quasi state actors with a declaration of war seems like a very bad strategic choice and public relations strategy. For America puts its own forces on equal footing with a distant enemy on the worst possible geopolitical and military terrain. Moreover, America demonstrates to declared enemies and potential enemies in the region that we are not as formidable as many might have expected a superpower to be.

The symbolism of Afghanistan cannot be lost on the Muslim world. Here, at least one superpower has already experienced humiliating defeat at the hands of disorganized irregular guerrilla forces. The catastrophe of Afghanistan is an extension of the disastrous Iraq policy. But sadly, even Obama feels obligated to fight the Afghan enemy as that enemy would no doubt choose to be fought, by occupation, and at a distance. Obama already made Afghanistan an issue in his campaign against McCain. He said the real war against terrorism needed to be fought there, and in Pakistan. Yet stateless terrorists hardly need Afghanistan to launch assaults against Americans. They can kill Americans in India, in Indonesia, near Yemen, in East Africa, and in dozens of other locations.