A Brief Hiatus from a Hiatus

This post is just a reminder that Soviet Roulette is currently on hiatus.  I have taken a break from posting here in order to make progress on a competing academic project.  I will try from time to time to post here briefly to update readers on my continued obsession with Russian history.  As we approach summer, I continue to read a variety of different books on Russian or Soviet history.  For instance, I am reading Catherine Merridale's excellent Red Fortress:  History and Illusion in the Kremlin.  The book has reminded me that Russia's modern history is no more interesting than its early modern history, and I hope eventually study Ivan the Terrible's reign and the Time of Troubles, for instance, in much more depth.  The links between early modern and modern, or even contemporary, Russia may sometimes be overestimated by Western observers, but they do exist.

In addition, to Merridale, I've begun Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov.  I tried to begin this book in tandem with Tolstoy's Resurrection to resolve once and for all the eternal question of Russian literature:  who is the better author?  Sadly, both books haven't begun all that well for me.  They both seem to share some sort of heaviness or perhaps didacticism.  I'm sure they are both great books, but even geniuses can produce uneven works.  I think of Oscar Wilde producing Salome after so many other magnificent plays.  One Russian novella that has surprised and delighted me is Leskov's The Enchanted Wanderer, a book that seems to combine adventure, Russian madness, and high comedy.

Russia was also in my mind when the Institute of International Education and the State Department hosted a workshop to assess the success of its Community College Administrators Seminar in Russia.  At this workshop in Washington, D.C., approximately 15 American Fulbright alumni met and discussed their Fulbright experiences and the future of American-Russian collaboration in higher education, with specific reference to the value of America's community colleges in this ongoing dialogue.

Hannah Arendt

Here a few quotations from Hannah Arendt from The Origins of Totalitarianism.  This book seems to demonstrate the usefulness of theory once and for all.  Without Arendt, one could hardly make sense of the plethora of memoirs concerning the absurdities related to Stalinism.

"Real power begins where secrecy begins."

"..the principle of authority is in all important respects diametrically opposed to that of totalitarian domination."

"The complete absence of successful or unsuccessful palace revolutions is one of the most remarkable characteristics of totalitarian dictatorships."

"The multiplicity of offices destroys all sense of responsibility and competence"

"Constant removal, demotion, and promotion make reliable teamwork impossible and prevent the development of experience."

"To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity."

"They therefore consider no country as permanently foreign, but, on the contrary, every country as their potential territory."

"For economic purposes, the totalitarian regimes are as much at home in their countries as the proverbial swarms of locusts."

"...those who rightly understand the terrible efficiency of totalitarian organization and police are likely to overestimate the material force of totalitarian countries, while those who understand the wasteful incompetence of totalitarian economics are likely to underestimate the power potential which can be created in disregard of all material factors."

"Only after the extermination of real enemies has been completed and the hunt for 'objective enemies' begun does terror become the actual content of totalitarian regimes."

"Multiplication of secret services makes last-minute changes possible, so that one branch may be preparing to bestow the Order of Lenin on the director of a factory while another makes arranges for his arrest."

"Free consent is as much an obstacle to total domination as free opposition."

Eugenia Ginzburg and Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism

Does the literature of the gulag capture the essence of the Soviet experience during the 1930s? Unprecedented numbers of Russian citizens (as well as many other categories of people) found themselves in a Siberia work camp during this period, and those who escaped the gulag were very likely to spend a considerable amount of energy anticipating execution or arrest.  But can arbitrary imprisonment and twenty year terms of hard labor capture the experience of a whole generation of Soviet citizens, many of whom surely supported Stalin and the Bolshevik project in general?  After all, camp memoirs reveal the extent to which even Soviet prisoners could defend the Soviet leader by claiming that Yezhov or Beria, and not Stalin, were to blame for prosecutorial or prison guard excesses.  If only somebody could get word to Stalin about what was happening in his name, the world would be put right again. 

Anya Bremzen, author of a wonderful memoir entitled Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, recently noted the problem with understanding the second full decade of Bolshevik rule.  The 1930s were a schizophrenic episode. You might well have been swept up in the purges, but if you remained “free” from arrest, you were very likely to be immersed in a state of “totalitarian joy,” i.e., an unending series of Communist festivals to celebrate Soviet achievement.  Understanding this dualism, it’s useful to read a book like Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey Into the Whirlwind in the context of a larger book about totalitarianism such as Hannah Arendt’s masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism.  On the one hand, Ginzburg’s book details the madness of Stalinism in which a loyal and dedicated Bolshevik leader could find oneself under arrest for no apparent reason at all.  Ginzburg’s classic tale of the Great Terror describes a typical cycle of Soviet justice, including arbitrary arrest, family disgrace (followed by imprisonment of both her husband and parents), psychological and physical torture, summary military trial, extended sentence, prolonged solitary confinement, barbaric transportation to the edges of Siberia, and brutal work conditions in the taiga.  On the other hand, Arendt’s theory of totalitarian government reveals that such a cycle of arbitrary terror was intrinsically linked to the nature of the Bolshevik’s ideology, an ideology that required an unending pool of enemies.

What exactly is totalitarianism?  Arendt’s treatise on the subject, groundbreaking at the time of publication, remains acutely perceptive.  In some ways, Arendt made the original argument that you can’t understand Stalinism without looking closely at Hitlerism.  In both cases, the ruling party became almost synonymous with the state.  Beyond that, the party made radical claims to represent all of humanity.  The case for fascism representing a claim to global government is perhaps controversial.  However, Arendt points out that fascist parties sprang up everywhere in Europe even as the Nazi platform clearly called for the conquest of large portions of the globe.  The communist plan for global government is much clearer,  although Arendt must remind us not to take Stalin’s call for “socialism in one country” too seriously.  Once the totalitarian party makes a claim to global suzerainty, it’s not hard to begin to treat its citizens as traitors, and foreign citizens as either natural saboteurs or spies.

The radical nature of totalitarian government expresses itself in another way.  According to both Nazism and Stalinism, the party is a movement rather than a traditional government,  If the party is a movement, it must continuously encounter new categories of enemies.  Arendt’s claim is that Nazism constantly found new enemies, and would have done so long after it had eliminated the last Jew from any of its territories.  The Nazis, after all, had already declared war against Slavic peoples, and indeed various categories of German people, including Communists and the allegedly “un-hygienic.”  So too did Bolshevism continue to identify new opponents long after subduing any hint of opposition from former aristocrats or bourgeois intellectuals.

In fact, Arendt notes that totalitarian regimes thrive on the logic of arbitrary terror as described by Ginzburg in Journey Into the Whirlwind.  According to Arendt, totalitarian governments are politically powerful but economically chaotic and inefficient.    Ginzburg’s memoir proves this rule.  On the one hand, Stalin had turned all Soviet citizens into potential spies, complicit in the country’s perpetual state of terror.  The fact that all citizens could be arrested for no reason whatsoever also meant that the entire country had reason to worry.  Indeed,  Stalinism, like Nazism, had essentially made the very idea of rebellion irrelevant.  In mere despotism, a man or woman might decide to oppose the government and court death as a consequence of his brave act of defiance.  In totalitarianism, rebels were likely to be put to death for their opposition, but so too were perfectly loyal supporters of the system such as Ginzburg, a professor of Leninist history. If Old Bolsheviks suffered and died, what would genuine opposition to Stalinism have really signified? 

Ginzburg’s memoir also illustrates the chronic inefficiency of totalitarianism.  Over and over again, the Bolshevik government sacrificed economic efficiency at the alter of ideology.   Hundreds of thousands of productive and even largely loyal citizens were thrown into the most barbaric and disastrously inefficient work camps system imaginable.  Many died for little or no reason at every stage of the journey between arrest and productive labor.  The parallel with Nazism is obvious.  As Arendt reminds us, the Nazi economy and war effort were repeatedly undermined by the racist ideological aspirations of Hitler. 

On a mundane level, Arendt explains the logic of totalitarianism by discussing a fictitious request from Moscow for more pipes.  In a traditional setting, an economic logic would dictate why more pipes are needed.  Under totalitarianism, nobody but the secret police can really be certain why more pipes have been ordered.  Does the factory need the pipes to increase output?  Yes, perhaps, but even if this is true, why is more output needed?  Does one agency want to embarrass another by increasing production at this factory?  Does someone in Moscow want to blame the factory’s managers for overproduction?  According to Arendt, nobody but the secret police—ultimately controlled by Stalin—can know the answer to questions such as these.  In fact, both Hitler and Stalin created complex, overlapping, and even competing governmental structures.  These structures were always confusing.  The net result was that multiple and often competing policies were proposed simultaneously, which only the will of the supreme leader (expressed through the vehicle of the secret police) could resolve. 

Whether outlined by Ginzburg or Arendt, totalitarianism doesn’t seen like a very gratifying system of government.  Yet even totalitarianism has its pleasures.  For one thing, a system of perpetual purges and spectacular falls from grace offers unprecedented opportunities for career advancement.  Arendt argues that the purges inevitably implicated large numbers of new recruits in the original crimes of the Bolsheviks and Nazis.  Thus, while your own lifespan might be cut short at any moment, you might well have had the opportunity to rise to great heights before your inevitable fall from the dizzying heights of power.  These then are the joys of totalitarianism. 

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Teffi's Subtly Worded

Some quotations from Pushkin Press's new book by Teffi, Subtly Worded.

"His wife had the hurt and confused look of someone who is constantly being scolded."

"His daughter's large nose slanted slightly to the right, dragging along with it a squinting left eye that peered at the world with suspicion."

"I don't think I've sniffed five kopeks from you since Christmas."

"He's ambitious--even excessively ambitious.  He wants to become a provocateur, but he doesn't know a single revolutionary song."

"The poet was someone very interesting.  He has not yet written any poems--he was still trying to come with a pen name..."

"Oh!  What a woman can get away with when she's wearing a hat like this!  Things that a woman wearing any old hat wouldn't even dare to dream of."

"Varenka felt rich and important, and modestly pursed her lips sot that the passers-by she had splashed with mud would not be too jealous."

"The web was obviously a hammock for flies."

"A fat May-bug, drunk on sunshine, had crashed into Lisa's forehead and fallen to the ground."

"Nanny, I'll never die, will I?  I'll eat lots of soup, and drinks lots of milk, and I'll never die.  That's right, isn't it?"

"They live righteously.  They speak little, and because both are hard of hearing, they both have their say."

"Yes, peasants are peasants.  Is a peasant going to try to eat less?"

"The bee may be a simple, humble creature--but all the same, on her name day she doesn't buzz."

"There once was a life.  It was lived out and it finished."

"She thought about her husband--who was handsome and no good."

"At least we'll still be alive.  Not everyone today can boast of having living relatives."

"That's pretty rich, too. He accredited himself as ambassador to Japan."  "Who appointed him?" "Know one knows."

"You must know waht Tyutchev said all those years ago:  'You cannot understand Russia with your mind." And since the human body has no other organ of understanding all we can do is throw up our hands in despair."

"We--les russes, as they call us--live the strangest of lives here, nothing like other people's.  We stick together, for example, not like planets, by mutual attraction, but by a force quite contrary to the laws of physics--mutual repulsion."

"Rasputin seemed to me to lack the steadiness needed to manage any kind of strategy. He was too twitchy, too easily distracted, too confused in every way."

"I don't know what [Rasputin] was like at the beginning of his trajectory, but by the time I met him, he was already adrift."

"It was like looking through a microscope at some species of beetle.  I could see the monstrous hairy legs, the giant maw--but I knew it was really just a little insect."

"It's Rasputin's doing," People were saying, "Who else?"  "What's he got to do with it?"  "He profits from everything black, evil, and incomprehensible."

"Raputin was now leaping about like a goat.  Mouth hanging open, skin drawn tight over his cheekbones, locks of hair whipping across the sunken sockets of his eyes, he was dreadful to behold."

"The fools don't understand who I am.  A sorcerer?  Maybe I am.  They burn sorcerers, so let them burn me.  But there's one thing they don't understand:  if they kill me, it will be the end of Russia.  Remember my clever girl:  if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia.  They'll bury us together."

Spies and Commissars

Unfortunately, I have been working on a project that pulls my time away from Soviet Roulette.  My apologies to devoted readers.  However, I will try to recommend a few books on Soviet history even in my hiatus.  For instance, I'be been impressed with Robert Sevice's book, Spies and Commissars:  The Early Years of The Russian Revolution.  Although Service is one of the greatest living historians of Soviet history, I was offput by the title, expecting a small book of the outrageous adventures of a few marginal actors in the employ of the Kremlin or its adversaries.  Instead, Service offers up a comprehensive review of Soviet foreign policy in its early years, something to rival even George Kennan's treatment of the subject.  In fact, Service wisely depicts Soviet foreign policy in the much broader context of the Soviet Union's emerging social tensions.  Service deserves praise for a number of different accomplishments, including his objectivity, and broad understanding of European history.  Service knows the biographies of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, but he also understands something about the domestic and foreign affairs of almost every other European power in the interwar era.

For my part, Service's examination of the Soviet elite in the midst of the First World War and the Civil War demonstrates the fact that Trotsky and Stalin may not have been so far apart on the issues. Indeed, Soviet rulers changed their minds on a number of issues, and often changed sides on any number of domestic debates as events unfolded.  The situation was so fluid that not even the infamous Brest-Litovsky Treaty meant as much as modern historians might expect.  The beliefs of Lenin and his chief conspirators are difficult to reconstruct in part because it's hard to remember that they really did believe that all of Europe stood on the brink of revolution.  Indeed, from month to month the Soviet elite was forced to confront new realities, both at home and abroad.  The modern dichotomy between war and peace is in fact a false one when applies to Soviet revolutionary politics. The Bolsheviks were never completely at peace.  Their erstwhile socialist allies were potential enemies, and it wasn't entirely clear whether the Germans would be their enemies or allies from one month to the next.  Service demands a great deal of admiration for depicting the chaos of early Soviet politics in all of its complexity.  In the context of this fluid time, Service's title makes sense.  This was a time in which their were no clear distinctions between politicians and spies (witness Lockhart's strange career), journalists and propagandists, or  soldiers or rebels.

Richard Wright

Taking a break from Soviet history, or so I thought, I recently completed Richard Wright's autobiography, Black Boy. The book, rich in dialogue and descriptive details and told from the unwavering perspective of a bewildered juvenile, begins with a brilliant and compelling examination of his early years in the Deep South. Growing up in and around Jackson, Mississippi, Wright suffered enormously from a culture of  economic inequality, systematic violence, and psychological terror.  Life in Jackson during the 1920s was extremely difficult.  African-Americans were denied access to almost every basic human right, including meaningful employment, reasonable levels of health care and education, and even the ability to consistently put food on the table.  The Southern culture of terror infected African-American family life, and helped to turn Wright's immediate family, and many of his friends, into co-conspirators.  Wright's sophisticated analysis of white racism is withering.  Under the constant threat of white intimidation or retaliation, Wright's family members lived incomplete lives, engaging in domestic violence, petty crime, and frenzied religious experience. Wright himself grew up hungry, physically abused, undereducated, and fearful of being hurt or killed by defenders of white privilege.

Incredibly, Richard Wright escaped the conditions to which he was born.  His courage, moral genius, work ethic, and budding literary talent helped him to move from the Deep South, first to Memphis, and ultimately to Chicago.  In Chicago, Wright's story perhaps inevitably merged with the subject of this blog, namely world communism.  The second half of Black Boy traces Wright's involvement with Chicago's communist movement.  In Chicago, Wright became heavily involved with Communist, or Communist-inspired cultural and political clubs.  Wright's fascination with Communism is instructive. Although Black Boy's literary talent is perhaps best illustrated by his depiction of his early life in Mississippi, the two halves of the book work together to explain something vital about American and indeed global history.  And that is that Wright found hope in Communism as a result of America's complete moral failure in the area of race relations.  Why did so many black Chicagoans worship the name of Lenin?  Clearly, their general religiosity didn't make this a natural alliance.  Still, America's Jim Crow laws made African-Americans look seriously at any leader who promised to break down barriers of racial as well as class exploitation.

Wright ultimately revolted against some of Communism's worst excesses.  He was appalled, for instance, by the Party's political witch hunts against alleged Trotskyites.  Yet Wright's ambivalence about the Communist Party's peculiar methodology should be set again the writer's interest in the Party's noble goal.  Abrham Terz (a.k.a., Andrei Sinyavsky), the author of a treatise on Socialist Realism, reminds us of just how appealing that goal could be.  For Tertz, Communism offered people the most glorious vision imaginable, better than anything Westerners had invented since the rise of Christianity.  Communism promised utopia, and claimed to make sense of everything, including America's history of racial oppression.

The link between African-American aspirations and Soviet promises is an interesting one, deserving of much fuller exploration.  Only recently, I noted that Koestler met up with one African-American intellectual in the heart of Soviet Asia during the 1930s.  Others have described Robeson's infatuation with the Soviet Union and its constitutional "guarantees" for racial equality.  But the links between African-American intellectual currents and Soviet ones are not simple.  Ironically, in Black Boy, Wright attributes Communist treachery in Chicago to the lessons that the world Communist Party had learned under the Russian tsars.  And of course his most famous novel, Native Son, seems to have been inspired by Dostoevsky's pre-revolutionary--even anti-revolutionary, novel, Crime and Punishment.

Socialist Realism

Some quotes from Abram Tertz's On Socialist Realism.

"Socialist realism is the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism.  It demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development."  (Tertz cites the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, 1934)

"A poet not only writes poems but helps, in his own way, to build Communism..."

"Our art, like our culture and our soviety, is teleological through and through."

"Aimless rivers become arteries of communication.  Aimless trees become paper filled with destiny."

"The modern mind cannot imagine anything more beautiful and splendid than the Communist ideal."

"As Lenin promised, we will make toilets out of pure gold..."

"An iron necessity and a strict hierarchical order harnessed the flow of centuries."

"The man who received a Marxist education knows the meaning of both past and future."

"It is a long time since men had such an exact knowledge of the meaning of the world's destiny--not since the Middle Ages most likely."

"...so that not one drop of blood be shed any more, we killed and killed and killed."

"Yes, we live in Communism.  It resembles our aspirations about as much as the Middle Ages resembled Christ, modern Western man resembles the free superman, and man resembles God.  But all the same, there is some resemblance, isn't there?"