Twenty-five years ago

The last blow by the Soviet hard liners, we thought, and how wrong we were. August 19, 1991 saw the beginning of the attempted coup by opponents of both Gorbachev's perestroika and of the new wave of politics that was coming in with Boris Yeltsin. After four dramatic days, the coup collapsed, Estonia declared independence, with the CPSU disbanded shortly after. By the end of the year the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and hope seemed to be in the air.

I spent those days in a TV news studio in London, interpreting Russian news broadcasts as they were shown and thinking about the various friends and acquaintances I had seen earlier that year, all of whom would have ended up in prison or dead if the coup had been successful.

Twenty-five years have passed and things have not turned out well. This is not really the place to go through all the many problems Russia faced under Yeltsin and the path it has taken under Putin back into the past. Suffice it to say that not only there will be no official commemoration of the coup but the organization For Human Rights, led by Lev Ponomaryov have been denied the right to hold a meeting and lay a wreath to the three people who were killed during the fighting towards the end of the four days at the badly looked after memorial to them. The memory hole must swallow it all.

Books I have been reading: Joshua Rubenstein - The Last Days of Stalin

One cannot live by Brexit alone. There will be postings on other subjects. I have decided to start a new thread - books I have been reading (and not just detective stories). To start with, a fascinating new volume by Joshua Rubenstein about the last year of Stalin's life, his death and the months immediately after. So you can all wait for part 3 of my rant, my piece about the latest House of Lords reports and my views on David Cameron's extraordinary pronouncements (though I cannot help wondering whether he is secretly a Brexiteer).

Recent years have seen various biographies of Stalin and some books that concentrate on the last period of his life. This is justified: Stalin's rule and the legacy he left have been crucial to modern history. Also, certain new documents have become available but, more importantly, new analysis and thinking have to produce new books.

Professor Rubenstein starts his book with a detailed description of the tyrant's very last days, from his massive stroke on March 1 to his actual death on the 5th. The story is well known in general but it is good to have it retold in detail, based on various accounts. And a very bizarre story it is, too. Stalin, possibly the most powerful man in the world, so feared assassination that he created rings of security around himself wherever he went and even in one dacha he changed his bedrooms in order that nobody should know where he was sleeping. What it actually created is a situation in which he was safely protected from any help he might have had after his stroke.

Members of his personal guard did not dare to enter his bedroom though they suspected that something must be wrong till the evening of the day after, that is probably about twelve hours after the stroke. When they finally managed to send in a servant who found "Uncle Joe" on the floor, unable to move or to speak or even to control his bladder, they went through a number of stages before a doctor could be called. By that time the various Politburo members who were mostly terrified that Stalin was about to start another major purge had arrived and began their jockeying for position. And so on, and so on.

The book leaves the non-grieving colleagues, the permanently drunk son and the genuinely grief-stricken daughter to wait for the old man's death and moves back to take in the last few years of the great dictator's life, his worsening health, his growing paranoia, the new purge that focused to a great degree on Jews and the threat to his immediate colleagues with whom he played a cat and mouse game. Nobody knew for certain who was in favour and who was out of it. It is no wonder that for many years a story was going round that they actually finished him off when they found him incapacitated. A nice story like the various ones about Beria's end but the evidence is non-existent and Professor Rubenstein will have no truck with it.

There is at least one new aspect: at the time and in the decades since then an assumption has reigned that Stalin was meditating on a plan to exile all the remaining Jews who did not end up in the Gulag or the execution chamber to some part of Siberia with one or two suggestions as to where that might be. Professor Rubenstein has not been able to find any direct evidence that such a plan existed though people spoke of it unofficially and even, occasionally, called for such an act. Had it been Stalin's intention or was he merely encouraging rumours to create even more terror in people's minds? Impossible to tell.

Finishing Stalin off, so to speak, the author moves to the post-Stalin era, analyzing the immediate developments inside the country and in the world, the possible missed opportunities though these were somewhat chimerical. Inside the country and the Soviet colonies there were several developments: there was the inevitable struggle for power, which first destroyed Beria, leaving Malenkov in apparent command until he was outmaneuvered by Khrushchev and Bulganin. The book does not go far enough to show Nikita Sergeyevich emerging as the undisputed leader. It is worth noting that the people Khrushchev pushed aside with the exception of Beria and his immediate acolytes were not even imprisoned, let alone murdered. About Beria he was clear and his colleagues agreed: it was either him or them. Curiously enough, what Khrushchev said and thought about Beria echoed Bukharin's comments to the Menshevik Dan about Stalin. The difference was that Bukharin did not seriously try to prevent the destruction that Stalin, he knew, was planning; Khrushchev preferred to move in first.

There were some economic reforms, and gradual release of prisoners, first criminals, which was not exactly a huge success but, after a few months, politicals; there was the abrogation of the Doctors' Plot and the release of those medics who were still alive (if only just after the torture and maltreatment).

Then there were the uprisings in the camps, put down ferociously but they did signify that some changes would have to be made. There were riots in several East European colonies, culminating in the East Berlin uprising on June 17. After that the more open attitude to the West became once again closed but cautious changes inside the country continued: a slight weakening of censorship, a slightly different economic outlook, a possible greater openness towards other countries. The book stops with all these tentative steps being taken and with the power struggle gearing up. One cannot help hoping that Professor Rubenstein will pick up the story in a following volume that will take in the uneasy years that led up to the Twentieth Congress and what happened then. Meanwhile, let me recommend this book to anyone who seriously wants to understand events in the second half of the twentieth century (and, let us face it, the beginning of the twenty-first). It is informative and moves at a thriller's pace. What more could one want?



Joshua Rubenstein:           The Last Days of Stalin
2016                                   Yale University Press

The new Russian problem - not that dissimilar from ...

... the old Russian problems and that is no coincidence, as the old Communist orators led by Stalin would have said.

In the last few months I have been musing about Russia and the many problems her people and the rest of us face. Partly this is connected to other work I have been doing but, inevitably, events in Ukraine have set many of us thinking or renewed previous thoughts. My plan is to write several general musings on the subject and that includes something that is of particular interest to me, the weird attitude Westerners and, particularly, many British writers and analysts (often self-appointed with little  knowledge) take to the country and its political rulers.

With no other country is there a widespread assumption that attacking or criticizing its government or the ruling regime is tantamount to criticizing the people and the country as a whole. One gets this from Russians but also from people who maintain that they like or love Russia and Russians yet cannot see that supporting those who oppress the latter is not a sign of those feelings. One can criticize David Cameron without being labelled anti-British, President Obama without being labelled anti-American except by the Obama-bots and even they are more interested in the "Saviour-like nature" of their hero than in the country as a whole, or President Hollande without being called a Francophobe. Yet the slightest mention of the possibility that Vladimir Putin and his entourage are not the wisest and most liberal and humanitarian rulers in the world brings down an avalanche of accusations of Russophobia. Russians imprisoned for demonstrating against the government? You are a Russophobe to say so. Russian economy being destroyed by the corruption of the ruling elite and its hangers on? What a Russophobic thing to say. The infrastructure is so bad that hundreds of thousands of people are left without power for weeks in the coldest weeks of winter in the Moscow region? Russophobe, Russophobe, Russophobe.

I shall enlarge on these various subjects in future postings but, first, let me recommend a book called It Was A Long Time Ago, And It Never Happened Anyway, subtitled Russia and the Communist Past by the journalist and historian David Satter who has, recently, been banned from Russia. (Full disclosure: David Satter is a friend.)

As the title indicates the main theme of the book is Russian refusal to know, understand or come to terms with the horrors of the Soviet period. Far from being "humiliated" by the West, as we are so often told, not least by Western apologists for Russian authoritarianism, Russia, even more than the other post-Soviet republics was allowed to ignore and fudge the truth about the twentieth century. Not so long ago I (and a few others) had a frank and open discussion with a Russian lady who maintained that she knew all about the years leading up to the Second World War, having studied with some of the best historians in Russia and read all there was to read thus being very well aware that the Soviet Union had shown no aggression in the early years of the war or the years leading up to it. It would appear she was unaware of such events as the Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 or the Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November, 1939. At least, there was an implication in her comments that she might have been aware of Soviet aggression at the end of the war but I did not ask too many questions.

One rather peculiar outcome of this refusal to face up to the truth is the duality of attitude that many Russians display. When one talks about the horrors of the Soviet Union, not only these are often brushed aside as being rather less important than people sometimes make it out but there is a firm assertion that it was not just the Russians who were guilty either directly or indirectly. That, of course, is true. Also, it is added sometimes, as the Russians were the victims (among others but that is often glossed over) it does not count as real political horror. On the other hand, according to the same people quite often, only Russians fought and suffered during the Second World War; others were either absent or collaborated.

In his introduction David Satter says:

Russia as a country has not been willing to face the full truth about Communism. Some people insist that the scale of the crimes has been exaggerated or that they were a product of necessity in a unique historical situation. Some say that there were comparable crimes in the West. Many argue that the Soviet system had redeeming features, that it brought literacy to millions of people and modernised the country. In fact, the failure to condemn Communism unreservedly - as Nazism was condemned in Germany - is now taken for granted in Russia.

We know what happens to people who point to the "redeeming features" of the Nazi system in Germany or the Fascist system in Italy.

In his Notes to the Introduction Satter wades into the discussion about the numbers of victims with all the necessary provisos:

The scale of murder in the Soviet Union was so immense that estimating the number of victims with any degree of accuracy is difficult if not impossible. Figures cited in recently available archival material are often in conflict with demographic data which places death tolls considerably higher.

In this book, I accept 20 million as the number of direct victims of the Soviet regime. This figure includes only those put to death by the regime or who died as a direct result of the regime's policies. It does not include the millions who died in wars, epidemics, and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies but not entirely the result of them.

The figure of 20 million includes a minimum of 200,000 victims of the Red Terror (1918 - 1922); 11 million victims of famine and dekulakization in the 1930s; 700,000 persons who were executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million persons who died in forced population transfers; and a minimum of 2.7 million persons who died in Gulag camps, labour colonies, and special settlements.

To the resulting figure of 16.6 million should be added persons who died in prisons, 975,000 Gulag prisoners released during the war to punitive battalions, where they faced almost certain death, the victims of partisan warfare in Ukraine and the Baltic republics after the war, and Gulag prisoners freed so that their deaths would not count in the mortality totals for the labour camps as well as other categories of victims across the length and breadth of a vast country.

It is easy to understand why such colossal figures (and that does not include the effect this would have had on the families of the victims, the low birth rate and the early deaths of many who had gone through the horrors of the prisons and the camps) are ignored or dismissed as being unimportant of merely the sign of the West being jealous, wanting to destroy Russia or to prevent her from becoming great again.

Let us look back

As we approach March 5, the presumed anniversary of Stalin's death (it was announced on that day but that means little) it may be a good idea to look at an event that took place on this day three years after the old tyrant's demise: Nikita Khrushchev's speech at a secret session of the Twentieth Congress.

I wrote about it on the fiftieth anniversary, referring to the people who still wished it would go away and we would be back to February 24, 1956. No such luck.

Fifty years ago, on February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, mounted the podium to give his report on the final, closed session of the party’s Twentieth Congress. It was, to put it mildly, an unusual report.

Instead of the expected boasts and admissions of failure (to be blamed on someone else) Khrushchev delivered a four-hour long speech in which he denounced what he first referred to as the cult of personality that had grown up around Stalin. In effect, he denounced Stalin and some of his crimes.

The speech concentrated on the purge of the party and the destruction of the Communist cadres through “glaring violations of revolutionary legality”. Little was said about the many millions of other victims but there were references to the destruction of the agriculture (and by inference, of the peasantry), to Stalin’s grave mistakes in the Second World War (the full horror of that is still largely unknown in Russia), the deportation of whole nationalities at the end of the war and the paranoia of the doctors’ plot.

Like a good Soviet apparatchik, Khrushchev made no references to the largely anti-Semitic nature of the second purge, which was gathering momentum as Stalin fortuitously (or, perhaps, not) died. But he did quote Stalin’s instructions on how to extract confessions from the various highly placed medical specialists and their assistants, all of whom had been arrested: “Beat, beat, beat and beat again”. Few survived.

It is said that the speech produced an unprecedented effect. People fainted in the hall. Supposedly secret, the speech was passed on to some Soviet and East European organizations. It was also smuggled out by one or two of the foreign Communist leaders who had been present. (One, the leader of the Polish party had a heart attack and died.)

The Poles passed the speech on to the Israelis, who passed it on to other western countries. Very swiftly, the so-called secret speech was known all over the world, though in the Soviet Union its existence was denied till the late eighties when it was finally published.

There is more in that piece about what Nikita Sergeyevich did not say (though he went back to the subject in another speech, this time open and more detailed, at the Twenty-Second Congress in 1961, which really did unleash discussions of the subject. In my very ordinary school in Budapest, the weekly form-teachers' lessons were set aside for the discussion of the speech and what it meant for the concept of Communism. We were in our early teens. It can be imagined how much more was said among our elders if not betters. How different from 1956 when the secret speech had to be smuggled in to meetings of such groups as the Petöfi Circle. 

I wrote about it again when the death of Viktor Grayevsky, the man who passed the speech over to the Israelis who disseminated it in the West, was announced. 

We know how little is said or written about the horrors of Communism, which is seen as being somehow better and nicer in intention than the other monstrous ideology of the twentieth century, Nazism. Just imagine how people felt when the truth began to be spoken in the country where the system was created and first tried out. 

Never to be forgotten

Today is the anniversary of the death of one of the greatest fighters for freedom, Andrei Dmitriyevich Sakharov (1921 - 1989), finally destroyed by the system he fought.

Is that word so important?

Norman M. Naimark, Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University and author of several important books on the darker aspects of Soviet history (yes, I know, are there any others?) has just published an interesting study of Stalin's criminal rule: Stalin's Genocides. I have not seen it yet though I fully intend to read it on the grounds that there might be some new information or analysis there.

What intrigued me about the title and the blurb given out by Princeton University Press is the insistence that somehow it is important to prove that those crimes were genocide.

The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them.

Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace--the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror--and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

There are still some people (among whom there are various academic historians such as the egregious J. Arch Getty) who do go on bleating that the purge just growed and growed like Topsy without the little guy at the top knowing anything about it but many a document has been unearthed that has shown up the fallacy of that school of thought. Still, there is no harm in repeating the truth and publishing some more evidence.

Does it matter, however, whether what Stalin indulged in was genocide? The victims of Stalinism probably outnumber the victims of Hitler (and we can argue who was responsible for the fantastically high casualty rate on the Eastern Front). Even if anybody disputes that, there can be no question that there is no real need to compare Stalin to Hitler in order to prove that he and his system were evil. Or is there?

>Genocide is a relatively new term in international relations though, undoubtedly, the concept has existed in reality for many centuries. It's just it did not matter to people whether they were exterminating someone else for ethnic, religious or any other reason.

According to this summary

In 1944, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) sought to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder, including the destruction of the European Jews. He formed the word "genocide" by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing. In proposing this new term, Lemkin had in mind "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves."

The next year, the International Military Tribunal held at Nuremberg, Germany, charged top Nazis with "crimes against humanity." The word “genocide” was included in the indictment, but as a descriptive, not legal, term.

On December 9, 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust and in no small part due to the tireless efforts of Lemkin himself, the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention establishes "genocide” as an international crime, which signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish.” It defines genocide as:

[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As we know this activity was directed not just at Jews but the Roma and, to some extent, Slavs in Poland and the old Soviet Union.

There is, nevertheless, a problem with the definition or, rather, not so much with the definition but the importance accorded to this particular form of mass murder just as there was a problem with the definition of crimes against humanity in the framework of an aggressive war. (There were many other problems with the Nuremberg Trials but this is not the place to discuss them. Readers, however, are free to pile in.)

Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Union happily supported both that narrow definition of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg (a wider definition might have interfered with some members of the Soviet legal team) and the prioritizing genocide, as defined by the UN Convention above any common and garden mass murder.

One of the unintended consequences of that Convention was that everything, whether it be the Turkish massacres of Armenians in 1915 or Stalin's wide-ranging crimes, need to be defined as genocide. Otherwise, people might not take them seriously. Yet when one thinks about it, is it really so much more heinous to murder millions of Ukrainian peasants, let us say, because they were Ukrainians than it is to murder them because they were peasants?

Not just evil but insane

One of the books I have been reading as a form of .... ahem .... relaxation is Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken, the painful, indeed horrific tale of what happened to several thousand Americans, mostly ordinary workers, who decided to go with their families to the Soviet Union in the early thirties.

Some were members of the CPUSA, some were left-wing trade unionists, some had simply despaired of getting another job in the Depression or were afraid of losing the one they had. A few hundred went over as part of a deal Henry Ford made with Amtorg to construct car factories in the USSR and produce the Soviet Ford Model As.

Some managed to return; others found that their passports had been taken away and they could not get permission to leave, while living conditions became worse and worse, gradually equalling those of their Russian colleagues and, fist individuals, then dozens, then hundreds started disappearing into the Gulag.

Some survived and returned to the United States to tell the tale. The horror of it lies not simply in what happened to these unfortunate and often naive people but also the indifference shown by the American embassy in Moscow under the infamous Joseph E. Davies and at a time when the State Department was honeycombed with Soviet agents. Yet more horrifying is the behaviour of American fellow travellers and useful idiots such as Paul Robeson, whom Mr Tzouliadis rightly singles out: the man was spectacularly talented and highly intelligent yet his behaviour over the Soviet Union was utterly despicable.

One of the curious aspects of this story is the role of Henry Ford.

Despite a ferocious record of strike-breaking in Detroit, Henry Ford had been only too delighted to sell the Soviets teh necessary industrial blueprings and machinery, together with seventy-five thousand "knocked-down" Ford Model As from the River Rouge plant. It was a deal sweetened by the guaranee of five years of technical assistanc eand the promise of American labour and know-how. The Soviet contract was worth a staggering forty million dollars and, lest we forget, these were 1930s millions, paid for in gold at the height of the Depression.

The logic of the first sentence is not impeccable. Why despite? Ford did not break up strikes for reasons of ideology but because he did not want his factory to stop working. In the USSR, as Mr Tzouliadis mentions later on, strikes for much better reasons than in Michigan were broken up by the Red Army.

As a result of the deal numerous American car workers went to Nizhny Novgorod where the first Ford factory was built. It is not clear how many of this particular group disappeared in the purges but some seem to have managed to return home, disillusioned and miserable. Others stayed on, hoping that the bad conditions will change and disregarding what was happening around them until it started happening to them. By then they had been caught in the trap.

A few more important people went over to help finesse the deal and set up the factory. The first, exploratory group was led by by the engineer Bredo Berghoff, whose reports on Soviet conditions and ability to set up factories were negative and who issed a forceful warning about personal security and the terror, which at that stage was relatively mild.

Ford persevered and got what he wanted: that plum contract. The descriptions of what was actually happening in the plants were horrific with American workers and engineers stunned by the lack of any understanding of basic precautions or of mass production.

The next person to go over was Ford's Chief of Production, Charles Sorenson, who was not greatly in favour of the project but did his best to set up the factory and deal with the unfamiliar situation. When he returned to Detroit he told Ford that he would like to go back to Russia at some later stage to review the project he had set in motion. Ford was adamantly against it:

Charlie Don't you do it! They need a man like you. If you went over there, you would never come out again. Don't take that chance!

Which proves, yet again, the Ford was reasonably well aware of what and who he was dealing with in the Soviet Union. Mr Tzouliadis, to whom much of this story and the surrounding details were new and who is, therefore, more apt to rush into indignation than some people might be, writes:

If Ford's production chief could not be risked twice, no one seemed overly concerned for the safety of the company's present and former employees who would travel to Russia to assemble the Soviet Model As.

Presumably, Ford did not think assembly line workers were particularly valuable, though in actual fact, they were in the Soviet Union of that period. Nor did he care much about them - easy come, easy go. Nevertheless, I think Mr Tzouliadis is unfair to the admittedly ghastly Mr Ford. When he said that Charlie Sorenson would not be allowed out again, he meant that they would keep him there to work and not let him back to the United States. It is unlikely to have occurred even to Henry Ford that at some point in the near future useful workers and engineers would be rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, sent to the Gulag or simply murdered. That would have appeared to most people as completely insane whereas the notion of taking a skilled and experienced production chief's passport away and refusing him an exit visa was eminently sane if somewhat immoral. The the trials of various engineers on trumped up charges of sabotage and espionage, would not have been very well known until it came to the six British ones in the Metro-Vick case of 1933.

This reminds me of one of the crucial episodes in Margarete Buber-Neumann's superlative and harrowing book Under Two Dictators, about which I have written before.

I have to write about this from memory as my copy has been borrowed. Ms Buber-Neumann escaped to the Soviet Union in 1934 with her second husband, Heinz Neumann, Stalin's henchman in the German Communist Party, responsible for the purging of all those members who were not supporters of the Soviet leader. Almost certainly, the Gestapo picked a number of them up in 1933 - 34 on the basis of secret denunciations by Neumann and others of his ilk.

In 1937 both Neumann and his wife were arrested during the purge of foreign communists and the first part of Margarete's book deals with her experiences under Dictator Number One. During her calvary through the Soviet prisons and labour camps she heard that Heinz had been shot, though he had probably been given the fictitious sentence of ten years without rights of correspondence. (Or no sentence at all. Who was there to find out, with his wife in prison?)

In 1939 as part of the agreement with Nazi Germany, Stalin handed over all the German political prisoners and there is a tragic-comic description of their terrified arrival in the land of the Gestapo. The Jews were separated and sent off; the others were sent home with the proviso that they report regularly to the nearest police station.

Margarete was kept back for a very odd reason. The Gestapo officers in charge of the operation did not believe her story that her husband had been shot. Neumann, they reasoned, had been not just a Communist but one of Stalin's most faithful henchmen. Nobody shoots his faithful henchmen. (Little did they know.) Therefore, Neumann must have been sent back to Germany on a secret mission and the best way of finding that out is by imprisoning his wife in Ravensbrück.

Of course, looking at it sanely, the Gestapo was right: why would Stalin have his boy shot? Then again, why would he and his henchmen imprison and murder people who were essential to that economic and industrial development the Soviet Union so desperately needed and desired? It was not just an evil system but a completely insane one.