Politics of Leaving

My office is nearly empty now. I've put away books and dismantled all elements of bourgeois display. I've packed up all of the family photographs, files, and antiques that adorned this space over the past three years. I've put away a fencing trophy my maternal grandfather (the Left-Wing inspiration for this blog perhaps) won at Harvard in 1912. I've packed up a set of clay cats my paternal grandfather made in the impoverished, smoke-filled twilight of his life. I have cleaned up a war ration card my mother received at five years old. There's a stripped down table that sat in my paternal grandmother kept in her cluttered basement for many decades. Family photos, antique (but not valuable) clocks--everything must go.

There are only a few Russian books left here. I've uncovered a stash of excellent political works. There is William Taubman's biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, which demonstrated that this Cold War leader was as complex and contradictory as any modern leader. Khrushchev was all things, impossible to sum up. He was guilty of monstrous crimes as one of Stalin's henchmen, and yet helped to put the Soviet Union onto a much more humane path after Stalin's death. He was incredibly clever and funny, but somehow also capable of extremely foolish, impetuous, and boorish behavior. The ultimate sycophant under Stalin, Khrushchev somehow demonstrated real bravery, not only on his path to power, but also in his efforts to publish his memoirs while in the political wilderness.

On the Khrushchev theme, I've got Guiseppe Boffa's laudatory account of the Khrushchev era as a whole called, somewhat dramtically, Inside the Khrushchev Era. Boffa was an Italian journalist and fellow travellor who praised the Soviet Union for its technological and industrial achievements, and heralded Khrushchev as a practical and humaine leader--just right for the age of detente.

On Stalin himself, I see Simon Montefiore's two equally good books, Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar, and Young Stalin. Montefiore has quickly established himself as one of the deans of Russian history, and rightly so. These two works somehow reveal sides of Stalin that hadn't yet emerged, especially Young Stalin. Montefiore managed to uncover dozens if not hundreds of previously undiscovered sources about Stalin, some by former lovers and others with almost as much personal knowledge about the legendary autocrat. The whole course of history seems to have reversed itself with this book. One somehow comes to see a Stalin who wasn't destined to become the master of Russian's destiny but who, nevertheless, possessed a real and multi-faceted genius, for politics, but also for organization, criminal activity, revolutionary propaganda, and even, perhaps, poetry.

Next, I've got two of Isaac Deutcher's three books on Trotsky here, The Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky 1921- 1929, and the Prophet Outcast,Trotsky 1929- 1940. Although undoubtedly biased by sympathy for the man's political perspectives, these are tremendous books, thoroughly researched but vivid tales of political courage and indeed heroic opposition to Stalin's ascendancy. Of course, Deutcher doesn't criticize Trotsky's crimes nor even his personality flaws that ensured his defeat by opponents. Deutcher also wrote the unfinished Lenin's Childhood, a short potrait of Lenin, his father and mother, and, most importantly, his terrorist brother who was executed for his involvement in a plan to assassinate the tsar.

Other political books on hand are Milovan Djilas' Conversations with Stalin, which illuminates the ties that originally bound Eastern European strains of communism to Moscow, but also shows how Yugoslavian leaders became alienated by Stalin and Russian primacy in general. And, to follow up the story of dissillusionment with Djilas' ant-communist treatise, written from a Yugoslavian prison, there's The New Class. Somewhat more globally, I also have Walter Laqueur's book of political essays here, Out of the Ruins of Europe. One of these is even titled Russian Roulette. So glad I went with Soviet Roulette instead of Russian Roulette, the title which first came to me when I presented the idea for this blog to my wife and one of her best friends (who said, quite correctly, that I needed a hook for the blog a la Julia and Julia: ideas anyone?).

Down to my last few books, I see that the majority of these are in some fashion political works as well. As I've said before, I grew up believing that politics was everything. I don't practice that belief anymore, but my obsession with the Russian Revolution is a form of nostalgia for a time when everybody shared my early belief in the primacy of the political over the cultural. (A time when most people didn't think that Real Housewives of New York, Orange County, Atlanta, and New Jersey would trumps everything remotely political in terms of its watercooler or Facebook appeal). I've got the book, The Lost Politburo Transcripts, which shows Stalin's mastery of a unique form of political discourse, the politburo debate and group decision-making process. And another, The Death of Uncle Joe, which describes the progressive disillusionment of some (but definitely not all) of the British communist intellectuals, especially in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. It's a book that inspired me to think about why my Left-of-Center friends and family didn't come down harder on the Soviet Union for its massive human rights violations. On the same theme of disenchantment with communist ideals, I have Robert Conquest's book of short, anti-communist essays and editorials, Tyrants and Typewriters: Communiques from the Struggle for Truth. It's filled with dozens of short Conquest essays on subects such as Koestler, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, Grossman, Sakharov, and Djilas.

Nikolai "Piggy Foxy" Bukharin and Co.

The Russian Archives of Social and Political History hold extraordinary secrets. Foxy Piggy and the Sword of Revolution reveals some of them. The book is a collection of informal political caricatures produced by and for elite Russian government and party officials during the 1920s and 1930s. Of varying degrees of artistic fluency, they reveal a great deal about the nature of power in the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Revolution.

The cartoons, some incredibly funny, others merely malicious, show how Soviet leaders jockeyed for power with one another and intermingled personal feeling with public policy disputes. As the editors Vatlin and Maleshenko tell us, these cartoons were created in the midst of political activity, at Central Committee plenums, Party Congresses, and Politburo meetings. They suggest that Soviet leaders were creative if also crude students of human nature. While they do track the growing dominance of Stalin within the Party, they show that uniformity of expression was not established until the Great Purges of 1937-8. For while the editors point out that few cartoonists created portraits of Stalin that ridiculed him—as they surely did for most other leaders—Central Committee and Politburo politicians were busily, and often collaboratively, producing works that poked fun at one another, both on a personal basis and with respect to political opinion or error.

One cartoonist that stands out both for artistic talent and a humane subject matter is Bukharin. One can’t help but believe that this sensitive artist was proclaiming a more urbane view of politics than his peers, who frequently used their cartoons to do little more than attack and discredit their subjects. However, one can’t help but remember that Mao Tse Tung was an excellent poet and this didn’t do much for Chinese peasants or intellectuals.

It’s important not to generalize too much about Soviet politics based on this treasure trove of cartoon art. However, the editors rightly point out that the content of the artwork is largely devoid of attacks against colonialism or capitalism (common themes in public Soviet propaganda), suggesting that Soviet officials were more concerned with building Russian socialism than with exporting it during this time period. They also note that the work becomes darker and darker as the years go by, reflecting the end of any pretence to pluralism within the Politburo or Central Committee.

In truth, it’s hard to imagine how diversity of opinion lasted as long as it did in the upper echelons of the Communist Party. As the editors remind us, Hitler never even pretended to have equal debating partners. As a theme, economics looms largest. The editors note that the Soviet Union was attempting to create a brand new form of economics, and largely failing. They were producing economic plans, building factories, electrifying the countryside, balancing supply and demand, creating canals and dams, transforming agriculture, and eliminating any form of private trade or free enterprise. In this situation, officials fought with one another for scarce resources as well as the authority to exert influence over key economic activities. With the politburo making all decisions—and often doing so in an information vacuum—government officials were caught in a dilemma. Lacking all authority to make independent decisions, they took their concerns to powerful Party patrons, who ultimately resolved even conflicts which arose out of tiny practical concerns.

The cartoons reveal the darker side of this competition, and hint at the cost of losing this competition: being branded a saboteur or ideological opponent of socialism. As the editors suggest, the leaders who were producing this art with wrestling with their own incompetence and lack of insight into economic reality. They—and increasingly Stalin alone--made every decision, and yet key elements of the Soviet economy were in disarray. The trains collided, agriculture was collapsing, consumers had too little, and slave labor was needed to complete some of the massive industrialization and mining projects. Somebody deserved blame, and since it couldn’t be the Party elite, it had to be kulaks, Trotskyites, “wreckers,” and capitalist spies. The cartoons, which begin with some levity, end with the darker search for scapegoats.