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. 

Soviet Spring

As I said in my last post, I'm slowly adjusting the shock of living in suburbia.  There's a lot to like about the suburbs, and a friend once said that I was a "suburban tourist" because I seemed utterly entertained and delighted by the simple pleasures of the suburban lifestyle, including easy access to shopping malls, safe playgrounds and schools, enormous basement storage areas, and neighbors who, although frequently inebriated, do their best to look out for one another.

I'm still amazed by the suburban house I've purchased.  When I walk into the garage, I stand in wonder, thinking that my car has never had it so good:  having spent the better part of its life sleeping on the streets of Woodlawn, my car must at times ask itself if it has not taken up permanent residence in a spa, padded slipper, or cocoon.  When I walk outside my new home, I'm stunned by the fact that I can see stars in the sky, although I can hear almost nothing.  In all my life, I've never lived in such a remorselessly quiet environment.  Suburban life is no doubt much inevitably more quiet than urban life. When I lived in Lakeview, the whole apartment building shook as the trucks drove by, and television shows were often interrupted by car accidents or screaming matches that spontaneously erupted around three a.m. at the transvestite bar across the street.  When I lived in Woodlawn, the neighbors talked to one another right outside our windows, involving me, quite against my will, in the most intimate details of their lives.  Now, I live in silence, surrounded by silence.  With only one entrance to my subdivision, my home isn't even exposed to the fleeting noise of random traffic.

I experience suburban life as a form of exile and estrangement.  I lived an urban life with my first wife, got divorced, got engaged, then moved to the suburbs.  The difference in lifestyle underscores the difference between my pre-divorced and divorced selves.  Living here in this place, another byproduct of divorce, I wonder how people decide to get divorced in the first place.  One dreads separation from one's family, but when it comes it's much worse than one could have imagined.  If people knew how bad it would be, how hard it is to live apart from one's children, would they proceed with the rupture?

With apologies for the strained and awkward transition between my personal life and my passion for Soviet history, I see a connection between the decision to divorce and the decision to dismantle a country.  The decision to embrace the pain of separation and exile may have its analogy in Soviet history. I think of Gorbachev.  How was it that the statesmen, and men like him, finally decided to pull the plug on the Soviet system?  The decision can't have been an easy.  Taking the plunge would ultimately lead to the end of an empire, the loss of economic stability, and the misery of millions.  The decision to reform Russia led to consequences which, in the short run at least, were even worse than the  problem of communism.

Of course, Gorbachev and his supporters could not have known exactly where they were headed when they decided that "things can't go on like this."  They were even determined to salvage something good from the wreckage of Russian communism. Even so, these Soviet reformers knew the country was sick, mortally sick perhaps, and they eventually decided to risk killing the patient in order to move forward.  They wanted to see around the next corner of history.  

I wonder how long people like Gorbachev waited they made even the first tenuous moves to upset the status quo.  Notwithstanding the myriad indications of Soviet malaise, Soviet would-be revolutionaries or reformers must have trembled as they contemplated undermining the system they knew so well.  Like the decision to divorce, people have a good reason to pause before pursuing radical change.   Change in a deeply flawed system--whether that system be a regime or relationship--breeds pain and suffering, almost in direct proportion to the degree of malaise that permeates the system.  

My fiancee is Tunisian.  When we first met, she was excited about the revolution that was overtaking her country.  She knew her people deserved freedom and change.  But the pain of that change is already evident.  The Soviet experience of revolution wasn't irrelevant.  Somewhat cynically, I told her that the Russians had also been excited about the prospects of radical change in their corrupt society.  This was true both in 1917 and 1989, but in both cases the revolution brought about an enormous harvest of bitterness.  My fiancee was not deterred:  the future could certainly be better than the past.  How could things not get better?  Sadly, Tunisia is now threatened by religious extremism and a strong measure of violent anti-Americanism. Probably the future will be better than the recent past.  Probably the Arab Spring was worthwhile.  And yet one can at least sympathize, if only for a moment, with those moderates who hesitated, if only for a moment, before throwing in their lot with the future.

Soviet Spirits

The other night a friend gave me a flight of Soviet vodka bottles from the late 1980s or early 1990s.  Although I'm not quiet certain that even 40 proof Vodka can kill off the germs that might have accumulated over the decades, I cannot resist the urge to try something that will form a visceral link to the Soviet past.  The ties that bind us to the past are a strange blend of the tangible and the spiritual.  And life is full of strange, unexpected portals to seemingly ancient history.  If we're open to the experience, we're bound to stumble upon the ghosts of our ancestors many times a day.

Take my recent move from the South Side of Chicago to the wilds of Northwest Indiana.  As I spent the day packing, I paused for a moment to consider an object that took me back in time over twenty-five years, a plant that my uncle had sent to my family from Japan upon the death of my mother, his sister.  This plant, which wasn't looking too long for this world, had survived for a very long time at my dad's home, and then eventually wound up living a peripatetic life with me. How odd then that during the move it vanished forever, a lost physical link to a world which included--almost--the physical avatar of my mom's spiritual essence.

The phrase physical avatar sounds peculiar, but it reminds me that I'm now much, much more acquainted with mom the ghost than with mom the concrete, flesh and bones, human being.  At any rate, the plant is gone, but I'll continue to stumble over physical reminders of this absent family member for years, or decades, or perhaps forever.  I'm reading the autobiography of Fidel Castro--a series of interviews really--in which Castro happily, nostalgically relates the fact that some curator or local librarian or archivist had managed to uncover a book of pictures of Napoleonic generals   with which he had played endlessly as a child.  He thought the book was either the actual book he had owned fifty years previously, or at any rate an exact replica of the one he had once possessed.  Castro feigned indifference on this question of whether the book was the one his former self had touched so often, but he couldn't help but ask the question:  was this the very same book he had once won in a trade with a friend?  Could this book be a message from the past, or conversely, a message from the future into the past, that things had turned out alright, that Castro the boy would prosper and become one of the world's longest-serving dictators?

The plant, my uncle's gift, is now gone for good.  And the loss can't help me but think of the original loss of that thing which this plant replaced.  But history will continue to resurface in my house.  I will find pictures, and objects, and perhaps a piece of furniture that will transport me back to that magical time when mom lived.  And if there aren't many physical objects left, I will be more creative about inventing them.  Wasn't this one of mom's books?  No?  Did she at least read it?  Was this the dish mom used to own?  No?  Had she had least owned one much like it?

I'm in the suburbs now.  It's deadly quiet.  The windows are open.  The stars are visible, the crickets chirping, the yard is wide and long.  I used to live in a house much like this one.  As a child, my family lived on two floors, as I do again.  My mother and I were suburbanites, as I am again.  What does all this have to do with the Soviets?  Not much.  But when mom lived, the Soviet Union lived.  I conflate the two things.  Faulker once wrote:  My mother is a fish.  I sometimes feel that my mother is the USSR.

Francis Sufford's USSR

I've been buy packing up my Soviet books again, preparing to take them to their new home.  As I put them away I feel deeply nostalgic.  The books have travelled quite a lot.  These past two years have been difficult ones for them, and for me.  In about twenty-four months my son and I established a new home, and set out to create a new family, a family of two, with surrounding circles of love and support,  but a history of loss and sorrow.  Of course, my son now has two wonderful, and deeply interconnected, families.  What have these two years been like?  My quick-witted, strong-willed son and I have created new rituals, eating patterns, and patterns of work and fun.  We've even thrived.  What's strange is to realize this:  in two years my son and I left a family of three, landed in a family of two (actually, he found himself in two different families of two), and now my son and I are launching into a brand new family of four.  It's amazing how much life can change for a boy of seven.  I take comfort in knowing that my son's journey involves love and growth and family and adventure--all the best parts of living.

But enough about us... We all deal with change, and in many ways change and development are the preconditions of nostalgia.  In the Soviet Union, every man woman and child experienced change on an almost unprecedented level.  The average citizen dealt directly or indirectly with some terrifying combination of war, famine, political terror, and economic revolution.  Francis Stufford's Red Plenty, a book I've discussed previously, captures the essence of this radical change.  Even after the brutal Stalin left the stage of history, the Soviet Union innovated on an unimaginable scale.  According to Stufford, the Party had given its leaders the right to determine almost every aspect of its citizens' lives.  Like Plato's Philosopher Kings, Russia's leaders felt obliged to make decisions about the people's spiritual, cultural, political, military, and economic life.  They believed that Marx had taught them a special theory of social change, and that leaving history to the uninitiated was a ridiculous and even immoral proposition.  History had refuted the quaint nothing that individuals and bourgeois freedom would get a people where it wanted--indeed needed--to go.

To be create a happy civilization, Philosopher Kings needed to ensure that ordinary people weren't allowed to make mistakes, be inefficient, or exercise some kind of misguided and chaotic will to power.  The result was that a very tiny group of people (but primarily Khrushchev,  and later Brezhnev) road roughshod over any pretence of human rights or autonomy.  For a while, the system seemed to work.  Economic centralism produced growth.  Eventually, the limits of Gosplan, and its inherent absurdities, were reached.  The economy began to stall, even grinding to a virtual halt at the end of Khrushchev's rule.  People had little incentive to work.  Notwithstanding the massive planning bureaucracy, the various parts of the economy never seemed to fit together.   Lines and shortages proliferated.  Innovation was rare.  Agriculture fell apart.  The end might have come sooner, but according to Stufford, the USSR's massive oil reserves and new petroleum discoveries during an oil boom hid the underlying sickness of the socialist economic regime.
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Russian Gloom

Jaspers wrote "[there] exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsibile for every wrong and every injustice in the world...If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent [crimes], I too am guilty.  If I was present at the murder of others without risking my life to prevent it, I feel guilty in a way not adequately conceivable either legally, politically or morally.  That I live after such a thing has happened, weighs upon me as indelible guilt."

"Dostoevsky was convinced that there was not a "villain or scoundrel among the Russians that did not know that he was disgusting and vile," whereas among other peoples a person who does evil congratulates himself and pretends he is a flower of civilization."  David Satter.

[Chaadaev wrote that] "there is in Russians a lack of stability, a lack of a certain consistency in mind, a certain logic.  The Western syllogism is to us alien.  In our minds there is something worse than superficiality.  The best ideas, in the absence of connections and consistency, like sterile outbreaks, paralyze in our brains."

[According to Chaadaev,] "Alone in the world we gave the world nothing and took nothing from the world.  We did nothing to assist the movement forward of human reason, and everything we received from this movement we distorted."  David Satter.

Having recently overcome a small health crisis, I have felt a little more gloomy than usual.  Looking at my DVR memory, which consists of dozens upon dozens of different crime shows, I wondered if I shouldn't consider turning toward some more cheerful entertainment.  Watching 30 Rock helped, but I eventually realized that twentieth century Russian history doesn't contribute to cheerfulness.  David Satter's sophisticated book on historical guilt, It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past, was particularly depressing, even by the high standards of modern Russian historiography.  As mentioned previously, the book is a catalog of criminal state activity, including mass executions, man-made famines, and the sometimes random violence of the great purges.  The author's conclusion of present-day Russia is equally depressing.  As Satter writes:  "The passivity on the part of ordinary Russians, combined with a seeming inability to make moral judgements, gives Russia's rulers the conviction that they never will be held to account."  Of course, if both the recent past and present are closed, one can and should start reading 19th century Russian history and literature.  This is what I've done.  I'm reading Oblomov and finishing Henri Troyat's biography of Gogol as a start.  Reading the classics of Russian literature soothes the soul, although it's sad to think that the chicanery of Gogol's Chicharev and the laziness of Goncharov's Oblomov are dependent on serfdom.  How is it that even a country's tranquil century is predicated on slavery, to say nothing of imperialism, war, famine, and social turmoil?  At any rate, Gogol and Goncharov are funny and so a lot to lighten one's mood.  Here are a couple samples from Gogol's letters, as translated by his biographer, Troyat.

Here is Gogol's advice to a young acolyte:

"For the love of God, don't sit in one place for more than an hour and a half at a time, and don't lean over the tables:  you have a weak chest, you must know it.  Try always to be in bed by half past eleven.  And do not dance at all, especially not these wild dances!  They stir up the blood but do not allow the body to move enough, and you are not light enough on your feet.  You are not pretty.  Are you quite sure you know that?  You are only pretty when your face expresses some elevated emotion.  Your features were patently made to express the nobility of your soul;  as soon as you lose that expression, you become plain.  Therefore, give up all social functions, however modest.  You must see that society can give you nothing.  Keep your childlike innocence;  that is worth more than everything else."

Here are his reflections on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land:

"What have all these Stations of the Cross of Our Savior got to say to us know;  the Holy Sepulcher, Golgotha, the place where Christ was shown to the people by Pontius Pilate, the residence of the High Priest, where he was taken, the site of the Holy Cross--when all these places have been fathered together under the roof of a single church?  What is there for artist or poet in the landscapes of Judea with their monotonous hills, like the gray waves of the sea in a gale?  No doubt, it was all very picturesque in the Savior's lifetime, when Judea was nothing but gardens and every Jew sat in the shade of the tree he had planted himself;  but today, when you met five or six olive trees straggling up the mountain slope, gray and dusty as the rocks themselves, when a thin membrane of moss and a few tufts of grass showed green in the middle of a barren, irregular plain strewn with stones, when after five or six hours' travel you saw some tiny Arab hut glued somewhere to the hillside, looking less like a human habitation than a terra-cota pot, an oven, or some animal's lair--where in this could you see the land of milk and honey?"

Fainting Into the Past

Someone once said that the past is a foreign country.  I think this expression means that the present is not merely a logical extrapolation or even natural continuation of the past.  Instead, the past is alien, mysterious, and unknowable if one doesn’t know the language.   We feel, or should feel, more like tourists than residents even when we delve into our own personal histories.  In some ways, investigating former modes of living is as difficult as trying to get to know our own subconscious or unconscious lives.  

A few days ago I came face to face with this form of foreign territory when I fainted dead away, collapsing face first on the floor of my apartment.  The doctors told me that the incident was caused by an electrical event in the heart unrelated to the machinations or strivings of a promiscuous subconscious motive.  Be that as it may, loosing control of one’s physical movements, even for a moment, is a reminder that we are not always authors of our own storyline; more often than not, we are puppets of the past, or characters in somebody else’s play, or even victims of a set of circumstances we hardly seem to recognize.  

The past, when it bursts through to the present, is dark, furtive, powerful, and even terrifying.  The strange thing about the past is that it cannot be ignored for very long.  You can spend a lot of time and effort trying to remain in the present, but sooner or later you lose the battle and “faint” into the past.  It’s as if you went up to the bartender and asked for a beer but he served you a freezing blast of high-powered water from the hydrant instead.  I think the point of therapy is to introduce you more gradually and gracefully to the foreign country of your own history.  You can’t help but see a foreign country as strange and unpredictable, but you can become slowly acclimated to its bizarre rituals and traditions.  

What happens when a whole country “faints” into its own past rather than slowly comes to terms with the archeology of alien memories?  What is the national equivalent of individual therapy?  I think most nations try to manage the jarring effect of historical consciousness by erecting sites of memory and mourning and fostering some sort of ritualized collective remembrance.  Some nations are better than others at remembering.  Remembering takes courage of course.  It’s easy to celebrate a one-sided, triumphal arcadia, and much harder to admit to national pain, loss, conflict, and guilt.  Complicating the question of remembrance is the fact that some countries have more to remember than others;  or, to put matters another way, some countries have more subconscious motivations to avoid remembering than others.  

Russia, of course, is traditionally seen as one of the most tragic nations ever to walk upon the stage of history.  Perhaps this is an unreasonable cliché:  is it really possible than one group of people have had it harder than any other?  Whatever the case, Russian intellectuals and non-Russian observers note that the Russian nation’s understanding of the past, both recent and distant, is extraordinarily dark.  An elderly Russian today may indeed remember the chaos, humiliation, and corruption of the early 2000s; spectacular geopolitical collapse of the 1990s; the moral and economic stagnation of the 1970s;  the apocalypse of WWII;  the abject horror of the Great Purges;  the decimation of  the Collectivization famine;  the bloodiness of the Civil War;  and the trauma of the Revolution.  The Russian past is truly monstrous in many respects.   

Although it’s easy to dismiss the triumphs of Russia’s modern history—including the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the creation of a modern economy for instance—most Russians did not, and could not, afford to dwell on national tragedy.  In fact, David Satter’s book, It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened. Anyway, Satter's book shows that even twentieth century Russian history contains ample evidence of objective historical achievement.  For instance, Russians today often correctly remember that the Soviet government offered them job security, educational benefits, health benefits, and a general sense of international prestige.  Satter even argues that Russian working class citizens in the 1970s might well say that they had it has good as their counterparts in the West; while they certainly earned less, and possessed fewer objects than their Western brethren, they also worked far fewer hours, and at a much slower pace.  In the end, Soviet citizens may not have had much apartment space, but they did get paid vacations and never sweated about whether or not they would get fired for poor performance.  

Satter’s analysis of Russia’s complicated relationship to the past, and to Soviet history in particular, is nothing short of masterful.  Russia’s problems are manifold.  First, Soviet history is particularly (though of course not uniquely) horrific.  The author draws upon seemingly hundreds of discrete episodes of Soviet political terror and mass murder to explain the tangled web of Russian past and present.  Second, notwithstanding the fact that Russians played a leading part in The Soviet Union’s Party leadership circles, Russia has tried to detach itself from the wider story of the murderous Soviet Empire.  While the USSR may have been the “prison of nations,” Russia was allegedly only one of the many victims of international communist conspiracy.  Third, Russians, before, during, and after the Soviet experiment, have celebrated the principle of raison d’etat and autocracy;  almost every crime has been justified in the context of Russian power., and many today celebrate the Rise of former KGB leader, Putin, as some sort of paradoxical anecdote to the historical angst of the Russian people.  Fourth, so many Russians were involved in Stalin’s bloody tyranny, or its heirs, that the process of repenting, confessing,  or publicizing past crimes seems confusing or even overwhelming to most Russians.  If almost all of the country’s leaders (and many of one’s own family patriarchs) participated in abuses, can we reject them all? Are there really no heroes in a 73 year period of history in which the Soviet Union triumphed over Hitler and became a superpower?  

The confusion is Russia is all-consuming.  As one citizen asked:  how is it possible to erect a monument to both Stalin and his victims?  Fifth, the Russian people often seem to prefer to blame others for the sins of the past, including Jews.  If even the great writer Solzhenityn could ignore historical statistics in order to ask the Jews to accept responsibility for vicitimizing the enormous Russian population, how are ordinary Russians expected to blame their own state for their present predicament?  In the end, the past in Russia is more of a foreign country than almost anywhere else.  This is understandable.  The Soviet past beggars the imagination for its bloodiness and cruelty.  According to Satter, Russians have been victims of an ideology that devalues human life in favor of the state and its alleged needs.  Even the greatest of Russian writers, including Pushkin, Gogol, Chaadaev, Berdyaev, and Solzhenitsyn, have sometimes embraced this sad logic, accepting the cruel and antihumanist notion that Russians were born to suffer.  Until the Russians learn to grieve the past, and repent of their countrymen’s enormous mistakes, it seems they will be likely to faint repeatedly into the past.

The Good Soviets

I don't know if anybody can explain the source of their obsessions, interests, or passions, but the Soviet Union is undoubtedly one of the most important phenomena in modern human history.  This is true for a variety of reasons.  In the first place, the Soviet Union represented in some imperfect way the culmination of the wider socialist project of European intellectual history.  Bolshevism is related to all of the modern processes of European history, including industrialization, rationalization, colonization, and modernization.  We simply cannot analyze the meaning of the generic, ongoing Leftist critique of capitalism and modernity without understanding the Russian ideology of October, leaving aside none of its spectacularly visible triumphs and none of its egregiously terrible failures.  Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the other Old Bolsheviks were the inheritors of a revolutionary tradition that stretched back at least as far as Robespierre and the French revolutionaries.  They understood the Enlightenment tradition of political economy and participated fully in a historical dialogue about equality, fraternity, and liberty.  1917 is inextricably linked to 1789 and 1848.  What's fascinating is the extent to which the Soviet Union's collapse, in 1989, is also tied to 1789, although twenty years of introspection hasn't exactly helped contemporary Russians to understand their own place in the continuous history of revolutionary aspirations.

The Russian Revolution is a big moment in the history of humankind for a second reason:  it led, in short order, to the radical expansion of the revolutionary dream.  The expansion of this dream was so radical, that China is only one of many different countries that was transformed by their contact with Marxism.  While European power would have collapsed under any circumstances, Bolshevism helped to inspire some of its most successful opponents.  The Soviet Union has played a central role in twentieth century global history.  The country was one of the largest empires in the history of the world, and of course defeated Europe's second Napoleon, Adolph Hitler.  This alone would justify intensive introspection about the role of the Russian Communist Party and Bolshevik state.  The crimes of the regime are also intrinsically worthy of study.  Lenin's system of government led to unmitigated tyranny, famine, political terror, and demographic catastrophe.  To have lived through the early decades of the Soviet Union's existence, was to have survived revolutionary spontaneity, Civil War, economic dislocation, purge, colonialism, collectivization, famine, and global war.

The Soviet Union was an exercise in black government.  But it was also an engine of unprecedented experimentation.  At the time, there had been few similar adventures in atheism, central planning, socialist economics, or proletarian mobilization.  The Soviets attempted to re-write history.  Their faith in technology was absolute.  However misguided, Russian Communists produced something radically different from other villainous regimes:  they produced a serious critique of Western modernity.  In some ways, the Soviet Union remains the only plausible alternative to capitalism the world has ever known.

Understanding the full horror of Stalin's purges and gulag labor system makes it difficult to sympathize with the Bolshevik dream, but not impossible.  To understand Bolshevism, we must look to the revolutionaries of 1917.  Although Lenin made a long series of cruel decisions, his opposition to colonial exploitation, capitalist economic theory, tsarist oppression, and global militarism are admirable. But after Lenin and his colleagues had been swept away by Stalin, we must wait until the 1960s to rediscover the Soviet impulse for positive change.  In the 1960s, bloody Khrushchev became an unlikely champion of a benign future.  Notwithstanding his personal participation in Stalinist mass murder, Khrushchev had imbibed something good from his Party upbringing.  Indeed, he believed that the Soviet Union could successfully compete with its American and European rivals in the production of economic wealth.  The Soviet Union was, after all, outrunning the American economic growth rate by a factor of two or three, or so it appeared to both American and Russian economic experts.

Like Khrushchev, ordinary Russians in the 1960s had every reason to believe in their country.  We might well ask how this belief was possible when so many average citizens had relatives who had suffered so terribly at the hands of Stalin's lieutenants.  But Americans believed in the U.S. Constitution  even when millions of African-Americans were legally enslaved.  In fact, it was hard for Soviet citizens to ignore their government's propaganda about the unequal status of the slaves' ancestors even in modern, 1960s, America.

The novel, Red Plenty, helps us to understand this moment in 1960s Russia, after Stalinist brutality had faded, but before the limits of Soviet economics had been reached.  In the 1960s, Russia remained a heroic alternative to the imperialist West, friend of Cubans, Vietnamese, Polish, and struggling peoples all over the world.  In the 1960s, Russia was still a leader in nuclear armament, space exploration, and athletic competition.  The Russian economy wasn't perfect, but it wasn't apparently propped up by unemployment and inequality.  The secret was centralized planning.  During the 1960s, Russian life was good and getting better.  Housing shortages were getting better;  wages were getting higher;  consumer goods were becoming more plentiful.

If you read the Soviet Constitution, you get a sense of the Soviet promise.  According to that constitution, the Soviet regime was democratic but orderly, planned, and unified.  While Western critics talked about tyranny, many Soviet citizens may have once accepted their government's foundational documents at face value:  Russians, Ukrainians, and Uzbeks alike were heirs to a civilization of radical, proletarian equality, and logical, rational, and technocratic good government.  In the 1960s, most Russians understood that their system of government had overcome a dark past to overcome fascism, educate a backward country, and produce a space-age material culture.

Khrushchev's visit to America, which is discussed at length in both K Blows His Top and Red Plenty, is symbolic of this high water of Soviet pride.  Khrushchev landed in American in a gigantic airplane, larger than anything in the American commercial or military fleet.  The plane was so large he needed to climb down from it with the help of a ladder.   Khrushchev's visit was a strange mixture of braggadocio and insecurity.  Like many of his countrymen, the Soviet premier both admired and pitied America.  America was a truly great power, more dynamic by far than its decadent counterparts in Western Europe;  and yet Russia had come much farther in a much shorter space of time than America had.  If the trend continued, surely the Soviet Union and its communist imitators had nothing to fear from peaceful competition.  Khruschev had seen the future, and it worked.