An apposite quote from Lord Acton

Once again, it being the silly season, there are discussions about the need to reform the House of Lords, make it more accountable to the people, make it more democratic, make it representative of the people's will, and so on, just because one particular friend of a former Prime Minister has turned out to be somewhat silly in his behaviour in his own time and at his own expense. I may add that apart from the cocaine nothing Lord Sewel did was illegal though I can't help thinking that the wearing of an orange bra ought to be.

Anyway, I shall write a long piece on the subject very soon. (Really, I will.) In the meantime I was interested to find this quote by Lord Acton from his History of Freedom in Hugh Tulloch's book:

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.

As we look at political systems that were built on the concept of the "will of the people" or of one class, we can see that he was right.

Plus ça change ...

One of the books I an reading at the moment is The Secret World, a collection of writings, published and unpublished by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, an eminent historian with one or two lapses of judgement (well, one in particular) on the subject of the Secret Service in which he served during the Second World War and in which he remained interested ever after.

The articles, letters and book on Philby, reprinted here in full, are wonderfully well written. Professor Trevor-Roper was a stylist that few could rival. Much of it is of enormous interest but he also shows a good deal of closed mindedness of the kind he accuses his own wartime superiors and colleagues. On the whole, I'd say he never came to terms with the extent to which Communists agents of espionage and influence, penetrated various British and American institutions, displaying a certain amount of censoriousness towards anyone who tried to unravel this. (And I find it particularly infuriating that he and, I am sorry to say, his editor, Edward Harrison, refer to Russia when they mean the Soviet Union.)

The review of Andrew Boyle's The Climate of Treason, a crucial publication in the history of that unravelling is dismissive: no real need for it, nothing important in it and, in any case, the three rather sordid traitors (how right Trevor-Roper is on that adjective), Burgess, Maclean and Philby, did very little real harm.

Just as one despairs at such willful misreading one comes across this paragraph. Having analyzed why so many young people joined or supported the Communist Party in the thirties for what seemed like very good reasons at the time, he adds:

There was also another reason, less reputable, but not, I think, less real. Intellectuals often pretend that, as a class, they are advocates of liberty. This is seldom true. Intellectuals like the beauty of mathematical order. They like tidiness, symmetry. Liberty is untidy, asymmetrical. Consequently young intellectuals, even when they speak of liberty, really worship power. they generally grow out of this when they realise that they are less likely to exercise power themselves than to be the victims of it. But for a time they think that they respect it. Communism, as intellectually justified system of total power, has a fatal fascination for young intellectuals seeking short cuts to total solution.

One could point to other displays of total power that intellectuals or those who think themselves to be intellectuals, support. But, when it comes to Communism and its one manifestation in the thirties, the Soviet Union (not Russia), though the same would apply to the supporters of Mao in the fifties and sixties, there is another consideration.

Even more than fascism or Nazism, Communism is a political system that purports to be constructed on an intellectually coherent base. It is not anything of the kind, as it happens, but that is what a good many people, more intelligent and intellectual than the Cambridge five and others of that ilk have believed. Even Albert Camus differentiated between the "irrational terror" of fascism and the "rational terror" of Communism. In actual fact, Stalin was often considerably less rational than Hitler and the terror introduced in Bolshevik Russia and the Soviet Union was no more rational than that introduced in Nazi Germany, though often considerably more bloody.

On top of this, it seemed that the Soviet Union really valued and cherished its intellectuals while the higgledy-piggledy Western systems did not. Somehow, it did not appear to be important to many that those intellectuals, so cherished at first, often found themselves, as was well known even in the thirties, in prisons, in torture chambers, in labour camps and execution chambers. Other intellectuals appeared to take their place and the life of the intellect was still, apparently, cherished.

Naturally, the Soviet Union's propaganda machine played on the Western intellectuals' sense of grievance and treated them as highly honoured guests as well as highly honoured agents. The easiest person to fool is the man (or the woman but more often the man) who thinks he is the only one to know the real truth but nobody appreciates it. Too much has been written about various fellow travellers for me to have to reiterate any of it (though I may well do another time) but the intricate relationship between intellectuals and absolute power or what they see as absolute power needs to be studied now just as it was by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper.

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.

Suprun case resumes

This blog has been following the case of Mikhail Suprun, the Russian historian on trial for collecting material about the treatment of Soviet citizens of German origin (pretty much as bad as many other nationalities or sub-nationalities) and of German POWs.

The trial was resumed on November 16:

Students were outside the court to show support for Professor Suprun and Alexander Dudarev. Throughout the hearing they stood as “single-person pickets”, taking turns in the biting wind and frost. They carried banners reading: “Maybe there’s been enough repression?”; “Is it really 1937 again?” and “Free History!”

Tatyana Kosinova from the Memorial Research Centre in St Petersburg explains that the court questioned two witnesses, employees of the archives who confirmed that Professor Suprun had worked in the archives, taken copies etc. Lawyer Ivan Pavlov points out that the historian is in no way denying that he did any of this. He believes that the witnesses in fact testified in the defendants’ favour and finds it strange that they were called at all.

“The prosecution did not have and still does not have proof that the information about victims of repression gathered by Mikhail Suprun contained personal and family secrets. They don’t intend to prove it and become immediately deaf to our calls”.

As reported, the charges are the result of Mikhail Suprun’s work on creating a database of Germans deported during the War and in the first post-War years to a special settlement in the Arkhangelsk region – Soviet citizens of German origin and civilians with German citizenship, as well as of German prisoners of war held in Arkhangelsk camps. This study was being carried out within the framework of an agreement concluded in 2007 between the German Red Cros and the Pomorsky University. The main aim of the research is to preserve the memory of the victims of the Second World War and the post-War period.

The investigators claim that the construction by Suprun of a list of five thousand victims of post-War deportations constitutes “the gathering of information about their private life without their consent”. By “an official exceeding his powers” is meant the fact that Colonel Dudarev provided Suprun with access to archival material needed for his research.

The role of the FSB [Federal Security Service] in the case was questioned when the investigation began two years ago. The account given by Dudarev of the plaintiffs’ testimony last week highlights the concern felt as to who is behind the case.

Dudarev said the plaintiffs reminisced about their own experiences and the sufferings of their relatives between the 1940s and 1960s, but when asked precisely what they are accusing the defendants of, they were unable to answer.

No, this is not quite 1937 and one must be thankful for that. But the situation is bleak, nonetheless. Is it not time our own historians started raising their voices against this outrage?

More on the Suprun trial

Mikhail Suprun's trial is conducted behind closed doors so little is known about the details but it is worth noting what the historian's legal attorney said:

Ivan Pavlov, JD, PhD, IIFD Board Chair and Mikhail Suprun’s legal attorney, stated that the essence of the accusation was not clear to him since one could hardly understand what reasons had there been to define any specific information as personal or family secret. During eight hours of court hearings, neither wronged persons nor representatives of the prosecution could not give the defense a clear explanation.

Moreover, not all wronged persons that spoke in court wished to bring Mikhail Suprun to criminal responsibility. In Pavlov’s opinion, the security bodies really seek not for defense of the wronged persons’ interests, but for a formal basis to close access to their archives for the majority of historians and other researchers.

“At present”, Pavlov said, “even a guilty verdict will be sort of positive result since the case will then get still wider public response, and will be reviewed at the federal level – by the Constitutional Court”.

He is not wrong: the case is all about controlling information, in this case about Russian/Soviet history.

Back to reality

It consists of countries where historians are arrested and put on trial for studying important parts of that country's history. I have reported on the case of Mikhail Suprun (whom I met once many years ago when he was researching in London) before: here and here.

Radio Free Europe gives a very good coherent account of the case as it is progressing (and that is not very coherent) and of the actual charges against Suprun.

Four years ago, Suprun and Nadezhda Shalygina, a postgraduate student at Arkhangelsk's Pomor University, started a study on the fate of ethnic Germans deported from Crimea and the Volga region during World War II as "enemies of the Soviet people" to so-called "labor armies" in northern Russia.

One of the goals of the study was to identify those who were deported and chronicle the hardships they faced.

By 2009, Suprun and Shalygina had identified some 20 percent of the ethnic Germans who had been deported to the northern Arkhangelsk region.

Germany's Red Cross expressed support for the publication of "The Book of Memory" based on the results of Suprun's research.

But when the local prosecutor's office announced that the relatives of some deported Germans were suing Suprun for revealing personal information about their families, an investigation was opened.

Dudarev's lawyer told RFE/RL today that on October 17 the plaintiffs gave vague and mutually contradictory testimony.

Dudarev said the plaintiffs reminisced about their own experiences and the sufferings of their relatives between the 1940s and 1960s, but when asked precisely what they are accusing the defendants of, they were unable to answer.

Not surprising that they could not answer - they had not even realized that they had written any complaints. In fact, they denied having done so and were quite surprised that their signatures appeared on the documents.

The trial is, apparently, conducted behind closed doors. But of course.

Will no-one rid us?

Professor Eric Hobsbawm is 94 years old and age has not diminished his ability to tell lies about twentieth century history or defend indefensible totalitarian regimes. In his review of Professor Hobsbawm's latest book, How to Change the World in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Moynihan enumerates some of the highly regarded historian's slippery comments and justifications.

One wouldn't know it from "How to Change the World," but Mr. Hobsbawm wasn't always convinced that the Soviet Union, along with its puppets and imitators, was misunderstanding the essence of Marxism. He never relinquished his membership in the Communist Party, even after Moscow's invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Indeed, he began his writing career with a co-authored pamphlet defending the indefensible Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. "To this day," he writes in his memoirs, "I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness." There was some ugliness in the socialist states occupied by Moscow, he admitted in 2002, but "leaving aside the victims of the Berlin Wall," East Germany was a pleasant place to live. Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

In a now infamous 1994 interview with journalist Michael Ignatieff, the historian was asked if the murder of "15, 20 million people might have been justified" in establishing a Marxist paradise. "Yes," Mr. Hobsbawm replied. Asked the same question the following year, he reiterated his support for the "sacrifice of millions of lives" in pursuit of a vague egalitarianism. That such comments caused surprise is itself surprising; Mr. Hobsbawm's lifelong commitment to the Party testified to his approval of the Soviet experience, whatever its crimes. It's not that he didn't know what was going on in the dank basements of the Lubyanka and on the frozen steppes of Siberia. It's that he didn't much care.

Readers of "How to Change the World" will be treated to explications of synarchism, a dozen mentions of the Russian Narodniks, and countless digressions on justly forgotten Marxist thinkers and politicians. But there is remarkably little discussion of the way communist regimes actually governed. There is virtually nothing on the vast Soviet concentration-camp system, unless one counts a complaint that "Marx was typecast as the inspirer of terror and gulag, and communists as essentially defenders of, if not participators in, terror and the KGB." Also missing is any mention of the more than 40 million Chinese murdered in Mao's Great Leap Forward or the almost two million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

When the bloody history of 20th-century communism intrudes upon Mr. Hobsbawm's disquisitions, it's quickly dismissed. Of the countries occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II—"the Second World War," he says with characteristic slipperiness, "led communist parties to power" in Eastern and Central Europe—he explains that a "possible critique of the new [postwar] socialist regimes does not concern us here." Why did communist regimes share the characteristics of state terror, oppression and murder? "To answer this question is not part of the present chapter."

It is little short of astonishing that Professor Hobsbawm should actually say that "real" Marxism was not practised in those self-described Communist countries. Undoubtedly, back in the old days he would have attacked anyone who suggested such a heresy about Stalinism, Maoism, what have you.

When I reviewed The Age of Extremes in the Salisbury Review [the article is not on line] I pointed out a couple of interesting historical comments. Professor Hobsbawm with a completely straight face could say, among other things, that it was not entirely comprehensible but very sad that agricultural failure and, indeed, famine happened wherever collectivization was practised. This meant, in his opinion, that one cannot really judge how effective, economically and socially, such a theoretically wonderful idea could be.

He was also coy on the subject of the Warsaw uprising, saying quite fairly that most urban uprisings in Europe towards the end of the war were successful, with the Allies racing to help those who were fighting the Nazis. The one exception was in Warsaw and, Professor Hobsbawm speculated, that must have been because it took place prematurely. So it failed and was put down with some ferocity. No mention here of the well known fact that, unlike the British and the Americans, the Soviets decided not to race to help the Poles but stopped and watched the fun, refusing to allow even Western aid. After all, their aim was to impose their own government on Poland not let the Poles be involved in liberating themselves.

There are many other points of this kind that one could quote from Professor Hobsbawm's work. What is so shocking is the fact that he is described by the media and the academia (on all sides of the political spectrum) as one of our greatest modern historians. Would this be said about an historian who told lies about some other totalitarian system, for instance Nazism? We know the answer to that. David Irving is worse than a pariah in the intellectual world.

I have written on this subject before, in 2006, mentioning such matters as the Danish cartoons (as the blog was about freedom of speech) and David Irving's imprisonment in Austria for Holocaust denial. Who, I asked, should be denied their rights to say bad things, lying things, wicked things about historical events?

What of those many left-wing groups that still proclaim the need for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of the working class by violence if necessary? Should they all be arrested?

Well, of course not. But what of the historians who have been peddling lies about the Soviet Union, denying the horrors of Communism and generally abusing freedom of speech? What of Professor Eric Hobsbawm CH, given that honour by Tony Blair?

Throughout his long and distinguished career Professor Hobsbawm belonged to the CPGB (as long as there was a CPGB to belong to) and refused to acknowledge the Joseph Stalin was not the nicest possible man around, who occasionally got a little bit angry but what can you expect when you have the welfare of the world at heart.

Even in recent books Professor Hobsbawm implicitly denied the extent of Stalin’s and Mao’s mass murders, and was all coy about the victims of collectivization imposed by every single Communist tyrant from Uncle Joe to Colonel Mengistu. Far from being disdained, let alone arrested and imprisoned, the good professor is highly feted (Companion of Honour, no less) and his books are required reading by all university students of history.

All this, despite the fact that every single thing the Austrian judge or the British one in the Irving libel case of 2000 said about that wretched man can be said about Professor Hobsbawm (and numerous other, less eminent historians) with a few adjustments: instead of Nazism, Communism; instead of the Holocaust, the purges and collectivization; instead of mass murder, mass murder.

And yet, as Michael Moynihan points out:

In 2003, the New York Times declared Eric Hobsbawm "one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Communist and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly written histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad." The Spectator, a right-leaning British magazine, gushed that Hobsbawm is "arguably our greatest living historian—not only Britain's, but the world's." The Nation anointed him "one of Aristotle's 'men of virtue.' "

That the 94-year-old Mr. Hobsbawm has long championed dictatorial regimes hasn't diminished his standing among the intelligentsia or within the establishment he so obviously loathes. In 1998, Queen Elizabeth II bestowed upon him a Companion of Honour—"In action faithful and in honour clear."

One can exonerate the Queen - she was given his name by the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and presumably asked no more. Though, it is possible, that Her Majesty has her own views on people who support vile, murderous regimes and corrupt the teaching of history. But what on earth was the Spectator thinking of by publishing that kind of nauseating comment?

As it happens, Professor Hobsbawm was one of the first people my family visited on our arrival to England, he having been our guest at various times in Hungary (naturally, he was a much honoured visitor to the East European countries, though, as we know now, they were not really practising Marxism). For a while my father and he kept in touch and in his autobiography, Interesting Times, Professor Hobsbawm refers to this friendship in a slightly disdainful way, suggesting that my father "had claimed" to have been arrested in the Soviet Union. No doubt, the great man thought that all stories of such arrests were merely "claims" that could not be substantiated, perhaps not even now with the publication of many of the Soviet secret police archives. Or maybe it is the publication of that material that made him deny the Soviet Union "real Marxist" status.

My father once asked him whether he and his friends and colleagues knew what was going on in the Soviet Union. The answer was unequivocal. Of course they knew, said Professor Hobsbawm, but they did not want to know. Since then, as we know, he has accepted the knowledge and has decided that all those sacrifices would have been well worth it if the socialist utopia had been established.