I read an article many years ago on "intellectual survivalism", about writers that prepared minds to survive in uncertain futures - citing Robert A. Heinlein in particular.

Solzhenitsyn would be on my list, just as Solzhenitsyn cited Dostoevsky before him. Together with Vassily Grossman (Life and Fate) and Boris Pasternak, that's a triumvirate born in Soviet tyranny that towers over the nihilist literature of the West.

To the extent the Left "hated" Solzhenitsyn, it was more about his Russian nationalism and belief in the decadence of Western Enlightenment ideals than his exposure of the Gulags. By the time Solzhenitsyn became prominent, the pro-Soviet fringe of the American Left was tiny, and of that, probably half were FBI infiltrators.

For example in one of his last books, Two Hundred Years Together, Solzhenitsyn made the absurd claim that the czarist-era Russian government was not anti-Semitic and that Russian Jews bear as much or more blame than Russian gentiles do for the historic conflicts between the two groups.

I tend to agree with AJL. Solzhenitsyn was an extremely complex historical figure and is seen in different ways by different people, each taking those parts of his makeup that they were in accord with as the real Solzhenitsyn and overlooking the rest.

As far as his chararcter is concerned, as a humnan being, in my lifetime only Nelson Mandela comes mind as mirroring his achievement in showing the indomitabilty of spirit under the most degrading of circumstances. This is by far his greatest achievemnt and the one I would remember him for, letting pass those parts that may not have fell short of these high standards.

One might pause to reflect that the American right supported the people who ran the South African Gulags throughout the greater part of Mandela's imprisonment, before claiming the moral high ground with men like Solzhenitsyn or Mandela as one's standard bearers, or seek to condemn them for political opinions they held or hold that you might be in disagreement with.

Their bravery commands that sort of respect.

AJL's usual dishonesty shines through.

First, dude I'm sorry but I was there. The Left hated him as someone who trashed the Soviet system. He was a liar (often put more charitably as 'exaggerated, but meant the same thing), and implicitly a warmonger. This hatred did not extend to the entire Left, but I certainly ran into it often enough.

I'll add that you could hardly ever find a liberal who had actually sat down and read the books. Too hard on all those peddled pre-conceptions of moral equivalence, I guess. That damn reality thing...

Second, Solzhenitsyn's comments regarding Jews in Russia have no bearing on the work he did re: the Gulags, which was a monumental service to civilization and mankind. None. Zero. Zip. The one is simply irrelevant to the other. Likewise, those comments do not change the fact that his Harvard speech was, and is, thought-provoking.

They may have some bearing on some of the specific points he raises, and an argument could be made (but wasn't) that explains the specific linkages and issues.

Since it wasn't, we just have the usual "argument by distraction" dishonesty.

#4 from JK:

You were where , and when? Sorry, but I think AJL, and Somin, (whom you can hardly characterize as a leftist) call this one more accurately.

Me? I knew a bunch of self-identified Leftists in my college days, (1970-1975) and some in my law school days ('75-78). (I'm guessing the NLG, and on-air personnel at KPFK Pacifica LA, would meet your standards as adequate Leftist boogey-men) (...and boogey-women!)

Most of them who had any interest in Soviet politics had in fact read big chunks of Solzhenitsyn's work. Did they regard him, on reading some the later work, as a Czarist-Nationalist nutter, and possibly an anti-Semite? Yes. Did they claim that his work should be dismissed because of that, or argue that he was misleading as to the facts under Leninism and Stalinism? Not much, as I recall.

By the time the bulk of Solzhenitsyn's work was in print in the US, the number of US Leftists who were engaged in anything like a full-hearted defense of the Soviet Union, or Soviet Leninism, was, IIRC, pretty damn minuscule, and they were already mostly regarded as "old Marxist coots" (Remember, IIRC this was a large part of the basis for the supposed "Old Left/New Left" schism, which emerged in the early to mid-60's? Ivan Denisovich was published in the US in 1963; First Circle in '68, the Gulags not until the 1970's) These coots also all knew each other, and were of a sufficiently small number that there was a realistic possibility that the government plants, informers and miscellaneous provacateurs substantially augmented the membership rolls, and the receipt of dues for the organizations in question.

I'll acknowledge there was some equally blind defense of Mao among some quarters, and I have vivid recollection of endless debates between extremely small factions of far-leftist organizations over the distinctions between Maoist Leninism and Soviet Leninism. The majority of those left of center neither listened nor cared to these factionalist pissing-matches.

Joe, let me be blunt. You are spreading disinformatsia based on your hatred of the American left.

Show us the leftists attacking Solzhenitsyn over the Gulags. Author and title.

I was here, too; in fact, I think I'm older than you are. Even during the Vietnam War, leftists who were apologists for the Soviet system were few and far between. By the mid-1960s, when Solzhenitsyn's work became known in the West, Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalinism was openly known.

Solzhenitsyn's courage in surviving the camps and willingness to “expose” them (of course, they were hardly unknown, but their scope had been grossly underestimated) is indisputable. That doesn't change the fact he was an anti-Semite (you must really hate the Left to overlook this minor detail), an apologist for Milosevic, and a chauvinistic autocrat. In short, Solzhenitsyn is a large target for not just for us dishonest ultra-leftists but a broad swath of adherents of Western democratic tradition.

If we are going to compare Solzhenitsyn to Mandela, it would be more useful to conduct a Gedanken-experiment where the Mandela who was finally released resembled Mugabe or Sobukwe.

Can we get Joe Katzman to define exactly what he means by "The Left" in this context, or at least identify those people that he "ran into it often enough" who apparently shaped his current view (such as it is)?

I'm not as old as you guys, but is this what we are talking about?

You can be sure that the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn is going to be celebrated in the most nauseating fashion in the mainstream press. Somewhat less importantly, the remaining supporters of the late USSR are going to waste some sorely needed energy laying a boot or two into the corpse of this "slanderer". There is plenty to criticise. Solzhenitsyn was notable for his reactionary pro-Tsarist politics, and for his concessions to antisemitism. And, as just as many of his criticisms of the Stalinist terror were, they were both exaggerated and conjoined to a paranoid view about the supposed menace posed by the USSR.

Lenin's Tomb

I have a feeling that Joe and I are the same age, in our 60s. If that is the case, the left he abandoned might have been that which was rooted in the Marxism of the '30s and still had legs in the '60s.

I was there as well, and I don't really remember anyone on the left, aside from those mentioned above, by then, the Radical Lunatic Fringe, who spoke out against him when his books began appearing in the West in 1968.

#8 from PD Shaw at 9:08 pm on Aug 12, 2008

Lenin's Tomb

This was then, as it is now the Radical Lunatic Fringe. No one in the American Mainstream, in either Party defended the Gulags. Associating it with the American Leftr would be like associating the Thunderbolt, a hideous Racist rightwing rag with the American Right of the same period.

Re: PD Shaw at #8:

Interesting piece, that "Lenin's Tomb"; I suggest that everyone take a look at the entire piece, not just the snippet.

". . . formerly left-wing intellectuals who were apprised of the horrors of the camps decided that Solzhenitsyn's text was a revelation that, not only were Stalinist politics corrupted (they had already made that decision years before) but that the whole arcanum of Maoisms and Trotskyisms that stood as alternatives to those politics were also corrupted at source. . . . Solzhenitsyn, who blamed Marx for the killing fields in Cambodia, could have found nothing objectionable in that. Yet, those leftists who had been acquainted with the texts circulated by David Rousset, Ante Ciliga and Victor Serge, all from the anti-Stalinist left, could hardly pretend to be shocked by revelations of the barbarism of Stalinism . . "

I think, PD, that you acknowledge Lenin's Tomb as being a leftist, yet somehow neither the above, nor the reference to "Stalinist terror" in the snippet, read quite the same as the impression conveyed by your "The Left hated him as someone who trashed the Soviet system."

. . . and TOC, I was thinking along the same lines, but you wouldn't have to go quite that far to the far right in the 1960's. A quick glance at the right-most fringe of the American Independent Party, circa 1968, would have yielded a certain amount of frothing about
"pride in our our white European cultural heritage","Zionist bankers", the explicit belief that "negro music" was part of the Communist plan for world domination, and a recurring suggestion that maybe the South maybe shoulda won the Civil War. Do I seriously contend that those views were of a piece with [to pick a good target in Katzman's case] Ronald Reagan's brand of mainstream conservativism? Nah.

The pretense is maintained that by the time Gulag Archipelago appeared, the nature of the Soviet system was already acknowledged by everyone except a tiny far left fringe, and that is light years from the truth.

Hence the origin of the original NEOCONSERVATIVES (creepy organ music) whose project was to educate The Democratic Party about the reality of the Soviet system. Most of the "neoconservatives" who belonged to a major party were Democrats; the rest (Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook) belonged to the little socialist parties that were enemies of the pro-Soviet CPUSA - one of the most subserviently pro-Soviet parties in the world.

Note that they set out to educate The Democratic Party, not to educate the 60s New Left, which was rightly considered a hopeless case.

So the monster that lives under your beds was born, and it never would have been if the realities that Solzhenitsyn wrote about had not been so studiously ignored by liberals.

Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook ...

And I should have added Irving Kristol, of course.

The origin of the neo-conservatives was most certainly not to educate the rest of the left about the barbarity of Stalinism. The neoconservatives arose from one small part of the large, already-existing anti-Stalinist Left, from its Trotskyist-Communist part, to be precise. And in the case of Kristol and Podhoretz, and probably the others about whose work I am less informed, they assumed that people who disagreed with them were evil and needed to be "smashed" just as much in their new incarnation as in the old.

The Democratic Party knew full well about the Communists. See under Korean War, Henry Wallace, the Iron Curtain, etc. The labor unions and even the ACLU were busy purging Communists with a zeal that seems a little over the top in retrospect. They did not, however, generally share the neoconservative need (much echoed here) to feel that the situation was a permanent emergency requiring desperate, preferably violent and authoritarian, measures.

So far no one has presented any actual examples of leftists decrying Solzhenitsyn on behalf of Communism, as opposed to his anti-Semitism and other obnoxious views. Any articles in "The Nation"? "The New Republic"? The New York Review of Books? Or will you eventually dig up some mewling nonsense from the agent provocateur in charge of the Albanian Communist Solidarity Movement? So far, nothing at all.

We hear a lot about Bush Derangement Syndrome. But the view of Solzhenitsyn from Joe and Glen is so distorted by Liberal Derangement Syndrome, it leaves all pretense to reality far behind.

I make no claims, I found some of the obits from Marxists interesting bits of archeology. Here is another:

Anti-communists revere Solzhenitsyn's name and habitually cite as truth his book, The Gulag Archipelago, because the terrifying image of the massive political prison system is really only found in Solzhenitsyn's historical fiction.

...

Let me cut to the chase: Solzhenitsyn's books are works of historical fiction - or, more accurately, historical falsification. Solzhenitsyn, a hero to authoritarians and racists, was a literary fraud

Andrew Austin

Associate Professor of Social Change and Development and Chair of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

I must thank Mr Shaw, he has found a professor at a third-rate college who has just the views Katzman ascribes to the Left.

I think I will let the Gulag-revisionist Prof Austin's obscurity speak for itself.

they assumed that people who disagreed with them were evil and needed to be "smashed" just as much in their new incarnation as in the old.

This is what you assume. And this is what the common assumption is in a Democratic Party that is now almost wholly a relic of the New Left.

The Democratic Party knew full well about the Communists. See under Korean War, Henry Wallace, the Iron Curtain, etc.

Are you kidding? Henry Wallace? Wallace was a legendary stooge; maybe you mean Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who was far from typical. At any rate you are talking about the 50s. The 60s were a different scene.

... the neoconservative need (much echoed here) to feel that the situation was a permanent emergency requiring desperate, preferably violent and authoritarian, measures.

That's the monster under your bed talking. Nothing else.

You dare mock the Chair of Social Change?

That last comment was directed to AJL.

Some interesting notes on the early neoconservatives, from someone who was there:

A de facto alliance had formed [in the 60s] against the New Left. Men such as Irving Howe, on the democratic left, had sensed the Stalinist cast of mind in the writing and rampaging of the time, and in effect joined the liberal center to resist it. On the philosophical right, the followers of Leo Strauss, far more influential than generally known (possibly because they were so few in number), had also joined with the liberals against the madness of the time. But now the New Left was finished, and so in all likelihood was this temporary alliance against it [...]

The Straussians would now presumably resume their critique of liberalism, allied with a point of view that was coming to be known as "neo-conservative", a term that had first appeared in Howe's journal Dissent, and was now being applied with no very fine distinction to persons such as Kristol, who was indeed one, to [Daniel] Bell, who demanded the right to remain a socialist, and to persons of the center such as myself, resigned to the fate of personifying, at one and the same time, "neo-conservative" to Michael Harrington and "left-liberalism" to William F. Buckley, Jr.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous Place (1975)

----------

I would disagree with Moynihan that the New Left was dead, or that liberals and neocons were ever that sympatico in the late 60s. But he knew the people and he knew what kind of people they were, unlike the people who yell "neocon" in every other sentence and think they know what they're talking about.

Interesting that these people, most of whom had nothing in common except an opposition to the anti-democratic socialism of the Soviet Union, have been singled out for such hatred. So much for Solzhenitsyn being fashionable.

I know some of you guys just hate history, but we're almost done -

Moynihan on Solzhenitsyn (1974) from the same book:

There was evident discomfort as Solzhenitsyn went on about the perfidies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had recognized Stalin's regime ... Most discomfiting of all - for it was not an easy evening - the speaker somehow was someone who knew about us. He appeared, his first time ever in the United States, bearded and speaking Russian and scarcely able to know where he was, much less to whom precisely he was speaking, and yet he knew what was going on here. He knew secrets, and the knowledge gave him a stunning strength.

There are two histories in this thread. One of them involves detestation of Communism and recognition that, while Solzhenitsyn was a courageous fighter against Communism, he had grievous faults, not the least of which was his affection for the Tsarist tyranny that was so egregious the most vicious forms of anarchism and Communism flourished in Russia as nowhere else. Solzhenitsyn is not, of course, the only man of courage whose opposition to evil, notwithstanding their own personal sacrifice, arose from something antithetical to the Western liberal tradition. Not everyone is Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel. Some are Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Kwame Nkrumah, and Colonel Fabien.

The second version of history here is a cartoon, everything in clear black and white, suitable for very small and very stupid children. The Left is monolithic, evil, and despite including the larger political party of the United States (somehow shrunk to a "relic"), sympathetic to Communism. Solzhenitsyn opposed Communism, so he wears a White Hat. His anti-Semitism? Swept under the rug. (Katzman's grandparents must be aghast.) In the cartoon version, even Franklin Roosevelt has to wear the Black Hat; he recognized the Soviet Union. How could he compare morally to the obscurantist bigot Solzhenitsyn and his thought-provoking anti-Enlightenment speeches? Thanks, buy I'll take FDR any day.

(Glen, you are so far into the cartoon that you misunderstand: Henry Wallace left the Democrats because there was no space for his Communist-infused campaign there. If you weren't starting from the ahistorical belief that the Democratic Party was a creature of the New or Old Left, you would find it easier to understand what I wrote.)

Andrew, I think that you similarly sweep a significant amount of history under the rug.

Both in the ongoing attraction of significant (although not dominant) elements of the Left in the US for the Soviet project, and in the 60's through 80's post-Kennedy feeling that the status quo was better than any alternative (see Gaddis for more on this), and the fact that the entire FP establishment was willing to overlook the moral disaster of the USSR in order to maintain and preserve stability.

That last is a by far the most significant characteristic to me, and the most relevant to today's issues.

A.L.

The second version of history here is a cartoon, everything in clear black and white, suitable for very small and very stupid children. The Left is monolithic, evil, and despite including the larger political party of the United States (somehow shrunk to a "relic"), sympathetic to Communism.

Every time your own political prejudices are questioned, you claim that the entire left is being herded into a concentration camp. You inflate every criticism into a preposterous exaggeration, and then accuse it of being a preposterous exaggeration. What was that you were saying about a black and white world?

From the LA Times obit:

At times, Solzhenitsyn was courteous and attentive, with an outpouring of good humor. But he was also stubborn and abrasive, and developed a consuming hatred of communism that dismayed even those in the West who admired his work and integrity.

He denounced the East-West detente of the 1970s as a sham and called the 1975 Helsinki Accord -- the charter of the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe -- the West's capitulation to Soviet enslavement of Eastern Europe.

During 20 years of exile in the U.S., he was never hesitant to criticize his adopted country; he viewed the United States and the West in general as flaccid, morally weak, cravenly materialistic and suffering from "the spiritual impotence that comes from living a life of ease."

Although generally sympathetic to its aims, he spurned the Soviet dissident movement as a betrayal of Russia's soul and ancient traditions. He frequently clashed with fellow opponents of the Soviet system.

Solzhenitsyn called for a moral and spiritual reawakening in his homeland and the West based on fundamental Christian values, and a rejection of the materialism, hedonism and selfishness that he insisted was corrupting civilization. Such views led one critic to denounce him as "the Russian ayatollah."

Also from the obit: his biographer, Michael Scammell, concluded that "he felt positively uncomfortable without a hair shirt of some kind."

And this is what the common assumption is in a Democratic Party that is now almost wholly a relic of the New Left.

My only regret is having written anything that could give you an excuse to claim I am exaggerating. What the Solzhenitsyn-fellators (to borrow an image from another thread) have contributed here is either exaggerated, distorted by serious omission, or simply wrong.

With the exception of an obscure clown contributed by PD Shaw, we still are waiting for evidence of the Soviet apologist cry from the "Left" against Solzhenitsyn and in praise of Stalinism. There is no such material. On the other hand, there is abundant justification for Solzhenitsyn as autocrat, as anti-Semite, and as anti-liberal. (I wonder how Solzhenitsyn explained the decadent West's triumph over his preference, Milosevic.) Neither Katzman nor Wishard have engaged this evidence once. To the extent I have distracted the thread from this obvious fact, I am sorry.

Although I'm willing to give Katzman and other's the opportunity to explain themselves before making any conclusions, at this point I'd have to say that Andrew in #25 has advanced the most convincing argument on this thread and one that completely punctures it's original thesis, which now appears to be nothing more than a lot of hot gas and righteous ire.

#26 from G_Tarhune at 4:36 pm on Aug 13, 2008

Agreed

Eh, P.D. Shaw, and J. K.: take a look at ol' Professor Austin's CV. I did. BS (Psych., Middle Tennessee State U.!) in 1993. Assuming this isn't a second career for him, and he went more or less straight through, that means he was BORN in about 1970 or 1971 or so, and the CCCP collapsed while he was still in undergraduate school.

So Austin's pre-glastnost Soviet-apologist attacks on Solzhenitsyn, and his efforts, on behalf of the Left, to "characterize him as a liar while the Soviet Union still stood" (J.K.'s original post), those woulda been when Austin was, maybe, 15?

Now I will admit I may have said some dumb stuff as a young (15 year-old) hothead in the antiwar movement circa. 1970, and my political reasoning might not have been as developed as it is now, (hey, I was 15!) but as far as I know, nobody much claimed, fifteen years later, that any of the stuff I said was representative of much of anything, let alone the view of the entire American Left, for periods preceding my birth.... I might have thought it was cool, but nobody did it...

r gould-saltman

... this isn't an exaggeration, it's ridiculous.

Exaggeration? Maybe. Certainly reasonable people can disagree about the extent of New Left influence in the modern Democratic Party.

Ridiculous? Nyet. Not when the leading Democratic candidate begins his ascent by surrounding himself with New Left figures (including some of the very worst). Nor is the problem Obama, or limited to Obama - Edwards and Clinton abased themselves at the same shrine. And New Left dogma is so internalized that contemporary liberals can't even understand why this is a problem.

The Democratic Party is not all bad. But your knowledge of the bad aspects is buried under tons of denial.

the Solzhenitsyn-fellators (to borrow an image from another thread)

Be sure to return what you borrow. Whoever you borrowed it from needs all the mental imagery they can get.

With the exception of an obscure clown contributed by PD Shaw, we still are waiting for evidence of the Soviet apologist cry from the "Left" against Solzhenitsyn and in praise of Stalinism.

Now you're being ridiculous. While there were Soviet apologists who would praise Stalin, they were a tiny proportion. How many Holocaust deniers praise Hitler? Some do - but the ones who do are not the most dangerous ones, because they openly discredit themselves.

Solzhenitsyn's leftist critics weren't upset because he attacked Stalin. Some of them were willing to attack Stalin, too - to true believers, Stalin was the scapegoat that "ruined" Soviet socialism, and all the horrors were just Stalin's fault. Solzhenitsyn outraged people by tracing the Gulag back to Lenin, arguing that tyranny and oppression were inherent to communism.

... there is abundant justification for Solzhenitsyn as autocrat, as anti-Semite, and as anti-liberal.

There is no room here to deal justly with the question of Solzhenitsyn and the Jews. Solzhenitsyn expressed admiration for religious Jews and for Zionists, but not for assimilationist Jews who joined the Bolsheviks. Like others, I believe he over-estimates the number and influence of the latter.

Kind of the same way the contemporary left greatly over-estimates the machinations of "Likudniks", Fifth Columnists, and Jewish Neocons - if I were them, I wouldn't be eager to suffer comparison with Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn wrote an extensive work on the history of Jews in Russia, which I haven't read. I'm confident that you haven't read it either, not that that's going to stop you from condemning him.

Finally, nobody ever said Solzhenitsyn was a Western-style liberal. If that's the measure of the thing, the argument is yours. But it's a pretty parochial and narrow-minded argument.

Anne Applebaum in her column on Solzhenitsyn after his death wrote:
"Not all of this was new: credible witnesses had reported on the growth of the Gulag and the spread of terror since the Russian revolution. But what Solzhenitsyn produced was simply more thorough, more monumental and more detailed than anything that had preceded it. His account could not be dismissed as a single man's experience. No one who dealt with the Soviet Union, diplomatically or intellectually, could ignore it. So threatening was the book to certain branches of the European left that Jean-Paul Sartre described Solzhenitsyn as a "dangerous element". Its publication certainly contributed to the recognition of human rights as a legitimate element of international debate and foreign policy."

Sartre was not by any means alone on the left in his hatred for Solzhenitsyn after the great writer's exposure of the Gulags and the awful nature of the Soviet Union. There has been a lot of ink spilled on the left trying to vilify him, and this was seen even in some of the obituaries. This was not always merely because they thought him a nationalist or a crank, though some surely did. There have always been many on the left with a hatred of the West and sympathy for communism, and that translates to a hatred for someone so responsible for bringing down communism. Joseph Epstein writes about Solzhenitsyn and the Western left:

This notion of the West as distinctly not the solution, but as part of the same problem of modernity that brought about the hideous excrescence of Communism, has deep roots in Russia's
Slavophile past. But it also has roots in Solzhenitsyn's
own intense distrust of Western leftists,who stood by for decades while Russians suffered. Throughout his books, he takes shots at
"useful idiots" (Lenin's term)-"the anti-fascists and the existentialists, the pacifists, the hearts that bled for Africa [but] had nothing to say about the destruction of our culture, about the
destruction of our nation." When Jean-Paul Sartre wished to meet with him, Solzhenitsyn felt honor-bound to refuse this particularly egregious "useful idiot." At one point in 1972, when the Soviet leaders were making it especially hot for him, Solzhenitsyn thought to stage interviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post;
but their respective Moscow correspondents,Hedrick Smith and Robert Kaiser, appalled him with the triviality of their questions.

Solzhenitsyn had his biases, some of them not attractive, but there has been no writer who has had such an influence on world history, and for the better.

I was not heretofore aware that Sartre was a member of the American Democratic Party.

Andrew - any reply to my #22?

A.L.

Soltzenitsyn was a Jeremiah, no doubt; but his message was powerful precisely he had no counter-revolutionary aspects. He was a child of the Revolution; that denounced it's very heart. He wasn't altogether loved on the corporate establishment; who never really learned the reason behind the failure of the New Economic Plan. His was an audience of the populist right; and the blue collar left of Meany & Kirkland. He didn't countenance the merging of socialist and capitalist systems that Galbraith imagined. His dissapointment at the over reach in the communist model and later in the "Robber Baron" pidgin capitalism practiced by former apparatchik turned oligarchs; probably made him support the likes of Putin,more than he should. To lump him with Nkrumah,
obscurantist rabblerouser who along with Kenyatta & Amin, turned
the promise of Africa into a living nightmare or Mandela ;whose prediliction for violence is ignored in the retrospective hagiography preached by the likes of Time's Richard Stengel (Yes he didn't encourage total nationalization of industry, want a medal;)it is only in comparison to Mbeki and Zuma does he garnish any awards.

Solzhenitsyn thought to stage interviews in the New York Times and the Washington Post; but their respective Moscow correspondents,Hedrick Smith and Robert Kaiser, appalled him with the triviality of their questions.

I remember pulling down Hedrick Smith's The Russians from my parents' bookshelf when I was a kid. It was a big book with a portentous title, which to me meant PROMISE OF GREAT WISDOM HEREIN. I read it twice, but profits fell below expectations.

There was a lot of interesting information in it - Smith spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union, and he was no Walter Duranty. It's a journalist book, full of journalist stuff.

But the lasting impression he gave was that the faults of the Soviet Union were the faults of Russian character. The Russians, it seems, are all a bit f--ked up. They just can't help it. They suffered Czarist autocracy because they were too f--ked up to enjoy anything better, and then they suffered Communism for exactly the same reason.

Nobody can do anything about this, except keep the Russians mollified and hope that they shape up some day.

That fatalistic, condescending attitude is very familiar to me now. It ignores ideology and the consequences of bad ideology, and it denies that all human beings share either a common potential or a common vulnerability.

Andrew, you are indeed confused. The original comment of Joe Katzman was about the left, and so was mine. I am not saying anything about the Democratic Party. That seems to be your idea. But the American left as well as the European left was clearly more sympathetic to the Soviet Union than to the US and the West. They were, for the most part, antagonistic to Solzhenitsyn. A major left wing historian like Hobsbawm can to this day not bear to think about the great loss of the communist ideal. Most on the left gave up only when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, but many still would like to see socialism and they continue to work for that goal.
Glen: As for Hedrick, I too read his book, oh, so many years ago, and I agree with what you say. As for the Russian character, it is not so simple. They do at the present time seem to have a psychological need for an authoritarian political structure, and this has been true for a long time. It makes them a backward looking people. But communism set them back in a way that is almost too large to grasp, and this is the reason for Solzhenitsyn's anger at both the communist system and the West's unwillingness to recognize the demonic nature of that system. After all, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, Russia had taken a large step forward and things were looking up. Then came the Revolution.
However, there is something else in the Russian soul that we see in the great Russian writers and artists. It's easy to see that there is a seed that lies dormant within the Russian earth.

Sez Herb, at #35:

"But the American left as well as the European left was clearly more sympathetic to the Soviet Union than to the US and the West. They were, for the most part, antagonistic to Solzhenitsyn. . .*** . . Most on the left gave up only when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991".

Yes, I understood that that was Katzman's and Shaw's empirical claim. AJL and others called "BS!"

When asked to provide some clear and unequivocal examples, we first got tossed:

the now-much-bandied-about Professor Austin, (who was demonstrably NOT around doing this stuff at any relevant time, and so couldn't have been part of Katzman's "I was there" claim at #4),

then

Glen Wishard's explanation (#29) that, of course, there weren't easily found instances of Leftists being EXPLICIT about this, because they were REALLY SNEAKY and CLEVER about it (Drat them!) and

a reference to Sartre (Herb at #30).

We're waiting.

*** Re: Hobsbawm: "A major left wing historian like Hobsbawm can to this day not bear to think about the great loss of the communist ideal. " My recollection is that by the early 1990's, Hobsbawm had acknowledged that his prior, (and admittedly completely appalling) suggestion that had there been a Utopian outcome in Communism, it might have justified the death toll, was completely indefensible.

I understood that that was Katzman's and Shaw's empirical claim

Shaw made no claim, let alone an empirical one. OK, I made one claim at #15:

I make no claims

Other than that claim, I make no claims.

PD Shaw at #37:

I understood your #8 and #15 as examples intended as responses to AJL's "Show me some!" at #6, and intended to bolster Katzman's factual assertions in his original post and #4. If you didn't intend them as such, I _mis-_construed them, and I apologize.

However, I'll stand my ground with Katzman and Herb...

R Gould-Saltman:

Glen Wishard's explanation (#29) that, of course, there weren't easily found instances of Leftists being EXPLICIT about this, because they were REALLY SNEAKY and CLEVER about it (Drat them!) and a reference to Sartre (Herb at #30). We're waiting.

What I wrote was perfectly clear in spite of your caricature, but if it wasn't, I couldn't give a damn.

The spectacle of AJL spewing epithets at Solzhenitsyn, while demanding an example of a liberal Democrat who hates Solzhenitsyn, is too silly to maintain my interest.

Do your own goddamn homework.

A.L.: What you are referring to as "stability", looks more to me like Kennan's "containment" plan in action. I am still waiting for evidence of Stalinophilia in the mainstream American Left. On its fringes, you could find some sympathy for Castro, for Ché, even for Uncle Ho—but this derived, I suggest, from guilt/revulsion over the overtly colonialist or feudal regimes against which they struggled. For the Sclerotic Union, not so much. (This is not to deny that in practice, Castro and Ho were almost as tyrannical as their Russian forebearers.)

It seems distortion of the historical record is going to be the rule on right-wing web sites. From Pajamas Media, for example, we have an obituary of Solzhenitsyn decrying Jimmy Carter's policy of detente. Total bullshit. Detente was the policy of the Republican Henry Kissinger and was implemented (like the rapprochement with Red China) in the administration of the Republican Richard Nixon, not, you will agree, a figure of the American Left, New or otherwise. Nor is it clear to me exactly how Human Rights as foreign policy and Solzhenitsyn as Jeremiah (to plagiarize narciso) fit together: Solzhenitsyn was a vehement critic of the Helsinki Accords. (Walesa and, I believe, Havel thought just the opposite.) To the extent the Soviet Union was brought down by our barely-covert subsidy of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan, the cause of universal human rights seems to have been advanced only modestly.

Tell me, A.L.—Had Solzhenitsyn lived another week, what would he be saying about Georgia today? Would he not be fanatically pro-Putin?

Aside to narciso: do you have some evidence that Solzhenitsyn had sympathy for the American trade union movement of Meaney and Kirkland? The unions may have been his natural audience (Why though? His blaming the Jews for others' economic misfortunes??). But what bond ran in the other direction? Color me very skeptical. Something more like the antebellum South with illiterate serfs in lieu of blacks strikes me as Solzhenitsyn's preferred economic model. Don't blame third-wave mixed economy or Russian kleptocracy for Solzhenitsyn's fondness for Putin. He was a Russian chauvinist and nationalist from the moment he rejected Communism, making him Putin's most natural ally.

Glen, you have a reading problem. The claim you and Katzman made (I took PD Shaw providing such a hilarious mediocrity as a joke) was that the Left hated Solzhenitsyn because he exposed Communism as brutal and evil. My very first comment, #2, acknowledged the Left's antipathy towards Solzhenitsyn but related it to his anti-Semitism, Russian expansionist nationalism, and disdain for "weak" Western democratic ideals. (No one has seen fit to disagree with my ascription of these beliefs to Solzhenitsyn.)

The spectacle of AJL spewing epithets at Solzhenitsyn, while demanding an example of a liberal Democrat who hates Solzhenitsyn, is too silly to maintain my interest.

But of course, it is I whom Katzman refers to as supplying "dishonest" arguments. A new definition of chutzpah.

You are a fraud, Glen, and in this case a liar. At least you are obvious about it.

You are a fraud, Glen, and in this case a liar. At least you are obvious about it.

Go back and read my response in #29. Then I'll expect an apology - not to me, but to God for wasting bandwidth.

I despair of discussing anything with you these days, because everything turns into a protracted whine about the Democrats getting pushed off the swing set. Again and again and again and again.

You know, I'm going to have to kind of agree with AJL etc. here, and kind of disagree.

The American left - with the exceptions of a couple professors and a few folks on the CPUSA payroll - was pretty disdainful of the Soviets. I don't think that they felt they were as evil as they in fact were - and here's the razor dividing Joe's and Andrew's positions (that the mainstream Left in the US felt that the Soviets were wrong, that their system wasn't working - but they didn't really face the evil of the gulag system and the inherent dehumanization in the system until Solzhenitsyn's work made that impossible).

And that's the 'state change' that marked the Reagan years - the perception that the Soviet system wasn't inefficient, or boring, or incapable of competing - but that it was, fundamentally, evil.

A.L.

Reagan wrote in his diary of congressional Democrats: "They are actually sitting on the Soviet side of the negotiating table." I didn't want to get into this Democratic business, but there were plenty on that side of the aisle whose actions and words, shall we say, leave themselves open to Reagan's interpretation. This sort of thing is easy enough to find in the history books, in old newspapers, and in any person's memory if they are of a certain age.

Funny, Herb: I'm old enough and I've passed the Jeopardy test a couple times. How about some verified examples of those traitorous Democrats. And I wouldn't mind a link to the alleged Reagan quote, which doesn't show up in Google.

A.L.: I would suggest that before Solzhenitsyn, the understanding of the USSR as evil was widespread, including among liberals, but it arose from (1) Soviet foreign policy in respect of Eastern Europe, especially Hungary and later Czechoslovakia and (2) the elimination of so many top Bolsheviks during the purges. What Solzhenitsyn showed was that these horrors continued even after Stalin and that the internal terror was enormous, not limited to Trotsky and other obvious rivals of Stalin. There was also, of course, disagreement about what to do with the Soviet Union, but given the correct history of detente and the correct history of who injected human rights into American foreign policy, I don't see the Democrats as coming out second-best here.