In the Richmond District of San Francisco, there is a seemingly impossible commingling of disparate immigrant cultures, particularly Russian and Chinese---along with Vietnamese, Korean, Irish and a smattering of Italian. Among these groups, the Russians have taken a dominant hold of much of the area known as 'The Avenues'---a fog-shrouded grid of long, treeless streets that stretch out towards The Great Highway, and the pounding surf of the Pacific. This blogger spent the better part of his adult life a mile or so from the surf, tucked beneath the restless fog, blaring the furnace twelve months of the year, lulled to sleep at night by omnipresent foghorns.
A curious acceptance of the flagitious Soviet past can be found in The Richmond District.
Many friendships made in The Richmond are Russian. There's a wonderfully displaced, quiet distress among them; the kind of people who sit by ponds in Golden Gate Park, playing chess and smoking noxious tobacco tanned in the center of the old country, pontificating about life. Even the most rudimentary Russian language skills will draw one into the badinage of a displaced people, glad to be in a new, free country, but yearning for the comforts of old haunts.
Novelty stores sell everything that is imaginable, including a multitude of products that wink and smirk at the Soviet past that echo throughout the Russian expatriate community. It is curious---there are many products made in the C.I.S. that have Lenin or Brezhnev's likeness on them, and plenty more with the omnipresent hammer and sickle. It is possible to buy cooking oil deliberately branded to look like it was the product of a state factory run by Stalinists. Packaged sets of miniature vodka bottles branded with Brezhnev can be had for the drinking. Communist posters are for sale, hanging mutely as reminders of an inglorious past, somehow revered. Surely, there is a sense of loss among these people who resurrect the symbols of a potent past, gone to ash.
This blogger received a gag gift from a Ukrainian friend. It was a Lenin shirt, blazed with large Cyrillic letters proclaiming: 'Work. Drink. Die---Drink.' The back of the shirt had a giant hammer and sickle surrounded by vodka bottles, and could be worn in complete safety in the Russian expatriate community of The Richmond. It is hard to call this shirt reverent towards Lenin. But neither is it irreverent.
But why? Imagine slipping on a t-shirt with Hitler's likeness on the front, and perhaps adding some German saying like 'arbeit macht frei' sporting a big swastika on the back. One would reasonably expect to be shot within five minutes of publicly donning of such a garment. But not Stalin or Lenin shirts. Or Mao.
An interesting website that can take days to absorb is Matthew White's Homepage. The site contains various bits of visual historical-geographic and statistical information. It's a marvel to study. One page is entitled Who was the Bloodiest Tyrant of the 20th Century? and compares raw numbers of murdered millions at the hands of various tyrants. The top three are Hilter, Stalin and Mao---not necessarily in that order. Depending on how you sift the numbers, each of the three takes homicidal first place.
The most general accounting ranks the three as follows:
Mao: 40M deaths
Hitler: 34M deaths
Stalin: 20M deaths
Go there for yourself and see how the numbers can be interpreted. (Also, there's some fascinating maps.) Suffice it to say that Stalin, Mao and Hitler are on par, by way of extreme murder. If immorality is measured in millions of deaths, these three are essentially equivalent.
This essay was inspired by Mr. Katzman's linking to Lamech, the blogger who questions the flying of confederate flags, seeing them as an insult to the true message of Christianity, and of course to the victims of Dixie. It is truly strange how culture can assign varied levels of reprehension onto historical monsters. Why is it that Stalin is 'OK' (even though we all know he wasn't), but Hitler is absolutely heinous (which we all know he was).
For that matter, there seems to be in our culture a softness exhibited towards the Communists in general---as though they meant well but had the wrong system in place. Why is this? Is it because the Communists won World War II along with the Allies? Is it because some of the central tenets of Communism found fertile ground as Socialism in Europe and in the Left on the American continent? Is it because there are enough rough parallels between FDR's New Deal and a communist system to elicit a few nods of appreciation?
Consider all the Holocaust movies and books that have been made. Certainly there is no equivalent profusion of media about the gulags or Stalin's purges. The Ukrainian famine of the 1930s created by Stalin is news to a lot of people---including Russians. Whereas the Nazis were proud of their murderous deeds, the Soviets were quite secretive about their death mills. They continued grinding bone and flesh for decades, silently. Hilter's death machine went out with a bang, with liberators opening the gates of Dachau and Treblinka. The Soviet system just faded away, quietly. The liberators were the jailers themselves.
Perhaps our softness on Communist evil is a lesson about the importance of winning decisively. The softness and conditional outrage towards the Soviet death machine is a product of a war that didn't entirely end in defeat. 1991 saw the end of the Soviet system, but there was no admission of guilt---no Nuremburg trials, no hanging of the gulag commanders. Reading Lamech's essay on the Stars and Bars reveals a similar phenomenon: although the Confederacy signed a truce, many of the ideals and culture of the racist slave-holding South went without repent, reabsorbing into the Union. Racism would remain in place for decades after 1865.
All of this takes us back to the present war. Winning must be decisive. The symbols of oppression must be revealed---and reviled. Who are we blinking at today? Who do we tacitly nod at while feigning disapproval? Can wars be won when the symbols of oppression are debatable and not obvious?
I can't imagine anyone reading Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and not agreeing with Reagan's assessment of the Soviet Union as an evil empire. I would love to explain away some folks' sympathy for Communism or the Old South as a straight ignorance of the full historical record. Unfortunately there is a great capacity within human nature for willful blindness.
Most often what I hear from far-lefties is that pure Marxism, devoid of militarism and Big Brother and wiping out internal dissent, would be the perfect system of government. They definitely think there are some Communist luminaries who are good-hearted and trying to do what is right. I can't agree. Maybe I'm willfully blind to the essential rightness of Communism!
Some of my leftie friends were fond of pointing out the old saw that "if people were perfect then Communisum would work".
I finally came up with the response that "if people were perfect we would not need Communisum."
That sort of put paid to that debate.
Why do you think that Solzhenitzyn is an authoritative source on anything? He's a self-serving ass and a nut (lately -- for sure, but who knows, maybe he's always been that way.)
I think one of the factors that causes the notable difference between people's emotional reactions toward Nazi imagery vs. Soviet imagery has to do with the nature of the respective beasts and their philosophical roots. While both were truly monstrous, Lenin and Stalin were more something that happened to the Russians without a great deal of public support; on the other hand, Hitler enjoyed large amounts of public support and represented the culminating point of a dangerous philosophy of extreme nationalism and state-worship that was begun by Fichte and Hegel.
Communism's deaths were caused by a sort of dry, calculating collectivism enforced from on high by those who had taken power; Naziism's massacres were motivated by a sort of delirious collective insanity which penetrated the entire German culture at the time. Both are monstrous, but it's not hard to see why one evokes a stronger gut reaction than the other.
As to who we're winking at now... Well, I still see morons walking around with Che Guevara T-shirts on. Never fails to make me sick. These are typically the same people who support Palestinian suicide bombers (I've not personally seen anyone wearing an Islamic Jihad headband, but I know they do exist).
Matt M. -- I'm afraid I don't really agree with your distinction between the brutality of Soviet Communism and Nazism. While Nazism probably had a greater depth of public support, the murders of both regimes were facilitated by the same sort of deference to authoritarian rule. While one can argue how much the average German knew about conditions in the concentration and extermination camps, I don't think the vast majority of Germans passionately supported their brutality. Rather, they rationalized extreme measures as necessary in the fight against the "Judeo-Bolshevik Threat". Similarly, Soviet Communism cultivated fear of the "Capitalist Counter-Revolutionary Threat", and rationalized murder accordingly. The elaborate bureaucracies of both regimes aided this by both cultivating paranoia and facilitating willful blindness to the reality of their camps and other policies.
My short answer to Cicero's query would be the one of the ones offered: "It is because some of the central tenets of Communism found fertile ground as Socialism in Europe and in the Left on the American continent." Holocaust apologists do the same sort of rationalizing and dissembling on Hitler's behalf. It's just that they're more often recognized as whackjobs and not listened to.
I think the key reasons for the distinction were as follows:
1) Nazi Fascism was a nationalistic doctrine, prospectively appealing to an inherently narrower "audience" than Communism. Working class and impoverished people vastly outnumber people of Northern European "Aryan" ancestry worldwide.
2) Nazism’s brutality was focused on a particular ethnic group both widely dispersed and influential throughout the world. Jews have worked hard for decades to make sure that Nazism’s atrocities were and continue to be held up for scrutiny. Had Hitler merely exterminated Gypsies and the mentally ill, we'd have a much murkier memory of it.
3) Germany was a country with extensive cultural and economic ties to the rest of the western world. Russia was always more isolated, and considered backward. In effect, the crimes of a "civilized" Germany were more shocking than those of a barely more than "barbarian" Russia.
4) Germany militarily posed a demonstrably greater threat to the world, in that it conquered most of Europe and was defeated only after a titanic struggle. When it was defeated, it was defeated utterly, and in a poor position to rationalize its actions. Had Soviet Russia gone on such an overt rampage, and been crushed, exposure of the crimes of its leaders would have been imposed upon it.
Warum -- Whatever Solzhenitsyn's personal shortcomings, do you believe that he significantly overstated the barbarism of the GULAG?
Two of the authors who have a lot to offer on the subject of the West’s responses to Stalinism are historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Their case studies center on the treatment of the CPUSA and American communists by the U.S. community of academic, university-based historians. Their conclusions are telegraphed by the title of their 2003 book, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage. This scholarly book makes for a fascinating, and damning, read of the sorts of benign indifference to mass-murder that Cicero is reflecting on in the body of this post. At least in part, mainstream historians' tweedy, intellectual discourse provides a cue that Lenin, Stalin, and for that matter Che "Motorcycle Diaries" Guevara deserve knowing winks, in a way that fascist mass-murderers certainly do not.
Jamie Glazov’s lengthy interview with Haynes and Klehr makes for interesting reading as well.
Honest leftist Ralph Luker provides a synopsis of the positions of Klehr and Haynes and their adversaries in this entry on the historians’ blog Cliopatra.
Warum, if Solzhenitsyn must be seen as not credible on the Gulag, try Anne Applebaum's 'Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps', or one of Robert Conquest's works on the USSR.
I've always liked Conquest's (possibly apocryphal) remark; on being asked to suggest a new title for the 1990 update of his 1968 book The Great Terror: "How about 'I Told You So, You F***ing Fools'?"
That said, one reason I think may influence people re. comparing Nazi's and Soviets/Communists.
Though both used absolutely abhorrent means, the Nazis ends were also complete evil. In many respects the Nazis means WERE their ends.
As a plea of mitigation, Communists could at least content their aim was to create a society of progress, peace, equality etc; foolish utopianism, fatally flawed, tainted, and rendered unobtainable, by their methods, but not an abomination in their very nature.
John,
yes, of course -- I didn't question gulags, I questioned the authoritativeness of Solzhenitsyn, who is a mind boggingly overpriced commodity, primarily due to his having been ideologically instrumental to the West in its conflict with the USSR. The only respect he commanded in the USSR was due to his dissidence (any cretin who'd take a dump on the CPSU -- for whatever reason -- would be revered at the time); at the same time he is not a good writer or credible historian; and, as some believe -- not w/o foundation -- not a good man. He has no influence in Russia now that he's no longer an oppositionary poster boy and is not hyped by the West. Deprived of these, largely external and somewhat accidental, supporting strengths, he is finally taken for what he is: a cantankerous reactionary old nut (and maybe a fraud), wholly irrelevant to what goes on in the country. His main achievement was to grow his Orthodox beard at the right time and attach himself to the Western propaganda machine when it was willing to use him. I recently had a chance to page through his Archipelago, and was amazed at what a piece of junk it really is both as history and literature. Time changes things: some 20 years ago I was deeply shaken by this very book.
To speculate on the original question: I'd say that fundamentally, Communism appears to be a Christian heresy, which means it fell, as it were, on a receptive ground: that's, I suspect, why, while it was very influential in the West, in the East it fell on barren soil as it were and never took root.
Just like Christianity, it is -- doctrinally -- universal, plausible (meaning offering a plausible explanation of reality, as any religion must), and millenarian. Economically, it was a reformed capitalism -- even in intent, not only in practice.
None of this can be said of Nazism, which was really a paganistic cult of a naked group power, with no long-time tradition, or consistent philosophy at its foundation and alien to the historically predominating in the area of its appearance culture. Communism was really Protestantism II; the Capitalism-vs-Communism war -- another Thirty Years War. As a curious detail: my first doubts about it arose many years ago when I read a sizeable and detailed book on the history of the Catholic Church. The parallels were inescapable, revelatory; Luther's Theses could (mutatis mutandis, or course) serve as a perfect verbalization of my inchoate apostasy.
There's a very good reason why the Soviets aren't viewed as bad as the Nazis; there isn't a vocal group of victims and their descendents discussing the issue in the U.S. The squeky wheel gets the grease as they say.
Anyway, I don't think that Soviet (or Nazi) kitsch is that big of a deal.
Also, I think the author underestimates the market and demand for Nazi kitsch; it is commonly sold on-line after all (to the chagrin of those who would perfer to regulate markets than let them act freely) and is en vogue with many elements of American society.
It's refreshing to have the chance to agree with Gary Gunnels (11:40am): "Soviets aren't viewed as harshly as Nazis because there isn't a vocal group of victims and their descendants making noise in the U.S."
While the 20th Century has entered the books as Humankind's Bloodiest Ever (yet), it deserves acclaim for another chilling reason--the invisibility of the murdered.
Scroll down this list of atrocities. That Lenin's and Stalin's victims and their families suffered silently and to no notice of the civilized world is...typical.
We can thank God that the torments of the Nazis' victims, at least, are known to history.
Gary Gunnels---I'm well aware of Nazie kitsch. Try wearing an SS uniform or Hitler T-shirt in San Francisco, as opposed to a Stalin shirt. Night and day.
Gary Gunnels---I'm well aware of Nazi kitsch. Try wearing an SS uniform or Hitler T-shirt in San Francisco, as opposed to a Stalin shirt. Night and day comparison.
Marcus Cicero,
Maybe they would get beat up in San Francisco; they wouldn't in other parts of the country.
AMac,
People can only absorb so much of it.
While the 20th Century has entered the books as Humankind's Bloodiest Ever (yet)...
I've always wondered; was it more bloody per capita? How does it compare - per capita - with the wars of religion that were spawned by the Reformation & Counter-Reformation? Or the campaigns of the Mongols?
...it deserves acclaim for another chilling reason--the invisibility of the murdered.
Maybe. I don't know if its anymore invisible than it was in centuries past.
And if you're a capitalist, we likely agree on more than you realize. Though I am of course an atheist.
I think you're lowballing Stalin. If I remember right (and I'm giving myself 90% odds of being correct), Dmitri Volgonikov, former Chief Historian of the Red Army (top that) says that 21.5 million Soviets were killed in the purges of the thirties alone. That doesn't count the lesser horrors of the 20's, late 40's, and early 50's. That doesn't count the horrific toll on alleged "traitors" during WWII, and that has no bearing on the Ukranians deliberately starved, not to mention Chechens, et al....
20 million? Way lowballed.
>People can only absorb so much of [the suffering, e.g. that caused by Bolshevism.]
Naw, follow the links to Haynes & Klehr I offered earlier in the thread. These comfortable toffs of the American Academy aren't worried about absorbing so much of the import of the crimes committed by their favorite lefties. The voiceless millions of the gulags, etc., can siddown and shaddup. Inconvenient, and in bad taste.
>capitalist...atheist
??
Ukrainians deliberately starved during the forced collectivization of farms under Stalin: estimated to exceed 30 million.
(An item of personal interest, as my maiden name was Robin Stefanovna Kowalchuka ... my paternal grandfather was from Kiev with estates in the country and my paternal grandmother came from a Ukrainian khulakh family near Lvov. Some of those 30 million were related to me.)
Andrew X, etc.,
Unfortunately, any attempt to discern how many died under Stalin (either by design - e.g., shot in the head, sent to the gulag, etc. - or as a result of his disasterous industrialization program - e.g., starved to death) is mere guesswork. However, Mao's regime likely did kill more people; but, that's also simply likely due to the fact that they had more people to kill in the first place.
Anyway, its not like Stalin did this all by himself. He had plenty of willing partners in the task.
AMac,
I was not referring to academics specifically, but to people generally. Look at our situation today. How many folks have died in the Congo over the past few years? A million or more perhaps (guesswork really). Is it a well reported situation in the U.S.? Not really. As with most things in life there is only so much a particular population can train its attention on.
Are you saying that a capitalist cannot be an atheist, or vice versa?
Gary Gunnels (12:53am),
I don't wish for my days to be filled with the cries of the last century's doomed, or yours either. On the other hand, our society has the luxury of hiring people to remember and interpret our past, people known as academic historians. When many or most in this group find the sorts of stories that Marcus Cicero is reflecting on here to be not particularly worthy of rememberance, and in fact a darned obstruction to an otherwise-pleasant ideological view, then perhaps something is a bit askew. Nobody put a gun to their collective heads and made them choose the university over a career in physical therapy or, perhaps, woodcutting in the taiga.
See the interview of Glazov with Haynes and Klehr that I referenced earlier, or other comments on this thread, e.g. Ms. Kowalchuka's.
Re. capitalist/atheist, I haven't claimed anything. You'd have to say what point you are making.
Andrew X,
"Dmitri Volgonikov, former Chief Historian of the Red Army (top that)"
Top what? I have no doubts that he's been all his life a high-ranking member of Soviet nomenklatura. Do I trust or respect him? No. Is he the worst of them? No. What can't be topped here?
"says that 21.5 million Soviets were killed in the purges of the thirties alone."
These numbers are impossible. If all these projections were true, there'd be simply no people left in Russia. Yet, population actually increased during the Soviet times. Use your common sense. It's bad enough to kill a hundred thousand people in purges of the 30s; you don't need to make it 20 million, just to, sort of, make it stick.
More of the same (Robin Burk), "Ukrainians deliberately starved during the forced collectivization of farms under Stalin: estimated to exceed 30 million." How many Ukrainians do you think there were at all, to begin with? (A hint: right now it's 47 mil., was probably less in the pre-famine 20s.) Otoh, why stop at 30 million? Make it 30 trillion! so what if it's more than there are people on earth -- at least it's impressive.
Quoth Cicero, "Who are we blinking at today? Who do we tacitly nod at while feigning disapproval? Can wars be won when the symbols of oppression are debatable and not obvious?". Indeed, indeed! And so, while we're on our high horse: Where are the Indians ? About 100 million of them. Did they go to Ukraine to be starved by Staline.
:-)
AMac,
Well, you claimed, or implied at least, that we rarely agreed. Thus my statement.
When many or most in this group find the sorts of stories that Marcus Cicero is reflecting on here to be not particularly worthy of rememberance...
Lots and lots of academic historians concern themselves with the issue of Stalinism (indeed, I've read about two dozen books on the nature of his regime, and not one of them attempted to apologize for his crimes); check out Amazon.com and you'll find a plethora of works on the subject.
Anyway, I'm a former academic historian myself, and I have yet to meet anyone who denied or tried to downplay the murderous nature of the Stalinism, etc. Indeed, the one example of such behavior that I know of comes from Noam Chomsky and his writings on the Khmer Rouge, where he appears to place all (most?) of the blame for the genocide in Cambodia on the U.S. The problem with that example is that Chomsky isn't an academic historian. So my question is, who are you talking about here? Robert Thurston, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and that crowd? Or someone from a far earlier period? If the former, then I would state that you arguments are way off the mark; that class of historians coming out of the 1980s and 1990s were interested in de-mythologizing Stalin as a figure and describe why he was so popular amongst elements of Soviet society and why so many went along with his various monstrosities, or simply added their monstrosities to his.
Now, I have met and read the works of a few historians who have tried to paint Stalinism as an aberration vis a vis communism; however, that is a completely different sort of stupidity from apologizing for Stalinism itself. For example, Stephen Cohen in his biography of Bukharin (published in 1980) is certainly guilty of the "Stalinism is an aberration" line of thinking, but he never apologizes for Stalinism himself (indeed, Bukharin couldn't be viewed heroically in the book without his murder at the hands of Stalin).
As to In Denial, I thought it largely concerned the historiography of the CPUSA?